The City of Poetry: Imagining the Civic Role of the Poet in Fourteenth-Century Italy

Abstract

In his 1920 essay, “La metodologia della critica letteraria e laDivina Commedia,” Benedetto Croce levied a notable rebuke against Dantean erudites, grammarians, and philologists for their conjoining of allegorical and aesthetico-historical criticism, advocating instead for a more rigorous focus on the historical, intellectual, and political contexts of creation. Building upon seminal studies of the last two centuries by Michele Barbi (1890), Carlo Dionisotti (1965) and Saverio Bellomo (2004), recent work such as that of Simon Gilson (2018) has done just this by producing valuable historicized accounts of Dante’s Italian production, dissemination, and reception between the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In spite of the excellent work done here, the concentration upon reception has not been matched by attention to the medieval Italian civic space. These contexts merit further critical consideration, not least because of their influences on authorship and reception. Against the foil of these approaches, David Lummus’s monograph impressively stages literary and documentary evidence alongside a reconstruction of the intellectual, social, and political landscapes of the medieval Italian city state. The work is divided into four chapters, accompanied by an introduction and epilogue. Read independently, the chapters constitute rich standalone studies on the negotiations between poets and the medieval civic space; in its entirety, the book offers a coherent and compelling account of the often interweaving rapport between civic institutions and the burgeoning poetic profession. In his introduction, Lummus describes the emergence of a poet extra textum—that is, one who (re)actively constructs authority both internal and external to the textual space. He approaches this civic and poetic interplay via a declaredly clear and impartial methodological framework which seeks to address “how each poet’s ideas about poetry both emerge from and react to specific historical circumstances, without passing judgment on their respective ideologies or on their associations with power” (15). While the historical documents collated appear to tell their own stories, in actuality Lummus organizes and presents them in a mode conducive to understanding a rich and complex network of relations between poets as well as their conceptions of poetry. The first chapter, “Albertino Mussato, Poet of the City”, examines the politically charged poetics of Padovan statesman Albertino Mussato. For Lummus, longstanding scholarly concentration upon the vernacular has inadvertently resulted in unwarranted judgments towards the literary production of the Middle Ages (5–6). In view of this, Lummus’s chapter constitutes an important reorientation towards the relatively neglected Latin output of the period. Building upon the work of Zardo (1884), Hyde (1966), Witt (2000), and Rippe (2003), the chapter begins with an overview of Mussato’s political trajectory within the civic turmoil of early fourteenth-century Padua. As the city’s poet laureate and celebrated diplomat, Mussato was deeply embedded in Paduan political and intellectual life; it was precisely through his dualist pre-humanist poetics and political preoccupations that he went on to exert considerable influence upon Padovan academic, monastic, and civic institutions. As Lummus cogently demonstrates through close examination of the author’s epistolary and poetic writings, Mussato’s output signals two striking reconceptualisations of the civic office of the poet: those of the poeta-theologus ITALIAN CULTURE, Vol. 41 No. 1, March 2023, 103–113