“Voi che ve ne andaste per paura” ovvero tre sguardi sulla battaglia di Montaperti

L’obiettivo che si pone l’articolo č quello di esaminare le diverse prospettive in cui fu percepita la battaglia di Montaperti, combattuta nel 1260 tra guelfi fiorentini e ghibellini senesi, sostenuti a loro volta dagli esuli ghibellini di Firenze. Questo scontro s’impresse durevolmente nella memoria dei membri di ambedue i partiti rivelando quanta importanza avesse per gli italiani dell’epoca l’appartenenza a un raggruppamento politico determinato. In una tale ottica, l’adesione a una data fazione va ritenuta un tratto italiano per antonomasia che, seppure in una forma rudimentale, č sopravvissuta per secoli. Basti pensare al Palio di Siena, che puň esser visto come un prolungamento della rivalitŕ tra guelfi e ghibellini. Ai fini della ricerca sono stati analizzati: il sonetto ***[A voi che ve ne andaste per paura] di Rustico Filippi (di Filippo) – ghibellino fiorentino che deride lo sbaraglio dei guelfi, il Canto X dell’Inferno, in cui Dante parla con il capo degli esuli ghibellini fiorentini, Farinata degli Uberti, e la canzone ***[Ahi lasso! or e stagion de doler tanto] di Guittone d’Arezzo che constata con amarezza che Firenze č ormai soltanto un simulacro dell’antica grandezza. Viene inoltre segnalato che tra le righe dei componimenti traspare un’altra caratteristica tipicamente italiana, quella di una specie di campanilismo, ovverossia di patriottismo locale.

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.

Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante

Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante provides a new perspective on the highly networked literary landscape of thirteenth and fourteenth-century Italy. It demonstrates the fundamental role of dialogue between and within texts in the works of four poets who represent some of the major developments in early Italian literature: Guittone d’Arezzo, Guido Guinizzelli, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante. Rather than reading the cultural landscape through the lens of Dante’s works, significant though they may be, the first part of this study reconstructs the rich network of literary, especially poetic dialogue that was at the heart of medieval writing in Italy before and contemporary with Dante. The second part of the book uses this reconstruction to demonstrated Dante’s engagement with and indebtedness to the dynamics of exchange that characterized the practice of medieval Italian poets. The overall argument of the book, for the centrality of dialogic processes to the emerging Italian literary tradition, is underpinned by a conceptualization of dialogue in relation to medieval and modern literary theory and philosophy of language. By triangulating between Brunetto Latini’s Rettorica, Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’, and as sense of ‘performative’ speech adapted from J. L. Austin, Poetry in Dialogue shows the openness of its corpus to new dialogues and interpretations, highlighting the instabilities of even the most apparently fixed, monumental texts (such as Dante’s Commedia).