This article offers a detailed reading of the surviving sonnets of the poet known as the Compiuta Donzella di Firenze, paying particular attention to her performance of a gendered subject and critical engagement with common lyric tropes.A lack of bibliographical information about the Compiuta Donzella, the first woman to whom literary texts in the Italian vernacular are attributed, has led to speculation over her identity and 'authenticity' or biographical readings of her texts. Acknowledging the same sorts of playful, ironic, and performative lyric subject and content in the Compiuta Donzella's work that are commonly ascribed to other lyric voices allows us to appreciate the technical and thematic artifice in her sonnets. Comparative close reading of her surviving texts and some responses to them (by Guittone d'Arezzo, Maestro Rinuccino or Guido Guinizzelli, and an anonymous poet) provides a broader perspective on her work as engaged in active dialogue with the lyric context of thirteenth-century Italy.
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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.
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.
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.
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