364 Italian Bookshelf - Ibiblio

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“Italian Bookshelf” Annali d’ italianistica 24 (2006) 369 Dante, cantari, and the pre-humanists. It is unfortunate that Surdich cites so little from original texts, which enliven the narrative with specificity. In any case the mere fact that Surdich speaks of all of these various opere minori and precursors of humanism goes beyond the basic requirement of an introductory text. The chapter dedicated to Boccaccio (135-56) does not disappoint from what one would expect, given Surdich’s expertise. He offers a concise yet full panorama of the author’s works. The Decameron is described in detail and from different angles: themes, parody, sources, expressive style. With regard to the Corbaccio, Boccaccio’s most problematic work, Surdich offers three possible explanations for the work’s title, and seeks to explain how this misogynic text can be reconciled with the rest of Boccaccio’s oeuvre. The tenth chapter (157-65) is devoted to Trecento prose. Surdich treats the chroniclers, especially Villani, the short story writers (novellieri) Sacchetti, Sercambi, Giovanni Fiorentino, religious writers and mystics (Caterina da Siena, for instance) and volgarizzamenti of Latin poems. His section on Sacchetti is especially thorough, and Surdich distinguishes him from Boccaccio on account of his often explicit morality. This book is a fine introduction to the Duecento and Trecento for beginning students of Italian literature and seems directed specifically to such an audience. Surdich’s presentation is reliable and solid: he has the facts at his fingertips and is most often judicious in his commentary. A student will learn a great deal from this book, though there is nothing that will surprise an experienced reader. The observations and analyses are relatively standard. For a firm grasp of the dates and major players of the Italian Duecento and Trecento, Surdich’s book is a good place to begin. Jacob Blakesley, University of Chicago Simon A. Gilson. Dante and Renaissance Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Pp. 324. A study of the reception of Dante in Florence from 1350 to 1481, Simon Gilson’s Dante and Renaissance Florence tracks how and to what purposes Dante’s supporters and denigrators responded to their city’s most famous vernacular poet. This is an original study, a clearly written, thorough, and important book that illustrates for the first time Dante’s centrality to Florentine culture and thought in the Renaissance. Reception, in this book, is given a compendious application, as it embraces the diverse social and cultural links, in Latin or vernacular, with “humanists, scientists, philosophers, theologians, artists, and poets” (1). Dante, in these diverse circles, becomes “patriotic emblem, politically committed citizen, moralist, philosopher, theologian, Neoplatonist, and prophet” (1). Gilson thus addresses how Dante’s vernacular poem was used politically to promote the vernacular and to support a variety of political positions in the one hundred and thirty years on which the book focuses, and Dante’s fate amidst the increasingly important rediscovery of classical Latin. The book is divided into three sections: “Competing Cults: The Legacy of the Trecento and the Impact of Humanism, 1350-1430”; “New Directions and the Rise of the Vernacular, 1430-1481”; and “Cristoforo Landino and his Comento sopra la Comedia (1481).” It includes discussions of Boccaccio and Petrarch, Salutati, Villani, and Bruni, Giovanni Gherardi da Prato and Cino Rinuccini, Domenico da Prato, Francesco Filelfo, Matteo Palmieri, Lorenzo de’ Medici, and Cristoforo Landino, among others.
370 “Italian Bookshelf” Annali d’ italianistica 24 (2006) Dante’s position in the cultural ideals of the Renaissance, and in the revival of classical learning and poetry, contributes to his important place in defining the new relationship that Renaissance writers strove to establish with the past, Gilson argues. In Boccaccio’s “cult of Dante” (22), Gilson documents that Boccaccio produced three manuscript copies of the Commedia in his own hand, dating from the early 1350s to the 1370s, incorporated references to Dante’s works in both his Latin and vernacular works, and, of course, wrote the Trattatello in laude di Dante. Engaging with Dante’s poem in many diverse ways, Boccaccio became Dante’s copyist and biographer, and as literary artist, he directly responded by remaking Dante in his own works; finally, he was one of the first and most important exegetes of Dante’s poem (22). Boccaccio’s complex reception of Dante, both a response to Dante’s work and to the concerns about Dante’s “vernacular” expressed by his fellow humanist, Petrarch, to some degree set the direction for Renaissance receptions of Florence’s greatest poet. Petrarch’s response to Dante is famously less generous than his friend Boccaccio’s, and Gilson shows how Petrarch tried to demonstrate his lack of animosity towards the earlier famous Florentine poet (32-40). Petrarch was less than enthusiastic about Dante’s popularity than Boccaccio; indeed, he seems to scorn the whole idea of popularity ― public recitations of Dante’s poetry, for example. But Boccaccio’s investment in Dante’s place in Florentine letters is made explicit in his lectures on Dante in the 1370s, lectures that became central to later commentaries, including that by Benvenuto da Imola, who heard Boccaccio’s Esposizioni (53). The first section elaborates on Dante’s place in this emerging “Renaissance.” In the second, Gilson evaluates Dante’s place in the Florentine vernacular culture as more and more classical texts surface and Latin emerges as the pinnacle of humanist culture. Salutati, for instance, whose classicism ties him to Petrarch and the relationship between the ancient Roman world and moral and religious issues, nonetheless was a staunch defender of Dante, despite his fellow Florentine’s use of the vernacular. Some writers, like Bruni, could criticize Dante for his weak Latin, over-attachment to scholastic thought, and shallow knowledge of classics; others, like Salutati, who dislikes Dante’s politics, or Villani, still laud him as “a moral teacher, Florentine citizen, cultivator of the city’s native idiom, and authoritative writer, especially in matters of ethics, natural philosophy, and theology” (92). In “Dante as a Civic and Linguistic Model,” Gilson elaborates on how Dante became a tool in the hands of the Medicis to promote the status of the vernacular. In Bruni’s Vita di Dante however, the poet is presented as the “ideal Florentine citizen ― learned, politically active, and conscious of how all spheres of human activity may best serve the city” (123). Here Dante becomes a prototype of the civic humanist, almost, Gilson suggests, as a form of defiance to the Medici regime (123). In “Dante and Florentine Vernacular Humanism,” Gilson explores how Dante’s Commedia and his other writings are received in Florence in the 1460s and 1470s to argue that the recovery of earlier vernacular Florentine texts laid the groundwork for Landino’s Comento of the following decade. The final section explores the 1481 Comento di Christophoro Landino Fiorentino sopra la Comedia di Danthe Alighieri poeta fiorentino. Landino’s Comento remains the most important commentary on the Comedy from the sixteenth century, since it saw fifteen reprints from its publication date in 1481 to the end of the sixteenth century. In fact, given that the first press run was 1200 copies, its popularity far exceeds most books
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364 Italian Bookshelf - Ibiblio

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