Guittone d'Arezzo's critical fortunes have risen over the past fifty years to the point where he now commands grudging respect from serious readers of Duecento literature. But his poetry remains lapidary, often wilfully obscure; and it is too sparing of fancy and verbal beauty to hold for long any but the most dogged reader. Large areas of his work are still neglected, and the same few poems, reprinted in anthologies, continue to be read in isolation. But they cannot be understood properly unless we know what Guittone disowned when he turned his back on 'Amore'. This study offers an interpretation of that imposing body of work which the poet claims to have rejected.
This book, originally published in paperback in 1976 under the ISBN 978-0-900547-41-6, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.
Vincent Moleta is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Western Australia.
Guittone d'Arezzo's critical fortunes have risen over the past fifty years to the point where he now commands grudging respect from serious readers of Duecento literature. The abuse levelled at him by the emerging stilnovisti and later by Dante is now seen as a negative proof of his pre-eminence in the generation that followed the death of Frederick II, while his use of the vernacular for political and moral poems is now recognized as an innovation that had vast repercussions in Italian literature. Within the canzoniere itself it is no longer necessary to accept the rigid separation, imposed by the order of poems in the earliest MSS, of Fra Guittone from Guittone, and of the secular from the religious works. His conversion in middle life belies a steadiness of temper, an original grasp of his craft, and an unashamed didacticism which are everywhere present in his writing and confer a certain unity on the whole corpus.
I propose a fresh study of Guittone's early poetry in the light of his post-conversion palinode. I shall attempt to trace the development of Guittone's early poetry from its idealistic courtly beginnings to his final rejection of 'materia amorosa' in middle life. To show where my reading differs from previous interpretations, I shall broach in a discursive way the problem posed by Guittone's judgement on his love poetry, and introduce the terms used in my reading of the texts. This will lead straight to the poems written after conversion which in turn lead back to the sonnets and canzoni of Guittone's 'prima maniera'.
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34-55
3. Order in the 'prima maniera' and two early narrative experiments Vincent Moleta doi:10.59860/td.c385c7c
I shall try to show that the printed, that is, manuscript, order of the sonetti d'amore – "serious' narratives, and anti-idealistic genre groups – does in fact reveal and correspond to a discernible process of disengagement from the fin' amors ideal as a literary inspiration, and that the sonnet families are steps towards the self-criticism of 'Ora parrà s'eo saverò cantare' and the other poems written after conversion.
In the previous chapter I touched on certain discords of tone and inner logic which seemed to me evidence of Guittone's difficulty in creating convincing biographical narrative, and hinted at his disenchantment with the fin' amors tradition. That disenchantment, sporadic and muted though it is in the early cycles, finds expression in a double tension, already noted, which can be restated now because it is endemic to Guittone's entire narrative experiment and leads straight to the third and major cycle.
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80-90
5. The 'tenzone con la donna villana' and the ars amandi Vincent Moleta doi:10.59860/td.c58be06
There are precedents for the 'tenzone con la donna villana' in the tenzone, ss. 37-49, and the abuse interlude, ss. 50-8, within the third cycle. The difference, however, is not merely one of degree.' It points to a more fundamental change in the poet's attitude to fin' amors as outlined in the previous chapter. In ss. 37-49 it was the lover's expectation of the lady's 'cortesia' which enabled her to expose the shortcomings of fin' amors sentiment. Within the serious and naive context of that cycle her words were brisk but not 'villane', except perhaps towards the end of their encounter. It was a dialogue between two levels of commitment to the values embodied in courtly language; it was not a dialogue between the stilus tragicus and the stilus comicus. In the sonnets that followed the tenzone, the lover was acutely aware of the clash between his base speech and the demands of 'cortesia'.
I have tried to show that narrative in the sonnet cycles relies only partly on thematic variation and that, far from falling into conveniently rounded groups, the sonnets trace Guittone's continuing experiments with received literary ideals. To link the canzoni with the sonnets distorts the cyclic and progressive nature of the sonnet families. It adds nothing to the effect of particular shifts of tone, stance and motif which take place within each cycle; and it blurs what the sonnets show to be a steady movement from sentimental idealism to sentimental realism. The sonnets, as distinct from the canzoni, are the primary and consistent expression of Guittone's early poetic development. They provide the essential and continuing background to the technically more ambitious but sporadic statements of traditional 'materia amorosa' in the canzoni. In this sense Pellizari's thematic subordination of canzoni to sonnets is witness to the narrative primacy of the sonnets.
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