SPOT ON LITERATURE

 

     

THE MIDDLE AGES


AND THE RENAISSANCE

       

       
see also:
 
Arturian Legend
 
(Pre-Raphaelite's and Beardsley's Vision)
 

***
 
Dante Alighieri "The Divine Comedy"
      
(Illustrations by G. Dore, W. Blake, S. Dali)

***

Boccaccio "The Decameron"

(Illustrations by Salvador Dali)

***

Ariosto "Orlando Fuioso" (Illustrations by Gustave Dore)


***

Rabelais "Gargantua and Pantagruel"

(Illustrations by Gustave Dore)

***

W. Shakespeare "Hamlet"

(illustration from Eugene Delacroix)

 

As the Roman Empire declined and 'civilised' Greco-Roman culture was overcome by a diversity of 'barbarian' counter culture, so literature was lost to what has become known as the 'Dark Ages'. With the end of classical culture European thought had lost its central focus of Rome and scholarship was left to the many emerging monasteries.
The Dark Ages is seen as a cultural step backwards, however this was a time of gradual fusion between the largely Christian Roman civilisation and heathen practices. Despite the lack of literary profusion during the Middle Ages a strong oral tradition was maintained and stories from these mysterious times have inspired many writers. Eventually works from all over Europe did emerge and had a great influence on the evolution of literature with the writings of such luminaries as Chaucer and Dante still being studied in schools today.
 

William Morris
(1834-1896)
Queen Guinevere
1858

ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE
 

The decline of the Roman Empire was an immensely long and complicated process. In
spite of the name sometimes given to the succeeding centuries, not all knowledge of
Roman civilization was lost in the 'Dark Ages', and the Empire itself survived in Byzantium, in a
form increasingly alienated from the West. But Rome itself fell into ruins and large parts of the
former Roman Empire were occupied by tribes who were not only pagans but also illiterate.
Among them were the Germanic tribes known as the Anglo-Saxons who occupied lowland Britain,
extinguishing the culture of the Romano-Celts, despite the efforts of the legendary King Arthur
and his knights.
 

OLD ENGLISH

Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, is the oldest form of our language. Modern readers, unless they have studied it, cannot read it any more than they can read classical Greek, but the language is not the only problem. It is much easier to relate to the ancient Greeks than to the Anglo-Saxons with their grim gods and bloody, beleaguered heroes. Life in an Anglo-Saxon village is more remote to us than life in classical Athens. We would feel more at home dining in some comfort in an Attic villa while a bard recites Homer than we would in the draughty hall of some Saxon chief, or even in the cloisters of a Benedictine abbey listening to the Latin chants of the monks.


BEOWULF

Beowulf, the first English epic, dates from the 7th century and runs to about 3,000 lines. It relates the adventures of a Scandinavian hero and his conflicts with several ghastly monsters, the last of which proves fatal. Though in verse, it depends more on alliteration rather than rhyme and, like all early poetry, was designed to be recited - intoned even. It is slow-moving, largely due to the rhetorical trick of describing every object by a metaphorical synonym. Homer of course always referred to the sea (for instance) as 'the wine-dark sea' (actually a mistranslation, but a happy one), but in Beowulf this device is carried to excess, each mention of the object being followed by a whole string of descriptive terms.
Beowulf gets a mixed reception nowadays. It was defended in memorable terms by J. R. R.
Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings: 'profound feeling, and poignant vision, filled with the beauty and mortality of the world, are aroused by brief phrases, light touches, short words resounding like harp-strings sharply plucked'. On the other hand, the late Brigid Brophy put it top of her list of 'works of literature we could do without'.
The author of Beowulf is unknown, and although a number of Old English poems have been preserved, the names of only two poets have come down to us. In the case of Caedmon (late 7th century), a monk of humble origins, who is said to have translated parts of the Bible into English verse, it is little more than a name, since only one poem can definitely be ascribed to him. Cynewulf, who lived later, about the early 9th century, has had many poems on religious subjects ascribed to him, but modern scholars accept only four, to which his name was attached in runic characters, as definite.

_____________________________________       Beowulf - heroic poem, the highest achievement of Old English literature and the earliest European vernacular epic. Preserved in a single manuscript (Cotton Vitellius A XV) from c. 1000, it deals with events of the early 6th century and is believed to have been composed between 700 and 750. It did not appear in print until 1815. Although originally untitled, it was later named after the Scandinavian hero Beowulf, whose exploits and character provide its connecting theme. There is no evidence of a historical Beowulf, but some characters, sites, and events in the poem can be historically verified. The poem falls into two parts. It opens in Denmark, where King Hrothgar's splendid mead hall, Heorot, has been ravaged for 12 years by nightly visits from an evil monster, Grendel, who carries off Hrothgar's warriors and devours them. Unexpectedly, young Beowulf, a prince of the Geats of southern Sweden, arrives with a small band of retainers and offers to cleanse Heorot of its monster. The King is astonished at the little-known hero's daring but welcomes him, and after an evening of feasting, much courtesy, and some discourtesy, the King retires, leaving Beowulf in charge. During the night Grendel comes from the moors, tears open the heavy doors, and devours one of the sleeping Geats. He then grapples with Beowulf, whose powerful grip he cannot escape. He wrenches himself free, tearing off his arm, and leaves, mortally wounded. The next day is one of rejoicing in Heorot. But at night as the warriors sleep, Grendel's mother comes to avenge her son, killing one of Hrothgar's men. In the morning Beowulf seeks her out in her cave at the bottom of a mere and kills her. He cuts the head from Grendel's corpse and returns to Heorot. The Danes rejoice once more. Hrothgar makes a farewell speech about the character of the true hero, as Beowulf, enriched with honours and princely gifts, returns home to King Hygelac of the Geats. The second part passes rapidly over King Hygelac's subsequent death in a battle (of historical record), the death of his son, and Beowulf's succession to the kingship and his peaceful rule of 50 years. But now a fire-breathing dragon ravages his land and the doughty but aging Beowulf engages it. The fight is long and terrible and a painful contrast to the battles of his youth. Painful, too, is the desertion of his retainers except for his young kinsman Wiglaf. Beowulf kills the dragon but is mortally wounded. The poem ends with his funeral rites and a lament. Beowulf belongs metrically, stylistically, and thematically to the inherited Germanic heroic tradition. Many incidents, such as Beowulf's tearing off the monster's arm and his descent into the mere, are familiar motifs from folklore. The ethical values are manifestly the Germanic code of loyalty to chief and tribe and vengeance to enemies. Yet the poem isso infused with a Christian spirit that it lacks the grim fatality of many of the Eddic lays or the Icelandic sagas. Beowulf himself seems more altruistic than other Germanic heroes or the heroes of the Iliad. It is significant that his three battles are not against men, which would entail the retaliation of the blood feud, but against evil monsters, enemies of the whole community and of civilization itself. Many critics have seen the poem as a Christian allegory, with Beowulf the champion of goodness and light against the forces of evil and darkness. His sacrificial death is not seen as tragic but as the fitting end of a good (some would say “too good”) hero's life. That is not to say that Beowulf is an optimistic poem. The English critic J.R.R. Tolkien suggests that its total effect is more like a long, lyrical elegy than an epic. Even the earlier, happier section in Denmark is filled with ominous allusions that were well understood by contemporary audiences. Thus, after Grendel's death, King Hrothgar speaks sanguinely of the future, which the audience knows will end with the destruction of his line and the burning of Heorot. In the second part the movement is slow and funereal; scenes from Beowulf's youth are replayed in a minor key as a counterpoint to his last battle, and the mood becomes increasingly sombre as the wyro (fate) that comes to all mencloses in on him. John Gardner's Grendel (1971) is a retelling of the story from the point of view of the monster. Encyclopedia Britannica _____________________________________

BEDE

Caedmon's poem was preserved in a manuscript by Bede, or Baeda, (A.D. 673-735), the great figure of the early Anglo-Saxon period, who spent most of his life in a monastery at Jarrow and was known to later generations as the Venerable Bede. As a monk and a scholar, he wrote in Latin, and his most famous work, among many on various subjects, is his History of the English Church and People, which he completed in about A.D. 731. It describes the history of Britain from the invasion of Julius Caesar (55 B.C.) up to his own day and, although displaying understandable bias in favour of the Church and of his native Northumbrian kingdom - and against the marauding Vikings, destroyers of monasteries — it is generally both reliable and perceptive.


KING ALFRED

Bede's History was translated into Old English as part of the literary revival associated with Alfred the Great, King of Wessex (A.D. 871-899). The King himself even translated some works from Latin for the furtherance of education, and he encouraged an important venture already in existence, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The most important historical source for the period, the Chronicle was in fact several, produced in different versions in different towns: the Peterborough Chronicle is the most famous survivor. It eventually covered the period from the beginning of Christianity to the mid-12th century. The records for the early years are merely a brief register, but from the 5th century the entries become more detailed, especially for certain events, such as Alfred's wars against the Danes, and poems are included, notably one about the Battle of Brunanburh (A.D. 937), best known in a translation bv Tennyson.

 

MYTH AND MYSTERY

 

see also:

Arturian Legend

(Pre-Raphaelite's

and
 
Beardsley's Vision)

Middle English, the language of Chaucer, is easier than Old English for the modern reader. The transition took place gradually, but is conveniently dated from the Norman Conquest (1066). Thereafter the ruling class spoke French and, inevitably, English absorbed many French words. A more fundamental change was the loss of most of the inflections that, in Old English, indicated the function of a word within a sentence. Thus, in Old English it was possible to have a sentence in which, for example, the object preceded the verb, as in Urne dceghwamlican hlaf sele us todae, or 'Give us today our daily bread'. The suffix -ne (in urne) indicates the object of the verb sele ('give'). In Middle (or modern) English, it was necessary for the verb to precede the object.

 

LEGENDARY HEROES


While the aristocracy spoke and wrote in French, the monkish chroniclers, such as William ot Malmesbury and Geoffrey of Monmouth. wrote in Latin, the language of the Church. Geoffrey's History of the Kings of Britain (c.1148) helped to popularize the legends of king Arthur, and the first English version of Arthurian legend appeared near the end of the 12th century in a poetic history, the Brut, by Layamon. a Worcestershire cleric. It also contained the first English accounts of Lear and Cymheline.
Arthurian legend, the standard medieval version of which was Sir Thomas Malorv's Le Morte d'Arthur (1470), was not confined to England, and the story was developed by Chretien de Troves (late 12th century) and other French writers. Epic was characteristic of other European peoples. In France, the Chansons de Geste, dating from the 12th century, recounted heroic episodes in the time of Charlemagne. They were similarly infused with a spirit of patriotism and Christian idealism, dealing in particular with the contest with Islam.


THE SAGAS

The great Icelandic Sagas, mostly written down in the 13th century, also recorded the heroic pioneers of earlier times, such as Erik the Red who colonized Greenland in about A.D. 1000. They are prose narratives, however, in general less high-flown than French epic and more reliable historically. The Volsunga Saga, a retelling of the earlier, poetic Edda, the chief source for Norse mythology, provided the material for Wagner's operatic Ring cycle (1848-74).


MYSTERY PLAYS

Most medieval writing was religious, and miracle plays, as they were called, were dramatizations of miraculous episodes from the lives of the Christian saints. Later they included stories from the Bible (first translated in full into English in the 14th century) and were called mystery plays ('mystery' referred to a craft or trade). They were commonly performed in the market-place by local craftsmen, often with much humour, sometimes macabre, and (as in modern pantomime) with contemporary allusions. Each craftsmen's guild had responsibility for a particular piece, frequently linked with the craft concerned. In York, for example, the Shipwrights performed the story of Noah's Ark.
A later development was the 'morality play', in which the characters are personified virtues and vices (Beauty, Truth, Greed, etc.). The 15th-century Everyman, originally Dutch, is the best known. Mystery plays were first recorded in the 13th century; possibly they began as religious pageants associated with the feast day of Corpus Christi. ('Pageant' originally meant the stage on wheels on which the plays were performed.)
Complete cycles of mystery plays have survived from Chester, Wakefield and York, but many other towns had them. Some show considerable literary merit. They were popular in most of Europe, but in England they were finished off by a combination of the Reformation (opposed to religious pageantry), realist drama and professional theatre. They have been revived in the 20th century and The Passion Play of Oberammergau, Bavaria, dating from 1633, is still produced.


POETRY

The two poetic gems of medieval England, Chaucer apart, are The Vision of Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Although William Langland, author of Piers Plowman, and the unknown author of Sir Gawain were contemporaries of Chaucer, they seem to have belonged to an earlier age, partly because they used the old technique of alliteration rather than the syllabic rhyming verse introduced from France. Piers Plowman, often described as the greatest religious poem in English, opens with the narrator falling asleep on the Malvern Hills and dreaming that he sees 'a fair field full of folk', where he can observe the whole of society engaged in their tasks. The poem contains episodes of great imaginative power, unequalled by any other medieval writer.
The subject of Sir Gawain is an episode in Arthurian legend, in which Sir Gawain overcomes a supernatural opponent, the fearful Green Knight. Though an impeccable epic hero. Sir Gawain remains human and fallible, and the poem, about 2,500 lines long, is written in gorgeous and complex language. It survives in only a single manuscript, which also contains three other alliterative poems of high quality, 'The Pearl', 'Patience' and 'Purity1 which, though of a completely different type, are probably by the same poet.
        

"After sharpe shoures,' quod Pees • 'moste shene [bright] is the sonne; Is no vveder warmer • than after watery cloudes. Ne [nor] no love levere [dearer] • ne lever frendes. Than after werre [war] and wo • whan Love and Pees be maistres. Was nevere werre in this world • ne wykkednesse so kene, That ne Love, and [if ] hym luste • to laughynge ne broughte, And Pees thorw pacience • alie perilles stopped.' 'Truce,' quod Treuth • thow tellcs us soth, bi lesus! Clippe [embrace] we in covenaunt • and each of us cusse other!' 'And lete no peple,' quod Pees • perceyve that we chydde! For inpossible is no thying • to him that is almyghty."

Piers Plowman, (B-text) 17, (ed, Alastair Fowler).
          

 
 
MEDIEVAI   FLORENCE

 

In the late Middle Ages, the northern Italian cities were the most prosperous states in Europe, with Florence, thanks to its geographical and economic circumstances, outstanding. The dialect of Tuscany resembled Latin, the mother tongue, and by 1300 it was generally recognized as the language of literature. Italian literature reached new heights, love poetry in particular, but also newer forms such as satire and comedy. The greatest among many fine lyric poets established a unique position in the Western literary tradition.
 

DANTE
 

See also:

Dante Alighieri

"The Divine Comedy"

Illustrations by

Gustave Dore,

William Blake,

Salvador Dali
 

ANDREA DEL CASTAGNO
Dante Alighieri
1450

Dante Alighieri (1265—1321) was a prominent citizen of Florence, closely involved in the fractious politics of the time, hut his personal circumstances were far more important than his public career. In his twenties he fell in love with the young woman whom in his poetry he calls Beatrice. When she died young, in 1290, Dante was inconsolable. She was the subject of most of the poems in his Vita nuova, probably written in the years immediately following her death, and she plays a prominent part in his later, most famous work, Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy).
The Divine Comedy has been described as a summary of the civilization of the Middle Ages and heralded the Renaissance. The work, a magnificent structure in 100 cantos, is divided into three sections, 'Hell', 'Purgatory' and 'Paradise', around which the poet takes a guided tour, firstly with Virgil around Hell and Purgatory. In Paradise, a world of joy and beauty, his guide is Beatrice. The poem is based on Dante's considerable knowledge of philosophy and other learned subjects and is undeniably a challenge to the modern reader. However, no one could fail to find certain passages extremely moving, others charming and delightful, yet others horrifying.
It seems to have been written mainly in the last decade of Dante's life. A political revolution in Florence in 1300 had barred him permanently from his native city, and he spent his later years wandering, finally settling at Ravenna, where he completed the Divine Comedy just before his death. He was mentioned by Chaucer and was widely admired in 17th-century England. Out of fashion in the 18th century, he was enthusiastically revived by the Romantics. In the 20th century his greatest advocate was T. S. Eliot.
   

Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy - Inferno Inferno: Canto I Midway upon the journey of our life   I found myself within a forest dark,   For the straightforward pathway had been lost. Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say   What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,   Which in the very thought renews the fear. So bitter is it, death is little more;   But of the good to treat, which there I found,   Speak will I of the other things I saw there. I cannot well repeat how there I entered,   So full was I of slumber at the moment   In which I had abandoned the true way. But after I had reached a mountain's foot,   At that point where the valley terminated,   Which had with consternation pierced my heart, Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders,   Vested already with that planet's rays   Which leadeth others right by every road. Then was the fear a little quieted   That in my heart's lake had endured throughout   The night, which I had passed so piteously. And even as he, who, with distressful breath,   Forth issued from the sea upon the shore,   Turns to the water perilous and gazes; So did my soul, that still was fleeing onward,   Turn itself back to re-behold the pass   Which never yet a living person left. After my weary body I had rested,   The way resumed I on the desert slope,   So that the firm foot ever was the lower. And lo! almost where the ascent began,   A panther light and swift exceedingly,   Which with a spotted skin was covered o'er! And never moved she from before my face,   Nay, rather did impede so much my way,   That many times I to return had turned.

  
PETRARCH
 


ANDREA DEL CASTAGNO
Francesco Petrarca
1450
   
Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304—74) represented a milestone — his devotion to the Classics and his criticism of Aristotle suggest a Renaissance man, and he is regarded as the founder of Italian humanism. Although Petrarch considered them relatively unimportant, he is remembered especially for his lyrics, known as 'rime sparse', including the long series about Laura, Petrarch's Beatrice, whose identity is similarly obscure. He met her in 1327 in Provence, his home as a young man. Though his family had been exiled from Florence, Petrarch was often in Italy, and in 1341 was crowned Poet Laureate in Rome. He remained a great traveller, employed on diplomatic missions by various Italian courts, and was known and admired throughout Europe. He was the favourite Italian poet of the English Renaissance and his love sonnets had immense influence on 16th-century English poets from Wyatt to Sidney.

_____________________________________ Petrarch born July 20, 1304, Arezzo, Tuscany [Italy] died July 18/19, 1374, Arqua, near Padua, Carrara Italian in full Francesco Petrarca Italian scholar, poet, and Humanist whose poems addressed to Laura, an idealized beloved, contributed to the Renaissance flowering of lyric poetry. Petrarch's inquiring mind and love of classical authors led him to travel, visiting men of learning and searching monastic libraries for classical manuscripts. He was regarded as the greatest scholar of his age. Education and early poems. Petrarch's father, a lawyer, had been obliged to leave Florence in 1302 and had moved to Arezzo, where Petrarch was born. The family eventually moved to Avignon (1312), in the Provence region of southern France, the home of the exiled papal court, at which an Italian lawyer might hope to find employment. Petrarch's first studies were at Carpentras, Fr., and at his father's insistence he was sent to study law at Montpellier, Fr. (1316). From there he returned toItaly with his younger brother Gherardo to continue these studies at Bologna (1320). But already he was developing what, in a later letter, he described as “an unquenchable thirst for literature.” Petrarch's earliest surviving poems, on the death of his mother, date from the Montpellier and Bologna period, though like all Petrarch's work they were heavily revised later. Meanwhile, his knowledge and love of the classical authors increasing, he made his acquaintance with the new vernacular poetry that was being written. After his father's death, in 1326, Petrarch was free to abandon his law studies and pursue his own interests. Returning to Avignon, he took minor ecclesiastical orders and entered the household of the influential cardinal Giovanni Colonna. Petrarch enjoyed life in Avignon, and there is a famous description of him and his brother as dandies in its polished courtly world; but he was also making a name there for his scholarship and the elegance of his culture. As well as a love of literature, Petrarch also had during his early youth a deep religious faith, a love of virtue, and an unusually deep perception of the transitory nature of human affairs. There now followed the reaction—a period of dissipation—which also coincided with the beginning of his famous chaste love for a woman known now only as Laura. Vain attempts have been made to identify her, but Petrarch himself kept silent about everything concerning her civil status, as though he thought it unimportant. He first saw her in the Church of St. Clare at Avignon on April 6, 1327,and loved her, although she was outside his reach, almost until his death. From this love there springs the work for which he is most celebrated, the Italian poems (Rime), which he affected to despise as mere trifles in the vulgar tongue but which he collected and revised throughout his life. Classical studies and career (1330–40) He spent the summer of 1330 at Lombez, Fr., the bishop of which was an old friend from Bologna, Giacomo Colonna. In 1335 he received a canonry there but continued to reside at Avignon in the service of the Cardinal, with whom he stayed until 1337. Quite apart from his love for Laura, this period was an important one for Petrarch. These were years of ambition and unremitting study (notably in the field of classical Latin). They were also years of travel. In 1333 his journeying took him through France, Flanders, Brabant, and the Rhineland, where he visited men of learning and searched monastic libraries for “lost” classical manuscripts (in Liège he discovered copies of two speeches by Cicero). InParis he was given a copy of the Confessions of St. Augustine by a friend and spiritual confidant, the Augustinian monk Dionigi of Sansepolcro, and he was to use this more and more as the breviary of his spiritual life. These experiences bring Petrarch's mission as a stubborn advocate of the continuity between classical culture and theChristian message more sharply into focus. By making a synthesis of the two seemingly conflicting ideals—regarding the one as the rich promise and the other as its divine fulfillment—he can claim to be the founder and great representative of the movement known as European Humanism. He rejected the sterile argumentation and endless dialectical subtleties to which medieval Scholasticism had become prey and turned back for values and illumination to the moral weight of the classical world. In1337 he visited Rome for the first time, to be stirred among its ruins by the evident grandeur of its past. On returning to Avignon he sought a refuge from its corrupt life—the papacy at this time was wholly absorbed in secular matters—and a few miles to the east found his “fair transalpine solitude” of Vaucluse, which was afterward to become a much-loved place of retreat. The chronology of Petrarch's writings is somewhat complicated by his habit of revising, often extensively. By the time he discovered Vaucluse, however, he had written a good many of the individual poems that he was to include in the Epistolae metricae (66 “letters” in Latin hexameter verses) and some of the vernacular Rime inspired by his lovefor Laura. At Vaucluse he began to work on Africa, an epic poem on the subject of the Second Punic War. He also began work on De viris illustribus, intended as a series of biographies of heroes from Roman history (later modified to include famous men of all time, beginning with Adam, as Petrarch's desire to emphasize the continuity among ideals of the Old Testament, of the classical world, and of Christianity increased). Moral and literary evolution (1340–46) Meanwhile, his reputation as a scholar was spreading; in September 1340 he received invitations from Paris and Rome to be crowned as poet. He had perhaps sought out this honour, partly from ambition but mainly in order that the rebirth of the cult of poetry after more than 1,000 years might be fittingly celebrated. He had no hesitation in choosing Rome, and accordingly he was crowned on the Capitoline Hill on April 8, 1341, afterward placing his laurel wreath on the tomb of the Apostle in St. Peter's Basilica: again, the symbolic gesture linking the classical tradition with the Christian message. From Rome he went to Parma and the nearby solitude of Selvapiana, returning to Avignon in the autumn of 1343. It is generally believed that he went through some kind of moral crisis at this time, rooted in his inability to make his life conform to his religious faith and possibly heightened by his brother's decision to enter a Carthusian monastery. At any rate, this is a common reading of the Secretum meum (1342–43). It is an autobiographical treatise consisting of three dialogues between Petrarch and St. Augustine in the presence of Truth. In it he maintains hope that, even amidst worldly preoccupations and error, even while absorbed in himself and his own affairs, a man might still find a way to God. Thus, Petrarch's spiritual “problem” found a coherent solution, one that can be said to express the Petrarchan vision and the Humanist's religious and moral outlook. It was therefore an evolution—both moral and literary—rather than a “crisis” that made Petrarch decide his love for Laura was love for the creature rather than for the Creator and therefore wrong—proof of his attachment to the world. It was an evolution in his thinking that led him to break through the barriers of his too-exclusive admiration for antiquity and to admit other authoritative voices. It was now, for example, that De viris was enlarged to include material from sacred as well as secular history, while in the De vita solitaria (1346) he developed the theoretical basis and description of the “solitary life” whereby man enjoys theconsolations of nature and study together with those of prayer. Break with his past (1346–53) The events of the next few years are fundamental to his biography, both as a man and as a writer. In the first place, he became enthusiastic for the efforts of Cola di Rienzo to revive the Roman republic and restore popular government in Rome—a sympathy that divided him still more sharply from the Avignon court and in 1346 even led to the loss of Cardinal Colonna's friendship. The Plague of 1348, known as the Black Death, saw many friends fall victim, including Laura, who died on April 6, the anniversary of Petrarch's first seeing her. Finally, in the jubilee year of 1350 he made apilgrimage to Rome and later assigned to this year his renunciation of sensual pleasures. These are the landmarks of Petrarch's career, but the time in between was filled with diplomatic missions, study, and immense literary activity. In Verona in 1345 he made his great discovery of the letters of Cicero to Atticus, Brutus, andQuintus, which allowed him to penetrate the surface of the great orator and see the man himself. The letters spurred himon to write epistles to the ancient authors whom he loved and to make a collection of his own letters that he had scattered among his friends. These great collections record not only Petrarch's genius for friendship but also all those shifts in attitude by which he left behind the Middle Ages andprepared for the Renaissance. Toward the end of 1345 he returned again to the peace of Vaucluse and spent two years there, chiefly revising De vita solitaria but also developing the theme of solitude in a specifically monastic context, in De otio religioso. Between November 1347 and his pilgrimage to Rome in 1350 he was also in Verona, Parma, and Padua. Much of the time was spent in advancing his career in the church; the manoeuvring and animosities this involved resulted in an intense longing for the peace of Vaucluse; not even a visit from his lifelong friend the poet Boccaccio, who offered him a chair to be established under his guidance in the University of Florence, could deflect him. He left Rome in May 1351 for Vaucluse. Here he worked on a new plan for the Rime. The project was divided into two parts: the Rime in vita di Laura (“Poems During Laura's Life”) and the Rime in morte di Laura (“PoemsAfter Laura's Death”), which he now selected and arranged to illustrate the story of his own spiritual growth. The choice of poems was further governed by an exquisite aesthetic taste and by a preference for an approximately chronological arrangement, from the description of his falling in love to his final invocation to the Virgin; from his “youthful errors” to his realization that “all worldly pleasure is a fleeting dream”; from his love for this world to his final trust in God. The theme of his Canzoniere (as the poems are usually known) therefore goes beyond the apparent subject matter, his love for Laura. For the first time in the history of the new poetry, lyrics are held together in a marvellous new tapestry, possessing its own unity. By selecting all that was most polished and at the same time most vigorous in the lyric tradition of the preceding two centuries and filtering it through his new appreciation of the classics, he not only bequeathed to humanity the most limpid and yet passionate, precise yet suggestive, expression of love and grief, of the ecstasies and sorrows of man, but also created with his marvellous sensibility the form and language of the modern lyric, to provide a common stock for lyric poets of the whole of Europe. He also continued work on the Metricae, begun in 1350; he embarked on a polemic against the conservative enemies of his new conception of education, which rejected the prevailing Aristotelianism of the schools and restored the spiritual worth of classical writers—the new studies to be called litterae humanae, “humane letters.” He also began work on his poem Trionfi, a more generalized version of the story of the human soul in its progress from earthly passion toward fulfillment in God. Later years (1353–74) But the death of his closest friends, dislike of the newly elected pope, Innocent VI, increasingly bitter relations with the Avignon court, all finally determined Petrarch to leave Provence. He found rooms in Milan and stayed there for most of the next eight years. During these eight years he also completed the first proper edition of the Rime, continued assiduously with the Fami liares, worked on the Trionfi, and set in order many of his earlier writings. Early in 1361 he went to Padua, hoping to escape the Plague. He remained there until September 1362, when, again a fugitive from the Black Death, he sought shelter in Venice. He was given a house, and in return Petrarch promised to bequeath all his books to the republic. He was joined by his daughter Francesca, and the tranquil happiness of her little family gave him great pleasure. He was visited by his dearest and most famous friends (including the great chancellor Benintendi de' Ravegnani and Boccaccio, who presented him with a long-desired Latin translation of Homer's poems); he was invited to play an honourable part in the life and politics of the city; he worked peacefully but with great concentration at the definitive versions of his various writings. Nevertheless, after receiving an insult fromfour young men who followed the Arab “naturalist” interpretation of Aristotle's work, Petrarch was induced to move back to Padua in 1367. He remained there until his death, dividing his time from 1370 between Padua and Arquà, in the neighbouring Euganean hills, where he had a little house. There he wrote the defense of his Humanism against the critical attack from Venice, De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia. He was still in great demand as a diplomat; in 1370 he was called to Rome by Urban V, and he set off eager to see the fulfillment of his great dream of a new Roman papacy, but at Ferrara he was seized by a stroke. Yet he did not stop working; in addition to revision he composed more minor works and added new sections to his Posteritati, an autobiographical letter to posterity that was to have formed the conclusion to his Seniles; he also composed the final sections of the Trionfi. Petrarch died in 1374 while working in his study at Arquà and was found the next morning, his head resting on a manuscript of Virgil. The hallmark of Petrarch's thought was a deep consciousness of the past as the nutriment of the present. His abiding achievement was to recognize that, if there is a Providence that guides the world, then it has set man at the centre. Petrarch provided a theoretical basis for the enrichment of man's life. But, even more important, the Humanist attitudes of the Italian 15th century that led into the Renaissance would not have been possible without him. John Humphreys Whitfield Encyclopedia Britannica _____________________________________

 

Petrarch Sonnet I To Laura in Life O you, who hears in scattered verse the sound Of all those sighs with which my heart I fed, When I, by youthful error was misled, Unlike my present self in passion drowned; Who hears the woes, the pleadings that abound Throughout my song, by hopes and vain griefs bred; If ever true love its influence over you shed, Oh ! let your pity be with pardon crowned. But now full well I see how to the crowd For a long time I proved a public jest: E'ven by myself my folly is allowed: And of my vanity what's left is shame, Repentance, and a knowledge deep impressed, That worldly pleasure is a passing dream. Translated by R. Nott Sonnet XXIV To Laura in Death The eyes, the face, the limbs of heavenly mold, So long the theme of my impassioned lay, Charms which so stole me from myself away, That strange to other men the course I hold; The crisped locks of pure and lucid gold, The lightning of the angelic smile, whose ray To earth could all of paradise convey, A little dust are now —to feeling cold. And yet I live—but that I live bewail, Sunk the loved light that through the tempest led My shattered bark, bereft of mast and sail: Hushed be for aye the song that breathed love's fire! Lost is the theme on which my fancy fed, And turned to mourning my once tuneful lyre. Translated by Lady Dacre

BOCCACCIO
  


ANDREA DEL CASTAGNO
Giovanni Boccaccio
1450

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313—75), a close contemporary and friend of Petrarch, shared his admiration for Classical civilization, his love of the new Italian poetry and his wide-ranging interests. He was a great enthusiast for Dante, writing his biography and giving public lectures on the Divine Comedy. As a lyric poet, he was in neither Dante's nor Petrarch's class, his strong suit being narrative; like Petrarch, he became famous chiefly for what he would have considered a lesser work, The Decameron.
It is a collection of a hundred stories told by a party of young men and women sheltering in a house outside Florence to avoid the Black Death — the plague that carried off perhaps one-third of the population of Europe in the late 1340s. Most of the stories were written, or compiled, very soon after the epidemic. They were drawn from many sources and, provided rich material for other writers, notably Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales - although it is possible that Chaucer obtained them indirectly since he never mentions Boccaccio by name. (As there was no law, or even conception, of copyright, writers felt no need to disguise their sources.)
 

_____________________________________ see also: Boccaccio "The Decameron" (Illustrations by Salvador Dali) _____________________________________ Boccaccio born 1313, Paris, Fr. died Dec. 21, 1375, Certaldo, Tuscany [Italy] Italian poet and scholar, best remembered as the author of the earthy tales in the Decameron. With Petrarch he laid the foundations for the humanism of the Renaissance and raised vernacular literature to the level and status of the classics of antiquity. Youth Boccaccio was the son of a Tuscan merchant, Boccaccio di Chellino (called Boccaccino), and a mother who was probably French. He passed his early childhood rather unhappily in Florence. His father had no sympathy for Boccaccio's literary inclinations and sent him, not later than 1328, to Naples to learn business, probably in an office of the Bardi, who dominated the court of Naples by means of their loans. In this milieu Boccaccio experienced the aristocracy of the commercial world as well as all that survived of the splendours of courtly chivalry and feudalism. He also studied canon law and mixed with the learned men of the court and the friends and admirers of Petrarch, through whom he came to know the work of Petrarch himself. These years in Naples, moreover, were the years of Boccaccio's love for Fiammetta, whose person dominates all his literary activity up to the Decameron, in which there also appears a Fiammetta whose character somewhat resembles that of the Fiammetta of his earlier works. Attempts to use passages from Boccaccio's writings to identify Fiammetta with a supposedly historical Maria, natural daughter of King Robert and wife of a count of Aquino, are untrustworthy—the more so since there is no documentary proof that this Maria ever existed. Early works It was probably in 1340 that Boccaccio was recalled to Florence by his father, involved in the bankruptcy of the Bardi. The sheltered period of his life thus came to an end, and thenceforward there were to be only difficulties and occasional periods of poverty. From Naples, however, the young Boccaccio brought with him a store of literary work already completed. La caccia di Diana (“Diana's Hunt”), his earliest work, is a short poem, in terza rima (an iambic verse consisting of stanzas of three lines), of no great merit. Much more important are two works with themes derived from medieval romances: Il filocolo (c. 1336; “The Love Afflicted”), a prose work in five books on the loves and adventures of Florio and Biancofiore (Floire and Blanchefleur); and Il filostra to (c. 1338; “The Love Struck”), ashort poem in ottava rima (a stanza form composed of eight 11-syllable lines) telling the story of Troilus and the faithless Criseida. The Teseida (probably begun in Naples and finished in Florence, 1340–41) is an ambitious epic of 12 cantos in ottava rima in which the wars of Theseus serve as abackground for the love of two friends, Arcita and Palemone, for the same woman, Emilia; Arcita finally wins her in a tournament but dies immediately. While the themes of chivalry and love in these works had long been familiar in courtly circles, Boccaccio enriched them with the fruits of his own acute observation of real life and sought to present them nobly and illustriously by a display of learning and rhetorical ornament, so as to make his Italian worthy of comparison with the monuments of Latin literature. It was Boccaccio, too, who raised to literary dignity ottava rima, the verse metre of the popular minstrels,which was eventually to become the characteristic vehicle for Italian verse. Boccaccio's early works had an immediate effect outside Italy: Geoffrey Chaucer drew inspiration from Il filostrato for his own Troilus and Criseyde (as William Shakespeare was later to do for Troilus and Cressida) and from Boccaccio's Teseida for his “Knight's Tale” in The Canterbury Tales. The 10 or 12 years following Boccaccio's return to Florence are the period of his full maturity, culminating in the Decameron. From 1341 to 1345 he worked on Il ninfale d'Ameto (“Ameto's Story of the Nymphs”), in prose and terza rima; L'amorosa visione (“The Amorous Vision”; 1342–43), amediocre allegorical poem of 50 short cantos in terza rima; the prose Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (1343–44); and the poem Il ninfale fiesolano (perhaps 1344–45; “Tale of the Fiesole Nymph”), in ottava rima, on the love of the shepherd Africo for the nymph Mensola. Boccaccio, meanwhile, was trying continually to put his financial affairs in order, though he never succeeded in doing so. Little is known, however, of the detail of his life in the period following his return to Florence. He was at Ravenna between 1345 and 1346, at Forlì in 1347, in Florence during the ravages of the Black Death in 1348, and in Florence again in 1349. The Decameron It was probably in the years 1348–53 that Boccaccio composed the Decameron in the form in which it is read today. In the broad sweep of its range and its alternately tragic and comic views of life, it is rightly regarded as his masterpiece. Stylistically, it is the most perfect example of Italian classical prose, and its influence on Renaissance literature throughout Europe was enormous. The Decameron begins with the flight of 10 young people (7 women and 3 men) from plague-stricken Florence in 1348. They retire to a rich, well-watered countryside, where, in the course of a fortnight, each member of the party has a turn as king or queen over the others, deciding in detail how their day shall be spent and directing their leisurely walks, their outdoor conversations, their dances and songs, and, above all, their alternate storytelling. This storytelling occupies 10 days of the fortnight (the rest being set aside for personal adornment or for religious devotions); hence the title of the book itself, Decameron, or “Ten Days' Work.” The stories thus amount to 100 in all. Each of the days, moreover, ends with a canzone (song) for dancing sung by one of the storytellers, and these canzoni include some of Boccaccio's finest lyric poetry. In addition to the 100 stories, Boccaccio has a master theme, namely, the way of life of the refined bourgeoisie, who combined respect for conventions with an open-minded attitude to personal behaviour. The sombre tones of the opening passages of the book, in which the plague and the moral and social chaos that accompanies it are described in the grand manner, are in sharp contrast to the scintillating liveliness of Day I, which isspent almost entirely in witty disputation, and to the playful atmosphere of intrigue that characterizes the tales of adventure or deception related on Days II and III. With Day IVand its stories of unhappy love, the gloomy note returns; but Day V brings some relief, though it does not entirely dissipate the echo of solemnity, by giving happy endings to stories of love that does not at first run smoothly. Day VI reintroduces the gaiety of Day I and constitutes the overtureto the great comic score, Days VII, VIII, and IX, which are given over to laughter, trickery, and license. Finally, in Day X, all the themes of the preceding days are brought to a high pitch, the impure made pure and the common made heroic. The prefaces to the days and to the individual stories and certain passages of especial magnificence based on classical models, with their select vocabulary and elaborate periods, have long held the attention of critics. But there is also another Boccaccio: the master of the spoken word and of the swift, vivid, tense narrative free from the proliferation of ornament. These two aspects of the Decameron made it the fountainhead of Italian literary prose for the following centuries. The influential 19th-century critic Francesco De Sanctis regarded the Decameron as a “Human Comedy” in succession to Dante's Divine Comedy and Boccaccio as the pioneer of a new moral order superseding that of the European Middle Ages. This view is no longer tenable, however, since the Middle Ages can no longer be presented as having been wholly ascetic or wholly concerned with God and heavenly salvation in contrast with a Renaissance concerned only with the human. Also, in particular, the whole corpus of Boccaccio's work is basically medieval in subject matter, form, and taste, at least in its point of departure. It is the spirit in which Boccaccio treats his subjects and his forms that is new. For the first time in the Middle Ages, Boccaccio in the Decameron deliberately shows man striving with fortune andlearning to overcome it. To be truly noble, according to the Decameron, man must accept life as it is, without bitterness, must accept, above all, the consequences of his own action, however contrary to his expectation or even tragic they may be. To realize his own earthly happiness, he must confine his desire to what is humanly possible and renounce the absolute without regret. Thus Boccaccio insists both on man's powers and on their inescapable limitations, without reference to the possible intervention of divine grace. A sense of spiritual realities and an affirmation of moral valuesunderlying the frivolity even in the most licentious passages of the Decameron are features of Boccaccio's work that modern criticism has brought to light and that make it no longer possible to regard him only as an obscene mocker or sensual cynic. During the years in which Boccaccio is believed to have written the Decameron, the Florentines appointed him ambassador to the lords of Romagna in 1350; municipal councillor and also ambassador to Louis, duke of Bavaria, in the Tirol in 1351; and ambassador to Pope Innocent VI in 1354. Petrarch and Boccaccio's mature years Of far more lasting importance than official honours was Boccaccio's first meeting with Petrarch, in Florence in 1350,which helped to bring about a decisive change in Boccaccio's literary activity. Boccaccio revered the older man as his master, and Petrarch proved himself a serene andready counselor and a reliable helper. Together, through the exchange of books, news, and ideas, the two men laid the foundations for the humanist reconquest of classical antiquity. After the Decameron, of which Petrarch remained in ignorance until the very last years of his life, Boccaccio wrote nothing in Italian except Il Corbaccio (1354–55; a satire on a widow who had jilted him), his late writings on Dante, and perhaps an occasional lyric. Turning instead to Latin, he devoted himself to humanist scholarship rather than to imaginative or poetic creation. His encyclopaedic De genealogia deorum gentilium (“On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles”), medieval in structure but humanist inspirit, was probably begun in the very year of his meeting with Petrarch but was continuously corrected and revised until his death. His Bucolicum carmen (1351–66), a series of allegorical eclogues (short pastoral poems) on contemporary events, follows classical models on lines already indicated by Dante and Petrarch. His other Latin works include De claris mulieribus (1360–74; Concerning Famous Women), a collection of biographies of famous women; and De casibus virorum illustrium (1355–74; “On the Fates of Famous Men”), on the inevitable catastrophe awaiting all who are too fortunate. The meeting with Petrarch, however, was not the only cause of the change in Boccaccio's writing. A premature weakening of his physical powers and disappointments in love may also have contributed to it. Some such occurrence would explain how Boccaccio, having previously written always in praise of women and love, came suddenly to write the bitterly misogynistic Corbaccio and then turn his genius elsewhere. Furthermore, there are signs that he may have begun to feel religious scruples. Petrarch describes how the Carthusian monk Pietro Petrone, on his deathbed in 1362, sent another Carthusian, Gioacchino Ciani, to exhort Boccaccio to renounce his worldly studies; and it was Petrarch who then dissuaded Boccaccio from burning his own works and selling his library. As early as 1360, moreover, Boccaccio's way of life was regarded as austere enough to justify his being entrusted with a pastoral cure of souls in a cathedral. He had taken minor orders many years earlier, perhaps at first only in the hope of being given benefices. Boccaccio's circle in Florence was of vital importance as a nucleus of early humanism. Leonzio Pilato, whom Boccaccio housed from 1360 to 1362 and whose nomination as reader in Greek at the Studio (the old University of Florence) he procured, made the rough Latin translation through which Petrarch and Boccaccio became acquainted with Homer's poems—the starting point of Greek studies by the humanists. The recovery of Latin classical texts—Varro, Martial, Apuleius, Seneca, Ovid, and, above all, Tacitus—likewise occupied Boccaccio's admiring attention. Even so, he did not neglect Italian poetry, his enthusiasm for his immediate predecessors, especially Dante, being one of the characteristics that distinguish him from Petrarch. His Vita di Dante Alighieri, or Trattatello in laude di Dante (“Little Tractate in Praise of Dante”), and the two abridged editions of it that he made show his devotion to Dante's memory. Last years All these studies were pursued in poverty, sometimes almostin destitution, and Boccaccio had to earn most of his income by transcribing his own works or those of others. In 1363 poverty compelled him to retire to the village of Certaldo. In October 1373, however, he began public readings of Dante's Divina commedia in the Church of San Stefano di Badia in Florence. A revised text of the commentary that he gave with these readings is still extant but breaks off at the point that he had reached when, early in 1374, ill health made him lose heart. Petrarch's death in July 1374 was another grief to him, and he retired again to Certaldo. There Boccaccio died the following year and was buried in the Church of SS. Michele e Jacopo. Boccaccio and the Renaissance Boccaccio was a man of the Renaissance in almost every sense. His humanism comprised not only classical studies and the attempt to rediscover and reinterpret ancient texts but also the attempt to raise literature in the modern languages to the level of the classical by setting standards for it and then conforming to those standards. Boccaccio advanced further than Petrarch in this direction not only because he sought to dignify prose as well as poetry but alsobecause, in his Ninfale fiesolano, in his Elegia de Madonna Fiammetta, and in the Decameron, he ennobled everyday experience, tragic and comic alike. Although his Teseida and Ninfale d'Ameto invite comparison with classical genres, his Filocolo and Filostrato raised to the level of learned art the literature of chivalry and love that had fallen to the level of the populace. The same attention to popular and medieval themes characterized Italian culture in the second half of the15th century; without Boccaccio, the literary culmination ofthe Italian Renaissance would be historically incomprehensible. Umberto Bosco Encyclopedia Britannica _____________________________________

THE AGE OF CHAUCER
 

 
Geoffrey Chaucer (d.1400) is one of the handful of great figures like Shakespeare or Samuel
Johnson whose name alone sums up a literary age. He was a member of the minor gentry, who
fought in Edward Ill's army as a young man, was captured in France and ransomed. He enjoyed
the patronage of John of Gaunt, to whom he was related by marriage, he held several minor
offices at court, and he undertook diplomatic missions abroad. One of these took him to
Florence in 1373 and he could, conceivably, have met Boccaccio and Petrarch. His early writings
show French and Italian influence, and culminate in Troilus and Criseyde, his most important
work before The Canterbury Tales, which was written in 'rhyme royal'
(seven-line units rhyming ababbcc).
 

GOWER

The learned John Gower (d. 1408) was a contemporary and friend of Chaucer who wrote in three languages, French, Latin and English. He was responsible for bringing much classical literature (especially Ovid) and medieval romance into the mainstream of English literature. His greatest work is Confessio Amantis, which contains a series of stories in verse, rather like The Canterbury Tales. In fact several of Gower's stones are echoed in Chaucer's great work.



THE CANTERBURY TALES

In The Canterbury Tales, the framework for the stories is a group of pilgrims who meet at an inn in Southwark on their wav to the tomb of Thomas Becket in Canterbury and, for the prize of a free supper, agree to tell stories to pass the time. Some of the stories are fables, some are moral, some romantic, and some comical and coarse (schoolteachers used to avoid 'The Miller's Tale'). Several are based on Petrarch and Boccaccio. There are about 30 pilgrims but only 24 stories: the work was unfinished, but it runs to about 17,000 lines, most, in rhymed couplets, some in prose. Although he could write lovely lines, Chaucer was not a great lyric poet. He was a great story-teller, a master of comedy, the first illustrious name in the great tradition of English comedy — and he had an understanding of human nature that rivaled Shakespeare.
The form of The Canterbury Tales is a familiar one. What is new is the intense realism of the characters. Chaucer not only had a profound and sympathetic understanding of human nature, he also seems to have had comprehensive knowledge of all levels of English society. His characters are the first in English literature who leap off the page, alive and kicking and totally believable, their virtues and still more their vices are all too easily-linked with contemporary equivalents.



Several portraits of Chaucer appeared in
manuscripts after his death.

 
AFTER CHAUCER

Chaucer was widely admired in his own time. Thomas Hoccleve, a younger contemporary who is sometimes unjustly dismissed as a mere imitator of Chaucer (and there were many of those), called him his 'master dear, flower of eloquence'. The manuscript of Hoccleve's De Regimine Principum (The Regiment of Princes) has a portrait of Chaucer in the margin. The poet appears as an elderly, white-haired man: this is clearly intended to be a likeness, another example of the dawn of realism. The flowering of English literature about the time of Richard II (1377-99) was followed by a comparatively barren period. In Scotland, however, the flowering came later, during the reigns of the cultured Stewart monarchs James III and James IV The outstanding poets were Robert Henryson (d.?1506), William Dunbar (d.?1513) and Gavin Douglas (d.1522), who translated the Aeneid and was one of the first to emphasize the distinction between 'Scottis' and 'Inglis'. Henryson's Testament of Cresseid follows on from Chaucer's poem about the same lady. Chaucer is not always an easy read, even with modernized spelling, but the dialect of Henryson's poem, although written roughly a century later, is harder, which, together with his powerful, though humane, morality, may explain why it is not better known. Dunbar, a sharp satirist with a ribald sense of humour, is for most moderns a more attractive figure, although he is best known for a decidedly doleful work, his elegy on the transitory nature of life, 'Lament for the Makaris', with its haunting Latin refrain, Timor mortis conturbat me ('The fear of death convulses me'). Circumstantial evidence suggests that death came to Dunbar on the terrible battlefield of Flodden.
An equally well-known and evocative verse refrain is Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan? (But where are the snows of yesteryear?). It comes from a poem Ballade des dames du temps jadis ('Ballad of the women of olden times') by Francois Villon, who lived in the mid-15th century and seems to have spent most of his life dodging the gallows. He was little known outside his own country until the 19th century, but is now widely regarded as the greatest poet of medieval France.
 

  
'Ful wed she soong the service dyvyne,
Entuned in hir nose ful semely,
And Frenssh she spak full faire and fetisly,
After the scole of Stratford attee Bowe,
For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe,"

Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, 'Prologue', 1,122.
  

THE RENAISSANCE
 

History gets more eventful, and change happens faster and more dramatically, the nearer you approach the present - or so it seems to us, at the leading edge. In the Middle Ages, change was so slow that people were hardly aware of it, there was a sharp quickening in the Renaissance and a tremendous spurt with the Industrial Revolution, since when the pace has become ever more frantic. Whatever the truth, this does not hold for literature.
It could be argued that, for European literature, the two centuries preceding the Industrial Revolution were more eventful than the two centuries following, though the reasons were not all literary. In the Renaissance, there was a hugely important development - the invention of printing with movable type, which made books as we know them possible. The establishment of nation states, especially in England and France, coincided with the establishment of the vernacular, a national language, which proved especially productive in England and France before the bones, so to speak, had set hard. By the 18th century, every form of literature was established in, or near to, its modern form, including the all-important genre of the novel, the one form of literature of which practically everyone today has some experience.

The Renaissance is the name given to the flowering of the arts, literature and politics that marked the transition from the European Middle Ages to the Modern Era. It began in the 14th century in Italy, where it reached its height in the early 16th century, and spread throughout Europe. The impulse for the Renaissance was the revival of interest in Classical (Greek and Roman) culture, and its predominant characteristic was humanism -an interest in human beings and in the potential of human nature, apart from religious values. Humanism was not anti-religion; on the contrary, the 16th century was an intensely religious age, but it did imply a reduction in the overwhelming authority that the Church had exercised in the Middle Ages. There was a new spirit of freedom, summed up by the young humanist philosopher Pico della Mirandola (1463-94): 'Constrained by no limits [Man] shall ordain for himself the limits of his nature'.
           

ITALY


Nicolo Machiavelli
 

To us, the most remarkable characteristic of the great figures of the Renaissance was their versatility. Leo Battista Alberti (1404-72), best known as an architect, was also a painter, a poet, a philosopher, a musician and, by all accounts, a remarkable athlete. In literature, however, the writers of the High Renaissance never quite measured up to their great predecessors, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. There was Ariosto's romantic epic Orlando Furioso, Castiglione's humanist dialogues in The Courtier, and Aretino's witty and scandalous satires. The most famous literary figure of Renaissance Florence is Nicolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). He is best known as a political philosopher, author of The Prince, a candid guide to statesmanship which admitted the necessity of using unpleasant means to gain desirable ends. It shocked Elizabethan England, where the adjective 'machiavellian' came to mean downright villainous. Machiavelli wrote many other works, including an excellent comedy, La Mandragola.
 

_____________________________________
 

see also:

Ariosto "Orlando Fuioso"


(Illustrations by Gustave Dore)

 
_____________________________________
 

Titian
Ariosto
 

Ludovico Ariosto

born Sept. 8, 1474, Reggio Emilia, duchy of Modena [Italy]
died July 6, 1533, Ferrara


Italian poet remembered for his epic poem Orlando furioso (1516), which is generally regarded as the finest expression of the literary tendencies and spiritual attitudes ofthe Italian Renaissance.

Ariosto's father, Count Niccolò, was commander of the citadel at Reggio Emilia. When Ludovico was 10, the family moved to his father's native Ferrara, and the poet always considered himself a Ferrarese. He showed an inclination toward poetry from an early age, but his father intended him for a legal career, and so he studied law, unwillingly, at Ferrara from 1489 to 1494. Afterward he devoted himself to literary studies until 1499. Count Niccolò died in 1500, and Ludovico, as the eldest son, had to give up his dream of a peaceful life devoted to humanistic studies in order to provide for his four brothers and five sisters. In 1502 he became commander of the citadel of Canossa and in 1503 entered the service of Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, son of Duke Ercole I.

Ariosto's duties as a courtier were sharply at odds with his own simple tastes. He was expected to be in constant attendance on the cardinal and to accompany him on dangerous expeditions as well as travel on diplomatic missions. In 1509 he followed the cardinal in Ferrara's campaign against Venice. In 1512 he went to Rome with the cardinal's brother Alfonso, who had succeeded Ercole as duke in 1505 and had sided with France in the Holy League war in an attempt to placate Pope Julius II. In this they were totally unsuccessful and were forced to flee over the Apennines to avoid the pope's wrath. In the following year, after the election of Leo X, hoping to find a situation that would allow him more time to pursue his literary ambitions, Ariosto again went to the Roman court. But his journey was in vain, and he returned to Ferrara.

So far Ariosto had produced a number of Latin verses inspired by the Roman poets Tibullus and Horace. They do not compare in technical skill with those by Pietro Bembo, a contemporary poet and outstanding scholar, but they are much more genuine in feeling. Since about 1505, however, Ariosto had been working on Orlando furioso, and, indeed, he continued to revise and refine it for the rest of his life. Thefirst edition was published in Venice in 1516. This version and the second (Ferrara, 1521) consisted of 40 cantos written in the metrical form of the ottava rima (an eight-line stanza, keeping to a tradition that had been followed since Giovanni Boccaccio in the 14th century through such 15th-century poets as Politian and Matteo Maria Boiardo). The second edition shows signs of Bembo's influence in matters of language and style that is still more evident in thethird edition.

Orlando furioso is an original continuation of Boiardo's poemOrlando innamorato. Its hero is Orlando, whose name is the Italian form of Roland. Orlando furioso consists of a number of episodes derived from the epics, romances, and heroic poetry of the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance. The poem, however, achieves homogeneity by the author's skill and economy in handling the various episodes. Despite complete disregard of unity of action (which was to become compulsory in the second half of the century), it is possible to identify three principal nuclei around which the various stories are grouped: Orlando's unrequited love for Angelica, which makes him go mad (furioso); the war between Christians (led by Charlemagne) and Saracens (led by Agramante) near Paris; and the secondary love story of Ruggiero and Bradamante. The first is the most important, particularly in the first part of the poem; the second represents the epic background to the whole narrative; and the third is merely introduced as a literary courtesy, since the Este family was supposed to owe its origin to the union of the two lovers. The main unifying element, however, is thepersonality of Ariosto himself, who confers his own refined spirituality on all his characters. Sensual love is the prevailing sentiment, but it is tempered by the author's ironical attitude and artistic detachment. Upon its publication in 1516, Orlando furioso enjoyed immediate popularity throughout Europe, and it was to influence greatlythe literature of the Renaissance.

In 1517 Cardinal Ippolito was created bishop of Buda. Ariosto refused to follow him to Hungary, however, and in the following year he entered the personal service of Duke Alfonso, the cardinal's brother. He was thus able to remain in Ferrara near his mistress, Alessandra Benucci, whom he had met in 1513. But, in 1522, financial necessity compelled him to accept the post of governor of the Garfagnana, a province in the wildest part of the Apennines. It was torn by rival political factions and overrun by brigands, but Ariosto showed great administrative ability in maintaining order there.

During this period, from 1517 to 1525, he composed his seven satires (titled Satire), modeled after the Sermones (satires) of Horace. The first (written in 1517 when he had refused to follow the cardinal to Buda) is a noble assertion ofthe dignity and independence of the writer; the second criticizes ecclesiastical corruption; the third moralizes on the need to refrain from ambition; the fourth deals with marriage; the fifth and sixth describe his personal feelings at being kept away from his family by his masters' selfishness; and the seventh (addressed to Pietro Bembo) points out the vices of humanists and reveals his sorrow at not having been allowed to complete his literary education in his youth.

Ariosto's five comedies, Cassaria (1508), I sup po si ti (1509), Il negromante (1520), La lena (1529), and I studenti (completed by his brother Gabriele and published posthumously as La scolastica), are based on the Latin classics but were inspired by contemporary life. Though minor works in themselves, they were among the first of those imitations of Latin comedy in the vernacular that would long characterize European comedy.

By 1525 Ariosto had managed to save enough money to return to Ferrara, where he bought a little house with a garden. Probably between 1528 and 1530 he married Alessandra Benucci (though secretly, so as not to forego certain ecclesiastical benefices to which he was entitled). Hespent the last years of his life with his wife, cultivating his garden and revising the Orlando furioso. The third edition of his masterpiece (Ferrara, 1532) contained 46 cantos (a giunta, or appendix, known as the Cinque canti, or “Five Cantos,” was published posthumously in 1545). This final version at last achieved perfection and was published a few months before Ariosto's death.

Giovanni Aquilecchia

Encyclopedia Britannica

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see also:

Ariosto "Orlando Fuioso" (Illustrations by G. Dore)
 

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Ariosto's romantic epic
Orlando Furioso

Ariosto

CANTO 1

               ARGUMENT
Angelica, whom pressing danger frights,
Flies in disorder through the greenwood shade.
Rinaldo's horse escapes: he, following, fights
Ferrau, the Spaniard, in a forest glade.
A second oath the haughty paynim plights,
And keeps it better than the first he made.
King Sacripant regains his long-lost treasure;
But good Rinaldo mars his promised pleasure.


               I
OF LOVES and LADIES, KNIGHTS and ARMS, I sing,
Of COURTESIES, and many a DARING FEAT;
And from those ancient days my story bring,
When Moors from Afric passed in hostile fleet,
And ravaged France, with Agramant their king,
Flushed with his youthful rage and furious heat,
Who on king Charles', the Roman emperor's head
Had vowed due vengeance for Troyano dead.

               II
In the same strain of Roland will I tell
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,
On whom strange madness and rank fury fell,
A man esteemed so wise in former time;
If she, who to like cruel pass has well
Nigh brought my feeble wit which fain would climb
And hourly wastes my sense, concede me skill
And strength my daring promise to fulfil.
 

Pietro Aretino, in Titian's first portrait of him

This little manuscript of Aretino’s pornographic sonnets and other poems is a wonderful example of the “under the counter” format in which prohibited texts circulated in the eighteenth century. (Temp. Ms.).

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Pietro Aretino

born April 20, 1492, Arezzo, Republic of Florence [Italy]
died Oct. 21, 1556, Venice


Italian poet, prose writer, and dramatist celebrated throughout Europe in his time for his bold and insolent literary attacks on the powerful. His fiery letters and dialogues are of great biographical and topical interest.

Although Aretino was the son of an Arezzo shoemaker, he later pretended to be the bastard son of a nobleman and derived his adopted name (“the Aretine”) from that of his native city (his real name is unknown). While still very young, he went to Perugia and painted for a time and then moved on to Rome in 1517, where he wrote a series of viciously satirical lampoons supporting the candidacy of Giulio de' Medici for the papacy (Giulio became Pope Clement VII in 1523). Despite the support of the pope and another patron, Aretino was finally forced to leave Rome because of his general notoriety and his 1524 collection of Sonetti lussuriosi (“Lewd Sonnets”). From Rome he went to Venice (1527), where he became the object of great adulation and lived in a grand and dissolute style for the rest of his life.

One of Aretino's closest friends in Venice was the painter Titian, for whom he sold many paintings to Francis I, king of France; a great gold chain that Aretino wears in Titian's portrait (c. 1545; Pitti Palace, Florence) was a gift from the king.

Among Aretino's many works, the most characteristic are his satirical attacks, often amounting to blackmail, on the powerful. He grew wealthy on gifts from kings and nobles who feared his satire and coveted the fame accruing from hisadulation. His six volumes of letters (published 1537–57) show his power and cynicism and give ample justification for the name he gave himself, “flagello dei principe” (“scourge of princes”). Aretino was particularly vicious in his attacks on Romans because they had forced him to flee to Venice. In his Ragionamenti (1534–36; modern edition, 1914; “Discussions”), Roman prostitutes reveal to each other the moral failings of many important men of their city, and in I dialoghi and other dialogues he continues the examination of carnality and corruption among Romans.

Only Aretino's dramas were relatively free of such venomous assaults. His five comedies are acutely perceivedpictures of lower-class life, free from the conventions that burdened other contemporary dramas. Of the five comedies, written between 1525 and 1544 (modern collection, Commedie, 1914), the best known is Cortigiana (published 1534, first performed 1537, “The Courtesan”), a lively and amusing panorama of the life of the lower classes in papal Rome. Aretino also wrote a tragedy, Orazia (published 1546; “The Horatii”), which has been judged by some the best Italian tragedy written in the 16th century.
 

Encyclopedia Britannica

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FRANCE

In the early 16th century, French was becoming established as a literary language. Poetry, especially lyric poetry, flourished; no more productive period for French poetry (excluding drama) would occur until the 19th century. However, the two greatest French writers of the century, especially in terms of their influence on literature in general, both wrote prose, though of totally different kinds. Rabelais (d.1533) is now not often read, partly because of the difficulty of translating this exuberant genius. He was at one time a monk, then a wandering scholar, then a physician, who wrote learned works on medicine in Latin. But he is remembered for his humorous, ribald, life-affirming tales of the popular giants Gargantua and Pantagruel, a vast, bubbling collection of stories and learning, condemned by some as obscene. Like Machiavelli, he bequeathed us the adjectives 'rabelaisian', and 'gargantuan'.
The difference between Rabelais and Montaigne (1533-92) has been likened to the difference between a pub at closing time and a quiet public library in mid-afternoon. A scholarly country gentleman, Montaigne is regarded as the inventor of the essay. His first volume of essays was published in 1580 and reissued several times with extensive additions. They reflect the author's changing philosophy and were increasingly based on his searching analysis of himself. Amused, tolerant, sceptical, Montaigne was the first great master of French prose, a model to later generations and a pervasive influence on other writers, including Shakespeare: one of his essays was a source for The Tempest.

Francois Rabelais










Francois Rabelais
Gargantua and Pantagruel

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see also:

Francois Rabelais

"Gargantua and Pantagruel"

Illustrations by Gustave Dore
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Francois Rabelais


born c. 1494, Poitou, France
died probably April 9, 1553, Paris


pseudonym Alcofribas NasierFrench writer and priest who for his contemporaries wasan eminent physician and humanist and for posterity is the author of the comic masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel . The four novels composing this work are outstanding for their rich use of Renaissance French and for their comedy, which ranges from gross burlesque to profound satire. They exploit popular legends, farces, and romances, as well as classical and Italian material, but were written primarily for a court public and a learned one. The adjective Rabelaisian applied to scatological humour is misleading; Rabelais used scatology aesthetically, not gratuitously, for comic condemnation. His creative exuberance, colourful and wide-ranging vocabulary, and literary variety continue to ensure his popularity.
Life.

Details of Rabelais's life are sparse and difficult to interpret. He was the son of Antoine Rabelais, a rich Touraine landowner and a prominent lawyer who deputized for the lieutenant-général of Poitou in 1527. After apparentlystudying law, Rabelais became a Franciscan novice at La Baumette (1510?) and later moved to the Puy-Saint-Martin convent at Fontenay-le-Comte in Poitou. By 1521 (perhaps earlier) he had taken holy orders.

Rabelais early acquired a reputation for profound humanist learning among his contemporaries, but the elements of religious satire and scatological humour in his comic novels eventually left him open to persecution. He depended throughout his life on powerful political figures (Guillaume du Bellay, Margaret of Navarre) and on high-ranking liberal ecclesiastics (Cardinal Jean du Bellay, Bishop Geoffroy d'Estissac, Cardinal Odet de Chatillon) for protection in thosedangerous and intolerant times in France.

Rabelais was closely associated with Pierre Amy, a liberal Franciscan humanist of international repute. In 1524 the Greek books of both scholars were temporarily confiscated by superiors of their convent, because Greek was suspect to hyperorthodox Roman Catholics as a “heretical” language that opened up the original New Testament to study. Rabelais then obtained a temporary dispensation from Pope Clement VII and was removed to the Benedictine houseof Saint-Pierre-de-Maillezais, the prior of which was his bishop, Geoffroy d'Estissac. He never liked his new order, however, and he later satirized the Benedictines, although he passed lightly over Franciscan shortcomings.

Rabelais studied medicine, probably under the aegis of the Benedictines in their Hôtel Saint-Denis in Paris. In 1530 he broke his vows and left the Benedictines to study medicine at the University of Montpellier, probably with the support of his patron, Geoffroy d'Estissac. Graduating within weeks, he lectured on the works of distinguished ancient Greek physicians and published his own editions of Hippocrates' Aphorisms and Galen's Ars parva (“The Art of Raising Children”) in 1532. As a doctor he placed great reliance on classical authority, siding with the Platonic school of Hippocrates but also following Galen and Avicenna. During this period an unknown widow bore him two children (François and Junie), who were given their father's name and were legitimated by Pope Paul IV in 1540.

After practicing medicine briefly in Narbonne, Rabelais was appointed physician to the hospital of Lyon, the Hôtel-Dieu, in 1532. In the same year, he edited the medical letters of Giovanni Manardi, a contemporary Italian physician. It was during this period that he discovered his true talent. Fired by the success of an anonymous popular chapbook, Les Grandes et inestimables cronicques du grant et énorme géant Gargantua, he published his first novel, Les horribles et épouvantables faits et prouesses du très renommé Pantagruel, roy des Dipsodes (1532; “The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds and Words of the Renowned Pantagruel, King of the Dipsodes”), under the pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier (an obvious anagram of his real name). Pantagruel is slighter in length and intellectual depth than his later novels,but nothing of this quality had been seen before in French in any similar genre. Rabelais displayed his delight in words, his profound sense of the comedy of language itself, his mastery of comic situation, monologue, dialogue, and action,and his genius as a storyteller who was able to create a worldof fantasy out of words alone. Within the framework of a mock-heroic, chivalrous romance, he laughed at many types of sophistry, including legal obscurantism and hermeticism, which he nevertheless preferred to the scholasticism of the Sorbonne. One chapter stands out for its sustained seriousness, praising the divine gift of fertile matrimony as acompensation for death caused by Adam's fall. Pantagruel borrows openly from Sir Thomas More's Utopia in its reference to the war between Pantagruel's country, Utopia, and the Dipsodes, but it also preaches a semi-Lutheran doctrine—that no one but God and his angels may spread thegospel by force. Pantagruel is memorable as the book in which Pantagruel's companion, Panurge, a cunning and witty rogue, first appears.

Though condemned by the Sorbonne in Paris as obscene, Pantagruel was a popular success. It was followed in 1533 bythe Pantagrueline Prognostication, a parody of the almanacs, astrological predictions that exercised a growing hold on the Renaissance mind. In 1534 Rabelais left the Hôtel-Dieu to travel to Rome with the bishop of Paris, Jean duBellay. He returned to Lyon in May of that year and publishedan edition of Bartolomeo Marliani's description of Rome, Topographia antiquae Romae. He returned to the Hôtel-Dieubut left it again in February 1535, upon which the authorities of the Lyon hospital appointed someone else to his post.

La vie inestimable du grand Gargantua (“The Inestimable Life of the Great Gargantua”) belongs to this period. The second edition is dated 1535; the first edition was probably published in 1534, though it lacks the title page in the only known copy. In Gargantua Rabelais continues to exploit medieval romances mock-heroically, telling of the birth, education, and prowesses of the giant Gargantua, who is Pantagruel's father. Much of the satire—for example, mockery of the ignorant trivialization of the mystical cult of emblems and of erroneous theories of heraldry—is calculated to delight the court; much also aims at delighting the learned reader—for example, Rabelais sides with humanist lawyers against legal traditionalists and doctors who accepted