Authorizing Petrarch

Renaissance Quarterly, Summer, 1999 by Deborah Parker

William J. Kennedy, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. 301 pp. $36.50. ISBN: 0-8014-2947-9.

Authorizing Petrarch offers a remarkably erudite study of Petrarch's complex interpretive legacy. This book explores the intersection between Petrarch's Rime sparse and a vast array of Renaissance texts. Throughout his analysis, Kennedy examines different "sites," fascinating points of contact among this authoritative work, the commentary tradition on Petrarch, and poets in widely varying different historical environments. As Kennedy demonstrates, the multivalent structure of the Rime sparse coupled with the flexible nature of the commentary tradition facilitated the kind of adaptations of the Petrarchan lyric effected by various imitators. Just as commentators shaped their responses to the Rime sparse according to their own cultural and social commitments, so did poets in Italy, France, and England. What emerges is a provocative investigation of the powerful effect of criticism on creative imitations of Petrarch's poetry.

The first three chapters focus on the canonization of the Rime sparse in Italy. Chapter 1 focuses on the rhetorical and stylistic features that contribute to the ambiguity of the Rime sparse. Chapter 2 examines the differing responses of ten of the most influential Italian Petrarch commentators (Antonio da Tempo, Francesco Filelfo, Hieronimo Squarzafico, Alessandro Vellutello, Giovanni Antonio Gesualdo, Sylvano da Venafro, Bernardino Daniello, Fausto da Longiano, Antonio Brucioli, and Lodovico Castelvetro). These diverse perspectives offer a wealth of opinion on issues pertaining to amatory relationships, gender roles, class differences, and national identities. Their glosses in turn enable the further exploration of similar issues on the part of Petrarchists. The balance of the book is devoted to an examination of adaptations of the Petrarchan model made by Pietro Bembo, Vittoria Colonna, and Veronica Gambara in Italy, Pernette du Guillet and Louise Labe in France, and Edmund Spenser in England.

The attention Kennedy accords the mediating influence of commentaries and the specific historical environments that underlie the literary pursuits of imitators in Italy, France, and England goes far beyond the limited scope of most investigations into Petrarchism, which are largely confined to formal analyses. Kennedy's more interdisciplinary approach, which fuses erudition with theoretical sophistication, illuminates the way in which poetic practice ramifies into larger issues such as national identification and gender roles. Such concerns are especially evident in Kennedy's examination of the ideological factors underlining Bembo's promulgation of Petrarch - a refreshing change from the formal analyses which mark Italian treatments of the Prose della volgar lingua - and his discussion of Louise Labe's Petrarchism, which incorporates aspects of Latin amatory verse, in order to explore a more openly erotic treatment of love. Successive poets develop the issues which best serves his or her purpose. Bembo's advocation of an Italian literary language based on Petrarch's poetry and Boccaccio's prose, a language perceived as untouched by history and regional rivalry, was keenly attuned to the ambitions of the Medici, and Labe's reorientation of Petarch's treatment of amatory relationships was intended to make available to a middle-class audience forms of verse excluded from the educated male community schooled in the humanist tradition. While Kennedy's approach incorporates many insights gleaned from theoretical readings, among them Freud and gender studies, these observations do not drive the readings. Ever attentive to the specific historical circumstances in which each commentator or poet wrote, to metrical, syntactical, and stylistic features of the poetry, and to Renaissance printing and editorial practices, Kennedy's readings remain highly attuned to the "site" of Petrarchism.

Authorizing Petrarch explores with considerable finesse how the Rime sparse plays a dual role in its relation to early modern European culture, actively shaping the fabric of that culture and, at the same time, being shaped by it. Ultimately Authorizing Petrarch directs our attention to the multivalent meanings radiating from Petrarch's masterpiece. It adumbrates with admirable erudition the productivity of the Rime sparse, the ability of this authoritative work to take on a new life in different social formations in the hands of some of Petrarch's most influential imitators.

DEBORAH PARKER University of Virginia