First Poetic Schools and Early Prose Narrative

When, in 1220, the twenty-five-year-old Frederick of Swabia, the future “stupor mundi,” entered Italy to claim his imperial crown, the troubadour Aimeric de Peguilhan (1190–1221) saluted him as the one who would bring back the knightly ideal: “I thought that Valor and Liberality were dead . . .. Never did a man see a physician of such youth, / so handsome, so good, so generous, and so knowledgeable, / so courageous, / so firm, so conquering, / so apt in speaking and understanding. / . . . See how much valor in a mere boy!”^[33]

Giacomo da Lentini, the most important poet at Frederick II's court, where the Italian poetic tradition started, was a notary, as was the court's most significant prose-writer, the protonotario, “first notary” or chancellor, Pier della Vigna. Imitating the Provençal lyric and the Bolognese notarial dictamen as well as the Roman stilus rhetoricus of the chancery of Honorius III, these courtiers carried on the civilizing trend that had imposed the patterns of cortesia on the urbanized knighthood. A striking novelty of this school is the practical deletion of the political context: love reigns supreme at a court where the centralizing will of the sovereign obviates the charged dialectical play of interests and special pleadings that characterized the careers of free agents at the feudal courts. From the status of a symbolic and allusive cover, courtly love could now turn to purely psychological and spiritual considerations. Frederick II's poets were no longer spokesmen of warrior knights but high bureaucrats who had to eschew all references to social, political, or economic claims.^[34]

As we have seen (chap. 5), courtoisie could perform a metaphysical function analogous to the theological one of divine grace; the opposition courtoisie/vilenie, originally meaning aristocracy versus both bourgeois and peasant estates, came to imply secular transcendence of social limitations whereby the poor or landless knights, even when nonnoble by feudal standards, could be redeemed and ennobled by courtesy

alone, the domna replacing God. This meaning of “true nobility” could find its place in the Provençal partimens or in the thoroughly secular neo-Platonic mysticism of the Perceval figure.

Moving along such lines, in the subsequent doctrine of the Dolce Stil Nuovo the argument for spiritual refinement played a key role, stressing personal inner nobility versus social privilege. Dante's Convivio would soon lend powerful support to this thesis. True nobility was, for these poets, gentleness of heart, and the “gentleman” was inescapably marked by the capacity for love. The motif of the noble heart as source of true nobility reminds us of Gottfried's edele herzen: it implied a happy yet tragic conspiracy, like that of Tristan and Isolt, individuals isolated by their virtuous superiority to the intrigue, dishonesty, baseness, raw ambition, and material impulses of the crowd at court. Cavalcanti was known, even as late as Boccaccio's Decameron, for his aristocratic will to stay aloof from the materialistic crowd of his fellow Florentine merchants, and Dante's own scorn for the bourgeois ideals of his fellow citizens was tied to his despair about the future of Florentine policies. All this notwithstanding, we must bear in mind that the Stil Nuovo is essentially a bourgeois movement, numbering among its leaders lawyers (like its “founder” Guinizelli and Dante's admired friend, Cino da Pistoia) and high merchants (Cavalcanti issued from a merchant Guelf family). It was not without social reason that it flourished in areas with strong popular bases, namely Bologna and Tuscany. The unashamed espousal of the vernacular, as most consciously with Dante, was an explicit act of faith in the popolo. In his Convivio Dante meant to share science with the common man, a goal that required the vernacular.

Popular sentiments were vocal all around on the political and cultural levels. The chroniclers of the bourgeois commune, typically Dante's contemporaries Dino Compagni and Giovanni Villani, could not hide their sympathy for the comune del popolo. Their keen analyses of events displayed the mentality and sense of values that characterize bourgeois rather than aristocratic societies, namely: a taste for parliamentary and free representative electoral procedures; respect for the rule of law; and concern for the cost of government—all matters of little concern to high noblemen and their acolytes. They criticized the very things that marked aristocratic life styles and their imitators among the high merchants, namely conspicuous consumption, sumptuous dress, and aggressively heroic individual postures.^[35] These same chroniclers and their communal predecessors held the view that noblemen tended to be bellicose, unruly, hard-headed, and arrogant in their unbounded ambitions—Starcateruses in potentia. The nobles could only survive by

banding together and forming collective consorterie around their own families and their allies. Deep down, their morals were those of the Nibelungs. Yet the environment of the city also acted on them as a civilizing force, though their resistance compelled the burghers to do their best to either tame them completely or oust them beyond city walls.

Cavalcanti reminded his audience of the Christian virtue of humility as a requirement for courtliness and courtesy when he attributed umiltà to his lady (“donna d'umiltà”) in “Chi è questa,” a sonnet that, for a textual competition with Guinizelli's “Io voglio del ver la mia donna laudare,” is textured in a sort of “parodia-analogia sacrale” of biblical terminology, as G. Contini put it.^[36] It was an idiosyncratic example of the blending of secular and religious mysticism that characterized late courtly lyric from Provence on. Courtly love had been the romantic side of that broad sense of love, compassion, human sympathy (reverentia ), and ultimately “humanity” that made up courtliness as a whole. Gottfried, we remember, had closely bound together nobility and morality: “[moral teaching] is given to all noble hearts as a nursemaid,” “[moraliteit] sist edelen herzen allen / zeiner ammen gegeben” (8014 f.). Around the same time that Cavalcanti wrote the Novellino (end of the thirteenth century), the prolific Florentine translator and moralist Bono Giamboni defined moral virtues as “courteous habits and beautiful, pleasing manners.”^[37]

The other genre that concerns us, the primer of conduct or treatise on social manners and mores, which may be ideally related to the early episcopal biographies, started in Italy with the Florentine Brunetto Latini and the Milanese Bonvesin da la Riva, popolani both (aside from the case just mentioned of Thomasin von Zerclaere, who wrote in German for a noble audience). This genre, too, like the lyric, developed by bending for a burgherly society standards that originally derived from the chivalric society and that had to be tamed and adapted—often by sheer transposition without transformation. Brunetto (1220 or after-1294) is the more striking case: a citizen of the most mercantile-minded commune, he adopted all the paraphernalia of chivalric education for the edification of his burgher citizens and city leaders. In the 1260s, Brunetto's portrait of a knight whose bearing befits his status as he rides through the city, comprised the advice to proceed with restraint—the traditional mesure —and an easy yet distinctive and dignified self-assurance:

Consiglioti che vade
molto cortesemente:
.   .   .   .   .     .   .

ch'andar così 'n disfreno
par gran salvatichezza.
.   .   .   .   .     .      .     .   .
Guarda che non ti move
com'on che sia di villa;
ma va sicuramente.

(Go  . . . in a stately manner [cortesemente ], . . . for to ride without restraint betrays great boorishness . . .. Guard against moving like a man from the country; but go self-assuredly.) (Tesoretto vv. 1806–1817)^[38]

Latini's Tesoretto describes a court inhabited by canonical chivalric figures allegorically representing, at first, the four cardinal virtues (the foundation of civic education in Cicero's De officiis ). Among these he assimilates the traditional “temperance” to the more chivalric term of “mesure ” (“Qui sta la Temperanza, / cui la gente talora / suol chiamare Misura”—vv. 1284–1286). Fortezza is defined as “Valenza-di-coraggio” (v. 1298). Virtue, the “Empress” of the court, is said to be “capo e salute / di tutta costumanza / e de la buona usanza / e d'i' bei reggimenti / a che vivon le genti” (vv 1239–1244)—in other words, all the qualities of good social conduct. Then follow the more specific chivalric virtues of Cortesia, Larghezza (Liberality), Leanza (Loyalty), and Prodezza (Prov. proece ] (vv. 1343–2054). Brunetto advises his reader (vv. 1350–1356) that more virtues related to these are treated on a loftier level in his Trésor. Cortesia declares Larghezza to be “il capo e la grandezza / di tutto mio mistero” (vv. 1587 f.). We are reminded that in speaking we need “provedimento [care, circumspection], . . . lingua adorna, . . . detto soave,” avoidance of “gravezza” [something like Castiglione's affettazione ], since it ingenerates “noia,” and finally, once again, “misura” (vv. 1559–1622).). As the poem proceeds, we meet Fino Amore with Ovidio intervening in the discussion.

Brunetto's Rettorica dealt more specifically with the art of government, in accordance with a false etymology that related rhetoric to regere, the art of the city's rettori.^[39] It is not clear whether his major work, the French Trésor, was earlier or later than the Tesoretto, but both stemmed from his period of exile in France (1260–1266). The Trésor was based on the Nicomachean Ethics, Guillaume Perrault's Summa aurea de virtutibus (vulgarized in Cavalca's Pungilingua ), the Moralium dogma philosophorum attributed to Guillaume de Conches and well known in Germany, and, for the last book on rhetoric and politics, Cicero's De inventione and some unidentified Italian political tracts reflecting communal democratic ideas.^[40]

Bonvesin (ca. 1250–1315) was a successful and apparently prosperous “magister” or, as in his epitaph, “doctor in gramatica,” owner of property including his private school. He implemented his role of educator of the Milanese high burghers by composing in the regional dialect a treatise in alexandrines, De quinquaginta curialitatibus ad mensam (before 1285 ?), where the curialitates of the Latin title correspond to the fifty rules of “cortesie da desco” indicated in the second line, namely “rules on civilized table manners.” It was an early and rather lively example of the genre that would culminate in Della Casa's Galateo and that was preceded by the Liber Faceti, which in turn was meant as a supplement to the popular medieval schoolbook Liber Catonis. Bonvesin's fifty rules of “cortesie” include the general principle that moderation or measure is necessary in everything (“mesura e modho,” v. 179, analogous to the Tuscan expression “modo e misura”).^[41]

The qualities of noble bearing that were traditionally attached to the civilized nobility were denied to the vilan upstart who has “climbed from lowliness to great prosperity” and political status: he is, in the words of Brunetto's and Bonvesin's contemporary, the Anonimo Genovese writing in the 1290s, devoid of “measure, grace, and kindness” —the virtues demanded of noble courtiers from Otto I to Castiglione.^[42] The vigorous versifier known simply as Anonimo Genovese offers an interesting mixture of aristocratic prejudice, mercantile experience (probably from his belonging to a prominent shipping family), and devout religious asceticism and moralism. A semantic shift from the courtly connotations of “convenience” to that of “responsibility and accountability” appears in his use of the term honesty: “for only honest works and virtues / are merchandise of quality.”^[43] The mercantile lexicon was still in its infancy, but the bourgeois ethic was clearly operative as a matter of survival.

In the nomenclature that resurfaced in Italy, after Occitan and French precedents that included Andreas Capellanus's identification of the noble and loving soul in his canonical De amore, “gentleness” (gentilezza ), “nobility” (nobiltà ), and “courtesy” (cortesia ) could be used as synonyms, but certain distinctions must be kept in mind. The ideology and the accompanying terminology were pervasive in Italian literary texts from the very beginning, and gentilezza was synonymous with civility even without losing its connotation of class nobility. But the lively debates on nobility, from Guinizelli,^[44] Dante, and on to such exemplary humanistic texts as the tracts by Buonaccorso da Montemagno,^[45] Giannozzo Manetti, and Pico della Mirandola, reflect a different social

situation from that of France, Germany, or England. Since in Italy the burghers' communes were the social and political centers, the aristocracy never attained the relatively homogeneous strength it enjoyed in those other regions. In Florence, in particular, the nobility was uneasily tolerated and constrained by the power of the burghers' guilds, which it had to join. That freedom from involvement in any form of manual labor which usually distinguished the nobleman was replaced by mercantile activities that Florentine noblemen came to share with the entrepreneurial class. Thus the theoretical debates on nobility that thrived in Guelf urban environments and around the universities retained a more abstract character and were aimed at a philosophically persuasive definition of the subject, based on spiritual and intellectual excellence rather than inherited feudal privileges and outward signs of distinction (Dante's antica ricchezza e belli costumi, Convivio 4). The theme of courtesy, on the contrary, retained its practical basis of ethical, behavioral casuistry, what the Germans referred to as schöne sîte or zuht, and was particularly popular in areas of seigniorial rule, like the hinterland of Venice (the area of the Franco-Venetian cantari ) and Ferrara.^[46]

At the time of Dante, cortesia began to be felt as a sublime moral attitude within a religious context in the Franciscan circles. Compare the Fioretti:

questo gentile uomo sarebbe buono per la nostra compagnia; il quale è così  . . . amorevole e cortese al prossimo e ai poveri . . .. La cortesia è una delle proprietà di Dio, il quale dà il sole suo e la sua piova a' giusti e agli ingiusti, per cortesia, ed è la cortesia sirocchia della carità, la quale spegne l'odio e conserva l'amore.^[47]

Remarkably, here courtesy is assimilated to charity and attributed to God himself. The most inspired collection of popular tales, known as the Novellino but entitled Libra di novelle o di bel parlar gentile in the Panciatichiano manuscript (ca. 1290), used the word as denoting effective speech—a sense it still carried markedly in Boccaccio.

Confirming the fact that from its earliest documents Italian prose narrative reflected courtly ideals, in the Novellino story after story mirrors a nostalgic longing for the gentle manners of a courtly society that the Florence of wealthy and self-conscious burghers could only dream about. The story of Prester John introduces Emperor Frederick II, a favorite character, as a paragon of courtly manners and speech, who answers the question of what is most precious in the whole world by saying: “The best thing in this world is measure” (misura ).^[48] It had been

a virtue of great prize all along. The story of Tristan and Isolde in the Novellino (no. 65 in Contini's edition) includes an exemplary illustration of courtly cunning in the deception of King Mark by the two lovers. It is the incident of King Mark watching their assignation from a pine tree and Isolde dispelling his suspicions through a clever trick.

Another text from the end of the Duecento that was close to the Novellino, I conti di antichi cavalieri, possibly of multiple French origin, contains, among others, charming stories about Saladino, starting with the first of the collection.^[49] There the Saladin is portrayed thus: “El Saladino fo sì valoroso (= prode ), largo (liberal), cortese signore e d'anemo gentile (courtois )” that he was reputed perfect. The troubadour Bertran de Born visited him and discovered his secret: every day he sought advice on what to do and say from the best experts (conoscenti )—in other words, he used his courtiers to the best advantage (548). The woman whom Bertran advises Saladino to love with high love, so that he will be inspired to even nobler deeds, imposes the condition that he depart from her town (just besieged in order to reach her), taking only her heart with him and leaving his heart with her (once again the motif of the severed heart). Conto 19 about Brunor and Galetto (Gallehault) moves on an equally high level of chivalry. A king owes his honor to good deeds, not to his possessions and power: a knightly king prefers to give away his kingdom (as Lancelot and Tristan did) in order to dedicate himself to chivalrous pursuits.^[50]Onore comes from valore, and valore from vertù. So Arthur is defined as “king only in his virtuous deeds of love, chivalry, courtesy, loyalty, and liberality.”^[51]

Francesco da Barberino (1264–1348) is remarkable for his knowledge of Provençal poets, of whom he mentions no fewer than twentyone (all from the twelfth and early thirteenth century) in his didactic prosimetric poem Reggimento e costumi di donna (before 1309–1318/ 1320), as against the merely six quoted by Dante and the fifteen by Petrarca.^[52] His didactic-allegorical poem Documenti d'Amore (before 1309–1314) treats the theory of love in awkward but learned terms.^[53] Scholarly familiarity with Provencal literature remained more operative in Italy than elsewhere, and in the Cinquecento, especially through Bembo, it would contribute to the establishment of Petrarca as the model of poetic practice. It was part of the continuity of a rich tradition of moral and behavioral sublimation that permeated the lyrical, ethical, and practical codes even in social environments largely dominated by the middle class.

After the Sicilian School, the high lyric thrived outside the courts,

but there was also a “court poetry” by professional courtiers—who, it must be said, did not show a high level of poetic inspiration. These Trecento poets are sometimes referred to as curiali, curtensi, or cortigiani.^[54] Such were the Sienese Bindo di Cione del Frate, the Ferrarese Antonio de' Beccari (1315-ca. 1370), the Paduan Francesco di Vannozzo di Bencivenne, Braccio Bracci from Arezzo (second half of fourteenth century), and the Sienese Simone Serdini, called II Saviozzo.^[55] They gravitated around the Milanese Visconti court, the principal court of northern Italy, and moved about a lot, mirroring their wandering nature through the chameleonlike opportunism of their shirting political stances, though other themes were more common to their verse, from the amorous to the burlesque. Vannozzo's work is the richest document of courtly literature extant from northern Italy. While Vannozzo showed some satirical verve in condemning current corruption and loss of courtly virtue,^[56] Braccio Bracci did not hesitate to flatter his lord Bernabò Visconti with a fictional letter of praise from the Sultan of Babylon.

The intensive use of the paradigm of servizio d'amore will disappear in the Quattrocento.^[57]Cortesia became a commonplace term, with an ever more vague meaning, still carrying along villania as its antonym. Yet the term was ready to enter the semantic field of etiquette, since as early as the second half of the fourteenth century it could be employed in the external sense of behavioral patterns that come immediately under the senses, as in the proverb “cortesia di bocca assai vale e poco costa” cited in Paolo da Certaldo's Libra di buoni costumi (79).^[58] A Tuscan merchant who may have held office in the Florentine commune, Paolo (fl. ca. 1360) had offered this interesting definition: “cortesia non è altro se non misura, e misura dura: e non è altro misura se non avere ordine ne' fatti tuoi”; “measure endures, and courtesy is nothing but measure, to wit, orderliness in your business.” Hence we may interpret the implicit values of parsimoniousness and accountability.^[59] His text is a witness to the popularity of several current manuals on conduct upon which he drew, specifically Le cinque chiavi della sapienza (a compilation of didactic sentences by various authors), L'Albertano (a summary of Albertano da Brescia's Latin works), Le quattro virtù morali (attributed to Seneca), Il libro di costumanza (a vulgarization of the Vulgarium dogma ), and La pìstola di Santo Bernardo della masserizia e reggimento della famiglia. The courtois morality of the communal bourgeois is contrasted by Paolo with “beastly,” irrational, and potentially criminal behavior of the peasant (still the uncourteous villano,

rustico, or pagano ), whom the landowner must handle with shrewdness and circumspection.^[60] The aristocratic quality of loyalty to one's liege has been turned into a bourgeois virtue: the peasant's good service toward the landlord.^[61]

In more general terms, we have seen the beginning of an Italian development that responded to transalpine cultural suggestions under the peculiar conditions of a lively burgherly society. The combination of social structures and cultural thrusts, namely, feudalism and curiality/ courtliness, that elsewhere generated the chivalrous ideals, was also a fact in Italian regions, but with a necessary adaptation to the vital conditions of mercantile forces either resisting or dominating. Chivalry thrived in Italy, too, but took peculiar forms of defense of spiritual values that were not bound to aristocratic milieus. The feudal nobility did retain a pervasive force in Italy, but was tempered, checked, and transformed by the assertive presence of the high merchants even while the new ideals were tinged by themes and motifs that originally issued from the same circles of clerical educators around episcopal and secular courts that also operated north of the Alps.