Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance

Renaissance Quarterly, Winter, 2000 by Germaine Warkentin

Gordon Braden, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance

New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999. xviii 198 pages. $25. ISBN: 0-300-07621-5.

Gordon Braden begins with an admission many of us might second: "I did not read Petrarch with any attentiveness until I had to" (xi). Petrarch's Latin writings today are the preserve of scholars (though not the less important for that) and his vernacular lyrics fare little better. Yet Horace's Odes, Shakespeare's Sonnets, and the Canzoniere together dominate the history of European lyric, and not just its archaeology, as Braden's quotation of a contemporary Petrarchizing poet late in his volume shows. The problem is two-fold: the lack of a method for reading through his profusion of facile imitators to Petrarch himself, and the lack of a firm historiographical approach to Petrarch's context and influence which can bring together in a single argument strands from classical elegy, medieval erotic theory (including medicine), and history of the book, all the while dealing good-humoredly with the paradox that Petrarch himself was no Petrarchist. The pan-European craze for imitating his writings would have repell ed that fastidious reader of Horace, Propertius, and Virgil, who labored to construct a fiction of his own separation from the crowd.

Braden's book began as an attempt to solve some of these problems in the classroom, but to do so, he says, he needed the big picture. The result is not the inclusive book he first attempted; he admits it is eccentric (too harsh a word, I think) in its interests, traces a personal argument, and confines itself to continental works. (A second volume, Petrarchan Love and the English Renaissance, is promised.) Of the three lengthy chapters, "Petrarch" begins with some deftly presented context -- social, ecclesiastical, and literary -- emphasizing Petrarch's fiction of himself as an exile, and also placing important stress on the trope of writing (pen, ink, paper) to which he so often returns. Braden then traces, chiefly through techniques of narrative explication, a survey of the poems of the Canzoniere, concluding that "Petrarchism as a tradition has its origins in the nurturing of a creative narcissism to the point where it releases the perfectly lucid fear that a soul wholly invested in the strength and comfo rt of its own imagining can only fall ill and die. Isolation from the unimagined is isolation from the only God who is not an idol, since He is also, as if by definition, what you did not make up" (60). "Petrarchism" follows that important insight across a very wide range of prose and poetry (not entirely ignoring England, as some sharp paragraphs on Barnabe Barnes show). "Plus Ultra" is almost exclusively an account of the poetry of Sor Juana Ines de la Crux, who mentions Petrarch just once in her extensive writings.

As that might suggest, Braden's own thread is stretched very thin indeed. Yet it is the chapter on Sor Juana to which I would send a student, far sooner than most of the earlier material. Braden has "striven for an approach which will make the phenomenon of Petrarchism intelligible as a whole" (xii), and twenty-nine pages of notes to what is in fact a rather short book show that he has read widely in European Petrarchist writings and related amorous works, and is familiar with much scholarship in other languages. But his method is essentially narrative and thematic; in the Petrarch chapter this works, based as it is in a solid beginning and a conclusion of great insight. In the central chapter on Petrarchism, however, there is an unnerving lack of control over the material; thus in the space often pages (72-82) we move from Chaucer to Poliziano to Boiardo to Spenser to Cervantes, and because Braden's instinct is to narrate and thematize rather than argue a case, our grip on his original position is quickly l ost. This lack of argumentative control also afflicts the final chapter, where above all the excellent brief account of Sor Juana's writings surely should lead us back to to that early insight about isolation from the unimagined. Braden's final words are "What it is like to be in love this way is the elite experience of which the poets write. What it is like to be the object of such love is perhaps no less than the ordinary experience of being human: imagine that this is how God feels about us" (161). Unhappily, we have been left with no sure pathway along the route by which he reached that point.