La lirica italiana. Un lessico fondamentale (secoli XIII-XIV).
Lorenzo Geri, Marco Grimaldi, and Nicolò Maldina, eds.
Rome: Carocci, 2021. 343 pp. €29.00.
Despite the title of the volume, La lirica italiana. Un lessico fondamentale (secoli XIII-XIV) is not a lexicon of early Italian lyric. While it is conceived as a collection of 20 contributions organized alphabetically, only a few of its entries form a lexicon in a traditional sense (e.g., “Amore” and “Io”), whereas the others rather provide a series of approaches and perspectives to think about and investigate early Italian poetry (e.g., “Court,” “Poetic forms,” “Music,” “Politics,”…). Curiously, Marco Grimaldi’s essay “Realtà” is an exception, for it is itself a lexicon: in fact, the author reflects on how early Italian poets represented reality by exploring a series of key concepts such as “the poet” (232), “the body” (233), “emotions” (233), and so on.
This is not to say that the volume fails to meet the expectations set by its title. Rather it exceeds them, for it is more than a lexicon. La lirica italiana is a prismatic point of entry into early Italian lyric. It provides the reader multiple accesses into a tradition that is often mistreated or ignored altogether in Italian schools and universities outside of Italy. It does so by retelling the same story from different points of view, a strategy that helps readers cement key information. For instance, the essays “Court” by Lorenzo Geri and “Città” by Nicola Maldina center their reflections around the spaces where early Italian poetry was produced and consumed, complementing each other and insisting on the crucial shift from courtly to civic poetry. Precisely because of the significance of such a shift, almost all other entries add to the same line of inquiry (see, for instance, “Dialogo” by Claudio Giunta, “Geografia” by Federico Ruggiero, “Lingua” by Irene Tocca, “Retorica” by Veronica Albi). The volume offers other numerous opportunities to create customized paths of investigation around themes and approaches that complement each other: for instance, readers will benefit from a combined reading of Marialaura Aghelu’s “Morale” and Enrico Fenzi’s “Politica,” Maria Sofia Lannutti’s “Musica” and Marco Grimaldi’s “Forme poetiche,” and so on.
In most cases, the itinerary charted in its essays follows an expected sequence: the troubadours, the Sicilians, Guittone and his school, the Stilnovo, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio. There are some significant exceptions: Marialaura Aghelu, for example, focuses on central Italy (perhaps what Fenzi points out about his theme, that there cannot be a significant political poetry in a courtly context, is also true about hers, “Morale”), with extremely interesting reflections on the so called “poeti minori” of the 14th century (Bindo Bonichi, Monte Andrea, Niccolò Soldanieri, among others). Nine essays out of twenty have at least one paragraph on Dante, Petrarch, or Boccaccio. However, overall, the volume does not repeat the same teleological narrative of many accounts implicitly suggesting that early Italian poetry seem to merely prepare the ground for the lyric of the three crowns. In this regard, instead, La lirica italiana succeeds in freeing early Italian poetry composed prior to Dante from its traditional subordination to the major authors of Trecento.
A volume like this one poses a number of challenges, two of which I would like to point out. First of all, it is not always clear what different contributors take “lyric” to mean. Some include in their analysis Dante’s Comedy, Cecco d’Ascoli’s Acerba, or Fazio degli Uberti’s Dittamondo, while other overtly avoid delving into didactic poems such as these. Although in “Forme poetiche” and “Io,” Marco Grimaldi and Lorenzo Geri begin to address the issue, the authors of the volume do not seem to share the same use of the term. A second question I would like to raise regards the traditions against which Italian poetry should be measured. Most contributors rightly take the poetic experience of the troubadours as the point of departure of their investigation. If I am not mistaken, none of them take medieval Latin poetry into consideration. The influence of troubadours over Italian vernacular poets is of course enormous; however, the volume’s silence over Latin poetry seems to suggest a sort of impermeability between the vernacular and Latin traditions.
As the editors of the volume claim in the Premessa, La lirica italiana is intended as a companion for students at Italian universities approaching early Italian poetry for the first time (13). At the same time, an updated and comprehensive bibliography will assist any graduate student and scholar with an interest in the topic (13-14). La lirica italiana is an important collective endeavor that fills the gap between introductory and specialistic resources available to students and scholars of early Italian poetry serving as a trampoline for new and original research.
Paolo Scartoni, Rutgers University