1. Especially E. Köhler, "Uber das Verhältnis von Liebe, Tapferkeit, Wissen und Reichtum bei den Trobadors," in Trobadorlyrik und höfischer Roman (1962)73 ff. [BACK]

2. See Jaeger's (1987) interpretation of the philosophy of the Chartres masters. [BACK]

3. A. Vallone (1950) has attempted to trace the poetic background to Dante's notion or, rather, "sentiment" of cortesia without any reference to social motivations but with clear awareness that the concept spans the whole period from the Provençals to Castiglione. [BACK]

4. For example Köhler, Mancini ed. 4 f., 41. [BACK]

5. Poésies complètes du troubadour Marcabru, ed. J.-M.-L. Dejeanne, Bibliothèque Méridionale . . . Facult́ des Lettres de Toulouse, Sér. 1 vol. 12 (Toulouse: Édouard Privat, 1909) 187. This is poem 38, st. 6 v. 7 in MS. R5 ^a ; Dejeanne, 190, translates: "aussi galanterie tourne maintenant en libertinage." [BACK]

6. "[Vulgare illustre] est etiam merito curiale dicendum, quia curialitas nil aliud est quam librata regula eorum que peragenda sunt; et quia statera huiusmodi librationis tantum in excellentissimis curiis esse solet, hinc est quod quicquid in actibus nostris bene libratum est, curiale dicatur. Unde cum istud in excellentissima Ytalorum curia sit libratum, dici curiale meretur. Sed dicere quod in excellentissima Ytalorum curia sit libratum, videtur nugatio, cum curia careamus. Ad quod facile respondetur. Nam licet curia, secundum quod unita accipitur, ut curia regis Alamaniae, in Ytalia non sit, membra tamen eius non desunt; et sicut membra illius uno Principe uniuntur, sic membra huius gratioso lumine rationis unita sunt. Quare falsum esset dicere curia carere Ytalos, quanquam Principe careamus, quoniam curiam habemus, licet corporaliter sit dispersa" ( VE 1.18.4 f.). Cf. Emilio Pasquini, "cortesia," and P. V. Mengaldo, "curiale," Enciclopedia Dantesca 2. I quote the De vulgari eloquentia from the Enciclopedia Dantesca (henceforth ED ), Appendice 763. [BACK]

7. Mengaldo, ED 2: 288 on Aristide Marigo's pertinent comments in his edition of the VE, lxxx-lxxxvi, 154-157, and Francesco Di Capua, Scritti minori, 2 vols. (Roma, Parigi: Desclée et Co., 1959) 1: 286-288. Incidentally, in an interesting discussion of the De vulgari eloquentia, the British poet Donald Davie ( Purity of Diction in English Verse, Oxford, London: Oxford University Press, 1953: 82-90 at 87 f.) connects Dante's notion of courtliness in De vulgari, eloquentia with "the modern notion of urbanity"—a judgment that Robin Kirkpatrick, Dante's Paradise and the Limitations of Modern Criticism: A Study of Style and Poetic Theory (Cambridge, England, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978) 74, cites approvingly. As we have seen, urbanity was already a traditional ingredient of curiality in the Middle Ages. [BACK]

8. Compare P. V. Mengaldo, "aulico" and "curiale" in ED. Also, De vulgari eloquentia 1.16.5, 1.17.1, and 1.18.2 f. See the medieval meanings of curialis and curialitas as courtly, refined, bureaucratic, and appropriate to civil servants, in Latham's Dictionary of Medieval Latin (chap. 2 above, note 25). [BACK]

9. "nisi forte novum aliquid atque intentatum artis hoc sibi preroget; ut nascentis militie dies, qui cum nulla prerogativa suam indignatur preterire dietam." [BACK]

10. A. Viscardi in R. S. Loomis, ed. (1959; 1961) 423. [BACK]

11. Charles T. Davis (1984), chap. 8 on Fra Remigio: see p. 203. [BACK]

12. "Sì che non dica quelli de li Uberti di Fiorenza, né quelli de li Visconti da Melano: 'Perch'io sono di cotale schiatta, io sono nobile'; ché '1 divino seme non cade in schiatta, cioè in istirpe, ma cade ne Ie singular persone, e, sì come di sotto si proverà, la stirpe non fa Ie singulari persone nobili" ( Cv 4.19-21 at 20.) [BACK]

13. Nicola Zingarelli, "La nobiltà di Dante," Nuova Antologia 332 (1927): 412: "La nobiltà di sangue Dante non la nega," since virtue can also be transmitted from father to son. [BACK]

14. Cf. Maria Picchio Simonelli's forthcoming volume on Inferno 3 in the "Lectura Dantis Americana" (University of Pennsylvania Press). [BACK]

15. "Cortesia e onestade è tutt'uno; e però che ne le corti anticamente le vertudi e li belli costumi s'usavano, sì come oggi s'usa lo contrario, si tolse quello vocabulo da le corti, e fu tanto dire cortesia quanto uso di corte." [BACK]

16. Emilio Pasquini, ED 2: 227b. [BACK]

17. Onesta in this Dantesque sonnet has precedents that point up its aesthetico-moral context rather than a more restricted moral one. Adorna is close to Dante's onesta in Guinizelli's "Passa per via adorna e sì gentile" ("Io voglio del ver la mia donna laudare"). See G. Contini, ed., Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols. (Milano, Napoli: R. Ricciardi, 1960) 2: 472. The subtext to Dante's sonnet was Cavalcanti's ballata grande "Veggio negli occhi della donna mia" ( Poeti del Duecento 2: 521). [BACK]

18. "decens composicio membrorum," which imposes a "membrorum omnium motus ordinatus et disposicio decens in omni habitu et actione." Jaeger (1987): 614 n. 132. [BACK]

19. For a discussion of Dante's use of Sordello's poetry with particular regard to Sordello's Ensenhamen d'onor, see Ruggero M. Ruggieri, L'umanesimo cavalleresco italiano da Dante al Pulci (Roma: Edizioni dell'Ateneo, 1962) ch. 3, "Tradizione e originalità nel lessico 'cavalleresco' di Dante: Dante e i trovatori provenzali." [BACK]

20. The popular Nicomachean Ethics, which began by defining politics as the science of the good, became available only in the twelfth century in three partial renderings from the Greek by an anonymous translator, and then in the thirteenth century in the complete translations by Robert Grosseteste and William of Moerbeke from the Greek, in addition to one from Arabic. Dante drew on Moerbeke's text and occasionally on Grosseteste's but leaned occasionally on Aquinas's and Albertus Magnus's commentaries. [BACK]

21. Dante's polemical portrait of nobility as based on intellectual and moral excellence sounded offensive to aristocratic readers when the nobility of stock became the pillars of authoritarian regimes. See an exemplary case of political use of the Convivio in a Lezione accademica of 1732 by the Pisan Angelo Poggesi, recently brought to light by Domenico Pietropaolo in "Dante's Concept of Nobility and the Eighteenth-Century Tuscan Aristocracy," Man and Nature / L'homme et la nature 5 (1986): 141-152. It is interesting to find that the Convivio could be so instrumentalized to attack the degenerate and conceited Tuscan aristocracy. [BACK]

22. M. Keen (1984) 146. Other interesting reminiscences from times gone by include "il gran barone" mentioned by Cacciaguida ( Pr 16: 128), to wit Hugh the Great of Brandenburg, Otto III's Imperial Vicar who died in Florence in 1001, and William II of Sicily (1166-1189) in Paradiso 20: 64 f., who sees in Paradise how heaven appreciates a just ruler: "come s'innamora / lo ciel del giusto rege." Jacopo della Lana (1328) praised William II as liberal and his court as a hospitable place for arts and pleasure:

liberalissimo. Non era cavalieri né d'altra condizione uomo, che fosse in sua corte o che passasse per quella contrada, che da lui non fosse provveduto; ed era lo dono proporzionato a sua vertude . . .. In essa corte  . . . erano li buoni dicitori in rima di ogni condizione, quivi erano li eccellentissimi cantatori, quivi erano persone d'ogni sollazzo che si può pensare virtudioso e onesto  . . . li abitanti e sudditi nôtavano in allegrezza.

Rather than an objective reflection of the state of affairs in twelfth-century Sicily, this was a remarkable projection of the image of the court that had established itself in northern Italy. See A. Roncaglia, "Le corti medievali," in A. Asor Rosa, ed., Letteratura Italiana 1 (1982): 105, citing La Comedia di Dante degli Allagherii col Commento di Jacopo della Lana, Bolognese, ed. L. Scarabelli (Bologna: Tipografia regia, 1866) 3: 310. [BACK]

23. Sonnet "Cortesia cortesia cortesia chiamo" in Mario Marti, ed., Poeti giocosi del tempo di Dante (Milano: Rizzoli, 1956) 391. All grace, the sonnet goes on, has been chased by avarizia, and those who have do not give. A younger contemporary of Dante's, Folgòre died in or before 1332. [BACK]

24. Ruggero M. Ruggieri has adeptly highlighted this central concern in Dante's opus: see his article, "Cavalleria," in ED 1: 897-899, to which I refer the reader for the pertinent bibliography. [BACK]

25. See Teodolinda Barolini, Dante's Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), esp. 96-100, 108-112 on Guiraut and 164-173 on Bertran, as well as the philological studies on single troubadours by Michelangelo Picone: "I trovatori di Dante: Bertran de Born," Studi e problemi di critica testuale 19 (1979): 71-94; "Giraut de Bornelh nella prospettiva di Dante," Vox Romanica 39 (1980): 22-43; and " Paradiso IX: Dante, Folchetto e la diaspora trobadorica," Medioevo romanzo 8 (1981-1983): 47-89, in addition to his "Dante e la tradizione arturiana," Romanische Forschungen 94 (1982): 1-18. Tenso, Bulletin of the Société Guilhem IX 5.1 (1989) is a special issue on the theme of "Dante's Influence on (Our Reading of) the Troubadours." In particular it focuses on the way Dante has accustomed us to underline the troubadours' exalted sense of the lady's value and the absoluteness of love. [BACK]

26. On Bertran see the ample commentary in The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born, eds. W. D. Paden et al. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1986). [BACK]

27. On the contrastive parallel between Bertran and Sordello in the Divina Commedia see T. Barolini, Dante's Poets (1984), "The Poetry of Politics: Bertran and Sordello" 153-172. It is not known whether Dante also knew Sordello's moral composition "Ensenhamen d'onor." [BACK]

28. Davis (1984): chap. 4, " Il buon tempo antico (The Good Old Time)," chap. 5, "The Malispini Question" with further supportive arguments from detailed analysis of the manuscripts, and the Appendix "Recent Work on the Malispini Question."

Text in Natalino Sapegno, ed., Poeti minori del Trece nto (Milano, Napoli: R. Ricciardi, 1952) 28-30. See L. Martines (1979) 84. [BACK]

29. [BACK]

30. Davis, chap. 3 "Poverty and Eschatology in the Commedia. " [BACK]

31. Martines 126-128 and the literature cited in his notes and bibliography, esp. pp. 340 and 347. [BACK]

32. See A. Scaglione, "Dante's Poetic Orthodoxy: The Case of Pier della Vigna," Lectura Dantis, ed. Tibor Wlassics, 1 (Charlottesville, VA: Bailey Printing, 1987): 49-60, rpt. in Paolo Cherchi and Michelangelo Picone, eds., Studi di Italianistica in onore di Giovanni Cecchetti (Ravenna: Longo, 1988) 57-66. [BACK]

33. On Adalbert of Bremen see Jaeger, esp. 67-81. [BACK]

34. See Convivio 4.13.6-9, where a sense of self-restraint even in seeking the highest goals is stressed as part of wisdom, and specifically discipline and measure in seeking knowledge beyond the possible and the useful: "Nel primo de l'Etica dice che 'l disciplinato chiede di sapere certezza ne le cose, secondo che [ne] la loro natura di certezza si riceva.'  . . . E però Paulo dice: 'Non più sapere che sapere si convegna, ma sapere a misura.'" [BACK]

35. " . . . cum et mulieribus  . . . inseruiret et in omni sermone omnibus affabilem esse et iucundum se uellet; domi uero etiam contumelias seruorum ancillarumque pertulit, ut ad id aliquando quod cupiebat, ueniret." [BACK]

36. Sources for the theological aspect of the episode (Pope Boniface's promise to absolve Guido for his yet uncommitted sin of deceitful counseling) do not seem to have been located, but there is a similar story in a thirteenth-century French poem, Valentin et Orson, successful enough to have received a printed edition in 1489, where an archbishop attempts to seduce King Pepin's sister by promising her absolution beforehand for the sin of fornication. [BACK]

37. R. Kirkpatrick, Dante's Paradiso and the Limitations of Modern Criticism (1978); idem, Dante's Inferno: Difficulty and Dead Poetry (Cambridge, England, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). It may sound like a coincidental confirmation of the preceding analysis that, in his 1978 study, Kirkpatrick phrases his conclusion on "The Organisation of the Canto in the Paradiso " thus: "[Dante is,] within the code of a divine courtliness, the lover of Beatrice. And in the Twenty Third Canto, which, in portraying the place of the Blessed Virgin in Heaven, is the supreme representation of the courtly life, Dante proves his claim to participate, according to his own peculiar virtues and abilities, in the celebration of ultimate civility " (p. 177, emphasis mine). [BACK]

38. Peter Dronke, Dante and Medieval Latin Traditions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Jeremy Tambling, Dante and Difference: Writing in the Commedia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). The methodological impasse that is evident in recent Dante criticism may be highlighted by the fact that, convincing as these objectors may sound, they have not exploited alternative methods in a satisfactory manner. For critical assessments of Dronke's, Tambling's, and Kirkpatrick's works see the reviews by Teodolinda Barolini in Renaissance Quarterly 41.2 (1988): 293-294; 42.3 (1989): 537-540; and Comparative Literature (forthcoming, 1991); also, Richard H. Lansing on Tambling, Italica 67.4 (1990): 520-522. [BACK]

39. Aurelio Roncaglia, "Per il 750 ° anniversario della Scuola poetica Siciliana," Atti dell'Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rendiconti della classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, Serie 8 ^a : 38 (Roma: Accademia dei Lincei, 1983-1984) 321-333, has made an intriguing hypothesis about the manuscript copy of the Provençal corpus that Frederick II may have obtained from Ezzelino da Romano in Verona and made available to his court poets around 1232. But see Alberto Vàrvaro's strictures in A. Asor Rosa, ed., Letteratura Italiana 7.1 (1987): 92. See Zumthor (1987) 164-166 on the first methodical uses of written documents for literary transmission. [BACK]

40. R. G. Witt (1988) 52. [BACK]

41. On this aspect of Petrarca's poetic and moral psychology see my "Petrarca 1974: A Sketch for A Portrait" in A. Scaglione, ed., Francis Petrarch, Six Centuries Later: A Symposium (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1975) 1-24; idem, "Classical Heritage and Petrarchan Self-Consciousness in the Literary Emergence of the Interior 'I'," Altro Polo 7 (Sydney, Australia, 1984): 23-34, rpt. in Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views: Petrarch (New York: Chelsea Press, 1989): 125-137.

Petrarca's appreciation for Occitan poetry needs no further arguing here; his taste for the "matter of Brittany," on the other hand, is not largely documented beyond such statements of awareness, tinged by condescendence for its sheer amenity and popular appeal, as in Trionfi 2: "Tr. Cupidinis," vv. 79-81: "quei che le carte empion di sogni: / Lancillotto, Tristano e gli altri erranti / onde convien che 'l vulgo errante agogni" (ed. C. Appel, Halle, 1901). [BACK]

42. Lucie Brind'Amour in T. Klaniczay et al., eds. (1988): 450-453. The key texts and authors for Castille are El cancionero de Baena (1445), Juan de Mena, the Marquis of Santillana, Juan del Encina, Jorge Manrique, and Hernando de Ludueña ( Doctrinal de gentileza ); for Catalonia, especially Ausias March. [BACK]

44. Roger S. Loomis, "The Allegorical Siege in the Art of the Middle Ages," American journal of Archaeology 2.23 (1919): 255-269, and Thomas M. Greene, "Magic and Festivity at the Renaissance Court," Renaissance Quarterly 40.4 (1987): 636-659 at 642. [BACK]

45. For example, A. Scaglione, "Cinquecento Mannerism and the Uses of Petrarch," in O. B. Hardison, ed., Medieval and Renaissance Studies 5 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971): 122-155. [BACK]

46. The text is worth quoting:

Lo basilisco a lo speco lucente
tragge a morire cum risbaldimento,
lo cesne canta plù gioiosamente
quand'egli è presso a lo so finimento,
  lo paon turba, istando plù gaudente,
cum a soi pedi fa riguardamento,
l'augel fenice s'arde veramente
per ritornare in novo nascimento.

In tai nature eo sentom'abenuto,
che allegro vado a morte a le belleze,
e 'nforzo 'l canto presso a lo finire;
   estando gaio torno dismarruto,
ardendo 'n foco inovo in allegreze,
per vui, plù gente, a cui spero redire.

The basilisk before the shining mirror / comes to death with joy, / the swan sings with greatest pleasure / when it approaches its end, / the peacock becomes perturbed when, / at the height of its rapture, it looks at its feet, / the phoenix burns itself to come back to a new life. / I feel I have acquired the nature of one of these animals / when I see I go toward my death in the name of beauty, / and sing more sharply as the end approaches; / even while I feel merry I become lost, / burning in fire I renew myself in joy, / all this because of you, most gentle one, to whom I seek to return.Text from Bruno Panvini, ed., Le rime della scuola siciliana 1 (Firenze: Olschki, 1962). Trans. mine. [BACK]

47. Text from Contini, ed., Letteratura Italiana delle Origini (1970). Frede Jensen's new edition of the Sicilian School (1986) is useful for its criteria of selection. [BACK]

48. G. Contini, ed., Poeti del Duecento (1960): 1: 107. [BACK]

49. Leonard Forster, The Icy Fire: Five Studies in European Petrarchism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969; 1978), is a brilliant study of Petrarca's antitheses within the whole Petrarchist tradition. [BACK]

50. The symmetric arrangement of this passage reminds the reader of the similar cadence in Marie de France's Lai du chèvrefeuille. Tristan discloses to Iseut that he is nearby in the forest by sending her a message in the form of a twig where he has carved the couplet: "Bele amie, si est de nus: / ne vus senz mei, ne jeo senz vus!" ("This is the way with us, my sweet friend: neither you without me, nor I without you!") Writing in France and England, the Norman Marie, perhaps the natural daughter of Geoffrey IV of Anjou, is supposed to have composed her lais between 1175-1189, and the Isopet and Espurgatoire Saint Patrice after 1189.

As to the precedent of Thomas, see Jean Charles Payen, ed., Les Tristan en vers (Paris: Garnier, 1974) 178 and 231: "La bele raïne, s'amie / en cui est sa mort e sa vie," vv. 1061 f.; "cum a dame, cum a s'amie, / en qui maint sa mort e sa vie," vv. 2711 f. [BACK]

51. Contini, ed., Poeti del Duecento (1960): 1: 109. [BACK]

52. G. Contini, ed., Poeti del Duecento (1960): 2: 602. [BACK]

53. J. Vernon Hall, " Decorum in Italian Renaissance Literary Criticism," Modern Language Quarterly 4 (1943): 177-183. [BACK]

54. See, for example, his letter no. 8 to the royal secretary Zanobi da Strada at Naples in Boccaccio, Opere latine minori, ed. F. Massera (Bari: Laterza, 1928): 130-135. On Boccaccio's social and political attitudes see Franco Gaeta in A. Asor Rosa, ed., Letteratura italiana 1 (1982): 215-228. Gaeta's section of the vol., pp. 149-255, deals with the transition "Dal comune alla corte rinascimentale." [BACK]

55. See Aldo Scaglione, "Boccaccio, Chaucer, and the Mercantile Ethic," in David Daiches and Anthony Thorlby, eds., Literature and Western Civilization, II: The Medieval World (London: Aldus Press, 1973): 579-600. [BACK]

56. Thomas G. Bergin, Boccaccio (New York: Viking, 1981): 69, 142. [BACK]

57. For example, Nicolas J. Perella, "The World of Boccaccio's Filocolo," PMLA 4 (1961): 330-339; A. Scaglione, Nature and Love in the Late Middle Ages: An Essay on the Cultural Context of the Decameron (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press; Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1963; rpt. Westwood, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976): chap. 4. [BACK]

58. "considerata periculorum susceptio et laborum perpessio" nourished on "magnificentia, fidentia, patientia, perseverantia." Cicero, De inventione 2.54.163. [BACK]

59. N. Elias, The Court Society, especially Appendix 2 "On the Position of the Intendant," 284-294, gives a trenchant description of the difference between bourgeois and aristocratic economic ethics in the ancien régime: the medieval aristocratic ethic was not very different [BACK]

60. For example, quote p. 63 in N. Elias, The Court Society. [BACK]

61. "Vivon quasi tutti d'entrata facendo poca stima di chi non la spende tutta; si reputan a vergogna il trafficare, et chi attende al guadagno, ancorché fusse fatto con il mercatar in grosso, non è tenuto gentiluomo fra loro; per questo presumono d'esser molto superiori a' gentiluomini delle città mercantili, spendon volentieri et più che non han di rendita, però son sempre indebitati fino agli occhi." Quoted by C. Donati, L'idea della nobiltà in Italia (1988) 165 from G. Agnelli, "Relazione dello stato di Ferrara di Orazio della Rena, 1589," Atti e memorie della Deputazione ferrarese di storia patria 8 (1898): 30. On Petrarca's and Boccaccio's uses of chivalric traditions, especially in their "minor" works, see R. M. Ruggieri, L'umanesimo cavalleresco italiano da Dante al Pulci (Roma, 1962) chaps. 4 and 5, pp. 85-134. [BACK]