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Introduction: Bembo, Petrarch, and Renaissance Belatedness

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SOURCE: Navarrete, Ignacio. “Introduction: Bembo, Petrarch, and Renaissance Belatedness.” In Orphans of Petrarch: Poetry and Theory in the Spanish Renaissance, pp. 3-14. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

[In the excerpt below, Navarrete argues that the Prose della volgar lingua “contains the first overt application of imitation theory … to the vernacular.” In the process of applying the theory, which was previously reserved for Latin models, to Petrarch, Navarrete maintains, Bembo “transforms Petrarch from a mere linguistic model … into a classical model subject to transformation and competitive emulation.”]

In its strictest sense, Petrarchism is the result of the transfer to the vernacular of models of literary history originally elaborated within the context of an attempt to ameliorate composition in Latin through the imitation of Cicero. The figure most associated with this transfer, both during the Renaissance and today, is Pietro Bembo, who in his landmark dialogue-treatise, the Prose della volgar lingua, proposed the strict imitation of Petrarch and Boccaccio as a solution to the problem of creating a national literary language for Italy. Bembo in his youth developed a reputation as a strict Ciceronian in matters of Latin style, and his theory of imitation was first worked out in an exchange of letters with Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, in which he rejected the eclectic approach promoted by earlier generations of Renaissance writers, particularly those associated with the Florentine Neoplatonists. To Bembo, imitation involves copying not only the style but “if you please, the same organizing principle which he has used whom you have set before you as an example” (Scott, 11); hence copying stylistic details alone, an inevitable consequence of eclectic imitation, would only result in a travesty. Imitation also gives a work a certain resonance; describing his own early attempts to avoid imitation, he concludes, “It pleased me and I experimented in it as far as I could, but all my thought, care, and study, all my labor was vexatious and void; for I invented nothing which could not easily have been drawn from the old writers; and when I tried to avoid that, it lacked the charm, the propriety, the majesty of those ages” (Scott, 13). Cicero and Virgil themselves attained this majesty by imitating their Greek predecessors, and they thus showed the way for Bembo and his contemporaries who, if they are diligent in their imitations, may someday hope to surpass their classical models. But for now this is only an elusive hope, as “it is not so arduous to surpass the one whom you equal as to equal the one whom you imitate” (Scott, 16).

As Ferruccio Ulivi pointed out, Bembo and the other humanist partisans of a strict Ciceronianism nourished a phenomenological concept of literary creation that emphasized process, as opposed to that metaphysical one which lay at the heart of Ficinian thought, which emphasized the emanation of ideas (23).1 Thomas Greene, elaborating on Ulivi's distinction, focuses on the conflict between “inventio and elocutio, or res and verba, or expressionism and formalism, between creativity as spontaneous nature and creativity as discipline, between impulse and method, or between beauty as variety and beauty as unity, between color and purity” (175). He thus identifies the dispute over Ciceronian imitation with perennial aesthetic issues in the history of literature, though at the cost of the historical specificity of the issues involved. Although he correctly sees Pico, an advocate of the eclectic approach, as grounded in humanist historiography—that is, emphasizing the difference between antiquity and the sixteenth century and the freedom of the modern writer to pick and choose—he overlooks that it is Bembo who locates a writer in the historical process of reading and writing, and who has no illusions about the easy restoration of antiquity.2

As Greene further notes, between Bembo's letter to Pico and his discussion of poetry in the Prose, “his theoretical outlook did not significantly change” (175). Yet this consistency is in itself remarkable, for the Prose contains the first overt application of imitation theory, previously reserved for the more exalted area of Latin prose composition, to the vernacular. In order to transfer his ideas, Bembo had to preserve not only his phenomenological outlook but also the humanist conception of history as divisible into a tripartite structure comprising classical achievements, medieval decline, and Renaissance renewal. The process by which Bembo establishes Petrarch as a model therefore deserves closer scrutiny. To appropriate the humanist scheme of history, Bembo begins by justifying the use of Italian rather than Latin; the Romans, he argues, composed in their own language, even though they valued the literary accomplishments of the Greeks more highly than their own. Had they ignored the rule of composing in the native language, they would have written in Greek, while the Greeks themselves would have written in Phoenician, and they in turn in Egyptian, and so on. In this way, Bembo describes each culture's sense of inferiority to a preceding one, which is itself largely forgotten as the new cultures arise.3 Thus language, and with it literature, are at any moment of time caught in an uncomfortable position of feeling inferior to the past and anxious about the future. Moreover, this cycle occurred not only in antiquity but in the recent past as well: Bembo declares that the scuola siciliana of thirteenth-century Italian poetry is only a name to him, and that although the Provençals were extremely influential and worthy of study, their language is as good as dead. This discussion of Provençal, in the Prose, directly precedes the statement of the questione della lingua—considering all the dialects spoken in Italy, which should a writer employ?—and therefore Bembo places the discussion about contemporary language in a context of past literatures that have come to grief. Bembo thus implies that this fate may hang over Italian as well, and that the Prose represents an attempt to ward it off.

As alternative solutions to the language problem, Bembo entertains two possibilities. The first is the lingua cortegiana, the common language spoken by courtiers throughout the peninsula. This however is rejected as being too unstable and lacking in uniformity. Moreover, speakers alone cannot guarantee immortality to a language:

Né la latina lingua chiamiamo noi lingua, solo che per cagion di Plauto, di Terenzio, di Virgilio, di Varrone, di Cicerone e degli altri che, scrivendo, hanno fatto che ella è lingua.

(110, Prose 1.14)

Not even Latin would we call a language, were it not for Plautus, for Terence, for Virgil, for Varro, for Cicero, and for the others who, by writing, made it into a language.

Here Bembo moves from arguing that writers insure that a language will be studied in ages to come to asserting that only writers make up the language. He concludes that Tuscan must become the literary language of Italy, for it was the principal heir to the Provençal tradition and, more importantly, because it is the most developed dialect in Italy:

Perciò che se io volessi dire che la fiorentina lingua più regolata si vede essere, più vaga, più pura che la provenzale, i miei due Toschi vi porrei dinanzi, il Boccaccio e il Petrarca senza più.

(110, Prose 1.14)

Thus if I wished to say that the Florentine language is clearly more ordered, more beautiful, and more pure than Provençal, I would put before you my two Tuscans, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and no more.

Petrarch and Boccaccio, however, lived almost 150 years before the composition of the Prose. By citing them rather than more contemporary Tuscans, Bembo underlines the endangered state of Italian poetry, courting the same fate that had earlier befallen the Sicilians. Yet by positing this gap, and turning to Petrarch and Boccaccio as models, Bembo saddles the vernacular with the same sense of cultural inferiority with which the humanists had earlier burdened Latin composition. By turning away from Latin (in the Prose at least), Bembo rejects the humanist ideal; but his method for improving the vernacular was derived from humanist practice. Again and again as Bembo repeats his key point—that Petrarch and Boccaccio have never been surpassed and that Italian literature in fact has decayed since the time they wrote—he appropriates for the vernacular the key elements of the humanist tripartite division of history: the notion of a dark age, and the practice of scholarship and imitation as the only means to recuperate the level attained by long-dead predecessors.

Ultimately, Bembo concludes the discussion of vernacular imitation with a nearly necromantic model of imitation, a description of artists in Rome disinterring ancient monuments and dutifully sketching the paintings, sculptures, and buildings. Reversing Petrarch's description of strolling through Rome and imagining what lay beneath the ruins, Bembo presents a city in the course of recovering its ancient cultural artifacts in such a way that modernity begins to merge with the predecessor that formerly lay underneath. This process of recovery, by providing adequate models, is responsible for the achievements of Michelangelo and Raphael, both of whom have become so proficient in their art that it would be difficult to tell their work from that of their antique models. If imitation can accomplish such results with the plastic arts, it should be able to accomplish far more for literature, “così leggiadra e così gentile” (so graceful and so noble, 184). While there is now an overabundance of books in Latin, however, the vernacular is most in need of development: the many vernacular writers have produced few works in prose or in verse worthy of preservation, and only the same process of imitation can lead to the restoration of poetry. Thus Bembo establishes a heuristic equivalence among Latin literature, the architectural and artistic monuments of ancient Rome, and the state of modern Italian letters. All three are subject to the same historical model adopted by Petrarch to define the humanist movement, yet while the first has been fully recovered through a plethora of books, and the second is now literally being exhumed for study, the necessary archaeology for the restoration of the vernacular has scarcely begun.

Bembo's understanding of Petrarchist imitation is primarily linguistic and stylistic, and his appreciation of Petrarch's phonetic structure led Cesare Segre to characterize it as “linguistic hedonism.” Yet even if his precepts were not easily transferred outside Italy, and were often resisted within it, he was tremendously influential in other ways. By displacing to the vernacular realm the theoretical foundations of Ciceronianism, he provided an ideological framework that justified the effort to illustrate the languages of contemporary Europe. From Ciceronianism, however, he also brought to the realm of the vernacular the tripartite historiography of the humanists, and the attendant sense of deficiency, which made Petrarchism the truest form of Renaissance vernacular lyric poetry, for it reflects the idea of decadence and rebirth inherent in the idea of a renaissance. Thus his theories were self-serving, for from the Prose there emerge two sets of linguistic heroes, Petrarch and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century as the original illustrators of the language, and Bembo himself as the vanguard of its restoration. Moreover, his fame as a Tuscan scholar brought his poetry a canonical status second only to Petrarch's, further increasing his influence abroad (see Cruz, Imitación, 24-34). Bembo's popularity, like that of contemporaries such as Sannazaro and Ariosto, may partly have been due—as Curtius argued (34 n. 44)—to a fashion for things Italian; but his legacy was a model of literary history and of Petrarch's place within it as the only modern classic, the standard against which lyric poets, both Italians and foreigners, must measure themselves.

To appreciate more fully Bembo's position in the development of vernacular humanism, we can situate him in a context that includes Petrarch's own views on literary history and imitation, and the subsequent history of what we might call the trope of the continual Renaissance. In his history of the Renaissance as a historical concept, Wallace Ferguson credited Petrarch with conflating models drawn from civic and sacred history to posit the tripartite division of time into the ancient Greco-Roman world, an intervening “dark age,” and the contemporary, incipient revival.4 Moreover, by rejecting any continuity with ancient Rome through the Holy Roman Empire (an idea still held by Dante a generation earlier), Petrarch was free to see the end of the republic, rather than the collapse of the empire, as the first step in a decline that included the cultural as well as the political spheres, while conversely the recovery of civic virtue would entail not only the founding of a new republic, but also the exhumation of culture through the cultivation of Latin and the study of Roman literature, particularly Cicero. Beginning with Petrarch, the two major tools for the humanist restoration of ancient standards of literary culture became scholarship, for the purification of model texts, and imitation, as a guide for the development of the moderns (see Ulivi, 9). Ferguson's view of Petrarch as the source of humanist theories of alienation from antiquity is echoed by Greene, who sees Petrarch as the founder of the “humanist hermeneutic,” the recognition that classical texts had a meaning in ancient times that can be recuperated only through scholarship, not through the atemporal allegorical and anagogic modes of interpretation practiced during the Middle Ages. Greene takes as paradigmatic Petrarch's description of a stroll through Rome, in the course of which he evokes the historical associations of the mounds and ruins he encounters. The passage echoes the eighth book of the Aeneid in which, as Aeneas walks through the site of the future Rome, the poet cites the buildings and monuments that will some day stand in the same locations. But Petrarch's retrospective tour, by emphasizing the decayed state of the scene, also underlines the fact that Rome is gone for good, and that its former magnificence can only be imagined. Thus even as he imitates Virgil, Petrarch recognizes the gulf of radical discontinuity that separates them and locates in that gulf his own freedom, his alterity from both antiquity and the middle ages. Thus as we have already seen in Bembo, archaeology—whether literary or architectural—would become the model science of the Renaissance: like the robbing of tombs, it entails the violation of taboos, and sometimes a little necromancy as well, to achieve its ultimate goal of bringing the dead back to life (Greene, 88-93).

Yet if Petrarch was responsible for the tripartite view of history through a self-representation as the one who began the revival of antiquity, subsequent generations often denied him that honor. As Ferguson shows (22-24), a succession of later humanists excluded Petrarch and Boccaccio from their ranks, relegating both of them to the benighted middle ages while fixing the beginning of the revival in their own generation. This continual, rhetorical postponement of the “renaissance” allows them comfortably to predict future achievements that will equal the ancients even as they emphasize their own attempts to begin to make up for the defects of the past. Ferguson's account of the history of humanist self-consciousness makes several important points. First, it recalls the connection established by Petrarch himself between politics and culture, which led later writers such as Bruni to remark on the lag between the rates of political and cultural development, and which was to have important consequences outside Italy. Second, it points out the overt sense of deficiency by comparison to antiquity, constantly cited as the standard; although there is contempt for what the humanists saw as the dark age that followed the collapse of Rome, there is also an implicit feeling of insecurity about their own age, only tenuously distinguished from that which preceded it. Third, it emphasizes that the beginning of the restoration of letters was variously dated, with the proclamation of a revival attaining the status of a trope. By constantly reappropriating Petrarch's idea of a renaissance as a defense against antiquity, the later humanists betray their chronic feeling of insecurity about the present when compared to the ancient past, and to the true pioneer humanists whom they attempt to ignore; by bringing forward the time of the rebirth, it is made to seem as if the moderns have had less time to catch up.5 But why did the humanists feel a need to deprecate their own forebears? I argue that this tendency represented an attempt to excuse their own shortcomings, their own failure to achieve according to the antique standards that they themselves had reestablished, and the desire on the part of the later humanists for a degree of priority. How to account for the seeming inability to compose literary monuments on a par with those of antiquity? One way was to pretend continually that they lived at only the beginning of the revival, that they were the pioneers, and thus that they were only laying the groundwork for future generations.

Naïve attempts to recreate antique literature, however, were doomed to failure. Greene draws our attention to what he calls heuristic imitations that—like Petrarch's stroll through Rome—underline the gap between cultures, and he quotes extensively from Petrarch's letters on imitation, in which the poet emphasizes the need to process ancient texts and make them one's own. Borrowing from Cicero, Petrarch advises an imitator to be like a bee, tasting from various flowers but transforming the nectar into a honey all its own.6 This apian model is then transformed into the famous digestive image, which has a prehistory going back to Seneca and which recurs throughout the Renaissance in discussions of imitation:

I have read Virgil, Flaccus, Severinus, Tullius not once but countless times, nor was my reading rushed but leisurely, pondering them as I went with all the powers of my intellect; I ate in the morning what I would digest in the evening, I swallowed as a boy what I would ruminate upon as an older man. I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow, and they have so become one with my mind that were I never to read them for the remainder of my life, they would cling to me, having taken root in the innermost recesses of my mind.

(3.212-13, Familiares 22.2; see Greene, 99)7

Here Petrarch stresses the transformatory aspect of imitation and the need to be true to one's personal style. Elsewhere, he warns against slavish imitation, comparing it with wearing someone else's clothing; in contrast, he claims to prefer his own “garment,” however rude and ill-cut. To Greene this passage constitutes evidence of Petrarch's strong sense of the self, and of its expression through an individual style; the successful assimilation of models along these lines characterizes the best poetry of a humanist period that extends to the eighteenth century (97-99).

Summarizing Petrarch's contribution to the development of humanist inferiority as a cultural phenomenon, Greene argues that the “humanist poet is not a neurotic son crippled by a Freudian family romance, which is to say he is not in Harold Bloom's terms Romantic. He is rather like the son in a classical comedy who displaces the father at the moment of reconciliation” (41). But Greene takes too benevolent a view of father-son relationships when he offers the following letter to explain the connection between imitation and sonhood:

An imitator must take care to write something similar yet not identical to the original, and that similarity must not be like the image to its original in painting where the greater the similarity the greater the praise for the artist, but rather like that of the son to his father. While often very different in their individual features, they have a certain something our painters call an “air,” especially noticeable about the face and eyes, that produces a resemblance; seeing the son's face, we are reminded of the father's. … We must thus see to it that if there is something similar, there is also a great deal that is dissimilar, and that the similar be elusive.

(3.301-2, Familiares 23.19; see Greene, 95)

Although the father-son model of imitation is, like that of the bee, taken from Seneca, Petrarch's particular use of it here skirts close to the very family romance that Greene finds of no relevance. Like the earlier tropes emphasizing the imitator's divergence from models (his own suit of clothes, however ill-fitting; his own honey, made of the nectar gathered from many flowers), this one stresses both similarity and difference. Slavish imitation is likened to mimesis, but while the possibility of deviating from the prototype offers some comfort, the analogy between model and father, and imitation and son, suggests that the model poet engenders the imitator, and this relationship of direct dependency is closer to medieval notions of midgets on the shoulders of giants than to the humanist hermeneutic. Moreover, the reader's constant back-and-forth comparison between imitation and model, to Pigman a sign of competitive emulation (26), hardly eases the anxiety of poets attempting to compete with the great writers of the past.

The father-son model established in the letter on imitation underlies Petrarch's letter about Dante. There, Petrarch compares the Tuscan poet to his own father, both of whom were exiled from Florence at the same time: “[M]y father, compelled by other matters and by concern for his family, resigned himself to exile, while his friend resisted and began devoting himself all the more vigorously to his literary pursuits, neglecting all else and desirous only of glory” (3.203, Familiares 21.15). Because of Petrarch's own thirst for fame and his resentment about life in Avignon, he imagines Dante as a fantasy father, more appropriate than his own. Yet he then denies that relationship by asserting that he never imitated Dante. The purpose of the letter (which is addressed to Boccaccio) is to defend himself against the charge that he is jealous of the Florentine poet. Petrarch concedes that there are grounds for the allegation, but goes on to justify his behavior:

While always passionately hunting for other books with little hope of finding them, I was strangely indifferent to this one, which was new and easily available. I admit this to be so, but deny that it was for the reasons that they give. At the time I too was devoted to the same kind of writing in the vernacular; I considered nothing more elegant and had yet to learn to look higher, but I did fear that, were I to immerse myself in his, or any other's, writings, being of an impressionable age so given to indiscriminate admiration, I could scarcely escape becoming an unwilling or unconscious imitator. … This one thing I do wish to make clear, for if any of my vernacular writings resembles, or is identical to, anything of his or anyone else's, it cannot be attributed to theft or imitation, which I have avoided like reefs, especially in vernacular works, but to pure chance or similarity of mind, as Tullius calls it, which caused me unwittingly to follow in another's footsteps.

(3.203-4)

Like the romantic poets Harold Bloom studies, Petrarch here tries carefully to hide his debts, a task made harder by his clear dependence on the vita nuova and the Commedia for the plan of his own Rime sparse.8 Here, in the context of vernacular poetry, Petrarch abandons the combination of piety and independence with which he had characterized imitation of the classical authors. Instead, predecessors become dangerous and imitation an unavoidable snare for the unwary poet. In contrast to his earlier admission of casually reading minor authors and studying the major ones until they became part of him, he now denies ever being an imitator, and where similarity to a model was earlier explained on a genetic basis, Petrarch now resorts to the mimetic imitation of a similar reality, or even happen-stance, to account for the resemblance of his works to Dante's.

In the same letter Petrarch also emphasizes his turn to Latin and away from the vernacular, attempting to elevate himself above Dante, who had followed just the opposite path in his career. Dismissing the notion that he is envious of Dante's popularity, Petrarch becomes shrill and unconvincing: “How can someone who does not envy Virgil envy anyone else, unless perhaps I envied him the applause and raucous acclaim of the fullers or tavern keepers or woolworkers who offend the ones they wish to praise, whom I, like Virgil and Homer, delight in doing without? I fully realize how little the esteem of the ignorant multitude carries weight with learned men” (3.205-6). Forgetting his republican principles, Petrarch here resorts to the tropes of vituperatio, portraying himself as a literary aristocrat appealing even in the vernacular to the more cultivated tastes of those who can appreciate Virgil and Homer (which is to say few indeed, as Petrarch himself probably did not know Greek). This letter, written at roughly the same time as his letters on imitation, gives us a very different image of Petrarch, struggling not with the ancients but with the living legacy of a more recent poet. The transparent defenses against Dante reveal the identity of his true poetic father and force Petrarch to employ every sort of reproach in his rhetorical warehouse. Just as his descriptions of the imitative process heuristically refer to both his Latin and his vernacular poetry, so too this letter reveals how even the strongest and most successful imitator can feel anxiety about his task.

Reviewing Petrarch's letters on imitation and the one on Dante, we can distinguish between two distinct reactions to his predecessors. The first is a sense of being inferior or deficient in comparison to the achievements of the ancients; this is what Harold Bloom calls “cultural belatedness” (Map, 77-80), and it became a defining feature of the Renaissance. Although Petrarch clearly looks up to their achievements and feels that his own culture as a whole has no comparable attainments, he is not ashamed to admit he has read their work. Indeed, he uses the digestive trope to emphasize how much labor he expended on study of the principal classical authors, to the point that they have been absorbed and transformed into a part of himself; in actuality, it is the very gulf between them that allows him the freedom to imitate these models in the fashion that Greene dubbed “heuristic.” Dante poses a different set of problems, however, and Petrarch's clear retreat into the language of a Freudian family romance (the assertion and then denial of a fantasy father in the place of his own) cannot merely be accounted for in terms of the real acquaintance between Dante and Petrarch's biological father. Dante is threatening to Petrarch in a much more immediate way than were the classical authors because his works, however rough Petrarch may judge their language to be, are the towering accomplishment of Italian vernacular literature, and in textual, structural, and mythic terms they are a necessary model for Petrarch's own work. Thus his feelings about Dante constitute what Bloom calls feelings of poetic belatedness, a nagging sense that the dead predecessor has formed oneself, and is even now speaking through one's own voice. Petrarch's shrillness regarding Dante is striking compared to his generosity about ancient authors; poetic belatedness is a much more emotional phenomenon than humanist belatedness, yet for that very reason, in a strong poet it produces greater results.

Shifting to Bembo, we can now appreciate the full implications of transfer to the vernacular of the tripartite model of history, and its attendant sense of humanist cultural belatedness. Bembo in the Prose explicates Petrarch's texts in terms of a rather idiosyncratic set of linguistic theories that were to have relatively little influence; what was influential was his designation of trecento Tuscan as the national literary language. Similarly, however much Bembo's theories of imitation may have been motivated by the need for well-trained writers in a papal chancery that was shifting its language of operation from Latin to Italian (see Donisotti's introduction to Bembo's Prose e rime, 36; and more recently Partner, 142-44), Bembo's argument is presented in terms of a myth of decline, and a proposal to stem the decline by reversing Petrarch's own self-proclaimed move from the vernacular into Latin. By using this myth, however, Bembo runs the risk of conflating the cultural belatedness of the humanists with the poetic belatedness Petrarch felt about his vernacular predecessor and rival. By crystallizing this union, Bembo transforms Petrarch from a mere linguistic model (one whose example is to be “followed,” in Pigman's terms) into a classical model subject to transformation and competitive emulation. Yet if he burdens the Renaissance vernacular poet with Petrarch as a type of poetic father, he also provides that poet the freedom inherent in the humanist hermeneutic. This distance allows writers to make of Petrarch what they will; however much Bembo may have meant Petrarchism to be a sociolinguistic concept, Petrarchism—particularly outside Italy—can take on a variety of generic, stylistic, thematic, and even ethical dimensions.

Notes

  1. Thus Bembo's literary theory is at odds with his reputation as a Neoplatonist, which is based on the love theory of his 1505 dialogue Gli Asolani, and on the speech “he” gives in book 4 of Castiglione's Cortegiano.

  2. On the role of Bembo's letter to Pico in the evolution of imitation theory, see Santangelo; Greene, 171-77; and Cruz, Imitación, 24-26. Bembo's rejection of a metaphysical, inspirational theory of poetry approximates twentieth-century hermeneutic and phenomenological approaches that emphasize reading and writing; see Kennedy, 1-2, 16-18, particularly his references to Gadamer and Ingarden.

  3. Bembo's arguments here are an echo of the trope of the translatio studii, which was to become crucial for the Renaissance outside Italy; see the section below on “Spanish Alterity and the Language of Empire.”

  4. Thus to Ferguson the idea of a “renaissance,” in contrast to other period concepts such as both “antiquity” and “middle ages,” is rooted in the cultural self-consciousness that existed at the time. By deriving our characterization of the “Renaissance” from the self-concept of the humanists, the term can be historicized, freed on the one hand from nineteenth-century Burckhardtian associations, and distinguished, on the other, from our own set of period concepts; see Waller, 5-8; also Kerrigan and Braden, 7: “The movement that counts, what we now call humanism, takes decisive form under Petrarch's inspiration and influence in the fourteenth century and is accompanied from the first with propaganda about its historic momentousness.”

  5. To Curtius, the creation of new tropes such as these can signal a major historical transition, for tropes “reflect the sequence of psychological periods. But in all poetical topoi the style of expression is historically determined. Now there are also topoi which are wanting throughout Antiquity down to the Augustan Age. … They have a twofold interest. First, as regards literary biology, we can observe in them the genesis of new topoi. Thus our knowledge of the genetics of the formal elements of literature is widened. Secondly, these topoi are indications of a changed psychological state; indications which are comprehensible in no other way” (82). Thus just as ancient tropes have a history that can be traced, so too do modern tropes such as the tripartite model of history, the idea of a Renaissance, the pairing of Petrarch and Boccaccio (as models of learning or of ignorance), and many other expressions used by the humanists; and the development of these new tropes is indicative of the psychological changes that characterize period boundaries.

  6. For a typology of Renaissance tropes that describe “following,” transformative imitation, and emulation, along with their classical sources, see Pigman.

  7. For the sake of consistency all quotations from Petrarch's Familiares (English: Letters on Familiar Matters) are taken from the translation by Aldo Bernardo.

  8. For a nuanced Bloomean approach to Petrarch's poetry that takes as its point of departure his theory of history, see Waller.

Bibliography

Bembo, Pietro. Prose e rime. Edition and introduction by Carlo Donisotti. 2d ed. Turin: UTET, 1966.

Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Cruz, Anne J. Imitación y transformación: El petrarquismo en la poesía de Boscán y Garcilaso de la Vega. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1988.

Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Bollingen Series 36. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973.

Ferguson, Wallace K. The Renaissance in Historical Thought. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Riverside Press, 1948.

Greene, Thomas M. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982.

Kennedy, William J. Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Literature. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978.

Kerrigan, William, and Gordon Braden. The Idea of the Renaissance. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Partner, Peter. The Pope's Men. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1990.

Petrarch [Francesco Petrarca]. Letters on Familiar Matters. 3 vols. Translated by Aldo S. Bernardo. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975-85.

Pigman, G. W., III. “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance.” Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 1-32.

Santangelo, Giorgio. Il Bembo critico e il principio d'imitazione. Florence: Sansoni, 1950.

Scott, Izora. Controversies over the Imitation of Cicero. New York: Teacher's College, Columbia University, 1910.

Segre, Cesare. “Edonismo linguistico nel cinquecento.” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 130 (1953): 145-77.

Ulivi, Ferruccio. L'imitazione nella poetica del rinascimento. Milan: Marzorati, 1959.

Waller, Marguerite. Petrarch's Poetics and Literary History. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.

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