Book review: Zygmunt G. Barański, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Literature, Doctrine, Reality

Abstract

tionship to Dante (349) and demonstrates how “Petrarch restricted Dante’s cultural status to that of a love poet” and “reduced Dante simply to one such poet among a large ‘schiera’ of erotic versifiers—a radical curtailment of [Dante’s] contemporary image” (357–358). In reviewing the large number of references to Orpheus and various Orphic elements in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Barański speculates “whether Petrarch’s Canzoniere may not in fact be the great overlooked Orphic text of the Western tradition” (411) and correctly argues (from my viewpoint) that the Canzoniere’s focus is “not on Laura but on the poet, not least because the woman is nothing but a projection of the self’s imagination” (420). In “Guido Cavalcanti and his First Readers” (443–469), Barański insightfully reviews Guido’s status as an auctoritas and Boccaccio’s recasting in Decameron VI.9 of the older poet in a positive light, in contrast to Dante’s negative portrayal of him as an implied heretic in Inferno 10. The last essay, perhaps the most provocative, explores “the question of the role played in the Middle Ages by obscenity and scatology” (606) and “the proper and improper use of language” (610) relative to Inferno 18’s excrement-besmirched flatterers, concluding that the canto’s contrapassi constitute “moral assertions of the ways in which [the sinfulness of panders, seducers, and flatterers] perverted the divine gift of speech” (613). This handsomely edited tome, which I heartily recommend to literary scholars and historians of the Trecento, concludes with a list of Barański’s publications, a general index, a useful index of references, and an index of manuscripts.