Guittone d’Arezzo

Chapter 1 demonstrates the dialogic nature of Guittone d’Arezzo’s performance of conversion through the intertextual relationship between his pre- and post-conversion poetry, written as ‘Guittone’ and ‘Frate Guittone’, respectively. This analysis is the first step in a discussion of the ‘corrective intertextuality’ used by authors (including Dante) to construct teleological narratives of subjectivity, often with recourse to religious authority. The chapter confronts the tension between irony and sincerity inherent in Guittone’s particular, intertwined performances of subjectivity and conversion across his whole corpus. The chapter gives an in-depth account of the destabilizing effects of (Frate) Guittone’s two voices and two phases of poetic writing.

Introduction

The Introduction lays out the aims and scope of the book and outlines its methodology. It triangulates the ‘dialogue’ of the title with medieval literary practices and theories of dialogue, in particular the tenzone, and with literary and linguistic theories of dialogism (Mikhail M. Bakhtin) and performative speech (John L. Austin). This Introduction provides an extensive definition of the tenzone and a summary of the critical problems surrounding this mode of writing, with particular reference to Brunetto Latini’s Rettorica. It introduces the importance of these dialogic process for our understanding of Dante and medieval Italian literature, including the works of Guittone d’Arezzo, Guido Guinizzelli, and Guido Cavalcanti.

Ars Legendi, Ars Poetica

Chapter 5 builds on the discussion of Dante in dialogue with the poets who preceded and overlapped with him to investigate the Florentine poet’s own efforts to perform a teleological, unitary, and converted subjectivity in the Commedia. The chapter explains and complicates the mechanics of Dante’s performance, using the dream of the femmina balba/siren as a focal point. This analysis draws on the models established through the discussions of Guittone, Guinizzelli, and Cavalcanti to reopen the closure of Dante’s performance of converted textuality and subjectivity. The chapter aims to open the way for the resiliently disruptive textuality of past works to sound alongside the self-consciously authorial voice of the poet of the Commedia.

Guido Guinizzelli

Chapter 2 introduces the poetry of Guido Guinizzelli in the context of thirteenth-century literary networks and exchange, especially the tenzone tradition. The chapter focusses on Guinizzelli’s outward-looking version of dialogic subjectivity, through which he refines his poetic voice in relation to, and response to, external forces and others’ voices, including Guittone and Bonagiunta. The analysis of Guinizzelli’s poems, including ‘Al cor gentil’ shows how his subjectivity and poetics develop through the statement and restatement of poetic positions in the dialogic interactions of tenzoni with other poets and in dialogue with the voice of God.

Dante in dialogue

Chapter 4 concentrates on Dante’s dialogues with and treatment of Guittone, Guinizzelli, and Cavalcanti through the Commedia as well as the Vita nova and Convivio. The chapter highlights the undercutting of Guinizzelli even as he is named as ‘padre’ in Purgatorio. It also makes a case for the proscription of Cavalcanti from the same realm with reference to the early tenzone beginning ‘Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io’. The chapter sheds new light on the motives for and means of the effacement of Guittone in Dante’s works. These three case studies all support a discussion of the dialogic tensions inherent in these intertextual moments.

Guido Cavalcanti

Chapter 3 introduces Guido Cavalcanti’s radically internalized model of poetic subjectivity as a point of contrast with the other poets in this study. The chapter demonstrates Cavalcanti’s resistance towards any sort of unitary poetics or accounts of self and his ambivalence towards religious authority as a source of literary validation. Cavalcanti’s divergence from his predecessors is demonstrated through analysis of his own poetry in dialogue with the works of Guittone, Guinizzelli, and Dante. The chapter explores Cavalcanti’s alternative model of subjectivity and love poetry, in which his texts perform an irreducibly polyphonic subjectivity through multiple personifications, justified by natural philosophy. This analysis foregrounds the importance of an intra-discursive dialogism, in which poetry and subjectivity are generated through tensions and internalized dialogues.

Conclusion

The Conclusion summarizes and synthesizes the arguments of the book, drawing out the central implications of dialogic processes for our understanding of medieval literature in Italy and, potentially, for poetic writing more broadly. This synthesis revisits the key claims about the importance of the tenzone as both mode of dialogue attested in specific exchanges and as a framework for thinking more broadly about intertextual dialogues in Italian texts of due- and early trecento. It presents the fruitful lack of closure in the works of Guittone, Guinizzelli, Cavalcanti, and Dante. By foregrounding the mechanisms of literary self-representation it encourages an understanding of the inherent instability of these poetic performances of subjectivity, sometimes in spite of a poet’s best efforts to control their narrative of self and literary authority.