Karlheinz Stierle. Francesco Petrarca: Ein Intellektueller im Europa des 14. Jahrhunderts.

Cervigni, Dino S.

Karlheinz Stierle. Francesco Petrarca: Ein Intellektueller im Europa des 14. Jahrhunderts. Munchen: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003. Pp. 973.

The year 2004, which marks the seventh centenary of Petrarch's birth, has seen, and still sees, many Petrarchan commemorative celebrations, soon to be followed by the publication of miscellaneous volumes of proceedings and countless other studies on Petrarch. Ushering in, as it were, all these commemorations and volumes, and offering a comprehensive view of Petrarch, Karlheinz Stierle's volume--Francesco Petrarca: An Intellectual in 14th-Century Europe--is a magisterial work that commends itself to all scholars for its treatment of all works of Petrarch in their specific context and their interpretation throughout the centuries. All I can do here is to outline the content of this extraordinary volume of 973 pages.

Each of the nine chapters of the volume analyzes Petrarch's ideas and works as they develop, mature, and are written down throughout five decades of the poet's literary, humanistic, and philosophical activity. A major characteristic of Stierle's volume is precisely his consummate ability to deal with the subject matter historically, contextually, and hermeneutically, following closely Petrarch in his poetic and philosophical development. An Introduction (9-21) outlines the main goals of the volume, which has in mind primarily a German audience, which--Stierle states--has had thus far only few opportunities to read Petrarch in a German translation accompanied by the original text (21). The volume's main interpretative direction is presented in a brief Conclusion (836-38), followed by an Appendix with notes (841-919), the index of names and places (921-27), the matters treated in the volume (928-38), and an extensive bibliography (939-73).

A fundamental point of reference for Stierle is the Dante-Petrarch relationship, which the author defines succinctly and contrastingly in the first chapter as "The World of Dante and the World of Petrarch" (23-50). For Stierle, the world of Petrarch is born of the world of Dante, without which the former cannot be understood; the intermediary between the two is Boccaccio's love for both Dante and Petrarch (25-34). The historical context within which Petrarch's world must be situated is, first of all, Avignon, which Stierle defines as "The Capital of the 14th Century" (Chap. Two: 51-90). Avignon, in fact, is the true center of the 14th century, marks the beginning of Petrarch's activity, and becomes emblematic of the poet's own inner contradictions (Babylon, labyrinth, Vaucluse, etc.).

Chapter Three (91-234) deals with Petrarch's "Studium" in the term's manifold meanings. Here Stierle deals primarily with the poet's love for the honesta studia, freedom, solitude, as well as the discovery of what Stierle calls "multiplicity," which Petrarch acquired through the studia humanitatis. The following chapter, "Petrarch's Places and Landscapes" (235-343), deals not only with space as a physical entity but also with the spiritual notion of space, which leads to the conception of its opposite--nowhere ("Kein Ort, nirgends" 289-91)--, and to the invention of the Petrarchan landscapes, as exemplified in the famous letter describing the ascent of Mont Ventoux.

Chapter Five (345-474) describes Petrarch's manifold attempts at creating a portrait of the self to be passed on to future generations, beginning with his laureate crowning in Rome and then moving to his various Italian sojourns, which concluded in Arqua (345-474). Stierle then focuses on the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Chap. Six: 475-660), which he views as the book of fragments that marks the poet's shift from epic to lyric, whose influence upon modern lyric poetry can hardly be measured. Primarily because of its focus on what Stierle calls "the poetics of pensare," Petrarch's lyric poems imply rationality and consciousness, as well as an array of opposite elements: reflection that seeks to forget the absence at the very essence of pensare; the projection of subjective emotion into the landscape and its illusory awareness; the manifold imaginings of the always present and always absent Laura, which offer the poet nothing but an illusory moment of peace, and bear out a failure of communication, as Stierle emphasizes also in the essay published in this issue of Annali.

Chapter Seven--emblematically called "Legitimizing the Modern Era" (661-709)--is devoted to the Trionfi, which Stierle analyzes also through its famous figurative renderings. Chapter Eight (711-43) seeks to bring together several strands of the thought of Petrarch, who situated himself between past and present, and who was so influential in shaping the modern epoch. Finally, in Chapter Nine (745-835) Stierle deals with the reception of Petrarch throughout the centuries, viewing posterity's assimilation and transformation of, and reaction to, Petrarch as a continuous process of drawing further meanings out of the reserves ("Sinnreserven" 747) always to be found in the works of the great humanist and poet. Here Stierle considers a long list of authors, from the well-known Petrarchists of the Renaissance to Montaigne, Muratori, Abbe de Sade, Rousseau, Goethe, the Italian Romantic poets (Alfieri, Foscolo, Leopardi, Manzoni), and finally the lyric poets of the twentieth century. At the end of this chapter, and thus of the volume, Stierle graphically outlines Petrarch's position in contemporary Europe, which, in his view, owes so much to the poet of Laura. "Europe is a chronotope," Stierle writes; and Petrarch was perfectly aware of his place in this chronotope, to the formation of which he contributed significantly, not only by bringing back the resources of ancient Greece and Rome, but also by ushering in new ways of representing the modern (834).

In the brief Conclusion (836-38), Stierle summarizes some of his fundamental findings, with particular emphasis on one of the volume's most recurring themes: "The world of Petrarch, in contrast to the world of Dante, is situated under the sign of the priority of the horizontal orientation of the world" (836). Presented in contrast to that of Dante, the Petrarchan world's horizontal orientation, as presented by Stierle, can certainly be accepted; outside this Dantean juxtaposition, however, Stierle's view of Petrarch's horizontal view can be questioned. To explain further this horizontality, Stierle employs the famous Petrarchan phrase "vagando et cogitando," which for Stierle suggests Petrarch's "In-der-Welt-Sein aus einem In-der-Landschaft-sein" (836): Petrarch belongs in the world through his presence in the landscape. To this presence is also related Petrarch's errare, which comprises classical, Christian, and poetic connotations, and is grounded in his dimension of time. All such poetic and philosophical elements explain, for Stierle, the fragmentary nature of so many of Petrarch's works and their modernity. In brief, Petrarch's work presents itself as the "landscape of the spirit" and the spirit of modernity, to which "Petrarch has first given a language" (838).

This fundamental work fully deserves an Italian translation, which is in the process of being completed.

Dino S. Cervigni, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill