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CC BY 4.0

A contribution to: Literature and Art

Edited by Elizabeth Benjamin and Sophie Corser

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 9

Modern Humanities Research Association

Artopen

Abstract.  This article will engage with issues of material culture and medieval technologies of writing in conversation with representations of the creative process and poetic subjectivity through a close reading of the sonnet ‘Noi siàn le triste penne isbigottite’ [We are the sad, bewildered quills] by the Florentine poet (and friend of Dante) Guido Cavalcanti (c.1255-1300), in light of common representations of scribes at work in visual culture. By reading Cavalcanti’s representation of the art of writing and the artefact of the text this article will explore the ‘written-ness’ of the Italian tradition, in contrast with the oral performance culture of troubadour lyric, and the implications of this material, textual tradition for the representation of a fragmented self. I will posit that Cavalcanti’s poetic praxis depends on the legible, material object of the text. Across Cavalcanti’s lyric output we witness a disassembling of the self into myriad, often physiological, parts, which are given individual voices through sustained prosopopoeia, generating a model of subjectivity located in physiology and textuality. In this sonnet, this practice is extended even to the implements of textual production. I will highlight the manner in which the multiple voices of Cavalcanti’s texts engage in an internalised dialogue, and their fundamental role in the representation of his poetic self. My reading will investigate this sonnet’s representation of tools of writing as lyric voices in themselves, contextualising this imagery within Cavalcanti’s poetics of self-fragmentation and placing it in conversation with the material culture of the circulation of poetry in late-medieval Italy. This article will act as a meeting place for issues of visual and material culture, textuality, and poetics in so far as they all contribute to the foregrounding of creative processes — the creation of poetic texts, content and selves — in this Cavalcantian text.

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