Dante Petrarch Boccaccio

Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the three crowns of Italian literature, dealt with literature, doctrine, and reality in distinct, yet also overlapping, ways. In this major collection of nineteen essays, Barański explores how they endeavoured to create and establish their authority and identity as writers, while developing new ideas about literature and its status in the world, and, especially in Dante's case, forging and legitimating new forms of writing. Each treated other authors, such as Guido Cavalcanti, or intellectuals, such as Epicurus, polemically and selectively as foils to their own self-portraits. Petrarch and Boccaccio had also to contend with Dante, and his extraordinary success as a 'modern' vernacular authority, though they employed very different strategies for doing so. Barański's close attention to the medieval context uniting these greatest of medieval writers is complemented by an equally close attention to the scholarly tradition on the questions addressed. To be a historian of literature also means being a historian of one's subject. Zygmunt G. Barański is Serena Professor of Italian Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and Notre Dame Professor of Dante & Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has published extensively on Dante, on medieval Italian literature, on Dante's fourteenth- and twentieth-century reception, and on twentieth-century Italian literature, film, and culture. For many years he was senior editor of The Italianist, and currently holds the same position with Le tre corone.

This text proposes a reinterpretation of the history behind the canon of the Tre Corone (Three Crowns), which consists of the three great Italian authors of the 14th century – Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Examining the first commentaries on Dante’s Commedia, the book argues that the elaboration of the canon of the Tre Corone does not date back to the 15th century but instead to the last quarter of the 14th century. The investigation moves from Guglielmo Maramauro’s commentary – circa 1373, and the first exegetical text in which we can find explicit quotations from Petrarch and Boccaccio – to the major commentators of the second half of the 14th century: Benvenuto da Imola, Francesco da Buti and the Anonimo Fiorentino. The work focuses on the conceptual and poetic continuity between Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio as identified by the first interpreters of the Commedia, demonstrating that contemporary readers and intellectuals immediately recognized a strong affinity between these three authors based on criteria not merely linguistic or rhetorical. The findings and conclusions of this work are of great interest to scholars of Dante, as well as those studying medieval poetry and Italian literature.

The early modern and modern cultural world in the West would be unthinkable without Petrarch and Boccaccio. Despite this fact, there is still no scholarly contribution entirely devoted to analysing their intellectual revolution. Internationally renowned scholars are invited to discuss and rethink the historical, intellectual, and literary roles of Petrarch and Boccaccio between the great model of Dante’s encyclopedia and the ideas of a double or multifaceted culture in the era of Italian Renaissance Humanism. In his lyrical poems and Latin treatises, Petrarch created a cultural pattern that was both Christian and Classical, exercising immense influence on the Western World in the centuries to come. Boccaccio translated this pattern into his own vernacular narratives and erudite works, ultimately claiming as his own achievement the reconstructed unity of the Ancient Greek and Latin world in his contemporary age. The volume reconsiders Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s heritages from different perspectives (philosophy, theology, history, philology, paleography, literature, theory), and investigates how these heritages shaped the cultural transition between the end of the Middle Ages and the early modern era, as well as European identity.

Since the beginnings of Italian vernacular literature, the nature of the relationship between Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) and his predecessor Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) has remained an open and endlessly fascinating question of both literary and cultural history. In this volume nine leading scholars of Italian medieval literature and culture address this question involving the two foundational figures of Italian literature. Through their collective reexamination of the question of who and what came between Petrarch and Dante in ideological, historiographical, and rhetorical terms, the authors explore the emergence of an anti-Dantean polemic in Petrarch's work. That stance has largely escaped scrutiny, thanks to a critical tradition that tends to minimize any suggestion of rivalry or incompatibility between them. The authors examine Petrarch's contentious and dismissive attitude toward the literary authority of his illustrious predecessor; the dramatic shift in theological and philosophical context that occurs from Dante to Petrarch; and their respective contributions as initiators of modern literary traditions in the vernacular. Petrarch's substantive ideological dissent from Dante clearly emerges, a dissent that casts in high relief the poets' radically divergent views of the relation between the human and the divine and of humans' capacity to bridge that gap.

This book examines Boccaccio's pivotal role in legitimizing the vernacular literature of Dante, Petrarch and Cavalcanti through argument, narrative and transcription.

Petrarch's "Epistola metrica II.10-Zoilo S." in English and Latin.

Celebrated in Italy as the 'Tre Corone' (the three crowns), Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio have exerted an immense influence over western culture. This book looks at their impact on Italian culture up to the Renaissance.