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13th and 14th Centuries

Italian Literature,
literature written in the Italian language from about the 13th century to the present.

Middle Ages

Before the 13th century the literary language of Italy was Latin, which served for the writing of chronicles, historical poems, heroic legends, lives of the saints, religious poems, and didactic and scientific works. In addition to those who wrote in Latin, a number of the early Italian poets wrote in French or in Provençal, and borrowed most of their verse forms and literary themes from foreign sources. One of the most important verse forms was the Provençal canzone. The literary themes included the deeds of ancient heroes, of Arthurian knights, and of Charlemagne and his paladins. The geste, or tales, of Charlemagne first appeared in a Franco-Venetian vernacular and were later Italianized in Tuscany. Besides attaining lasting popularity in Italy, the tales furnished themes of chivalry for subsequent Italian poets.

13th and Early 14th Centuries

The earliest poetry written in Italian was that of the Sicilian school connected with the German Hohenstaufen court of the Italian-speaking Holy Roman emperor Frederick II and his son Manfred. They chose to administer their far-flung empire mainly from Sicily, which, partly under the impact of Arab civilization, had become one of the chief cultural centers of 13th-century Europe. The poetry of the Sicilian school, although written in Italian, had otherwise no native quality. It was largely a court type of love poetry, almost slavishly and often clumsily imitative of the current Provençal models. The most remarkable poets of the school were Giacomo Pugliese (flourished about 1230-50) and Rinaldo d'Aquino.

After the fall of the Hohenstaufen dynasty in 1254, the center of Italian poetry shifted to two cities, Arezzo, known for the work of Guittone d'Arezzo, and Bologna, distinguished by the innovations of Guido Guinizelli. Guittone d'Arezzo and his followers produced little poetry of distinction. Guinizelli was the creator of the dolce stil nuovo ("sweet new style"). In this style the poet did not exalt the worldly, fashionable type of love cultivated in the courts of princes, as in Provençal and Sicilian love poetry. He wrote instead of a Platonic love relationship, in which the loveliness of the adored woman spiritualized the lover, lifting his soul to a comprehension of divine beauty. The greatest of Italian poets, Dante Alighieri, who had a high regard for Guinizelli, wrote his first book, La vita nuova (1292; The New Life, 1861), in the new style. In prose narrative interspersed with lyrics, Dante described his idealized love for his beloved, Beatrice. Dante and the other poets of the dolce stil nuovo, notably Guido Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoia, made it one of the great schools of Italian poetry.

Meanwhile another native, original type of poetry had appeared, a devotional poetry inspired by St. Francis of Assisi, whose Canto dell' amore (Canticle of Creatures) sings of love for all of God's creation rather than for any single human being. The same feeling was expressed in a collection of legends in verse, Fioretti (Little Flowers), based on the life of St. Francis. Other Franciscan poets followed in the 13th century, among them a poet with a Dantesque imagination, Jacopone da Todi, among whose beautiful hymns are the famous "Our Lady of the Passion" and "Stabat Mater."

Dante is one of the great figures of world literature. He is remarkable for the loftiness of his thought, the vividness and fluency of his verse, and the boldness of his imagination. He was one of the founders of Italian literature through his use of the vernacular for some of his greatest works. About 1304 he wrote in Latin De Vulgari Eloquentia (Concerning the Common Speech), in which he advocated the use of Italian as a literary language.

Dante mastered the knowledge of his time and stands out as the greatest interpreter of the ideals of medieval Europe. His Convivio (The Banquet), written during the first years of the 14th century, is an almost encyclopedic summary of European culture. To his scholarship Dante added experience drawn from a varied and active civic life. He served as a magistrate of Florence and took part in the political controversies of the time. His political convictions, for which he suffered exile, are expressed plainly in his Latin treatise on government, De Monarchia (circa 1313); in this work he projected enlightened imperial rule as the ideal system in which multiple conflicting states would be absorbed in one, church and state would be separated, and justice would be founded on Roman law.

Dante's greatest work is his epic poem La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy), probably begun about 1307, and written in the vernacular for the sake of full and direct communication. It is a dramatization of medieval philosophy and theology partly in terms of the controversies and personalities of 13th- and 14th-century Italy. In some respects it is a literary guided tour through the three worlds of medieval theology: hell, purgatory, and paradise. Dante's guides are Beatrice, the object of his chaste adoration, and the Roman poet Vergil.

Renaissance

The Renaissance in Italy was a period of expanding economic, political, and cultural activity. The towns and cities emerged from feudal conditions to become centers of commerce and industry. City leaders struggled constantly to increase their power by conquest and by establishing spheres of influence. Some city-states, such as Venice and Genoa, won control of Mediterranean empires. The period was marked by a rebirth of culture based on the discovery of ancient manuscripts and the reevaluation of classical literature and philosophy, which spread eventually throughout Europe.

Many of the great figures of early Renaissance literature were scholars concerned with philological research into and the translation of the Greek and Latin classics. They were called humanists because of their interest in human rather than otherwordly ideals, as opposed to the scholars and thinkers of the Middle Ages. Many humanists turned for inspiration to the works of Plato in preference to those of his pupil Aristotle, who was the dominant influence in medieval scholarship.

Late 14th Century

One of the most important figures of the early Renaissance was the humanist scholar and poet Petrarch. With him a new feeling entered Western culture. Unlike Dante and other medieval thinkers such as the Italian Scholastic philosopher Thomas Aquinas and the French philosopher Peter Abelard, Petrarch was not concerned so much with using the material of the ancient classical writers for his own purposes as with acting in the classical spirit. A great Latinist, he helped to restore classical Latin as a literary and scholarly language and to discredit the use of medieval Latin, which had served as an international medium of communication. After this period Latin lost currency as a spoken tongue.

Petrarch is often referred to as the "modern man" because of his interest in individuality; his Vita Solitaria (1480; Solitary Life, 1924) and his De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae (1468; Physicke Against Fortune, 1579) are considered the first essays to express this new attitude. He has been called also the first Italian nationalist, as contrasted with Dante, who was a universalist and for whom Italy was a part to be fitted into an imperial whole. To Petrarch, Italy was the heir and successor of ancient Rome, the civilizing mission of which he glorified in his Latin epic Africa (critical edition, 1926), dealing with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. He believed that the various states of Italy should be united to resume the mission of ancient Rome.

Impressive as were Petrarch's contributions to classical scholarship, his greatness rests on his Italian lyrics. His Canzoniere (after 1327; trans. 1777)—a collection of sonnets addressed to Laura, probably the Frenchwoman Laure de Noves, the counterpart of Dante's Beatrice—departs from the idealized approach of the dolce stil nuovo. It introduced an intensity and inwardness of feeling and perception heretofore unknown in European poetry.

Boccaccio, like Petrarch, was conscious of belonging to a new age. He was strongly influenced by Petrarch, and the two men became close friends. Boccaccio had a strong narrative bent, as evidenced by his prose romances Il Filocolo (circa 1336) and L'amorosa Fiammetta (Amorous Fiammetta, c. 1343). Boccaccio's greatest work is his Decamerone (1353; The Decameron, 1620), a masterpiece in which he drew directly from life instead of from literary models. It is a collection of 100 short stories presumed to have been told during a period of ten days by seven gentlemen and three ladies of Florence living in a remote country villa in which they had taken refuge from an epidemic of the plague.

Unlike Petrarch, Boccaccio valued Dante highly; his last work was a biography and a series of lectures on the work of the great poet. Boccaccio's writings gained an international public and were drawn upon for plots and characters by writers in other countries. For example, his epic poem La Teseida (c. 1341) was used by the 14th-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer as the basis for his "Knight's Tale" and by the 17th-century English poet John Dryden in his poem "Palamon and Arcite."

Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were the first Italian writers to make literary use of the Tuscan dialect spoken in Florence, Siena, and other towns of north-central Italy, and they won for it general acceptance as the language of culture.

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