“Come vertute in petra prezïosa”

Abstract

Although in the last few decades scholars have dedicated much attention to the juridical world and the academic environment of Bologna and its flourishing university in the second half of the thirteenth century, totally uncharted territory are the connections between Guido Guinizzelli di Magnano (1230s–1276), judge, prosecutor, and one of the main literary references of the upcoming Dolce Stilnovo, and the professional activity of Taddeo Alderotti (1206/1215–1295), the catalyst of the new scientific trends of the Bolognese medical school. Guido Guinizzelli’s canzone “Al cor gentil” offers a groundbreaking theory of nobility that philosophically conflates love with nobility. This article argues that the philosophical progress of the canzone presents an understanding of medical and scientific terminology that must be put in contact with Taddeo and his interest in Avicenna’s medical philosophy. Guinizzelli’s correspondence between love and nobility is nurtured by Avicenna’s increasingly popular doctrine of forma specifica, which structures the reasoning and the examples of the vernacular poem. Guinizzelli therefore frames the idea of nobility in the heart of the lover as the forma specifica of the noble man, and conceives the lady as the divine intelligence that reduces to act his potentiality.