Mourning Laura in the "Canzoniere": Lessons from LamentationsAuthor(s): Ronald L. MartinezReviewed work(s):Source: MLN, Vol. 118, No. 1, Italian Issue (Jan., 2003), pp. 1-45Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3251569 .Accessed: 10/12/2011 04:17

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Mourning Laura in the Canzoniere: Lessons from Lamentations

Ronald L. Martinez

Readers now recognize that the first words of Petrarch's Canzoniere- "Voi ch'ascoltate in rime sparse . . ."-are modelled in part on Lamentations 1.12, which is spoken by a personified Jerusalem lamenting her captivity and abjection: "O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, adtendite et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus."' Beginning a sonnet with the citation of this verse was domesticated for Italian vernacular lyric especially by Cavalcanti and Dante;2 Dante in particular

See, for example, Gianfranco Contini, Letteratura italiana delle origini, 6th ed. (Florence: Sansoni, 1991): 580. The notes in Francesco Petrarca: Canzoniere, ed. by Marco Santagata (Milan: Mondadori, 2nd ed., 1997: notes to sonnet 1 are pp. 5-12) are indispensable. This edition is used for all citations of text and commentary. I have also relied on Francesco Petrarca: Trionfi, Rime estravaganti, codice degli abozzi, ed. Marco Santagata (Milan: Mondadori, 1996) and on the edition of Petrarch's Codice degli Abbozzi by Laura Paolino (Turin: Einaudi, 2000); earlier traditions including some Renaissance commentators are digested in the edition by Giosue Carducci and Severino Ferrari, Francesco Petrarca: Le Rime (Florence: Sansoni, 1899): 3-4.

2 Cavalcanti's uses of Lamentations are studied in Giuseppe De Robertis, "I1 caso di Cavalcanti," in Dante e la Bibbia (Atti del congresso), ed. G. Barblan (Longo: Ravenna, 1989): 341-350. De Robertis's Il libro della Vita nuova (Florence: Sansoni, 2nd ed. 1970) and his edition of the Vita nuova (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1980) have documented the importance of Lamentations for Dante. For Dante, see Nancy Vickers, "Widowed Words: Dante, Petrarch, and the Metaphors of Mourning," in Discourses of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens (Hanover, N.H.: Universities of New England Press, 1989): 97-108; also Ronald L. Martinez, "Mourning Beatrice: The Rhetoric of Lamentations in the Vita nuova," MLN 115 (1998): 1-29 and "Cavacalcanti 'Man of Sorrows,"' forthcoming in the Acta of the 2000 New York Cavalcanti conference. For precedents in Guittone, see Guittone d'Arezzo, Canzoniere: I sonetti d'amore del codice laurenziano, ed. Lino Leonardi (Turin: Einaudi, 1994): 188-90 and the notes in Santagata, Canzoniere (pp. 6-7). Many other allusions

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begins the second sonnet of the Vita nuova "O voi che per la via d'amor passate."3 And as Giovanni Pozzi has recently pointed out, the beginning of the sestet of Petrarch's proemial sonnet, "Ma ben veggio or si come al popol tutto / favola fui gran tempo," also draws on Lamentations, in this case 3.14: "factus sum in derisum omni populo meo, canticum eorum tota die" [I am made a derision to all my people, their song all day long]:4 in this way, allusion to the book of laments attributed to Jeremiah articulates the principal parts of the poem.5

have been discerned in Petrarch's lines, including a pattern of echoes of Dante outlined by Roberto Mercuri, "Genesi della tradizione letteraria in Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio," in Letteratura italiana. Storia e geografia, ed. A. Asor Rosa, I. L'eta medievale (Turin: Einaudi, 1987): 359-61; for classical echoes, see Francisco Rico, "Pr6logos al Canzoniere. (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, I-III)" in Annali della Scuola Normale di Pisa. Classe di lettere efilosofia, serie III, XVIII (1988): 1071-1104.

3 For discussion, see de Robertis, Libro, 35-36 and his edition of the Vita nuova, 52; Guglielmo Gorni, ed., Vita nova (Turin: Einaudi, 1996): 35-37; and Martinez, "Mourn- ing Beatrice": 10-12. The influence of Boccaccio's early Filostrato (c. 1335) on Petrarch's uses of Lam. 1.12 is also probable; see 1.6, 5-6; 5.1, 7-8; 8.28, 3-4; and proemio, p. 63. Passages cited from Giovanni Boccaccio, Caccia di Diana e Filostrato, ed. V. Branca (Milan: Mondadori, 1990).

4 See Giovanni Pozzi, "Petrarca, i padri e soprattutto la Bibbia," in Studi petrarcheschi 6 (n.s.) (1989): 125-69, esp. 159-62. Pozzi also cites, for sonnet 1, parallels from Psalms 43.14 and 68.12 ("factus sum illis in parabolam") and there are related texts including Psalms 21.7-8, Psalm 30.12, and Job 30.1-9; these are also texts associated with the Passion; see John Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Kontrijk, Belgium: 1979): 40-49, 111, 149; and Ann Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Medieval Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 105-108. See note 16 below. In his index of texts cited by Petrarch, Santagata notes that Canz. 88.9-10 (". . voi che siete in via / volgete i passi") and 161.12 ("O anime gentili et amorose ... et voi nude ombre .... deh ristate a veder quale e'l mio male") are adaptations of Lam. 1.12 as well; the latter possibly echoing Dante Vita nuova 40.10 ("se voi restaste .. ."), from "Deh, peregrini," a poem heavily influenced by Lam. 1.12 (see De Robertis, Libro, 56; also Martinez, "Mourning Beatrice": 11-13), and several passages from the Inferno (10.24, 27.23). The anonymous 16th century annotator who wrote the marginal comment to Canzoniere sonnet 133 in the Aldine Petrarch prepared by Bembo ("Amor m'a posto come segno a strale") had no difficulty hearing the text of Lamentations behind Petrarch's lines: "Heremia. Posuit me quasi signum ad sagittam." See The 1501 Edition of Le Cose Volgari di Messer Francesco Petrarcha, revised and amended by Master Pietro Bembo, Venetian Noble, with intro. by Jeremy Parzen and Luigi Balsamo (Great Britain: Alecto, 1997): f. 60.

5 There are precedents in both Cavalcanti and Dante for this articulatory function of the citation. Dante's canzone begins with an incipit that adapts Lam. 1.12 ("Voi ch'intendendo ... / udite .. .") and continues in the sirma with an adaptation of Lam. 1.18 ("pero vi priego che lo mi' ntendiate"). Alfred Noyer-Weidner, "II sonetto I," Lectura petrarce4 (1984): 327-353, esp. 330, notes Petrarch's imitation of Dante's ballata "Voi che savete ragionar d'amore / udite .. ." which is itself an imitation of Lam. 1.1. For examples in Cavalcanti, see de Robertis, "II caso" and Martinez, "Cavalcanti 'Man of Sorrows,"' forthcoming.

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In his reliance on the text of Lamentations, Petrarch was unlikely to be citing unadorned scripture merely. He was arguably drawing on the sacred text as it was received, adapted, and even performed by late medieval culture.6 For late medieval readers, whose Bibles were often provided with commentaries, Lamentations was thought to be a

poetic text in Sapphic meter.7 From the 12th century onward it had been held up as a rhetorical treasury for topics of conquestio and

indignatio, figures adapted to excite the sympathy, pity, or righteous indignation of the listener, reader, or spectator.8 And since the time of

Gregory the Great, Lamentations exegesis had also made it plain that the moral sense of Lamentations (among numerous other meanings) dramatizes how the sinful soul, signified by the besieged Jerusalem, suffers in its alienation from God.9 But probably the most consequential

6 For the importance of glosses and commentaries in the medieval reception of the Bible, see, at least, Beryl Smalley, Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame:

University of Notre Dame Press, 2nd edition 1964) and Medieval Literary Criticism, c. 1100-1375: The Commentary Tradition, ed. A. J. Minnis, A.B. Scott, with David Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); although the 13th and 14th centuries saw increasing use of Bibles without commentary, glossed Bibles were by no means rare or obsolete (see Christopher de Hamel, The Book: A History of the Bible [London: Phaidon, 2001]: 91-115. By Petrarch's day the performance of scripture had long been widespread in the form of liturgical drama, religious pageants and mystery plays and, in Italy, laudi. The attribution to the Virgin Mary of Lam. 1.12 probably begins in the early Trecento; for

examples, see Karl Young, Drama of the Medieval Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933, 2 vols): I, 496-539, esp. 500-503; 507-512; and Sandro Sticca, The Planctus Mariae in the Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1988): 118-47.

7 The determination of Threni as lyric, and its "sapphic" meter, is found in most

important commentaries from Paschasius Radbertus in the 9th century to John Pecham and PeterJohn Olivi at the end of the 13th; for a modern account of how the medieval church treated Hebrew poetry, see James L. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry (New Haven and London, 1981), esp. 135-71.

8 As Beryl Smalley showed (Study, 59-63), in making his digest of Paschasius for the Glossa ordinaria version of Lamentations as supervised by Anselm of Laon, Gilbert the Universal drew directly from Cicero's De inventione and the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium for the list of topics of conquestio and indignatio: in those works, they are listed as topics of amplification suited to the conclusion of the oration, directed to moving the audience to anger or compassion. The most influential subsequent commentaries either list or allude to the topics: cf. Hugh of St. Cher (the fullest listing), Albertus Magnus (a full list),John Pecham (identifies examples as they appear; but gives no initial list); Aquinas (identifies examples). The commentaries that are only moralizations omit the rhetorical topics (Gilbertus Abbas, Hugh of St. Victor, Rupert of Deutz).

9 Gregory the Great, Homilia in evangelia XXIX (PL 76.1295-1296); discussion in

Stephen K. Wright, The Vengeance of our Lord: Medieval dramatizations of the Destruction of Jerusalem (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1989), esp. 23-27. Several commentaries on Lamentations (Gilbertus Abbas, Hugh of St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas) are "tropologies," omitting allegorical and historical material.

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effect of the exegesis and liturgical use of Lamentations for Petrarch's readers was that Lam.1.12 and 3.14, among other passages, were widely and persistently thought of allegorically, as spoken by Christ suffering derision and crucifixion.'1 Whether in the form of the Holy Week liturgy, during which Lamentations readings feature promi- nently, or in popular meditations on the Passion, where the rhetorical possibilities of the Lamentations text were fully exploited, the 14th century association of certain texts of Lamentations and the suffering of Christ was all but inescapable.

In the light of these traditions, the articulation of Petrarch's sonnet, rhetorically and psychologically, by citations of Lamentations appears even more suggestive. With the apostrophe of a reading public in the first line, Petrarch as the speaker appropriates the emotional intensity of the spectacle of the Passion, while his explicit rhetorical aims-"spero trovar pieta, nonch6 perdono"(1.8)-reflect the tradition of Lamentations as a rhetorical treasury.1 The peniten- tial turn that marks the beginning of the sestet ("Ma ben veggio or si . ." 1.9) might also follow the exegetical definitions of the moral, or tropological, sense of the Lamentations text, as well as penitential passages in the Holy week liturgy.'2 In short, Petrarch's adaptations of

10 Attributed to St. Bernard, the Meditatio in passione et resurrectione domini (PL 184.742-769) is now held to be a Franciscan product; (cf. 744: "clamat nobis de cruce: O vos omnes ...' et nemo est qui audiat, nemo qui consoletur, nemo qui respondeat.") And a few lines later: "attendite dolorem meum, ut in dolore meo videatur dolorem vestrum."); see also Pseudo-Anselm, Dialogus beatae Mariae et Anselmi de Passione domini (PL 159.288); equally influential were Bonaventura's Vitis mystica (PL 184.638: "tanto doloris subjicitur, ut in ipso veraciter noscatur impletum quod ante dixerat per prophetas: O vos omnes .. .") and his Lignum vitae (Quaracchi, VII, p. 71, 78). In Italian vernacular, a signal instance is Bonvesin dalla Riva's Libro delle tre scritture (ed. Leandro Biadene, Pisa: Spoerri, 1902) , in particular the Libro della scriptura rossa, verses 180- 184: "veniti e si guardati s'el e dolore ke sia, / s'el e in lo mondo angustia si grande como e la mia." For the diffusion and influence of these treatises in Italy, see Ann Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996); for this literature and its diffusion more generally, see now Thomas H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); see note 17.

"John Pecham, Expositio Threnorum Ieremiae Prophetae, in St. Bonaventura, Opera omnia (Quaracchi, 1895, vol. 7): 609 summarizes Cicero and previous commentaries (he explicitly names the Glossa) in identifying the function of the rhetorical topics as "conquestiones, quae sunt 'orationes auditorum misericordiam captans"' and "locos sive modos compassionem excitandi" (emphases Pecham's).

12 Hugh of St. Cher, Postillae super ThrenosJeremiae, in Opera omnia in universum vetus et novum testamentum (Pezzana, 1732, 8 vols.): 4, 282v observes that Lamentations "moraliter de animae defectione exponitur." The text of Lam. itself includes a strong penitential strain (cf. 5.16: "Vae nobis, quia peccavimus"); in the Easter liturgy a refrain derived from Hosea 14.2 ("Jerusalem, Jerusalem, convertere ad dominum tuum") concludes each of the three readings of the first Nocturns.

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Lamentations in the proemial sonnet heralds that reciprocal osmosis (as well as conflict) between sacred and profane affect that has long bemused interpreters of Petrarch's vernacular collection of lyrics.l3

At the same time, since probably written not long after Laura's death, the first sonnet commences the Canzoniere as a work of

mourning. It is a work of mourning for Laura, to be sure, but also, perhaps predominantly, for the speaker, who laments, if not always convicingly, the sacrifice of his moral autonomy to desire.14 It can be added that what critics such as Adelia Noferi, Alfred Noyer-Weidner, Daniela Goldin-Folena and Marco Santagata have observed regarding the complex vocative stance of the proemial sonnet is perfectly consistent with its appeal to the broadly phrased vocation in the text of Lam. 1.12, especially as interpreted by contemporary exegesis.l5 My

13 Sonnet 16, comparing the poet's search for traces of Laura to the quest of pilgrims to Rome for the face of Christ in viewing the Veronica, suggests how far Petrarch was willing to take this relation; some critics have found it blasphemous; see Santagata's notes in Canzoniere: 68-71. For this dichotomy-contamination of sacred and secular see Thomas Roche, "The Calendrical Structure of Petrarch's Canzoniere "Studies in Philology 71 (1974): 152-72; see also Robert M. Durling, Introduction to Petrarch's Lyric Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976): 18-26; Sarah Sturm-Maddox, Petrarch's Laurels (College Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992): 133-78. See also the scrupulous summaries of Kenelm Foster in Petrarch: Poet and Humanist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1984): 99-102. See also Kenelm Foster, "Beatrice or Medusa," Studies Presented to E.R Vincent, ed. by C.P. Brand, K. Foster and U. Limentani (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962): 41-56.

14 The emphasis on the loss of moral autonomy as a theme of the whole Canzoniere follows Rico's emphasis on Stoic principles regarding self-mastery in both the Secretum and in "Voi ch'ascoltate"; these are of course in 14th century terms non inconsistent (especially in Petrarch) with Christian penitence; see Francisco Rico, "'Rime sparse,' 'Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.' Para el titulo y el primer soneto del 'Canzoniere,"' in Medioevo romanzo 3 (1976): 101-38, reprinted with revisions in II 'Canzoniere'di Francesco Petrarca: La critica contemporanea, ed. G. Barbarisi and Claudia Berra (Milano: LED, 1992): 117-44, esp. 132-36; also Foster, Petrarch, 154-155, 164-173. Petrarch was fully aware of the distinction between lamenting Laura and lamenting his own losses; see Canz. 282.12-14. Rico, "Rime sparse": 106-107 identifies the first sonnet as the rhetorical partitio of exordium; for the marking of Canzoniere 1 as elegiac, by virtue of evocation of the Latin elegists and such medieval works as Henry of Settimello's Elegia, see Daniela Goldin-Folena, "Frons salutationis epistolaris. Abelardo, Eloisa, Petrarca e la polimorfia del Titulus," in Da una riva all'altra: Studi in onore di Antonio d'Andrea, ed. Dante della Terza (Florence: Cadmo, 1995): 41-60, esp. 54-60.

15 As Adelia Noferi observed ("Da un commento al Canzoniere petrarchesco: lettura del sonetto introduttivo," Lettere italiane 26 (1974): 165-79; esp. 167, what Petrarch does is express to his listeners his hope of finding pity among "chi per prova intenda amore"; he does not directly petition the listeners that he addresses with "Voi ch'ascoltate." This somewhat attenuates Santagata's point ("Rerum vulgariumfragmenta: L'inizio della storia," in Dal sonetto al Canzoniere. Ricerche sulla preistoria e la constituzione di un genere (Padova: Liviana, 1979): 145-66, that Petrarch's is the first poem in Italian vernacular literature to address a generic audience of readers, rather than a preselected,

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arguments in this paper will offer a preliminary glance at Petrarch's articulation of this double subject of mourning, for Laura and for the

poet's self, as it is informed by late medieval understanding and

liturgical use of Lamentations.'6 In addition, considering the Canzoniere as a project of mourning will I hope furnish a useful new perspective on the implications of Petrarch's much-discussed division of the collection into two parts.

Although reference to the Passion in the proemial sonnet is allusive and indirect,17 it is transparent in the third sonnet, where Petrarch makes the inception of his passion, the first sight of Laura, coincide with Good Friday: "il giorno ch'al sol si scoloraro / per la

pieta del suo Factore i rai" (Canz. 3.1-2). In one sense Petrarch's woes

accompany the universal, cosmic mourning for Christ's passion; but

they also deviate from it because invested in Laura and the laurel, rather than in Christ and the tree of the Cross.'8 Although sorting out the problem of 6 April 1327 not actually falling on Good Friday is not

contemplated here,19 we can perhaps better comprehend Petrarch's

specific group or individual-in fact the audience implied is potentially double: readers, and fellow lovers, which might but need not coincide. Nevertheless, the identification by exegetes of the "Vos omnes" addressed by the widow of Lamentations is that they are the peregrini literally passing by the holy places; allegorically, they are humans in via in this life-an all-inclusive category. By the same token, Petrarch hopes to find pity among all who have experienced passion, all who have been on the "via d'Amor" (cf. Vita nuova 7.3)), but "voi ch'ascoltate" modifies "vos omnes qui transitis," and the class of all pilgrims becomes the class of all readers or auditors. Compare Canz. 161.12-14, and see also, esp. 330-34.

16 The present paper omits discussion of Petrarch's use of Lamentations and its commentary tradition in his political canzoni "Spirto gentil" (Canz. 53) and "Italia mia," (Canz. 128); these poems will be discussed in a separate study of Petrarch's letters of exhortation to Charles IV and to the Avignon popes, in which Lamentations also figures prominently as a model.

17 Rosanna Bettarini, in her reading of "Vergine Bella" in Lacrime e inchiostro nel Canzoniere del Petrarca (Bologna: CLUEB, 1998): 9-43, documents Petrarch's use of

pseudo-Bernard (see esp. 35-38). But Petrarch's knowledge of this literature by 1357- 58 at the latest is certain given Sine Nomine 17, which includes a meditation on the Passion. In this context "piango e ragiono" is also a possible reference to the Lamentations preface ("flens, planxit lamentationem . . . eiulans dixit"). See note 10.

18 See Thomas P. Roche, "Calendrical Structure"; also Fredi Chiappelli, "Le theme de la Defectio solis dans le 'Canzoniere': variatio intus," now in II legame musaico, ed. Pier Massimo Forni and Giorgio Cavallini (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1984): 165-80. Robert M. Durling, "Petrarch's 'Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro,"' MLN 86 (1971): 1-20, esp. 16-19, plots the substitution of the cross for the laurel in the structure of Petrarch's sestinas.

19 Since the pioneering work of Carlo Calcaterra, "'Feria Sexta Aprilis,'" in Nella Selva del Petrarca (Bologna: Capelli, 1942): 209-46 bibliography on the problem has mushroomed: see Roche, "Calendrical Structure"; Bortolo Martinelli, "'Feria sexta

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motives for placing his first sight of Laura in a church on a Good

Friday if we recognize the intention of juxtaposing a personal affliction with the collective liturgical mourning of the Church.20 Both in general and in detail, the public liturgical mourning of the three

days leading up to Easter is inextricable from the text of Lamenta- tions, which by furnishing the readings for the first Nocturns of Matins on three consecutive days strongly characterizes the obser- vance of the Paschal season.21 That Lamentations was sung during the

nights preceding the three days makes no difference, as the liturgical day began on the previous evening, with Vespers;22 and as during Passion week nocturnal and diurnal offices were virtually continuous, a striking unity of mood was maintained.23 More specifically, 12th and

aprilis': la data sacra nel Canzoniere del Petrarca," now in Petrarca e il Ventoso (Bergamo: Minerva Italica, 1977): 103-48; Chiappelli "Le theme de la defectio solis"; Manlio Pastore Stocchi, "I sonetti III e LXI," Lectura petrarce 1 (1981): 1-23; F.J. Jones, "Arguments in Favor of a Calendrical Structure for Petrarch's 'Canzoniere,"' in Modem Language Review 79 (1984): 579-88; Giovanni Biancardi, "L'ipotesi di un ordinamento calendariale del Canzoniere di Petrarca," Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 172 (1995): 1-55; see also Vickers, "Widowed Words," 102-103. Foster has a lucid appraisal of the difficulties (Petrarch 53-54), and favors the Martinelli thesis.

20 Although Martinelli's explanation of the feria sexta problem has been challenged, his principal point, against Calcaterra, that the association of the date of the innamoramento with Good Friday (whatever its calendar date) is fundamental to the intentio auctoris of the Canzoniere, cannot be faulted. See esp. 121-31, 140-43. Canz. sonnet 4, which also draws an explicit parallel between Laura and Christ, in this case

regarding the Nativity, may also have liturgical reference, in this case to the other

complex liturgy of the ecclesiastical year, that of Advent. See Maria Grazia Criscione, "Una redazione ignota del commento di Lodovico Castelvetro ai primi quattro sonnetti dei 'Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,"' Studi petrarcheschi, n.s. IX (1992): 136-220, esp. 218-19.

21 Chiappelli, "Le theme," discusses scriptural, but not liturgical sources to the Good

Friday darkening of the sun. With the exception of the Good Friday problem, the

subject of Petrarch and the liturgy has been little studied; for the liturgy in medieval culture and literature generally see especially O.B. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1955). Rosemond Tuve's brilliant and far-reaching A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), esp. pp. 19-103 has been a model for my own approach to the use of Lamentations exegesis in Duecento and Trecento Poets.

22 A passage from Bonaventura spells it out (In II Sent. d. 13, a. 3, dub. 1): "Alius modus computandi dies attenditur in solemnitatem custoditione, in quo nox praecedens connumeratur diei sequenti; et hoc vult dicere a vespera in vesperam, ut praecedat nox, et sequatur dies, quia eramus aliquando tenebrae, nunc autem lux in Domino." Cited in Bortolo Martinelli, "Canto VII," in Lectura Dantis Neapolitana: Purgatorio, ed. Pompeo Giannantonio (Naples: Loffredo, 1989): 129. Vespers to vespers series of offices was the norm on festive days; see Andrew Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts of Mass and Office (Toronto: Medieval Institute, 1984): 14-19.

23 Durandus in the Rationale divinorum officiorum (Naples: Dura, 1859), Haymo of Favesham's Breviary, ed. SJ.P. Van Dijk in Sources of the Modern Roman Liturgy (Leiden:

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13th century liturgical writers such as Honorius of Autun and Durandus of Mendes state that the ceremony of tenebrae-the gradual extinction of all candles during the singing of the contiguous Matins and Lauds offices-itself recalled the Good Friday darkening of the sun at the crucifixion.24 Such a close association between the Good Friday commemoration of the crucifixion and its liturgical imitation during the Nocturns might warrant reading lines 7-8 of the third sonnet (". . . i miei guai / nel comune dolor s'incominciaro") as

suggesting Petrarch's first sight of Laura followed hard upon, if it did not actually accompany, recitation of the Lamentations text.25 To say so much may be stretching the point; but that Petrarch's decision to make Laura's death coincide with Good Friday entailed enlisting texts from the liturgical mourning of the church for the project of mourning her is amply borne out by the texts and structure of the Canzoniere,26 as I intend to show.

E. J. Brill, 2 vols., 1963), and the Liber Usualis (post-Tridentine, but preserving uses consistent with the Trecento where Passion week is concerned) show that passages from Lamentations went to form Responses for the Good Friday and Holy Saturday Office: the Response for the Second nocturn is "Tenebrae facta sunt"; for the Third nocturn the final versicle is from Lam. 1.12.

24 Durandus (Rationale 6.72.15): "consequenter candelae et lumen extinguuntur, nam hae tenebrae tribus noctibus celebratae significant tenebras quae tribus horis fuerunt, Christo in cruce pendente, vel ideo tribus noctibus lumen extinguuntur, quia verum lumen triduo jacuit in sepulcro." (Rationale 6.72.2) "Ecclesia in his diebus tenebras colit, et matutinas in tenebras finit. Primo, quia in luctu et moerore esset propter domini passionem, et propter eius triduanam mortem exequias celebrat triduanas. Secundo, officium tenebrarum significat non tam tenebras materiales, quae fuerunt super faciem terrae, dum pendebat sol iustitiae in cruce ... videlicet a sexta hora usque ad nonam inclusive, quam etiam spirituales, quae in illo triduo in cordibus fidelium extiterunt." For the obscuration of the sun signifying the death of Christ, but also Laura's, see Chiappelli, "Le Theme" 165-67 and Martinelli "'Feria sexta,"' 114-25. The verbal association of the extinguished sun (or the absent Laura) and tenebrae persists in the Canzoniere, see sonnet 363.1-2 ("morte a spento quel sol ch'abagliar suolmi / e'n tenebre son li occhi interi e saldi"); also 22.14; 127.70; 276.3; see also 275.1; 291.12, 338.2 and Note 105.

25 On the inclusion of death notices in the Vergil codex, see Pierre de Nolhac, Petrarque e 'humanisme (Paris: Champion, 1907): II, 283-92; Martinelli "'Feria sexta"': 136-38 and Giuseppe Billanovich, "I1 Virgilio di Petrarca da Avignone a Milano," in Studi Petrarcheschi (n.s.) 2 (1985): 15-52, esp. 41-46. In commenting on the notice of Laura's death, Martinelli (p. 146) notes Petrarch's equation of ora matutina in the entry on his first sight of her, and eadem hora prima, in the entry on her death, thus equating, or perhaps running together, the canonical hour of Matins (which began after Midnight) and that of Prime (which began about 6 AM; the briefer office of Lauds, falling between these, was often taken for granted); that these offices should be continuous was not uncommon during the busy Easter season.

26 Petrarch's verse "Nel comune dolor / i miei guai s'incominciaro" identifies a beginning, or cominciamento like the verse "Voi ch'ascoltate" itself. This may recall the

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As is well known, the period 1347-53 saw the inception of several of

Petrarch's most ambitious projects. These projects arguably reflect Petrarch's declared intentions, after Laura's death in the plague year of 1348 and in the wake of the Jubilee of 1350, of making a new

departure marked by a penitential tone and by a stoicizing resolve to achieve self-mastery.27 One project was the collection of familiar letters known as the Familiares; another was the collection of the Rerum vulgariumfragmenta, or, as traditionally known, the Canzoniere. Both projects are mentioned in the letter to Socrates (Ludwig van

Kempen) that serves as the prologue to the Familiares.28 Whether or not all five proemial sonnets of the Canzoniere were nearly simulta-

neously composed as a corona that postdates Laura's death, as Francisco Rico and Bortolo Martinelli would have it,29 sonnet 3, like sonnet 1, is generally thought written between 1349-1351, thus also

liturgical reading of Lam. 1.1, which begins "Incipit lamentatio Ieremie prophete." (See Durandus, Rationale 6.72.11-14 and Van Dijk, Sources: 84). The Hebrew letter, Aleph was itself recited as part of Lam. 1.1, and its meaning generally taken to be a sorrowful exclamation, as in the first verse of Henry of Settimello's Elegia de diversitatefortunae (PL 201.843): "Flet, ingemit Aleph." On the recall of this liturgical incipit in the Vita nuova, see the editions by De Robertis (190-96) and Gorni (166-172); see also Ronald Martinez, "Mourning Beatrice: The Rhetoric of Lamentation in the Vita Nuova," MLN 117 (1998): 1-29, and Note 63.

27 For accounts of this shift, see E.H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1961): 74-106; Rico; Foster, Petrarch: 5-17. Of course, resolve does not

guarantee success; E. H. Wilkins, in The Making of the Canzoniere and other Petrarchan Studies (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1951): 191 was right to insist that Canzone 264, initiating the second part of the Canzoniere, is a poem of conflict rather than one of achieved conversion.

28 See Familiares 1.1-11, in Francesco Petrarca Le familiari, ed. Vittorio Rossi (Flo- rence: Sansoni, 1933, 4 vols.): I, 3-5; dedicatory epistle to Socrates written early in 1350 (Wilkins, Life, 87). The third collection formally initiated in 1350-51 were the Epistole metriche, for which Petrarch wrote a dedication to Barbato da Sulmona in 1350 (Wilkins, Life, 92). See Foster, Petrarch 48-52 for a concise discussion of the parallels between Familiares 1.1, Epistole Metriche 1.1 and Rerum vulgariumfragmenta 1. Other work from this phase include the completion of the Bucolicum carmen, on which Petrarch made significant additions after the plague year, including "Laurea occidens," on Laura's death, finishing the collection by 1352 (Wilkins, Life, 80, 86; Thomas Bergin, Petrarch's Bucolicum Carmen, [New Haven and London: Yale university Press, 1974]: xi), and the special collection of letters attacking Avignon, the Sine nomine, generally held finished by 1352. According to Francisco Rico, 1349-51 were also the principal stages of composition of the Secretum (see Vida u obra de Petrarca. I, Lectura del 'Secretum' [Padua: Antenore, 1974]): 9-16; arguments summarized in Foster, Petrarch: 179-185; for echoes of sonnet I in the Secretum, see also Noyer-Weidner, "I1 sonetto I," 9-10.

29 For the hypothesis, see Rico, "Pr6logos," 1097-1103 (where he seems to limit the proemial group to 1-3, however); see Martinelli, "'Feria sexta"': 114 and the assent of Enrico Fenzi in his Introduction to his edition of the Secretum (Francesco Petrarca, Secretum / II mio segreto [Milan: Mursia, 1992]).

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roughly contemporary with Petrarch's elaboration of his canzone mourning Laura, "Che debb'io far, che mi consigli, Amore," poem 268 of the Canzoniere, whose early stages of composition have been shown to be 1348-1351. Thus all of these poems are plausibly associated with the period of time around the mid-century when, according to Rico's hypothesis, Petrarch first crystallized the idea of assembling the Canzoniere as a bipartite collection with a penitential theme.30 As is notorious, this articulation coincides closely, but not exactly, with the registration of Laura's death in the collection (announced in poem 267).31 Thus, as Dante began the second part of the Vita nuova with the incipit of Lam. 1.1, "Quomodo sedet solitaria civitas," Petrarch's collection had as part of its own new cominciamento allusion to Lam. 1.12 (sonnet 1) and a reiteration, with the inception of the second part, of prominent and insistent use of allusion to Lamentations.

Canzone 268, first drafted shortly after Laura's death-perhaps as early as the summer of 1348-was significantly revised in late Novem- ber of 1349 following the death of Sennuccio del Bene, its original dedicatee, and again in May and December of 1350 before being transcribed in ordine on XI Nov. 1356.32 The debts of Petrarch's

30 See Rico, "Rime sparse" 1976 [1992]: 131-144 on the dating of "Voi ch'ascoltate." Wilkins had proposed that from an early stage (if not the very earliest), the collection was divided into a first and second part, thus both prefaced (sonnet 1) and articulated (Canzone 264) with a penitential gesture; Foster summarizes Rico's arguments for the dating of "Voi ch'ascoltate" (Petrarch: 96-105).

31 Wilkins's views on the inception of bipartition in Petrarch's early collections are summarized and in part critiqued by Foster (Petrarch, 93-105: Foster excludes the very first collection of a dozen poems as a version of the Canzoniere); see also Bettarini, Lacrime, 51. For current thinking on the question of bipartition, see Santagata's note to "I' vo pensando" (Canzoniere: 1043-44) and Marco Santagata, Iframmenti dell'anima. Storia e racconto del Canzoniere di Petrarca (Bologna: I1 mulino, 1992): 148-55. Santagata maintains, against Wilkins, that the Correggio version (1356) may not have been bipartite, or at least lacked blank pages between sestina 142 and canzone 264-quite a different statement. In the absence of stronger evidence, Rico's arguments for the onset of the concept of bipartition with Laura's death and the penitential, stoic mood of 1348-1350 remains a useful hypothesis regarding the inception of the idea of the collection. See Notes 112-113.

32 See Canzone 268, in Canzoniere. 1066-1077. Both Bettarini, Lacrime 50-53 and Laura Paolino, "'Ad acerbam rei memoriam.' Le carte del lutto nel codice Vaticano Latino 3196 di Francesco Petrarca," Rivista di letteratura italiana 11 (1993): 73-102 esp. 75-80 have sharpened the probable dating of the first draft beginning of 268 to the period just before of the composition of the ballad "Amor, quand'io credea," (324 in 3195) which, along with the fragment of a ballad ("Occhi dolenti") placed between the canzone and "Amor, quand'io credea," suggest a coherent phase of work, reflecting intensive imitation of Dante's "widowed" canzone in the Vita nuova, "Li occhi dolenti,"

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lament to Dante's canzone of lament for Beatrice in the Vita nuova

("Li occhi dolenti per pieta del core") have long been a matter of record.33 More recently Rosannna Bettarini and Nancy Vickers have studied the revisions of"Che debb'io far" in relation to the poetics of

mourning that Dante announced with the citation of Lam. 1.1 in ch. 28 of the Vita nuova, a poetics of "widowed" verse that Vickers shows

especially influenced Petrarch as he revised the congedi to the canzone.34 Thus one of the principal influences of the mourning chapters of the Vita nuova on the second part of the Canzoniere was the

very idea of a poetics of lament.35 Along with the trope of "widowing" this poetics had been announced in the Vita nuova with the identifica- tion of "Li occhi dolenti" as a "figliuola di tristizia" in contrast to the

"figliuola d'Amor" that is the earlier canzone "Donne ch'avete." Indeed, speaking while weeping ("dire piangendo") is part of the

propositio of "Li occhi dolenti":

Pensai di volere disfogarla [la mia tristizia] con alquante parole dolorose, e per6 propuosi di fare una canzone, ne la quale piangendo ragionassi di lei per cui tanto dolore era fatta distruggitore de l'anima mia.

In Dante's canzone itself, we find not only "dicer6 di lei piangendo" but "parlar traendo guai" and "piangendo . . . chiamo Beatrice." These expressions suggest that Dante's exacerbated continuity of

weeping and articulate sound is implicit as a model of poetic utterance for the second part of Petrarch's Canzoniere, as suggested by poem 354, for example, when Love avows Laura to have been the most beautiful woman who ever lived: "piangendo i'l dico, et tu

piangendo scrivi."36

beginning well before September 1, 1348, when the ballad was first recorded as being composed, perhaps as early as May, 1348 (see Paolino 79): Petrarch first heard of Laura's death on 19 May, and the first dating of any composition on ff. 13-14 of 3196 is 17 May ("Felice stato").

33 For example, the Carducci-Ferrari edition of the Rime sparse, p. 371-76 includes eight substantial references to "Li occhi dolenti" and related poems and prose.

34 See Vickers, "Widowed Words," 103-08 on the congedo variations. See also Bettarini, Lacrime, 51-59.

35 Gorni (Vita nova 177-78) notes that dolente is a rhyme word only after the announcement of Beatrice's death (on five occasions: 20.9 v. 14; 21.6 v.13; 22.5 v.3; 25.4 v. 6; and 29.9 v. 6, loci given in Gorni's chapter numbering).

36 For the implications of the phrase "piangendo dico" see Chiappelli, "An Analysis of Structuration in Petrarch's Poetry," in Legame musaico, 147-64, including a discussion of pianto, 160-62. Bettarini, Lacrime 41 postulates a citation in piango e ragiono of pseudo- Bernard's Meditation on the Passion of Christ, "flebam dicendo et dicebam plorando," (see notes 10 and 17 above) is favorable to my hypothesis, but the parallel is probably generic, given the precedents in Dante and in the planh of Provencal lyric (echoed in

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Of course these expressions also recall the propositio for the whole collection in Canzoniere 1: "piango e ragiono," as well as the numerous instances of weeping and singing in the first part. I will return to the question of how the two parts differently articulate the mourning project at the conclusion of my arguments.

Canzone 268 immediately announces this poetics of "weeping speech" with its close imitations of "Li occhi dolenti," as readers have seen:37 note especially the echo of Dante's w. 54-55, "piangendo, sol nel mio lamento, / chiamo Beatrice, e dico . . ." in Canz. 268.31: "piangendo la richiamo." But the contiguity of speech or singing and lament is also the strong sense of Lamentations 5.15 ("versus est in luctus chorus noster") and of its familiar parallel from Job ("cithara mea versa est in luctus). The turning, and tuning, of the poetic or singing voice to mourning is in fact the principal idea of 268 (e.g. w. 79-80, "non t'apressare ove sia riso o canto, / canzon mia no, ma pianto"), and its most profound link to the poetics of Lamentations as a simultaneous weeping, lamenting, sighing, wailing, and speaking as it is announced in the prose praefatiuncula to the Biblical text: "Sedit Ieremias propheta flens, et planxit lamentatione haec in / Ierusalem, et amaro animo suspirans et eiulans, dixit . ..38

Indeed, Petrarch's early draft of the canzone in 3196 reveal the domination of the intertext from Lamentations. The first draft, written as early as the summer of 1348, read as follows:

Amore, in pianto ogni mio riso e volto ogni allegrezza in doglia, Ed e obscurato il sole agli occhi miei; Ogni dolce pensier dal cor m'e tolto ...

In 1349 Petrarch revised the probable first draft of eight lines, previously cancelled as appearing insufficiently sad for the canzone's

Dante's Arnaut, "plor e vau cantan"). As Contini observed (Letteratura delle origini, 580- 81) a formula in the Inferno, from Francesca to Ugolino (5.138-139, "l'uno spirito questo disse, / l'altro piangea si"; 33.9, "parlare e lagrimare vedrai insieme"); see also Martinez, "Lament and Lamentations: 80 n. 64, and note 85 below; for Arnaut and Francesca as influences in the Canzoniere, see Mercuri, "Dante": 362-64.

37 See Santagata, Canzoniere. 1073. 38 Aristide Marigo, Mistica e scienza nella Vita nuova di Dante (Padova: Drucker, 1914):

62 pointed out that Vita nuova 30.1 (Gorni 19.8) is virtually a paraphrase of the prose preface to Lamentations (cited in De Robertis, Libro 156 and Gorni, Vita nova 172): Petrarch had a clear precedent.

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beginning: "videtur non satis triste principium."39 Once displaced from their initial position these verses were retained, although somewhat altered, at the end of the first stanza of the definitive version transcribed into 3195:

Poscia ch'ogni mia gioia per lo suo dipartire in pianto e volta, Ogni dolcezza de mia vita e tolta.

Commentators have usually glossed these verses with James 4.9, "lugete et plorate: risus vester in luctum convertatur, et gaudium in maerore." Although the importance of James' epistle is beyond doubt, it only partially explains Petrarch's original cominciamento to the canzone. In the first draft, Petrarch lists four examples of reversed fortune: laughter into tears, gladness into woe, light to darkness, and the heart deprived of sweetness. A similar enumeration of woes, I

suggest, may be found in a hitherto overlooked passage from Lamen- tations 5.15-17, which offers a five-fold series of turns for the worse

corresponding closely to the fourfold list in Petrarch's lines. In the

quotation below, note especially mention of the darkening of the

eyes, and the double mention of the heart's lapse into sorrow, details found in Lamentations but without equivalents in James 4.9:

Deficit gaudium cordi nostri, [the joy of our heart is ceased] Versus est in luctum chorus noster, [our dancing is turned into

mourning] Cecidit corona capitis nostri; [the crown is fallen from our head] Vae nobis, quia peccavimus [woe to us because we have sinned] Propterea moestum factum est cor nostrum [Therefore is our heart

sorrowful] Ideo contenebrati sunt oculi nostri. [therefore are our eyes become

dim]

(Lam. 5.15-17)

Again, Petrarch likely drew on sources other than the Bible alone.

Describing the tenebrae service, which I mentioned before in relation to sonnet 3, Durandus in the Rationale incorporates parts of Lam. 5.15-17, contaminating them with other scriptural sources. Candles are extinguished as parts of the liturgy are concluded, Durandus

39 Accounts of the various moments of writing and revision are to be found in Rime 1899: 371-76; Nino Quarta; Studi sul testo delle rime del Petrarca (Napoli, Muca 1902): 113-19; Wilkins, Making 77-8 and 145; Bettarini, Lacrime, and Paolino, "'Ad acerbam."'

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writes, to signify that with each canticle, or psalm, we decline into sadness, because the true sun has set, and our joy is turned into sorrow, according to the text: "the crown is fallen from our head, our

dancing is turned into mourning." If Petrarch knew this passage, he would have found in one place a

mix of related scriptural citations, including Lam. 5.15-17, along with the liturgical context of Good Friday, with its darkened sun and

liturgical candles gradually extinguished during tenebrae.40 The cloud-

ing of sight by tears (cf. "contenebrati sunt oculi"), along with the

darkening of the sky, is also part of the liturgical text; indeed Job 16.17 ("caligaverunt oculi mei a fletu meo") is part of the responsory for the last lesson of the third Nocturn of Matins on Good Friday, juxtaposed to no other text than Lam. 1.18 (Videte, omnes populi .. .), while Lam. 1.12 furnishes the verse text ("O vos omnes . . .")-in short, the final items of the Matins liturgy, corresponding to nearly total darkness after the last of the tenebrae candles have been

extinguished.41 Petrarch's close attention to both scriptural and liturgical prece-

dents in crafting his canzone is also strongly indicated by his elaboration of the definitive version of the congedo to 268. The series of juxtapositions between states of joy and woe that articulates the final five lines of Petrarch's canzone already might put us in mind of a text like Lam. 5.15-17; and it is in fact easy to discern, using a simple schema, that the congedo adapts the texts ofJames, Job, and Lamenta- tions we have consulted already (and an additional text, from Amos), with the possible mediation of the text of Durandus. Consider the

following:

Fuggi'l sereno e'l verde, non t'appressare ove sia riso o canto, non ... riso > pianto canzon mia no, ma pianto: non ... canto > pianto non fa per te star fra gente allegra, canzon ... no > pianto vedova sconsolata in vesta negra. non ... allegra > vesta negra

40 The associations are traditional; Durandus digests an even more elaborate passage (also including ref. to Lam. 5.15-17) from Honorius of Autun's Gemma Animae, ch. 87 (PL 172.665-666); see also Martinelli, "'Feria sexta"': 120-25.

41 Martinelli, "'Feria sexta"': 121 cites Saint Maximus, from a book Petrarch cites in de Otio religioso: "In passione enim Christi caliginum se nocte circumdedit ... Indicium enim quoddam doloris in sole est tanto sceleri officium luminis denegasse, et ultione quadam Iudaeorum oculis tenebras infudisse." This links cosmic darkness to blindness. See also Durandus, Rationale, 6.72.2, in which the darkness is not so much material, "quam etiam spirituale, quae in illo triduo in cordibus fidelium extiterunt."

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In addition to the evocation of the widow of Lamentations (Lam. 1.1: "facta est quasi vidua domina gentium") who finds no consola- tion (Lam. 1.2, "non est qui consoletur . . ."; also 1.7, 17, 19, etc.) these oppositions reiterate, in sufficiently orderly fashion,42

risus vester in luctum convertitur ... (James 4.9) cithara mea versa est in luctum ... (Job 30.31; cf. Lam. 5.15) Et convertam festivitates vestras in luctum, Et omnia cantica vestra in planctum (Amos 8.10) Gaudium nostrum in luctum est conversum (Durandus, Rationale 5.15-17).

What cannot be avoided is that Petrarch's brooding over these

passages appears to have guided both early and late conceptions of the canzone as a funeral planctus.43 Given that Lamentations has been overlooked as a source for Petrarch's first-draft incipit for canzone 268, readers of "Che debb'io far" have also not realized that the one line from the fivefold list of Lam. 5.15-17 that Petrarch does not assimilate to his first-draft beginning of the canzone served rather to

inspire the first line of the third stanza in all versions, including the definitive one: "Caduta e la tua gloria, et tu nol vedi." It is plausibly also Lamentation commentaries, where corona is glossed as "glory,"

42 In opposing riso and canto to pianto I am not assuming Fenzi's construction of the passage that the congedo commends to the canzone places of weeping rather than places of laughter and song (rejected by Santagata; see Canzoniere: 1077) ; that pianto in verse 80 refers primarily to the genre of planctus itself is sufficiently obvious. The lexical oppositions diagrammed in the scheme nevertheless remain in force, and in defense of Fenzi the verse is ambiguously structured enough to suggest the elliptical, suspended reading he proposes; it is in fact warranted by scriptural precedent opposing the "house of mirth" to the "house of mourning" (cf. Ecclesiastes 7.3, "melius est ire ad domum luctus quam ad domum convivii . . ."; also Eccl. 7.5). These passages are adduced by Lamentations commentary in that they encourage looking to the end: "In illa enim finis cunctorum admonetur hominum" (Eccl. 7.3). See Paschasius, Expositio pp. 3, 95, 140. Durandus (Rationale 7.35.33) also cites Eccl. 7.2-3 as a reading, instead of the extracts ofJob, for the Office of the Dead; Knud Ottosen, Responsoriesfor the Office of the Dead (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1994): 85-87 locates this reading in a "minor" or reduced Office of the Dead that had widespread currency, especially in Germany.

43 Reference to the canzone as in mourning clothes ("veste negra") also may reflect accounts of the crucifixion; Martinelli, "'Feria sexta"': 122 reports, from Ubertino da Casale, Arbor vitae crucifixae Iesu (4.12, ed. Davis, Torino 1961, 318b): "et in eius morte [terra] lugubre et funere assumere vestimentum." Petrarch's close knowledge of liturgy is certain, given his canonries and deaconates, lifelong close association with Churchmen, and known practice of private devotions; see E. H. Wilkins, "Petrarch's Ecclesiastical Career," Studies in the Life and Works of Petrarch (Cambridge, Mass: Medieval Academy of America, 1955): 3-32; and, for Petrarch's possession of liturgical books, including breviaries, Giuseppe Billanovich, Petrarca letterato. 1. Lo scrittoio del Petrarca (Rome: Edizioni di storie e letteratura, 1947): 105; 116-117.

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that warranted Petrarch's replacement of corona with gloria in his text; commentators back up their gloss withJob 19.9: "he hath stripped me of my glory, and hath taken the crown from my head," which also

suggests the equivalence of "crown" and "glory."44 These are after all verses that likely caught the eye, and excited the dread, of the aging poet who wore a laurel crown.

The lines on fallen glory are part of Petrarch's reproach of a blind, ungrateful world-"orbo mondo ingrato"-unworthy of Laura, un-

worthy even of being trod by her sacred feet. Though unquestionably topics of medieval planctus (a subgenre of panegyric),45 these senti- ments also reflect medieval Christian understanding of Lam. 5.15-17, which saw in the phrases "our crown is fallen . . . we have sinned," reference to the supposed rejection of the Jews. Indeed, these lines inform one of the standard and widespread medieval iconographies of the crucifixion, in which the Synagogue is represented blindfolded with a falling crown, to show that it has failed to receive the Christian offer of salvation (compare "mondo ingrato") due to its spiritual blindness (compare "orbo mondo" and "et tu nol vedi") and that God's chosen people will henceforth be the Christians (compare "caduta e la tua gloria").46 For the Christ-surrogate Laura, Petrarch

44 See Hugh of St. Cher 309v, "hoc possunt dicere omnes illi, qui ceciderunt per mortale, unde amiserunt coronam gratiae, et gloriae . . ." and the Glossa 214: ["dominus exercituum corona gloriae etc. Hanc coronam ecclesia perdit dum fides christi corrumpit .. ."]. Medieval dictionaries and liturgical works sometimes derive chorus from corona: see Honorius of Autun, Gemma animae 1.140 (PL 172.586): "Chorus dicitur a concordia canentium, sive a corona circumstantium."

45 Santagata in Canzoniere: 1072, follows Bettarini, Lacrime: 56 citing Paul, Hebrews 11.38, "quibus dignus non erat mundus"; see also Seniles XVI.1, said of Giacomo Colonna. The topic also echoes Dante's "Li occhi dolenti" 27-28: "perche vedea ch'esta vita noiosa / non era degna di si gentil cosa," where degna in fact establishes a relation of coblas capfinidas with the next stanza (cf. v. 30, "ed essi gloriosa in loco degno").

46 For examples, see Heinz Schreckenberg, Jews in Christian Art (New York: Con- tinuum, 1996): 16-18; see also Wolfgang S. Seiferth, Synagogue and Church in the Middle Ages (New York: Ungar, 1970), esp. pp. 27-55 and 95-109. Amnon Linder, 'Jews and Judaism in the Eyes of Christian Thinkers of the Middle Ages: The Destruction of Jerusalem in Medieval Christian Liturgy," in From Witness to Witchcraft, ed. Jeremy Cohen (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1996): 115-16 points out that medieval versions of the reproaches from the Cross, or Improperia, one of the liturgical climaxes of the Good Friday liturgy, included words of Christ rejecting theJews. Martinelli, "'Feria sexta": 121 again cites Saint Maximus, who writes that the blindness of the Jews was said to be a punishment effected by the darkening of the sun on Good Friday: "Ultione quadam Iudaeorum oculis tenebras infudisse." Cf. Canzoniere sonnet 275,1: "Occhi miei, oscurato e'l nostro sole," which fuses the darkening of the eyes of Lam. 5.12 with the darkening of the sun on Good Friday (cf. Santagata's notes, Canzoniere: 1105, citing Matth. 24.29).

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has in his planctus adapted and considerably modified a widespread iconography of the crucifixion, sharpening the ironic contrast of his devotion to Laura with that of his yearning for the cross.47

In his elaborate adaptation of Lamentations 5 at the two extremes of his first canzone lamenting Laura, Petrarch does not however lose

sight of Lam. 1.12, the text that, as we saw, provides the incipit for the Canzoniere as a program of mourning. So it is that at the beginning of the penultimate stanza of 268, modified but recognizable, we find the characteristic pattern of vocative address followed by imperative verbs entreating pity: "Donne, voi che miraste sua beltate /... / di me vi doglia, e vincavi pietate."48 If we also recall that in the first draft of these lines Petrarch had written "Voi che vedeste," the parallel to "O vos omnes . . . adtendite et videte" is closer still.49 The phrasing, as Claudia Berra notes, also recalls the opening apostrophe of Canzoniere 1 ("Voi ch'ascoltate . . ."),50 confirming the link of the penitential mood beginning the second part with that of the first poem in the

47 This recalls sonnet 3 and the analogy-occultation of Petrarch's private sorrow- falling in love-in the collective mourning of Good Friday. Glossing Lam. 5.15 ("versa est in luctum") Hugh 309r writes: "hoc est bonum thema in vesperis Omnium Sanctorum, vel in die Mortuorum, quando post gaudium de solemnitate omnium Sanctorum convertitur Ecclesia ad luctum pro animabus omnium fidelium defunctorum, simile Job 30.31, "Versa est in luctum cythara mea, et organum meum in vocem flentium." For these, see Ottosen, Responsories: 401, 420. This raises the interesting point: on at least two occasions Petrarch resumed work on "Che debb'io far" in the month of November (28 Nov. 1349, and 11 Nov. 1356, Martinmas). As he presumably had heard recitation (public or private) during the first days of the same month, of the Office of the Dead and of the texts of Job 7.16, 30.31, and Lam. 5.15, putting him in mind of his own recent dead, Laura and Sennuccio del Bene, there may here be an indication of the effects of liturgical stimuli on Petrarch's work habits. See Notes 43, 109.

48As Santagata notes (Canzoniere 1075) in the apostrophe to women, rare in the Canzoniere (cf. 89.3) there is a strong influence here of the Vita nuova canzoni "Donne ch'avete," "Donna pietosa" and "Li occhi dolenti" (w. 9, 17, 63, 72) and, as Tonelli observed, also of Dante's sonnets concerning his mourning for Beatrice in ch 22 of the Vita nuova ("Voi che portate," "Se' tu colui"); we can add here the two related, uncollected sonnets (Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde, Dante's Lyric Poetry [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2 vols. 1967]: 35-39), also addressed to Donne, "Voi che portate la sembianza umile ... vedeste voi nostra donna gentile," lines 1 and 4; and "Voi, donne, che pietoso atto mostrate"). See Bettarini, Lacrime 55.

49 On Petrarch's substitution of donne, voi for simply Voi in line 56, cf. Vickers, "Widowed Words," 107-108, comparing Petrarch's isolation to Dante's community; the variants are in Petrarca, II codice degli abbozzi, pp. 249-53, and in Petrarca, Trionfi, 1996: 858: the early version was: "Voi che vedeste sua doppia beltate ... A piancer mecho vincavi pietate." (w. 56, 59).

50 See Claudia Berra, "La sestina doppia CCCXXXII," in Lectura petrarce 11 1991: 219- 235, esp. 234.

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collection. But this is not the only use of Lam. 1.12 in the canzone. Verses 18-19, in the second stanza, also represent a restatement of the

question of 1.12: "est dolor sicut dolor meus?" Compare: "Qual ingegno a parole / poria aguagliare il mio doglioso stato?"

Although this kind of restatement of Lam. 1.12 was already a topos of vernacular lyric by Petrarch's day,5' the variants in 3196 suggest the

itinerary of modification that originate in the Lam. 1.12 text; Petrarch had first written: "Oime qua' parole / Porebbeno aguagliare il dolor mio." The adaptation of "est dolor sicut dolor meus" in "aguagliare il dolor mio" betrays the filiation of Petrarch's text. A similar argument can be made for the final lines of the first version of the congedo, when the canzone was still dedicated to Sennuccio. Compare "altri non v'& che'ntenda i miei dolori" with "adtendite et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus."

The question of what guided the revision of the original first lines to "Che debb'io far" remains a teasing one. Bettarini's suggestion that the essential stimulus was the 12th verse in sonnet 291 ("ma io che debbo far del dolce alloro")-a poem associated with Sennuccio del Bene, the original dedicatee of the canzone-has garnered Santagata's influential nod.52 But we can still ask why the definitive beginning appears satis triste where the first one was not. Nancy Vickers notes that one effect of Petrarch's modification of the original eight lines was to limit imitation of Dante's beginning of second part of the Vita

51 See Guido Cavalcanti, Rime, XIX, 16-17 ("ch'altro cor non poria pensar ne dire / quant'e'l dolor che mi conven soffrire"). In his edition, Letterio Cassata (Guido Cavalcanti, Rime, Naples: de Rubeis, 1993) lists parallels in the Roman de la Rose 2965- 67 and the Fiore (CLI 1-2): "cuore umano / non penserebbe il gran dolor ch'io sento." For the link of lines 16-17 to Lam. 1.12 see Martinez, "Cavalcanti 'Man of Sorrows,' and Dante," forthcoming; this transformation is perhaps to be traced to Pecham's gloss on Lam. 2.13 p. 632: "Vel cui assimilabo te, filia Ierusalem? Quasi dicat: nulli; supra primo: "O vos omnes, etc." Lam. 2.13 itself goes on to say: "Cui exaequabo te . .. filia Sion." Rafaella Pelosini, "Cavalcanti nel 'Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,"' Studi petrarcheschi 9 (n.s., 1962): 9-76, which adopts Trovato's methodology, achieves only modest results.

52 Canzoniere sonnets 287 and 291 are associated with Sennuccio del Bene (who died in Oct. of 1349, and thus stimulated a return, in November of that year, to the elaboration of "Che debb'io far," of which he was the original dedicatee, but also required the modification of the congedo dedicating it to him); in the case of 287 the poem is a planctus for Sennuccio, in the case of 291 it is the theme of Laura /Aurora, which Petrarch also treats in a rima dispersa, a caudate or tailed sonnet addressed to Sennuccio (Francesco Petrarch, Rime disperse, ed. Joseph K. Barber [New York and London: Garland, 1991]: 98-99). Santagata indexes Petrarch's debts to Sennuccio, Rime 1556. For the import of Sennuccio in the "carte del lutto," see Paolino "'Ad acerbam"': 84-92 (now the fullest discussion); Bettarini, Lacrime: 48-54; andJoseph A. Barber, "I1 sonetto CXIII e gli altri sonetti a Sennuccio," Lectura petrarce 2 (1982): 21-39.

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nuova; indeed that work, by beginning as it does with full citation of Lam. 1.1 ("Quomodo sedet solitaria civitas") had probably pre- empted the option of an explicit scriptural beginning for any part of Petrarch's collection.53

Nevertheless, without here discussing other possible influences on the first line of canzone 268,54 Bettarini's suggestion seems to stop short of closing the discussion: for is it really probable that Petrarch's citation of his own sonnet, only linked allusively to Sennuccio, should render the full measure of sadness he evidently requires for the

incipit of canzone 268? The fact is that line 7 of sonnet 291 and the first line of "Che debb'io far" both derive in part from Sennuccio's famous planctus on the death of Henry VII in 1313, a text that I have not seen invoked in this context. In his planctus, Sennuccio laments the death of the Emperor because it means Sennuccio will be

separated from his lady love; at verse 13 he exclaims: "Deh, com' faro, che pur mi cresce amore."

To realize the parallel, we have only to compare, along with the lexical resemblances, the nearly identical metrical distribution offare, che, and amore in Petrarch's verse:55 "Che debb'io far, che mi consigli, amore?" Sennuccio's "Com' far6" is especially close to "che far6?," Petrarch's cancelled first draft of the first words in the new canzone

beginning. It is also telling that the question addressed to Amor, whose name occupies the last three syllables of the verse, and which is

virtually the only rhetorical feature linking the first draft of the

53 See Vickers, "Widowed Words," 99-100 and 104-106. 54 Bettarini suggests also Epistola Metrica I. 6.62: Ergo iterum quid agam?; but the

incipit to the poem, though a contested reading (1.6.1: "Quid agam? [faciam])" would seem equally if not more suggestive; see also Ep. Metr. 1.10.1: Heu quid agam? [of a

devastating storm]. Rico's suggestion of Secretum III. P. 160: "Quid igitur faciam?

Desperabimus ne?" is also highly apposite. However, given the close relation in 1349- 51 between Petrarch's three collections, the thematic import of verses such as Familiares 1.1.1: "Quid vero nunc agimus, frater?" and Petrarch's despairing attempt to find a

receptive ear for his complaints about Italy, Fam. 23.1.10: "Nunc quid agam? Et loqui oportet et cui loquar non invenio. Effundam voces in nubila ..." suggest that the satis triste principium for canzone 268 had wide resonance as an expression of Petrarch's

general dismay in 1348-1350. Here too Boccaccio may have played a part: see Filostrato 4.60, 6; 4.89, 1; 5.21, 1; and 7.32.1, all uses of "Che far6" to indicate grief and disorientation.

55 The metrical distribution of 291.7 is of course quite different; 268.1 and 291.7 share no corresponding stresses on equivalent words (stressed far on 6th syllable in 291, on 4th in 268); in the case of Sennuccio's verse 13, the correlation is much closer (faro on 4th and 10th syllables, also 5th syllable, unstressed, graphically identical if grammatically distinct che).

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beginning and the definitive form of canzone 268, is also anticipated by Sennuccio's placement of amore (though neither personified nor the recipient of a question) at the end of his verse 13. We know that Petrarch paid close attention to the positioning of the apostrophized Amor in the early stanzas of "Che debb'io far," for he shifted its initial position to the end of the line in the definitive version, but then wrote the first line of the second stanza as an assonant variation on the two original first lines. Compare (first draft):

Amor, in pianto ogni mio riso e volto, Ogni allegrezza in doglia

with (final version) Amor, tu'l senti, ond'io teco mi doglio.

The genre and subject of Sennuccio's poem are also right: his planctus is an early instance of the genre that came to be known as canzone disperata, in which personal exile is the occasion for separa- tion from home, political party, and often the beloved lady as well.56 Sennuccio's canzone begins: "Da poi che'i'ho perduta ogni speranza / di ritornare a voi, madonna mia." (w.1-2)

Verses like these, as well as verse 5, "non spero piui veder vostra sembianza" (one of nine uses of sperare or speranza in the poem), and verse 14, following the verse that inspires Petrarch's ("e mancami speranza in ogne canto") offer a clear suggestion for lines 7-8 of Petrarch's canzone: "perch6 mai veder lei / di qua non spero."57 Since nearly unchanged through the several versions of the canzone, lines 7-8 raise the possibility that Sennuccio's planctus for the Emperor, given its theme of wishing for death now the route to the lady is barred, was from the outset a model for 268.58 Choice of the

56 Early, indeed founding, examples of disperate are Dante's "Tre donne"-enor- mously influential for Petrarch (Santagata lists 27 allusions in Canzoniere. 1522) as well as Cavalcanti's ballata, "Per ch'io non spero." The type becomes a widely practiced genre in the mid-14th century, principally in the form of compositions by Ghibelline exiles; see the texts assembled in Natalino Sapegno, Poesia del Trecento (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1951).

57 Ballata 324, "Amor, quand'io credea," written at approximately the same time, also includes the theme of lost hope; see line 6: "et mie speranze acerbamente a spente" (Santagata, Canzoniere 1244); variants are discussed in Paolino, "Ad acerbam," 77.

58 Line 8 of the first draft beginning was: "La qual omai di qua veder non spero"; compare Sennuccio's line 5: "Non spero piu veder vostra sembianza." Bettarini, Lacrime 51-52 and Paolino "Ac acerbam": 77 discuss the links between Canz. 268.8 (on 13 r of 3196), the fragment "Occhi dolenti," and the ballata "Amor, quando fioria" (the latter two on 14r of 3196. I have not been able to see Dante Bianchi, "Intorno a le rime disperse del Petrarca, Poesie e abbozzi tratti da carte autografe," in Bollettino storico pavese 3 (1940): 33-43, cited in Billanovich, Petrarca letterato: 83 as discussing the literary relations of Sennuccio and Petrarch.

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model was perhaps stimulated, or at least prepared-possibly even before Sennuccio's death-by Petrarch's increasing interest, after the failure of Cola da Rienzo in late 1347, in summoning Emperor Charles IV to take up the reins of power in Italy.59 Some such motive led Petrarch to take from his drawer the 35-year old poem on the death of Charles' grandfather Henry VII.

Given this intertextual evidence, it can be suggested that the new

beginning to canzone 268 was satis triste because it simultaneously evoked three deaths: that of Laura, that of Sennuccio, and that of the much-lamented Henry VII, Sennuccio's idealized lord. Such associa- tive chains in Petrarch's memorializing practice are of course well- known. Indeed, as Bettarini and Paolino have pointed out, the dead Sennuccio himself plays a mediating role not only in relation to the dead Laura, but also to another of Petrarch's dead, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, whom Petrarch paired with Laura in a pair of sonnets that all but encircle the canzone "Che debb'io far." (266, 269).60 Nor is an allusion to the imperial dignity inappropriate to a lamentation for Laura; for as Petrarch observed in his sonnet-planctus for her-sonnet 267, immediately preceding canzone 268-she was "alma real, degnissima d'impero."61 In this light it seems that writing a sufficiently

59 For the inception of the Imperial idea: see Wilkins, Life, 54, Francesco Petrarca: Prose, ed. Guido Martellotti et al (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1954): xix-xx, Foster, Petrarch, 10- 12. See also Wilkins, Petrarch's Later Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1959): 23-24, 51-53, 78-79. For the use of Henry VII as an exhortatory ghost with which to attempt arousing Charles to action, see Fam. X.1.25-26 (ed. Rossi, 2: 283- 284); significantly, these texts, which attempt to recall Charles to the succour of Italy with rhetorical persuasions, follow Dante's political letters in drawing heavily on the text of Lamentations. Cino da Pistoia's lament for Henry VII also seems to have influenced the congedo of 268, although parallels could be explained by common derivation from "Li occhi dolenti"; see esp. the congedo, 37-45: "Canzon, piena d'affanni e di sospiri / nata di pianto e di molto dolore / movi piangendo e va' disconsolata: / e guarda che persona non ti miri / che non fosse fedele a quel signore / che tanta gente vedova ha lassata. / Tu te n'andrai cosi chiusa e celata / 1a dove troverai gente pensosa / de la singular morte dolorosa."

60 See Paolino, "Ad acerbam"': 81-84: esp. 82 (269, "il mio doppio thesauro, che mi facea viver lieto") compared with "Occhi dolenti" ballad, v. 4, "che lieti vi facea."). Paolino also argues that the link between 266 and 269 involves Sennuccio, given that he had answered sonnet 266 (Santagata, Canzoniere. 1060), thus giving a triple emphasis: "il sonnetto 266 poteva assolvere una duplice funzione: fare da pendant al 269 e, sebbene indirettamente, associare nella medesima commemorazione Laura, Giovanni Colonna e Sennuccio del Bene."

61 Santagata, Canzoniere: 972 notes that attributing imperial qualities to the lady is a topos; the associations of Laura with royal and imperial rank in the Canzoniere are few but notable: her royalty is proclaimed in Canz. sonnet 5.5 ("vostro stato real"); in sonnet 190 she enjoys the liberty granted by Caesar (Santagata, Canzoniere: 824-28). According to one traditional interpretation (challenged by Foresti; see Santagata,

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sad beginning was not, as Chiappelli seems to argue, exclusively a

question of rhetorical density and the writer's professional judgment, but also one of finding verses that existentially embodied and so memorialized the poet's experience of death: verses that testified to how, as Petrarch wrote in his obituaries in the Ambrosian Vergil, "nimis crebrescunt fortunae vulnera"[too much do the wounds of fortune gain in frequency].62 From this perspective, the original beginning of canzone 268, with its rendition of scripturally and

liturgically inspired mourning verses, might have appeared too

generic, and required not only rhetorical inflection, but the intensifi- cation offered by verbal traces of Petrarch's own relationships-to Sennuccio, to Laura, to Giovanni Colonna-before reaching a suffi-

ciently afflicted state.

Although Petrarch clearly backed off making verses closely derived from Scripture for the cominciamento of the first canzone in morte, the conversion of joy into woe, versatio in luctum, was nevertheless destined to function programmatically in the second part of the Canzoniere. The force and range of the phrase spring from the wide semantic field comprised by terms like versare, tornare, rinversare, volgere, voltare, rivolgere, convertire-in expressions meaning turn to, turn away, turn back, turn over, turn the page, turn fortune's wheel, but also pour forth words and tears ("versai lagrime e'inchiostro," 347.8)-in other words, versify. Terms from this field occur conspicu- ously at points where Petrarch's collection is articulated diachronically: thus the last poem of the Correggio or pre-Chigi version, sonnet 292, has for its final line the valedictory, "et la cetera mia rivolta in

pianto."63, while the first poem of the additions to the Chigi version

Canzoniere: 972-74), Laura had been kissed by the Emperor Charles IV (sonnet 238). The association of Laura with Aurora, developed in the poetic correspondence with Sennuccio, may harbor political implication, as the Aurora and the sunrise had strong Imperial associations, especially since Dante's Epistle V.

62 Bettarini, Lacrime: 54 writes: "Sennuccio e spodestato per il semplice fatto che nel frattempo era morto, restando, come dira Montale delle dediche soppresse di Ossi di seppia, un destinatario taciuto, qui come in altri luoghi del Canzoniere, un destinatario come era stato Cavalcanti del voluminoso messaggio della Vita Nuova. Non sara un caso comunque che, dopo la sua morte, la tornada di questa canzone diventi sempre piu cupa, sempre pii lacrimosa (seconda redazione), sempre pii sconsolata (terza redazione)." That, is, as Vickers would put it, increasingly widowed, or, we might say, increasingly tenebrous.

63 For "lachrymosa lyra," of sonnet 292.14, and for the early variant lacrimosa for "Che debb'io far" verse 82 (and thus, one might add, for the lachrymose emphasis of the second half in general), Bettarini, Lacrime: 56 suggests the influence of Henry of Settimello Elegia de diversitatefortune, 25-26, which also adaptsJob. 30.31: ". .. nunc mea

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(sonnet 293) concludes the octet with "rime aspre e fosche far soavi et chiare," which inverts the joy- into- woe formula. The final poem of the Chigi version, sonnet 304, furnishes no help in this respect, but the poems bracketing it do offer similar juxtapositions (cf. sonnet 303.12: "i di miei fur si chiari, or son si foschi"; sonnet 305, the 1st

poem in Giovanni Malpaghini's giunta from the summer of 1351: "da si lieti pensieri a pianger volta."). Poem 344, one of the poems from the Malatesta version (1371-2) copied into and then renumbered in the last part of the completed 3195 ms., rhymes both richly and

equivocally on verso in the sestet, so that Petrarch's troubles ("stato adverso") are linked to his mournful monotone ("non so piui mutar verso") and with his pouring forth of words and tears ("per la lingua et

per li occhi sfogo et verso").64 The equivocal rhyming in poem 344

inevitably evokes the technique of the nearby sestina, poem 332, "La mia benigna fortuna e'l viver lieto," to which I now turn.

The poet's fall or turn into sorrow, "versatio in luctum," finds an

appropriately double enunciation in Petrarch's double sestina 332; like canzone 268, and like Sennuccio's canzone, the poem includes an

appeal to death (v. 29-30, 43-44) as expedients for rejoining Laura. The sestina is separated from canzone 268 by relatively few non- sonnets: canzone 270, the second canzone-lament for Laura, is followed by 52 sonnets before the cluster of canzone 323, ballata 324, and canzone 325 are reached, the last non-sonnets before the sestina. The unusual placement of 324 (one of the poems in the "carte del lutto" and so chronologically linked in composition with "Che debb'io far") is thus in part explained, as it serves to anchor the jump from the mourning canzoni 268 and 270 to the two canzoni that flank

versa est / in luctum cithara. Fit lachrymosa lyra." The citation is important; note, however, that Henry's work declares its dependence on Lam. 1.1 in its very first distich: "Quomodo sola sedet probitas? Flet, et ingemit Aleph. / Facta velut vidua, quae prius uxor erat" (PL 204.843). For Henry of Settimello, too, and possibly for Petrarch, the "versa est in luctum" verse was a topos of Latin lyric satire-laments, as for example Walter of Chatillon's planctus against corrupt church officials "Versa est in luctum cythara Gualteri"; see Carmina Burana: Die Gedichte des Codex Buranus Lateinisch und Deutsch, ed. Carl Fischer, Hugo Kuhn and Gunter Bernt (Zurich and Munich: Artemis, 1974): 418-22.

64 See Canz. 337-49, Rv 6. Two "turns" for the worse are coordinated in Canz. 308: 1, 3: ". . . con Sorga 6 cangiato Arno"/ . . . / "volse in amaro sue sante dolcezze." Canz. 315.7-8 yields: ". . . rivolgeva in gioco / mie pene acerbe sua dolce onestade"; Canz. 347.8 and 13 coordinate the pouring forth of tears with the turn to Laura: "per ch'io tante versai lagrime e' nchiostro"; "... a te sola mi volsi." 291 (linked to Sennuccio)12 offers: "le mie notti fa triste, e i giorni oscuri."

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the ballata and from there to the sestina.6 Such anchoring is thematic and lexical, as 324 may be said to transmit the topic of lost

speranza as well as the harvest of intertextual echoes of Dante's widowed canzone "Li occhi miei" to the next cluster of non-sonnets (323 and 325) and thence to the sestina, as we shall see in a moment;66 thus 323 ends (v. 75) by stating that the symbolic views of Laura's death have made the poet wish for death, "an fatto un dolce di morir desio."

It is especially significant that the ballata, like the sestina, is the sole

representative of its form in the second part of the Canzoniere, Petrarch's retention of it confirms his interest in providing a strong transition to the double sestina. As the ninth and last instance of the form, the only one in morte, and the only double one in the Canzoniere, the sestina is doubly unique formally speaking, and its status within the collection accordingly hard to overstate; even the unusually numerous ten stanzas of "Vergine bella" have a sister in canzone 360.67 With its word-rhymes tumbling from slot to slot according to its

cyclical scheme, the sestina enacts the turning of Fortune's wheel

(already evoked in canzone 325, "a la sua volubil rota si volse") away from her briefly benign moment in the first line.68 The joy-to-woe formula I have been following in this essay is registered twice in the lines of the sestina: at lines 5 ["volti subitamente in doglia e'n pianto"] and 34, ["cosi e'l mio cantar converso in pianto"]69; but then twice again in lines 72-73, at the end of the poem, in abbreviated form and with reversed meaning ("me pu6 far si lieto"; "Far mi p6 lieto"), of which more presently.70 Verse 72 itself, juxtaposing attrista

65 Claudia Berra, "La sestina": 233-35 suggests that the thematic and lexical links between 332 and the poems of the "carte del lutto" might argue its early dating to the period of first mourning Laura (1348-50); Santagata is skeptical (see his note). Neither view has material evidence.

66 See Santagata Canzoniere: 1244-46 for the harvest of intertextual echoes between Canz. 324 and "Li occhi dolenti."

67 On these formal hapaxes in the second part, see Berra, "La sestina": 233. 68 Dante's petrose, including "Io son venuto al punto della rota" and the sestina "Al

poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra" exploit the idea of the heavens as wheels and thus as implicitly linked to changing Fortune. See Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez, Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante's Rime petrose (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), esp. 81-83, 111-14.

69 Suggested most directly by Job 30.31 and Amos 8.10; but see note 63 above.

70 Gabriele Frasca, Lafuria della sintassi: la sestina in Italia (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 1992) 224, makes the important point that verse 34, "cosi e'l mio cantar converso in pianto" acoustically rephrases Dante's opening line to his canzone attacking the donna-pietra, "Cosi nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro": this marks the sestina as the announcement of a poetic program. On the use of Dante's petrose for citational purposes (cf. "aspro stile,"

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to lieto at the end of respective hemistichs, recalls the vertical

juxtaposition, in the first stanza, of the anomalous adjectival word-

rhyme Lieto, in the first position, with pianto, in fifth place, their clear antithesis underscored by their approximate assonance and conso- nance. Only the necessary insertion of that spoiler, Morte, in sixth

place thwarts a balanced opposition of lieto and pianto at the vertical extremes of the first stanza. Although verso is not a word-rhyme, its close association with rime and stile guarantees its own double appear- ance (verse 4, "versi e'n rime"; and 15, "u' sono i versi, u' son giunte le rime"); the semantic field around versare is also well represented with volto, converso, torni, mutare, muti, and cangiare, buttressing the double enunciation of the conversion of joy to woe. As in the last lines of sonnet 344, the sestina realizes Petrarch's concept of reiterated, inconsolable plaint poured out in cycling cascades of tears and verse, and admirably summarizes the monotonic mournful voice of the second part of the Canzoniere.71

The close relationship of 332 to both 324 and 268 in terms of the theme of wishing for death and the struggle with despair have been discussed. Canzoniere 268 and 332 share intertextual echoes from Dante's Vita nuova, especially from the canzone "Li occhi dolenti," but also from the first poem of Dante's libello, where allegro and

piangendo are the first and last words of the sestet, circumscribing the dream of the God of Love holding Beatrice in his arms; these terms

anticipate, in miniature form, the itinerary of death and mourning in the libello itself.72 Thus piangendo in rhyme and the juxtaposition of letizia and tristizia in the first sonnet of the Vita nuova influence Petrarch's derivation of word-rhymes for the sestina; and I already

v. 74) rather than lexically imitative ones, see Berra 1991, 228-29, quoting De Robertis and others. Paolo Trovato, Dante in Petrarca: per un inventario dei dantismi nei 'Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,"' (Florence: Olschki, 1979) does not register this parallel.

71 Thus Canz. 269.5-6 ("Tolto m'ai, Morte, il mio doppio thesauro, / che mi fea viver lieto et gire altero") already projects a link from 268 to 332 ("Mia benigna fortuna e'l viver lieto"'); note also the echo of thesauro in 333.2 ("il mio caro thesoro"). Sonnet 279.10-11 ("'. . . a che pur versi / degli occhi tristi un doloroso fiume?"'), with its echo of Inferno 1.80 noted by Contini ("che spandi di parlar si largo flume") looks forward to lines such as 332.54 ("queste due fonti di pianto") and to verses 3-5: "e i soavi sospiri e'l dolce stile / che solea resonare in versi e'n rime / vo6ti subitamente in doglia e'n pianto"by way of 329.14.

72 See Martinez, "Mourning Beatrice," 28-29; immediately following Love's depar- ture piangendo in the first sonnet are the two sonnets "O voi che per la via d'Amor," with its programmatic imitation of Lam. 1.1, and the formal planctus for an anonymous dead lady, "Piangete amanti, poi che piange Amore," texts that foreshadow the death of Beatrice later in the book.

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RONALD L. MARTINEZ

noted above that Petrarch concludes the congedo of canzone 268 with

sharply drawn antitheses of laughter and tears, joy and mourning. Instances of letizia, tristizia, and piangendo from Dante's "Li occhi dolenti" also recur in the sestina, in the grammatical mutations of lieto, pianto, and tristo (36-37-38), and with attrista / lieto in 72-73.73 Such mutations were recognized by rhetorical tradition as conversiones.74

The canzoni preceding the sestina, 323 and 325, also participate in this system in the terms of Fortune's boast (in the middle line of the

poem, 56th of 112 lines): "so far lieti et tristi in un momento"; while 323 concludes the last stanza juxtaposing Laura's happy departure with the sorrow persisting in the world (lieta si dipartio, nonche secura / ahi, nulla, altro che pianto, al mondo dura"). These verbal nexus are also in play in the texts Petrarch composed on the same sheets (13v-14r,v) of 3196, and which are near contemporaries of "Che debb'io far." In these texts, the ballad "Amor, quand'io credea" and the fragments "Occhi dolenti" (a ballata) and "Gentil, alto desire," aspects of Dante's canzone "Li occhi dolenti" in the Vita nuova are also imitated. Echoing both the incipit and congedo of Dante's canzone, and instancing also the darkened-sun topic of "Che debb'io far," the ballata fragment also contains a version of the pianto / lieto antithesis:

Occhi dolenti, accompagnate il core, piangete omai mentre la vita dura

poi che'l sol vi si oscura che lieti ci facea col suo splendore.

(1-4)

73 Indeed, pianto is the proposed theme of "Li occhi dolenti" in the prose and in the

lyric (cf. v. 12); the word piangerand its related forms (piangendo, piange, pianger, pianto) is used seven times, twice in rhyme (pianto, 39 and piangendo, 71); such repetition is in fact etymological, as the derivation of planctus from plangor, the repeated striking of the

body when wailing, was widely recognized: the verbal repetitions thus suggest striking the body in "feminine" mourning. See Fra Guidotto da Bologna [Bono Giamboni], Fiore di rettorica, in Cesare Segre, La prosa del duecento (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1951): 127 ("E se la parola sara in lamentare, parlera come femmina, e percoterassi il

capo . ."). This in part justifies the use of the sestina as a planctus, with its sixfold

repetition, or repercussion, of each rhyme-word (see Dante, De vulgari eloquentia 2.13.13, speaking of the use of wordrhyme in the canzone "Amor tu vedi ben": "nimia scilicet eiusdem rithimi repercussio . . .").

74 For the doctrine of altering parts of speech (usually verbs and adjectives into nouns, and shifting nouns among different cases) to create rhetorical effects, known as conversio, see Boyde's discussion of Geoffroi de Vinsaufs theory of conversiones in Dante's Style in his Lyric Poetry (Cambridge: 1971), esp. 52-71. In Poetria nova 1623-44, Geoffroi's example develops the theme based on the verb "ego doleo," which brings forth "manat dolor," "causa doloris," "seminat dolorem," and so forth. See Edmond Faral, Les arts poetiques du XIIe e du XIIIe siecle (Paris: Champion, 1971): 247.

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This same fragment also recalls an important rhyme from the

congedo of "Che debb'io far" ("non fa per te star tra gente allegra"); and there is another restatement of the antithesis: "onde pensosa e lieta /conven ch'or si rallegr ed or sospire." (4-5).75

Although it may be stretching the point, these grammatical "con- versions" of the terms from Vita nuova sonnet 1 and the canzone "Occhi dolenti" into the lexical material for the versatio in luctum of the second part of the Canzoniere (and related texts in 3196) appear a neat match-up of theme ("versatio in luctum") and rhetorical tech-

nique (conversio; see Appendix). The last full stanza of the sestina, ending in the supplication for

death, a theme harking back to "Che debb'io far" and Sennuccio's

planh for Henry (as well as "Li occhi dolenti" and the fragments in 3196), also completes the program of allusion to Lamentations with

yet another citation of Lam. 1.12.76 As he does in establishing the antithesis of lieto and pianto, Petrarch harnesses the vertical conven- tion for copying out sestina verses, both to render conspicuous the reiteration of the first words of the proemial sonnet and to fore-

ground the allusion to Lam. 1.12:77

O voi che sospirate a miglior' notti, ch'ascoltate d'Amore o dite in rime, pregate non mi sia pii sorda Morte.

In the central three lines of the poem, where the juxtaposition of lieto and tristo is reiterated, there is yet another subtle recall of the

question posed in Lam. 1.12: "est dolor sicut dolor meus?" precisely by answering it:

75 Allegri is rhymed with negri in sonnet 328.1, 4: "L'ultimo, lasso, de' miei giorni allegri . . . / forse presago de' di tristi e negri." A double antithesis, as giomi is also opposed to "di tristi."

76 The remote source of the petition to death, who is deaf to it, is of course Boethius (noted in Santagata, Canzoniere: 1289; see Cons. Phil. I m. i, 15-16: "Eheu, quam surda [mors] miseros avertit aure / et flentes oculos claudere saeva negat," with recall also of Dante's canzone "Donna pietosa" w. 77-78 (Trovato, Dante in Petrarca: 135). A possible more proximate source is Sennuccio's lament for Henry VII, v. 17: "se non ch'i chiamo Morte che m'uccida." The association of Boethius' sorrow with the mourning of Lamentations is traditional, going back to Paschasius' preface to his commentary (Expositio, 5; PL 120.1061) and is manifest in Henry of Settimello's Elegia, a close imitation of the Consolation of Philosophy that takes its incipit from Lam. 1.1 (see note 63); for the Elegia and Lamentations, see Gorni 1996 (Vita nova 19.9): 173.

77 For the transcription of sestine with consecutive lines one below the other, rather than consecutively across the page as was the convention in writing out sonnets and canzoni, in both Petrarch and his predecessors, see Wayne Storey, Transcription and Visual Poetics in the Early Italian Lyric (New York and London: Garland, 1993): 245-255.

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RONALD L. MARTINEZ

Nessun visse gia mai piu di me lieto, Nessun vive piu tristo et giorni e notti Et doppiando'l dolor, doppia lo stile.

In Pecham's glosses to Lamentations, where the question of

comparing the suffering ofJerusalem arises (Lam. 2.13: "cui exaequabo te?), we find: "quasi dicat: nulla alia civitas similiter est destructa."

In these same central three lines, the technique of "doubling" the sestina is made explicit and thematic: it is here that the poem is, so to

speak, folded or doubled over. As Enrico Fenzi and Gabriele Frasca have made clear, the sestina must be a double one because it laments not only the present misery of Laura's loss but the additional misery of remembering having once been happy.78 Frasca's analysis can be taken further. For in the final analysis the redoubling of dolore has the effect of leveling the difference between before and after that puta- tively generates the poem: seen from present misery and disinganno, even happy days prove to have been, in reality, illusory. This too

brings us back to the proemial sonnet, with its parallelism of "van

sperare" and "van dolore": though the leveling of hope and woe, despite being strongly implicit, is easily overlooked.79 Indeed, the sestina is riddled with echoes of that first sonnet, as in the mention of "vario stile" at verse 35, which virtually compels recollection of the

proemial utterance.80 Prefacing his vast stoicizing omnibus of rem- edies for fortune good and bad, Petrarch wrote in about 1360 to Azzo da Correggio that life was a double duel with fortune, "duplex ... duellum cum fortuna." The phrase could summarize not only the double sorrow of the sestina, but the two parts of the Canzoniere as well, for from the standpoint of death, joy and woe are equivalent in their nullity.8' From the perspective of the stoic sage, and of Petrarch's

Augustinian superego, both former happiness and present misery are

78 See Fenzi (cited in Santagata, Canzoniere: 1286) and Frasca, Lafuria: 207-58, esp. 209-11, 222-29.

79 For a reading of the sonnet in terms of the stoic critique of the passions, see Rico, "Rime sparse," 1976 [1992]: 128-33; see also note 118.

80 Santagata's note to resonare (Canzoniere: 1284) mentions Canzoniere 1.1-2. But the picture is both more extensive and more intensive, as in lines 3-5 of the sestina the words sospiri, dolce stile, resonare, rime and pianto all recall terms from the octave of Canzoniere 1 (rime and suono 1, sospiri 2, stile and piango 5); see also Berra, "La sestina": 224, who notes the echoes of "vario stile" and "aspro stile."

81 This passage is mentioned by Chiappelli, "An Analysis," 147. An ominous if indirect link associates the loss of the "doppio thesauro" of Laura and Giovanni Colonna and the "duplex duellum" with Fortuna.

MLN

equivalent adversities,82 and the first line of the sestina "Mia benigna fortuna e'l viver lieto," might be read as ironically undercut from the outset.

This same process of levelling joy and sorrow may also explain the last lines of 344:

piansi e cantai: non so pii mutar verso. ma di e notte il duol ne l'alma accolto per la lingua et per li occhi sfogo et verso.

(344.12-14)

Santagata, the most recent editor, follows Leopardi in taking these lines to mean that the poet's former ability to sing and weep in alternation has now broken down, and he can no longer sing, only weep. But such a reading leaves a grotesque implication for the use of the tongue in the last line (salivation?), which, along with the eyes, is in chiastic relation with "piansi e cantai" in verse 12. Surely the lines mean, rather, that singing and weeping have become a single activity: weeping through the eyes accompanying the singing with the tongue: it is precisely "una poesia di pianto" that Petrarch is describing; for which sonnet 347, verse 8: "per ch'io tante versai lagrime e'nchiostro"- with striking use of syllepsis to level the difference of feminine lagrime and masculine inchiostro-furnishes an exact parallel. It is also signifi- cant that such weeping "day and night" is formulaic for sorrowing in

scripture, as in Lam. 2.18 ("deduc quasi torrentem lacrimas per diem et noctem") and Jeremiah 9.1.83

The passage-in retrospect, an increasingly level one-from illu-

sory former happiness to present misery is also entailed in Petrarch's

82 "Felice stato," the ballata written on 17 May, two days before the news of Laura's death, and that is the first of the poems in the "carte del lutto" discussed by Paolino, "Ad acerbam" (see pp. 73-75), appears in this light almost as the ironic preface to the first line of the "summarizing" sestina, equally forceful in its use of dramatic irony ("La benigna fortuna e'l viver lieto"). Rico's hypothesis is that the composition of the Secretum was largely done during 1349-51, and was thus contemporary with the writing of 268 and-if Claudia Berra's speculation is entertained-332 as well. See Berra, "La sestina": 233-35.

83 SeeJeremiah 9.1: "quis dabit capiti meo aquam, et oculis mies fontem lacrymarum, et plorabo die ac nocte interfectos filiae populi mei?" This verse is the incipit of the Planctus beatae Mariae by Ogier of Lociedo (d. 1214), attributed usually to Bernard of Clairvaux, of which seventeen manuscripts (mostly 14th and 15th cent.) survive; the Jeremiah text is also frequently coordinated by commentators with Lam. 1.2, 1.17, 2.18, etc. See Hugh 284v (to 1.2, "plorans ploravit in nocte") and Albertus Magnus, 243, who uses it to introduce his commentary. Bestul, Texts of the Passion is a valuable study and edition of Ogier's text.

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RONALD L. MARTINEZ

subtle inscription, in the central verses of the sestina, of further

important debts to Dante's Vita nuova and Commedia. Cued by line 27 ("con dolor rimembrando il tempo lieto"), with its unmistakable allusion to Dante's Francesca, the central verses in stanza seven, each of which begins with nesun, are a further, shall we say a doubled, reference to Francesca's famous citation-pronouncement:84

... nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria ...

(Dante, Inferno 5.121-123)

Compare:

Nesun visse gia mai pii di me lieto nesun vive piu tristo et giorni et notti; et doppiando il dolor, doppia lo stile che trae del cor si lacrimose rime.

(37-40)

Francesca's antithesis of a past tempo felice and a present miseria is reinscribed and leveled in what we saw is the formulaic lieto: tristo antithesis of the sestina, while the key term dolore remains unmodi-

fied, framing, along with nesun, the incorporation of Dante's text. The allusion remains in large part implicit in the fold, so to speak, between the two verses beginning with Nesun, but it furnishes the sufficient logic for the redoubled sorrow of the speaker: it is in fact the speaker's tacit voicing of Francesca's words, and thus a moment of

deep identification with her character. The mediating step may be

found, I propose, in the fact that both Francesca's words and Petrarch's verses are precise examples of the complaint topic, archived in Lamentation commentary, that bewails the contrast between past good fortune and present misfortune:85

84 For the abundance of reiterations in stanza seven, including figures of poliptoton, see Berra, "La sestina," 226; for the reference to Francesca, see Santagata, Canzoniere 1286.

85 On Francesca's sorrowful speech (but without reference to Lamentations or Cicero), see Vittorio Russo, "Tristitia e misericordia nel canto V dell'Inferno," in Dante e Roma (Florence: Olschki, 1975): 333-45; see also Ignazio Baldelli, Dante e Francesca (Florence: Olschki, 1999): 62-64; Martinez, "Lament and Lamentations": 90, n.64, and Martinez, "Mourning Beatrice": 19, n. 64. Like that of Ugolino, Francesca's planctus is notably enriched by both classical epic (Aen. 2.3-6) and scriptural citation (Lam. 1.12); the fall of Troy was of course a chief topic of secular lament poems, such as the famous

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MLN

... primus est, per quem in quibus bonis fuerimus, vel in

Quibus malis nunc simus, ostenditur, sicut hic. "Quomodo sedet sola ..."

The topic is typically the first listed in Lamentations commentaries

because its apposite example is the first line of Lamentations: "how is

the mistress of the Gentiles become as a widow." ["facta est quasi vidua domina gentium, princeps provinciarum facta est sub tributo"]. Not only does this same contrast of past (if illusory) joy and present sorrow govern the sestina, but by adopting Francesca's use of it

Petrarch does in a sense enfold within his collection the opening line

of Lamentations, still of course rigorously excluded insofar as it is

Dante's beginning for the second part of the Vita nuova.86 And at the

risk of overselling the import of Lam. 1.12, Francesca's famous lines, like verse 27 in the sestina, are themselves susceptible to analysis as an

amplification of, and answer to, the widow's question: "est dolor sicut

dolor meus?":

"nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria ... 87

"Pergama flere volo" (see A Thirteenth Century Anthology of Rhetorical Poems, ed. Bruce Harbert [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975]: 34-37); for discussion of Dido's laments, see Peter Dronke, "Dido's Lament: from Medieval Latin Lyric to Chaucer," in Intellectuals and Poets in Medieval Europe (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1992): 431-56. Francesca's Boethian citation ("in omni adversitate fortunae infelicissimum est

genus infortunii fuisse felicem") is cited as an example of the first locus conquestionis by Albertus Magnus in his Lamentations commentary (Opera omnia, ed. Borgnet [Paris: Vives, 1893], vol. 18: 250). In the text of Cicero from which the Lamentations topics were drawn, it is explicitly the reversals of Fortuna that are evoked (see Cicero, De inventione I. 52-56, ed. H.H. Hubbell [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1954]: 97-109).

86 The verse of Lam. 1.1 is a verse Petrarch adapted but once to his vernacular Muse, in a rima dispersa lamenting the absence of Laura. See Petrarch, Rime disperse: 76, poem 34.1-2: "Ai lassa, sconsolata la mia vita, / come rimani vedova e dolente!" The second verse renders "facta est... vidua" from Lam. 1.1; substituting "vita mia" for the widow is likely drawn from the tradition, going back to at least Gregory the Great, that understood the city as the human soul. The two references Santagata indexes for this

passage (Canzoniere: 1494) in the Canzoniere (27.13, "del suo sposo si lagna") and 53.82 ("Tu marito, tu padre"), are neither of them to the first part of the verse. Both

adaptations appear mediated by Lamentations commentary, however; cf. for 27.13, see Glossa 183, preface: ". . . lamentationes; in quibus sponsi a sponsa absentia multimodis fletibus deploratur."

87 Gorni (Vita nova, p. 35) makes the same point of the relation between the third line of "O voi che per la via d'Amor passate" (Gorni 2.14, Barbi 7.3), Dante's sonnet

beginning with an adaptation of Lam. 1.12: "s'elli e dolore alcun, quanto'l mio grave," and Francesca's verses at Inf. 5.121-123.

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The notion that death might make the speaker happy, far mi pb lieto, which Petrarch uses to finish his sestina-and which, as we saw, abbreviates and reverses the versatio in luctum-provides a crucial link to the final poem of the collection, the canzone to the Virgin.88 In his

suggestive reading, Guglielmo Gorni notes that the appeal to the

Virgin is the antidote to the appeal to death concluding the sestina (an appeal also present, as we saw, in canzone 268 and related texts); and this also makes it a distant echo of the appeal to readers at the

beginning of the collection.89 In formal terms, too, the final canzone is an incantatory, ritual inversion of the last sestina, using reiterations of Vergine, the term that begins two verses in every stanza, to "unwrite"

repeated mentions of Morte, which are concentrated at the ends of verses in "Mia benigna fortuna." This formal inversion is of course theologically grounded in the traditional idea of the Virgin's task as the reversal and erasure of the guilt of Eve, a task to which Petrarch refers explicitly at verses 35-36: "Vergine benedetta, / che'l pianto di Eva in allegrezza torni." Like the phrase in the last verses of the sestina ("far mi pu6 lieto"), this formula inverts back tojoy the turn from joy to sorrow I have been following in my argument.90 As Frasca and Gorni argue, such an inversion offers the sole escape, beyond or

excepting death, from the impasse of fixated mourning crystallized in the sestina, and indeed in the entire second part;91 and it is all the more pertinent to my argument here in that pianto and allegrezza are both conversiones of piangere and allegro, the terms first found opposed in Vita nuova 2 and subsequently in the nexus of relations between "Li occhi dolenti" and Petrarch's "Che debb'io far," "La mia benigna

88 Berra, "La sestina": 235 suggests a numerological link, as poem 332 is followed by the arithmantic poem 333, in turn separated from 366 by 33 poems, the number of

years of Christ's earthly life and the appropriate run-up to the canzone on the Virgin, 366.

89 Goldin-Folena, "Frons salutationis': 58 observes that the canzone to the Virgin is the rhetorical petitio of the Canzoniere, just as "Voi ch'ascoltate" is its salutatio; see also Roberto Antonelli, "Petrarca Rerum vulgariumfragmenta." in Letteratura italiana. Le opere, ed. A. Asor Rosa, vol I. Dalle Origini al Cinquecento (Turin: Einaudi, 1992): 408-10 for the circularity of the total structure of the Canzoniere.

90 At Purg. 28.94-96 Dante phrased the original fall of humanity from innocence into sin: "per sua diffalta in pianto e in affanno / cambi6 onesto riso e dolce gioco," a formulation not wasted on Petrarch as he applied the "versatio in luctum" topic (see Martinez, "Lament and Lamentation": 48-51).

91 See Frasca, 245; also Guglielmo Gorni, "Petrarca Virgini (Lettura della canzone CCCLXVI 'Vergine Bella,"' in Lectura petrarce 7 (1987): 201-18, esp. 209.

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fortuna," and the ballata and fragments of the "carte del lutto." 92 But such conclusive inversions were also foreseen by Lamentations com-

mentary, were indeed necessary and formulaic within the scheme of Christian salvation. Thus John Pecham writes that the mourning of Lamentations is for the sake of its final cause, which is joy: it is done "so that by plaint one might arrive at the dancing of spiritual and

contemplative joys; as the Psalmist says: "Thou hast turned for me my mourning into joy" ['Convertisti planctum meum in gaudium mihi..."' Ps. 29.12]. Shaping the poetic incantation of "Vergine bella," Petrarch stakes his hope that his long years as a weeping statue, "un sasso / d'umor vano stillante," will not have been for naught: that the work of mourning will be a work indeed, one that will find its sabbath and its rest.

As we saw, in Dante's Vita nuova, "Li occhi dolenti," is a "figliuola di tristizia" that inaugurates the "widowed" poetics of the second part. This canzone emerges in contrast to the poetry of praise, the "stile della loda" articulated for the first time with the canzone "Donne ch'avete," the "figliuola d'amore." How important "Li occhi dolenti" is for the second part of the Canzoniere has been demonstrated by readers and recalled in the discussion above; nor is the influence of "Donne ch'avete" on Petrarch's oeuvre unrecognized.93 But in light of the Lamentations program in the Canzoniere, how the transition between the styles inaugurated by these two poems in the libello affects Petrarch's collection may usefully be reassessed. In this concluding section, I will address how the conception of the Canzoniere as a doubled program of mourning can help explain the poet's biparti- tion of the collection.

In the Vita nuova, both Dante's composition of the "figliuola d'amore" and that of tristizia are marked as especially important

92 The phrase "il pianto di Eva" may allude to the derivation, in Christian exegesis, of the cries of pain at birth from Eve's name, given after the Fall as a malediction. See Peter Comestor in the Historia scholastica (PL 198.1070-1071): "forte quasi plangens homini miseriam, dixit eam Evam, quasi alludens ejulatui parvulorum. Masculus enim recenter natus ejulando dicit, a, mulier vero e, quasi diceret: Omnes dicent e, vel a quotquot nascuntur ab Eva." In scripture, Eve is condemned to childbirth pain, "in dolore paries filios" (Gen. 3.16); as Petrarch refers or alludes to Mary's motherhood of Christ in the first six stanzas, there is yet another reversal arguably at work here as well.

93 See Santagata, Canzoniere: 1520. Interestingly, echoes of "Donne ch'avete" are concentrated in sonnet 248, which anticipates the mortality of Laura and introduces the sequence 249-252 anticipating Laura's death and the mourning program of part II; in this way Petrarch retains the binarism of "Donne ch'avete" and "Li occhi dolenti" in the Vita nuova.

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beginnings, or cominciamenti. Indeed the precise term of cominciamento is used in the Vita nuova only of these two canzoni and of the sonnet with two beginnings; nor is it difficult to demonstrate that in the text of the Vita nuova this word and its related forms cluster around the

preparation for these two cardinal canzoni.94 But these two lyric "beginnings" are also echoes of the beginning of the Vita nuova itself: if in the Vita nuova the citation of Lam. 1.1 introduces the second part and heralds the inception of the poetics of mourning manifested in "Li occhi dolenti," the use of Lamentations is first explicitly an- nounced with Dante's adaptation of Lam. 1.12 for the incipit of "Voi che per la via d'amor passate," the second sonnet of the libello.95 But even the very first sonnet, in its presentation of the sorrow of Amor, anticipates the sorrows of the second part and is itself marked twice as an inception, a cominciamento (Vita nuova 3.8, 9).96 In this way, the Lamentations text, the idea of inception, and the articulation of the libello by its principal canzoni constitute a single pattern.

Petrarch's collection is similarly articulated, as we have seen. It is a

project for mourning the dead Laura with laments at 267, 268, and 270; yet, at the same time, the project of mourning both in vita and in morte is anticipated with the opening sonnet and its evocations of Lam. 1.12 and 3.14, and also by the Good Friday sonnet 3 and all of the poems in the proemial corona of sonnets, as Rico has argued.97 In the Vita nuova, Beatrice's death is first anticipated in the canzone "Donna pietosa" and its accompanying prose; but only several chap- ters later is it said to occur, marked by interrupting the canzone "Si

lungiamente" with insertion of the Lamentations incipit. The hiatus between parts one and two of Petrarch's fair copy of his lyric collection in Vat. 3195, with its 7 blank pages and foliated initial to

94 E.g. cominciare is used twice in Vita nuova 18.9, and cominiciai in 19.1 and 31.1. The

prose account of the poet's sickbed delirium, which uses cominciare for the author's affliction (23.3), for the onset of the delirium (23.5) and for its recounting to the ladies that attend him (23.15).

95 Dante's very use of "Incipit vita nova" as the rubric for the first chapter of his "libro della memoria" (Vn 1.1) may echo the liturgical introduction of the Lamentations text sung on Maundy Thursday, "Incipit lamentatio leremie prophete" (see Van Dyke, Sources, 84); one might also think of the beginning of Mark's gospel, "Initium evangelii Iesu Christi Filii Dei," but which is not as close. Note that in Vita nova 19.1 (Barbi 30.1; Gorni, p. 172-173) Dante refers to the OT text as "quello cominciamento di Yeremia profeta Quomodo sedet sola civitas).

96 See Note 72. 97 For Rico's arguments, see "Pr6logos," esp. pp. 1071-73, 1097-99. As Santagata

notes, however, Rico's arguments concern, in practice, mostly sonnets 1-3.

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canzone 264, complementing that to the first sonnet,98 inevitably echoes and parallels Dante's use of the Lamentations incipit- characteristically foliated and decorated in the earliest manuscripts- to divide the Vita nuova into parts in vita and in morte Beatricis.99 But

although Petrarch too has several poems in the first part anticipating Laura's death, one of which is a "orrible visione" (249-54), the second part notoriously begins with poems assuming Laura is still alive (264-66); only in poem 267 is her death announced. In this

respect, then, Petrarch's transition from part I to part II might appear to thwart or evade Dante's pattern of visionary anticipation followed

by narrative verification: the announcement of Laura's death is

displaced from the articulatory moment of the Canzoniere. Why this was done has been endlessly debated; I will offer another tentative solution at the conclusion of my argument.

Petrarch's proemial sonnets, Canzoniere 1-5, also function in a

temporally inverted manner in relation to the two parts of the Vita nuova. Where in the libello the "stile della loda" yields to the mourning of "Li occhi dolenti," in poems 1-5 of the Canzoniere a poem of

penitential lamentation, "Voi ch'ascoltate" occupies first place, while the fifth poem, the sonnet "Quando io movo i sospiri a chiamar voi," marking the inception of the act of praising Laura ("a lodar voi"), concludes the proemial corona, though with clear symmetrical refer- ence back to the first sonnet: thus the attacco "Voi ch'ascoltate,"

addressing auditors and readers of the collection, is balanced by the end of the first line of the fifth sonnet, "... a chiamarvoi," addressing the auditor-object of praise, Laura; both poems moreover share the term sospiri as the material basis of their words (Canz. 1.2; 5.1). Although the fifth sonnet has been extensively studied, even recently,

98 See Wilkins, Making: 190-193; Foster, Petrarch: 99-102; Santagata, Canzoniere. 1043- 44.

99 For the importance of the articulation, see Gorni's edition, xxi-xxvii and 164-74. The Chigiano L.VIII. 305 manuscript of the Vita nuova, copied by Boccaccio, reserves foliated initials for chapter beginnings and the initial letters of poems; the Lamenta- tions incipit is given only a small capital (fol 21v) and when repeated in ch. 30.1 is left embedded in the text; some emphasis is given, however, by the translation, in the left

margin, into vernacular of the Vulgate text. But the Trespiano fragment (see Giuseppe Tamburrino, "Un antico frammento della 'Vita Nuova,"' Italia medioevale et umanistica 10 [1967]: 377-83), possibly representing an older tradition closer to Dante's inten- tions, has the Lamentations incipit beginning ch. 28 rendered with a foliated initial, and the text of Lam. 1.1 when repeated in ch. 30.1 is again given a large foliated initial

capital and set off from the body of the text.

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RONALD L. MARTINEZ

its relation to the text of Vita nuova has not to my knowledge been described in much detail.'00

Petrarch's fifth sonnet parses the physical act of saying the name of Laura: the sonnet constitutes a gloss on meanings Petrarch finds graphically and acoustically implicit in the name. As Chiappelli observed, the enunciation and meaning of Beatrice's name are also important to Vita nuova, which begins by raising the question of how Beatrice's name is to be understood (2.1: "la quale fu chiamata da molti Beatrice li quali non sapeano che si chiamare").l10 Calling out Beatrice's name is also a crucial gesture during the crises in the libello, both during the delirium recorded in the central canzone, "Donna pietosa," (14: "chiamai il nome della donna mia") and in the canzone of mourning, "Li occhi dolenti," where the cry serves as self-consola- tion (55-57: "Poscia piangendo, sol nel mio lamento, / chiamo Beatrice, e dico: 'Or se' tu morta?'/ E mentre cosi la chiamo, me conforta."). In the second quatrain of his sonnet, Petrarch introduces an interdict emerging from within the name Laureta itself, an interdict based upon his supposed unworthiness for the task of praise ("TAci ... che farle honore / e d'altri homeri soma che da' tuoi"); in the sestet, this interdict is intepreted as the disdain of the sun-God Apollo for praises directed to his laurel-Laura by a presumptuous mortal. In the Vita nuova speaking the name of Beatrice is also interrupted, in "Donna pietosa," by the poet's own weeping (w. 15- 17: "voce ... si dolorosa e rotta si da l'angoscia del pianto, ch'io solo intesi il nome nel mio core"; 23.13, "la mia voce era si rotta dal singulto del piangere"), in this way suppressing Beatrice's name in a context where reticence was socially necessary. Later in the book, after Beatrice's death-itself anticipated by the truncation of her name during the delirium-reticence is self-imposed on any full

100 See Calcaterra, "'Sub lauro mea,"' Nella selva del Petrarca: 89-108; Gianfranco Contini, "Prehistoire de L'AURA de Petrarque," in Varianti e altra linguistica (Turin: Einaudi, 1970): 193-99; Robert Durling, Petrarch's Lyric Poetry (Cambridge, Harvard Press, 1976): 12-14; Fredi Chiappelli, "L'esegesi petrarchesca e l'elezione del 'sermo lauranus' per il linguaggio del 'Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,"' Studi Petrarcheschi n.s. 4 (1987): 47-85; Alfred Noyer-Weidner, "I1 nome di Laura nel Canzoniere petrarchesco; intorno all'enigma onomastico del sonnetto V ed alle sue funzioni poetiche," in Literarhistorische Begegnungen, Festschrift zum sechzigsten Geburtstag von Bernhard K6nig, hrsg. Von Andrea Kablitz und Ulrich Schulz-Buschaus, Tiibingen, Gunter Narr, 1993, 293-309.

101 See Chiappelli, "'Sermo lauranus,"' 62, note 19: "quasi che questa fase battesimale presupposta da RVF 5 fosse pensata come una vita nuova rimasta letterariamente inespleta."

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account of Beatrice's passing because this would entail both the author's insufficiency to deal with the subject ("non sarebbe sufficiente la mia lingua") and his indulgence in self-praise ("laudatore di me

medesimo"); for these reason, further discussion of the event is left "a un altro chiosatore."'02 Similarly, in the fifth sonnet, Petrarch allows that praise of Laura is "d'altri homeri soma che da' tuoi," prehu- manistically shifting the role of the writer from a glossator to an imitator of the Horatian prescriptions in the Ars poetica.'03

The link between Vita nuova chapters 28-29 and the fifth sonnet of the Canzoniere is not only thematic, however. The emphasis in the sonnet on the need for reverence in praising Laura ("reverire

insegna / la voce stessa" . . . "d'ogni reverenza e d'onor degna") again echoes Dante's text where he announces Beatrice's death and her enrollment in heaven under the device of the Virgin Mary (28.1: ". . .

a gloriare sotto la insegna di quella regina benedetta virgo Maria, lo cui nome fu in grandissima reverenzia ne le parole di questa Beatrice

beata."). Thus sonnets 1 and 5, at the extremes of the proemial corona, both reveal strong intertextual links with the Vita nuova, based in the correlation established there between the death of Beatrice and the death of Christ. This correlation is extended to two other proemial sonnets of the Canzoniere, 3-4, which associate Laura in the former case with Christ's passion and in the latter with that closest recorded imitator of Christ, Francis of Assisi.104 Subsequently, as we saw, the correlation is extended to part II and its exemplary laments in 268 and 332, with the thread of continuity often marked

by references to the darkening of Laura's sun by death.105

102 Though recent interpreters discount, in my view too categorically, the possibility that mortalin line 14 of the sonnet harbors a reiteration of the TA in TAci (verse 7), the observation of Robert Durling, Petrarch's Lyric Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1976): 13, to the effect that "the silence in line 7 is now connected with the idea of death" is a crucial one, and may indeed spring from the interruption of Beatrice's name in the Vita nuova as an acoustic presentiment of death.

103 For the Horatian parallel, see Noyer-Weidner, "Il nome di Laura": 301 and

Santagata, Canzoniere: 28; in the same gloss Santagata notes a parallel in Dante, from "Ne li occhi porta," 8, "aiutatemi, donne, farle onore"; this sonnet of course from Vita nuova ch. 17.

104 For the parallel with St. Francis, see Santagata, Canzoniere. 25, comparing Par. 11.49-50 with verse 14 of the sonnet.

105Santagata's note to sonnet 3 (Canzoniere: 19) refers to Luke 27.44-45 ("et obscuratus est sol") cf. also Matth. 24.29 ("sol obscuratus est") describing the darkness at the crucifixion. These passages are drawn on in Vita nuova chapter 23, both the

prose ("pareami vedere lo sole oscurare," 23.5) and the canzone "Donna pietosa" verse 54 ("vidi turbar lo sole"). In the Canzoniere, in addition to sonnet 3, with its overt

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The emphasis on critical junctures in the narrative of the Vita nuova for the introductory corona of sonnets of the Canzoniere serves, as does sonnet 1 more specifically, to announce the importance of the

poetics of mourning developed by Dante in the Vita nuova generally for the second part of the Canzoniere. More specifically, the poetics of

mourning of part II of the Vita nuova, announced with the Lamenta- tions incipit and the canzone "Li occhi dolenti," also helps to govern Petrarch's criteria of selection for part II of the Canzoniere. It could be said that,just as Dante says in part II of the Vita nuova that his city, and

by implication his poetic style, is "quasi vedova dispogliata di ogni dignitade" because of his mourning for Beatrice (30.1 and 31.2), the chief distinction between parts I and II of the Canzoniere is that the second part is humbled and impoverished, dispogliata, with respect to the first part.

Thus, in the second part of the Canzoniere, only one poem ad- dresses an external interlocutor (Sennuccio), as against fifteen in the first part. There are eight sestine in the first part, but only one in the second, though a double one. Only one poem in the second part is a ballata, while there are six in first part, and four madrigals to boot.

Only one poem in the second part (364) explicitly dates the passage of time since the first sight of Laura (though two others, 278.14 and 336.12-14, measure the time since her death), while there are thirteen such poems in the first part-enumerated from, though not

including, sonnet 3-, and many more if the sestine are thought of as

anniversary poems.'10 There are in the second part no poems of

invocation of the crucifixion, the first version of 268.3 read "et e obscurato il sole agli occhi miei" and the final version (268.17: "et in punto n'e scurato il sole"); see also Fragment 64 ("Occhi dolenti"; Santagata, Canzoniere 860), preserved on the same piece of parchment as the congedo to the first version of 268.3 and thus closely linked both to Petrarch's mourning program and to Dante's canzone "Li occhi dolenti," esp. w. 3-4: "poi che'l sol vi si oscura / che lieti vi facea con suo splendore"; see also Canz. 31.6 ("fia la vista del sole scolorita"). See also sonnets 275.1 ("Occhi miei, oscurato e'l nostro sole"); and 283.1-2, "discolorato ai, morte, il piu bel volto." Sonnet 218. 6-7 and 218.13 might confirm the derivation from the Vita nuova, for v. 7 (. . . "et poi'l vedrem turbare") echoes the verse of "Li occhi dolenti" ("vidi turbar lo sole") while 13 ("fien le cose oscure et sole") follows the prose of ch. 23 ("lo sole oscurare"). For discussion of Laura and the defectio solis, see Chiappelli, "Le theme," however neither he nor Santagata link Petrarch's use of the image to Vita nuova ch. 23.

106 Santagata, Canzoniere: 167 lists as anniversary poems Canz. 30, 50, 62, 79, 101, 107, 118, 122, 145, 212, 266, 271, 278, 364. For identifying sestine as anniversary poems, see Robert Durling, "Petrarch's Giovene donna," esp. 16-19; Sturm- Maddox, Petrarch's Metamorphoses: 52-53, notes that Petrarch's idea of writing anniversary poems may have drawn inspiration from the anniversary sonnet on Beatrice's death in Vn ch. 34.

M L N

political content (satirical or moral poems, in terms contemporary with Petrarch), although there are a dozen or more in the first part.107 Although in the second part there are ten canzoni (a perfect number), high given the total of only one hundred and one poems, they are not as varied in form (none are unissonans, such as 29, or coblas doblas, such as 206; orfrottole, like 105). Moreover, the canzoni of the second part are grouped only as pairs, whereas in part one, canzoni are found in groups of three (28-30), four (70 and the "tre sorelle," 71-73), and even five (125-129), as well as in pairs (e.g. 22- 23, 206-207). Whatever other account one might give for such a reduction and leveling of variety in part II, I would propose that it

may also be taken as an impoverishment suited to mourning Laura dead.

It is thus no accident that in the second part Petrarch alludes to the

passage in Vita nuova 30.1 where Dante offers the image of Florence "vedova e despogliata da ogni dignitade" as the implicit model for the

abjection of "Li occhi dolenti." Petrarch's sonnet (Canz. 326) is a traditional planh or compianto, and at w. 5-6 addresses Death, which ". .. .i spogliata nostra vita et scossa / d'ogni ornamento et del sovran suo honore."'08 Like the despoliation of "Li occhi dolenti," the

stripping of the speaker's life may be associated with the stripping of the altars and reduction of liturgical elements during the period of Christ's passion, so that, in the words of contemporary liturgiologists, churches were "widowed" as the Church itself was widowed of its

Spouse by the crucifixion.'09 That this technique of abjection and

107 Most would probably agree that Canz. 27, 28, 53, 102-104, 114, 128, 136-138, 176- 177, 232 and 238 have substantial political content.

108 See also Canz. 295.5-6, "Poi che l'ultimo giorno et l'ore extreme / spogliar di lei questa vita presente," where it is Laura who is despoiled of the world rather than the poet despoiled of her. Santagata Canzoniere: 1155 notes that the beginning of v. 7, "nostro stato dal ciel vede," echoes 324.12 "et qual e mia vita, ella sel vede," a ballata which derives all its rhymes, and esp. v. 12, from "Li occhi dolenti," esp. v. 69, "Ma qual ch'io sia la mia donna si vede" (see Santagata, Canzoniere. 1245-1246).

09 For this trope of the liturgy, see Durandus, Rationale 6.72.6: "Sic ergo istud officium [Matins on Maundy Thursday], quod caret principio et fine, quasi mortuum et viduatum videtur, quia et patres nostri viduati post mortem Christi fuerunt." For the stripping of the altars on Good Friday, see Rationale 6.76.1: "Altare namque Christum, seu corpus ejus, significant . . . Altare igitur vestimentis denudatur, quia fugientibus Apostolis, Christus solus remansit . . . Secundo, denudatio altaris designat quod Christus fuit nudatus in Cruce. Cum itaque nudatum altare conspicimus, illud propheticum ad memoriam revocamus: Et vidimus eum, et non erat aspectus, et desideravimus eum, despectum, et novissimum virorum" (Isa. 53). For these texts applied to the Vita nuova, see Martinez, "Mourning Beatrice," 24-26.

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impoverishment remains specifically linked to the Vita nuova exem-

plar throughout the second part of the Canzoniere is evident from my discussion in this paper; in fact all the canzone-groups of the second

part (268, 270; 323-[324]-325, 331-332, 359-360) include allusion to "Li occhi dolenti," the lament that inaugurates the style of mourning in part II of the Vita nuova."0

Thus the mourning of the second part is "monotonous" formally, acoustically, rhetorically, and generically: it displays a lack of metrical

variety, of variety of topics, of interlocutors. In the first part, the many politically contextualized poems create a backdrop of historical contexts and events; there are episodes of Laura ill, or distant, or that concern the poet's preoccupation with her glove and hand (Canz. 199-201); the poet receives and comments on a picture by Simone Martini (Canz. 77-78); one section anticipates Laura's death (Canz. 249-252). To adopt Oscar Wilde's words, the first part is "crowded with incident," as well as varied and rich in poetic means. Not so the second part, which is oneiric, repetitive, and crystallized around Laura's dozen or so subjectively experienced "returns.""' The fre-

quent repetition of Laura's visitations, which do not occur in diurnal time at all but as visions, hallucinations and dreams, thus furnish the

topical aspect of melancholy monotony (I am not aspiring to exhaus- tiveness of description) that accords with the "mourning" poverty and

humility of poetic means.'2 Indeed, in the obsessiveness and consis-

110 See "Li occhi dolenti," v. 13: ". . . se n'e gita in ciel"; cf. 270, 107:"mia donna al ciel e gita," (Santagata, Canzoniere: 1093); w. 29-30: "Partissi ... / piena di gratia"; cf. 323, 71: "lieta si dipartio .. ."; w. 38-39: "voglia /... di morir di pianto"; cf. 323.75, "dolce di morir desio" and 325.110: "ho di morir tal fame"; v. 55: "'. .. Or sei tu morta?"'; cf. 359.13-14, "Or donde / sai tu il mio stato?" w. 75-76: "figliuola di tristizia, vatten disconsolata"; cf. 331.35, "tristo e sconsolato," and 359.11: ". . . vengo sol per consolarti." The rhymes doglia voglia spoglia in "Li occhi dolenti" w. 37-40 also furnish rhymes for 360, 42-43: ". .. n6 cangiar posso l'ostinata voglia: / cosi in tutto mi spoglia / di liberta . . ." The strong parallels in 324 to Dante's canzone, discussed above, also anchor canzoni 323 and 325 to the series

11 Santagata, Canzoniere: 1121 lists Canz. 281-287, 334, 341-343, 356, 359; see Oscar Budel, "Parusia Redemtricis: Lauras Traumbesuche in Petrarcas 'Canzoniere,"' in Fritz Schalk, Petrarca 1304-1374. Beitrdge zu Werk und Wirkung (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1975): 33-50, and Giuliana Crevatin, "Quid de nocte? Francesco Petrarca e il sogno del conquistatore," Quaderni petrarcheschi 4 (1987): 139-166. A principal inspiration for Laura as revenant is of course Dante, Purgatorio 30.133-135 and 31.49-63.

112 Teodolinda Barolini, in "The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch's 'Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,"' MLN 104 (1989): 1-38, proposes a distinc- tion between the two parts based on their relative narrativity: in the first part narrative is avoided in order to freeze time and resist death, but it is invoked in the second part because Laura must be preserved in time, time must be appropriated. These claims are

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tency of Petrarch's "work of mourning" in the second part there is

abundantjustification for an analysis of what in in late-medieval terms would have been thought a near-pathological state of tristitia, and which in Freudian terms has the contours of fixated mourning, or melancholia.113

In one sense only is the second part enriched with respect to the first: in the amount of weeping done in its poems, and in the

doubling of the subject of mourning, the "duplex duellum" which, the the wake of the sestina's "doppiando il dolor" we may re-christen the "duplex planctus": that is, both the struggle with love, and the sorrow at its loss, are to be lamented. It is then logical that Petrarch not divide the book according to Laura in vita and in morte, but rather

according to whether the task of mourning is single or double.

Although explicit announcement of this double sorrow occurs only with the laments of Canz. 267, 268, and 270, each of which combines sorrow over Laura's death with continuing devotion to her beauty,"4 we can perhaps deduce from the inclusion in part II of poems in vita Petrarch's intention that part II include both aspects-continuing to lament the expense of spirit in fruitlessly loving Laura for a lifetime, and mourning the additional expense of lamenting her dead. The

persistent fantasy that she is still available to the Petrarch's perception, maintained by her habit of nocturnal visitations, is also consistent with this view. From this perspective, the inclusion of poems 264-266

suggestive and have been influential, but they do not directly affect the arguments of my essay.

11 dolor, doglia etc. and lamenti etc. are neutral as to number of uses in the two parts; as are conforto, confortare (but cf. 359.1). As we saw above, piangere, pianto are favored in the second part (almost two to one, 27 in II, and 18 in I; there are of course 12 uses in 332 alone), and consolata, sconsolata, dominate in part II: consolar and related forms are found four times in the first part, five times in the second, but sconsolato only once in the first part, six times in the second. This is consistent with the main "event" of the second part, the poet's consolation by Laura in visions and dreams, and with the dominant intertext, Dante's "Li occhi dolenti," which defines itself as disconsolata in the congedo (v. 76) but which also includes the poet's being comforted by saying the name of Beatrice (v. 56). Santagata's note (1997:1122) on "torni / a consolar" in Canz. 282.1- 2 lists the reiteration of the phrase in the poems of consolation.

114 See, for example, the idea that Petrarch must continue to love Laura even dead (Canz. 267.9), that her beauty returns to haunt him (268.45-46), which are juxtaposed to the claims of Canz. 270 and 271, that Laura's death has "freed" him from Love's yoke (but where Love appears determined to replace him, cf. 270.1). On the vexed issue of whether a second love- affair is referred to in 270 but especially in sonnet 271, see the discussions in Bettarini, Lacrime: 61-83 and Laura Paolino, "Appunti in margine alla canzone 'Amor se vuo' ch'i' torni al giogo antico,' (R V.E 270)," Studi eproblemi di critica testuale49 (1994): 11-24. Bettarini argues against the second-lady hypothesis; Santagata is more cautious, especially in respect to 271 (Canzoniere: 1084-1085).

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in part II is not only fullyjustified, it is necessary. 15 Petrarch's division of the book is in fact designed to if not minimize, then to blur the distinction of life and death, rather than accentuating it. Thus it is that including 264-266 assures that the division of the collection is not simply or even principally between vita and morte, but between

lamenting the vanity of love and lamenting the vanity of love and remembrance combined.

To strengthen the suggestion that a "duplex planctus" is the burden of part II, each of the intruding poems assuming a Laura adhuc in vita alludes to some aspect of Petrarchan lament understood as doubled. In the case of canzone 264 it is the twin temptations deplored by Augustine in the Secretum, the Laurel of Fame and that of Laura's beauty, while the poet hesitates at the crossroads, the bivium, of moral conversion. With sonnet 265, Petrarch inserts another

"hinge" text, in which the Arnaldian topic of tears wearing away stone looks back to repeated attempts to persuade Laura in the first part of the collection, but also inevitably projects forward the poet's attempt in the second part to persuade Death to take him, though after poem 266 Morte proves more hard of hearing than chaste Laura herself. By the same token, the poet's continued weeping over his harsh fortune at the hands of Madonna and Love in poem 265 (cf. w. 5-7, "piango ad

ognor") will subsequently share attention with weeping over Laura's death.16 Finally, sonnet 266, on the very brink of the first poem lamenting Laura's death, coordinates anniversaries remembering two cardinal persons in Petrarch's affective life, Giovanni Colonna and Laura, a pairing that heralds the loss of the "doppio thesauro," the same two persons mourned as dead a few poems later in sonnet 269: initiating a double project of mourning in a slightly different sense.

115 Both "Aspro core" and "Segnor mio caro," moreover, are linked to the moment of

composition of 1349-51; "Aspro core" was written in 1350 (Santagata), the "Segnor mio caro" evoked a response from Sennuccio del Bene in 1345; and as we have seen, the presence of Sennuccio is important for the nexus of texts around Canzone 268 (Sennuccio is the only named addressee in the second part).

116 See, in the first part, Canz. 212.1-2, 8 and 239.34-39; significantly, these last lines combine the chase of the wind with the attempt to wear away Laura's stony chastity (v. 38: "e'n versi tento sorda et rigida alma"); while 265. 12, "Non e si duro cor . . ." anticipates the hardness of the tomb in 333.1 ("Ite, rime dolenti, al duro sasso, che il mio caro thesoro in terra asconde"), also picking up thesauro from 269.5. For the sonnet, see Maurizio Perugi, Trovatori a Valchiusa: Un frammento della cultura provenzale delPetrarca (Padova: Antenore, 1985): 292-13, esp. 311-13. Roberto Antonelli, "Petrarca": 445-46 also suggests an emblematic placement for "Aspro core"just after canzone 264, as a summary and valediction of the poetry of love in vita.

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The double program for mourning Laura also appears reflected in the way Petrarch in the second part dates his years of loving Laura, both alive and dead. The double set of anniversary dates in sonnet 266, at one extreme of the second part, recur with variation at the other extreme of the collection, in poem 364. In this antepenultimate poem of the collection two durations are again recorded, the years since Petrarch's first sight of Laura, and the years since her death: the double temporal tally, in short, of the "duplex planctus." That both

temporal reckonings are given in one sonnet, at a distance of exactly one hundred poems from canzone 264, itself suggests the thematics of the double task of sorrow, the first lamenting Love's yoke, "Tennemi Amor anni ventun ardendo, / lieto nel foco, nel duolpien di

speme" (364.1-2), the second Laura's death, ". . . dieci altri anni

piangendo" (364.4). Sonnet 364 concludes with a verse ("ch'io conosco il mio fallo, e non lo scuso") that unmistakably inflects the final verse of 264 ("et veggio'l meglio, et al peggior m'appiglio"), an evocation of 264 that is then confirmed by the first verse of the very next poem, sonnet 365: "I' vo piangendo i miei passati tempi / i quai posi in amar cosa mortale," which parallels 264.1-2, the very first verses of the second part, announcing intensified penitential weeping over the

erring self: "I' vo pensando, e nel penser m'assale / una pieta si forte di me stesso .. ." The juxtaposition of pensando at 264.1 and piangendo at 365.1 itself recalls that of ardendo and piangendo in rhyme positions in the first quatrain of sonnet 364, the last sonnet in the collection

absolutely (and last poem of all with the exception of "Vergine bella"), which thus confirms the close link between the beginning and the end of the second part.

In conclusion, Petrarch in the second part of the Canzoniere laments both the physical loss of Laura to death and his lifelong, ineradicable attachment to her mortal beauty, "cosa mortal." The attenuation of the separation between life and death by the inclusion of 264-66 tends to confirm the Rico hypothesis regarding the dating of the first sonnet and the stoic-penitential ordering of the Canzoniere after Laura's death. Indeed the proposal of the double subject of lament is already present in the proemial sonnet, which by invoking the double hazard circumscribing the speaker ("fra le van speranze e'l van dolore") suggests the double subject of early, illusory hopes and subsequent mourning. The same division of Petrarch's mourning task is also suggested by the sonnet's extremes, as it evokes at the outset the wasted sighs of juvenile longing (verses 1-4), and con- cludes with the bitter, mature knowledge that "quanto piace al

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mondo e breve sogno." Yet, at the same time, the temporal distinction of before and after ("quand'ero in parte altr'uom . .") and even the

grammatical distinction of the two vanities speranza and dolore, as Castelvetro acutely perceived, are attenuated and blurred. In Petrarch's

conception, within the first sonnet, of distinct moments that are yet overlapping and continuous we already have the model for the transition between first and second parts of the Canzoniere as one between simple and complex mourning.

Brown University

Appendix. A schematic presentation of the passages adduced in pp. 11-43 may be helpful: Vita nuova sonnet 1:

8: Allegro mi sembiava Amor tenendo

14 appresso gir lo vedea piangendo. Vita nuova canzone "Li occhi dolenti"

54: poscia piangendo, sol nel mio lamento / chiamo Beatrice

57: pianger di doglia e sospirar d'angoscia

Congedo 71: pietosa mia canzone, or va piangendo ... ["gir ... piangendo," Vita nuova 1.14]

ritruova le tue donne e le donzelle

a cui le tue sorelle

erano usate di portar letizia; e tu, che se' figliuola di tristizia

76 vatten disconsolata a star con elle.

Congedo Canz. 268:

78 Fuggi'l sereno e'l verde, non t'appressare ove sia riso o canto, canzon mia no, ma pianto: non fa per te star fra gente allegra 82 vedova sconsolata in vesta negra.

Vat. 3196 ballata "Occhi dolenti":

2 piangete omai mentre la vita dura

3 poi che'l sol vi si oscura

4 che lieti ci facea col suo splendore Vat. 3196 fragment "Gentil alto desire":

4 Onde pensosa e lieta

5 conven ch'or si rallegri ed or sospire.

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Canzone 325

56 "so far lieti et tristi in un momento," Canzone 323

71 lieta si dipartio, nonche secura

72 ahi, nulla, altro che pianto, al mondo dura. Sestina 332:

1 Mia benigna fortuna e'l viver lieto (conversio of letizia, "Li occhi dolenti." 5 volti subitamente in doglia e'n pianto (conversio of piangendo, Vn 1) 34 Cosi 'l1 mio cantar converso in pianto (Canz. 268: Non canto ... ma pianto) 36 Ch'e tanto or tristo quanto mai fu lieto (letizia, tristizia, "Li occhi dolenti") 37 Nesun visse gia mai piu di me lieto

38 nesun vive pi6 tristo et giorno et notti

72 ch'ogni uom attrista, et me p6 far si lieto

73 Far mi p6 lieto, in una o'n poche notti

366 35-36: Vergine benedetta, / che'l pianto d'Eva in allegrezza torni.

(Conversiones of Vn 1, allegro, piangendo; cf. Canz. 268, pianto, allegra) Other poems in part II including conversiones of pianto: 282

10 or, come vedi, vo di te piangendo 11 di te piangendo no, ma de' miei danni

320

14 or vo piangendo io suo cenere sparso 353

1-2: . . . augelletto che cantando vai / over piagendo, il tuo tempo passato 354

14 piangendo i'l dico, et tu piangendo scrivi

356

13 Mentre piangendo allor seco s'adira [l'anima mia] 364

1-2 Tennemi Amor anni ventuno ardendo 4: Saliro al ciel, dieci altri anni piangendo.

365

1: I' vo piangendo i miei passati tempi [cf. 264.1: I' vo pensando]. Uses of pianger in part II: 268.21; 279.12; 293.12; 310.2; 304.14; 305.4; 310.3; 332.22; 338.9; 338.13; 342.13; 359.34.

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