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Notes toward a Gendered History of ItalianLiterature, with a Discussion of Dante’s

Beatrix Loquax

T his paper sketches a paradigm for evaluating the treatment ofwomen in early Italian literature. I will consider that well-worn trajec-tory—Italian literature from its lyric origins to Dante, Petrarch, andBoccaccio—from a less worn perspective, that of gender, and proposea framework for thinking about what we see.

Let me begin by explaining, because I think there is heuristicvalue in the explanation, how a critic with a long track record ofworking on these authors from a nongendered perspective arrived atthis particular intellectual crossroads. The issue of gender is central inearly Italian literature and is clearly posed by the texts themselves:Italian literary texts of this period feature male lover-poets and thefemale figures that they love. The difficulty, for me, was in figuringout how to approach this issue in a way that is integrated with andemerges from the complex reality of the texts rather than being super-imposed onto them from above and outside. I could see the issue:because much of the early Italian tradition deals with desire that isfiltered through a cultural system we know as ‘‘courtly love,’’ in whichthe male lover aspires to the love of a lady worshiped as an ennoblingideal, attention to issues of gender seems a transparently useful criticalmove. I could see the need: there is an absence of sustained analysis ofgender in medieval Italian literature, which in turn must be viewedwithin a broader intellectual context in which the word ‘‘gender’’ inthe sense of ‘‘gender studies’’ is not even easily translated into Italian.What I could not see was a satisfying avenue—which at this stage inour critical enterprise must mean an avenue that goes beyond ‘‘womenin x, y, or z’’—by which to approach the issue of gender in theseauthors.1

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I reached the paradigm that I will put forth here slowly, and byworking backward in historical time from Boccaccio, the Italian au-thor who most explicitly places the category ‘‘woman’’ (rather thanjust a particular woman) at the core of his opus. As I tried to show in‘‘Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi: Toward a Sexual Poetics ofthe Decameron,’’ included in this volume, Boccaccio, in a fashion thatis contradictory, nuanced, and anything but ideologically doctrinaire,shines a light on the disenfranchisement of women, using them asemblematic for all those who are oppressed, disenfranchised, cloisteredaway from society, and stripped of agency. Female agency came intofocus for me again in ‘‘Dante and Francesca da Rimini,’’ in which,through a historicist reconstruction of Inferno $, I uncovered a sub-merged ‘‘feminist’’ agenda embedded in Dante’s damned dynasticwife.2 From Francesca I worked backward again to look at the issue ofgender as it developed before the Commedia, in Dante’s lyrics andthen in the poems of Guittone d’Arezzo, drawing in this way nearerto the courtly origins of the Italian tradition.

My goal here is to suggest how we could connect the dots: howwe could approach a gendered history of early Italian literature. To tellthis story we have to follow the trajectory of the nongendered history,starting before Dante, in the lyric prehistory to the Commedia, andincluding both of the key forgers of the aftermath to the Commedia—the period that sets the stage for the rest of Italian literary history—namely Petrarch and Boccaccio. In this essay I advance a frameworkfor evaluating the treatment of women in this tradition, which in-volves looking at Italian literature from its lyric origins to Dante, Boc-caccio, and Petrarch through the lens of the competing ideologicalsystems to which these authors subscribe: on the one hand, they sub-scribe to the ideology of courtly love, which permeates the beautifullove poetry for which the tradition is so well known, and, on theother, to an often violently anti-courtly ideology that permeates theirmoralistic poetry. These two ideologies underwrite very different atti-tudes toward women and toward gender.

The dialectic between courtly and anti-courtly ideologies is a his-torical constant in the early Italian tradition: it is present not only inDante, but in poets before Dante, like Guittone d’Arezzo, and it is amajor feature of Boccaccio’s work as well. For this reason, the ideolog-ical shifts manifested by these authors lend themselves to the construc-tion of a historical overview of gender in this tradition, allowing us to

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frame a gendered history of early Italian literature in terms of thedialectic between a courtly ideology and a competing set of values.

Courtliness, the set of values associated with what Dante and hispeers call cortesia, is by definition a gendered issue, since its logic isconstructed around a male/female binary. In the courtly lyric, the malelover-poet voices his aspiration to possess the unattainable perfectionthat the lady represents. On the other side of this binary stands thecourtly lady, who represents, embodies, serves as goal and point ofreference, but does not, in the courtly lyric, do, act, or speak. Dantestarted life as a courtly poet; he ended life as the author of the Comme-dia, a text in which women act, speak, and possess moral agency. Thequestion that arose for me, the question that offered me the means toget beyond the ‘‘women-in-the-Commedia’’ approach to gender issuesin Dante and to think in terms of a larger historical paradigm, dia-chronically, was thus the following: how do we account for Dante’sdevelopment from a courtly poet into the poet of the Commedia, thatis, into a poet who assigns moral agency to all human beings, includ-ing women? In other words, how do we account for Dante’s develop-ment into the poet who gave Francesca da Rimini, forgotten bycontemporary chroniclers and dynastically unimportant, a voice and aname, indeed the only contemporary historical name recorded in In-ferno $? How did Dante become the poet who wrote Francesca’s story,who inscribed Francesca’s existence into our collective memory, ourhistory?

Poetry based in a courtly logic is always fundamentally narcissisticand centered on the male lover/poet; the female object of desire servesas a screen on which he projects questions and concerns about himself.Whether we are speaking of the early courtly poetry of the SicilianGiacomo da Lentini or the later theologized courtliness of Dante andhis fellow stilnovisti, the fundamental logic of the courtly poem re-mains narcissistic, as Dante acknowledges in the Vita nuova when hesets himself the task of breaking from it. The didactic works of writerslike Guittone d’Arezzo, Dante in his late moral canzoni, and Boccac-cio, on the other hand, are marked by a utilitarian stamp: women aresupposed to use this literature, to be instructed by it, to learn from it.These texts, precisely by virtue of their moralistic and even paternalis-tic programs, demonstrate a need to communicate with women, totreat them as subjects who can learn, rather than as objects to bedesired.

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Whereas the early Sicilian poets keep their focus on the poet andhis conflicts, Guittone d’Arezzo, unlike Giacomo da Lentini, writesnot only love poetry in the courtly style but also moralistic poems likehis didactic poem on female chastity, Altra fiata aggio gia, donne, par-lato. This canzone offers an early model of a paradigm that Dante willadopt in a moral canzone like Doglia mi reca nello core ardire, wherebypaternalistic morality defeats courtliness and ironically enhances thestatus of women by conceiving them as moral agents.3

In Dante’s work we can see the tension between the courtly ap-proach to women, in which the female figure serves to arbitrate malebehavior and exists functionally only as a predicate to the male lover-poet, and a moralizing approach in which women are arbiters of them-selves and exist in the poem as potential users of poetry in their ownright. His early poetry is entirely within the courtly tradition, in whichthe poet projects his own fears and desires, without exploring the sub-jectivity of the lady. In the theologized variant of courtly love Dantecalls stil novo poetry, the poet learns to ask no reward of the lady andto find in the act of praising her its own reward. But still there is noexploration of her subjectivity or assignment to her of moral agency.The ladies of Dante’s early lyrics—whose names include Violetta, Fio-retta, Lisetta, and the stony cold donna petra as well as Beatrice—havein common that they do not speak.

By contrast, the Beatrice of the Commedia is loquacious; she is averitable Beatrix loquax. Starting with this anomaly—a lyric lady (nota shepherdess, as in the Provencal pastorela) who speaks—we will nowturn to exploring Dante’s construction of the figure of Beatrice.

* * *

In teaching the Commedia over the last thirty years, I have foundthat there is no figure more difficult to make interesting, appeal-ing—or indeed comprehensible—than Beatrice. For the average naıvereader, characters like Francesca and Farinata come into immediatefocus, while the figure of Beatrice remains blurry. Perusing the criticalliterature, we see that this abstracted quality is reified and codified:here we find Beatrice as an allegory for teologia, for illuminating grace,for the church, for whatever abstraction the critic finds most worthyand compelling.

Dante, a poet whose miraculous economy can conjure a cohesivecharacter with a few strokes of his pen, seems to have failed to createsuch a character with Beatrice. While I have watched reader after

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reader fall in love with Vergil and mourn his loss, I have never wit-nessed a similar affective response to Beatrice: either to her spectaculararrival or to her eventual departure and replacement by Bernard ofClairvaux. Eager to establish Beatrice’s personality traits, criticspounce on the occasions when the text seems to offer suggestions ofsuch traits, and end up making foolish ad feminam comments that are,in any case, less indices of a particular personality than of behaviorscategorized by type—indeed, by gender. Thus, for instance, we hearabout what has been dubbed the ‘‘typically female’’ jealousy displayedby Beatrice when she reproves the pilgrim for his past straying whenthey meet in the earthly paradise.

Much more than Beatrice, Dante’s Vergil seems to operate polyse-mously: he can signify classical culture and its limitations, he can sig-nify the tragedy of human history and the lacrimae rerum of humanexistence, while at the same time functioning as a character in thediegesis (‘‘Virgilio’’), who comes to exist through time in the text’svirtual reality and to whom one becomes—similarly through the pas-sage of time—attached. A great similarity between Vergil and Beatriceas textual constructs is the duration of textual time they inhabit. Thepoem’s three major characters are textually disposed in a decreasingscale, whereby the pilgrim inhabits the whole text, Vergil two-thirds,and Beatrice approximately one-third. In Vergil’s case, this textualpresence translates into a powerful affect, which we could even calllove, and which is experienced not just by the pilgrim, but also by thereader. A great dissimilarity between Vergil and Beatrice as textualconstructs is in the reader’s response; as I noted, the reader does notrespond to Beatrice with the warmth shown to Vergil. While the pil-grim’s progress functions in most respects as a template on which thereader subconsciously models her- or himself, in this respect pilgrimand reader sharply diverge: for the pilgrim, of course, never fails toevince his passion for Beatrice, a passion that the reader never seemsto share.

Even as the long duree of their textual existences and their dramat-ically intertwined importance to the pilgrim bind Vergil and Beatrice,they are separated by great gulfs. Of these gulfs—the salvation of theone versus the damnation of the other, the contemporaneity of theone versus the antiquity of the other, the youth of the one versus thevenerable maturity of the other—perhaps the most salient from apurely diegetic perspective is the disparity of gender: the femaleness ofthe one versus the maleness of the other. Especially in combination

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with her youth, Beatrice’s gender poses an interesting set of narrativechallenges for Dante. Beatrice’s gender is central to her primary rolein the Commedia: as the object of the pilgrim’s passionate love, how-ever we choose to construe that love, she is a catalyst for much of thelexicon of desire that is the Commedia’s basic linguistic engine. At thesame time, this youthful female figure is invested with an authoritythat is rarely associated with females in narratives, unless they be alle-gorical figures like Boethius’s Lady Philosophy. The pilgrim’s feelingsfor Beatrice—unlike the reader’s—are a given that exist undeterred bythe confusing multiplicity of codes and signifying systems that em-body her.

In constructing our affective response to Vergil, on the other hand,and in drawing us into the space of that relationship, Dante drawsconsistently on one code, that of the older authority figure, undifferen-tiated by gender, who at first functions as teacher and then modulatescompletely into parent. He draws on a primary and universal humanlove: the love of the child for the parent. In the past I have shown howthe Vergil plot is written into the Commedia as two distinct but tightlycoordinated storylines: as one maps the progressive undermining ofVergil’s authority, the other records the simultaneous growth in thepilgrim’s love for him, the parent whom we love despite the fallibilityand the limitations that we come to recognize as we pass out of child-hood. In concrete narrative terms, these dual storylines mean thatDante insinuates affective language into the narrative at moments ofgreatest intellective stress, forcing us, with the pilgrim, into the di-lemma of loving and respecting that which is fallible, corruptible, andtransitory—into the human experience par excellence.4

In constructing our response to Vergil, Dante draws upon the lovethat an adult child feels for an aging parent: the parent who used tobe, for each of us, as Vergil was for Dante, the one ‘‘who knew every-thing’’ (che tutto seppe) (Inf. $.!) and ‘‘the sea of all wisdom’’ (il mardi tutto ’l senno) (Inf. %.$), but who inevitably—as we gain our ownperspective on life—no longer is. Ultimately, the character ‘‘Virgilio’’taps into our universal human experience of loss, our universal humanexperience of the Vergilian lacrimae rerum:5 Vergil—not Beatrice—isthe Commedia’s great contribution to the annals of love and loss. WithBeatrice, Dante cannot draw in the same way upon the experience ofloss, for Beatrice remains for all eternity in heaven; nor can he whollymodel the interaction between the pilgrim and Beatrice on a parent-child template. While there are powerfully arresting and important

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images of Beatrice as mother in the Paradiso, the affective languagethat dominates in the representation of Beatrice is erotic, not maternal.It is interesting to note that the maternal Beatrice of the Paradiso isdrawn from a very different moment on the arc of the parent-childdynamic than the one on which Dante draws for his figuration ofVergil: she is the mother of an infant, not an adult. By figuring Be-atrice as the mother of an infant—for instance, as a mother bird feed-ing her young in the opening simile of Paradiso #!—Dante draws onthe aspect of maternal love that is most easily blended with eros.6

Writing on the maternal imagery used for Beatrice, Rachel Jacoff com-ments that ‘‘at the apex of this imagery, the extraordinary openingbird simile of Paradiso $$%%%, Dante blends the language of desire andof maternal tenderness in perfect fusion.’’7

Joan Ferrante’s Woman as Image in Medieval Literature is notewor-thy for the author’s clear understanding that Dante does not rejecthuman love while aspiring to divine love: ‘‘What is unusual in Dante’sview of love, particularly after the thirteenth century, is that humanlove between man and woman is not just a figure for the love of manand God, but a necessary step towards that love’’ (&!'). In WomanEarthly and Divine in the ‘‘Comedy’’ of Dante, Marianne Shapiro casti-gates Dante for his masculine and medieval prejudices against womenrather than being alert to his radical departures from the dualist stereo-types of both his tradition and ours. Shapiro holds that Dante divestshis ‘‘good’’ women of sexuality in the Commedia, finding a ‘‘solutionto the problem of woman which was a return to the sublimation ofthe mother.’’8 While it is certainly true that Dante invests his Beatricewith maternal energy, we must not lose sight of the fact that the domi-nant register in Dante’s portrayal of Beatrice is erotic. The interpretivechallenge is that she is both ‘‘good’’ and not desexualized. A critic whohas accepted this challenge is F. Regina Psaki, who in a series of articlesargues against what she correctly sees as the prevailing tenet of Dantecriticism, according to which ‘‘human love has been subsumed or cor-rected by divine love,’’ in favor of a ‘‘redeemed or even redemptiveeroticism which makes a place for human sexual love not only inearthly life but in beatitude.’’9

There is probably no more radically alien construct in the Comme-dia than the figure of Beatrice. In unraveling some of the textual skeinthat is Beatrice, I will focus on Beatrice’s original identity as a courtlylady, a lady celebrated by Dante in courtly lyrics. A first step towardunderstanding this figure is clarity with respect to how alien Beatrice

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really is. She is culturally alien to us precisely by virtue of her originalidentity as a courtly lady, since courtliness—for all that its aftereffectsare still visible in aspects of our popular culture—is hard for us toswallow without cultural condescension. But more important is thepoint, not sufficiently acknowledged, that Beatrice was radically alienin her own time, and for her first readers: for what were they to makeof a courtly lady who speaks—who indeed speaks like a man?

As I noted previously, in Dante’s work we can see the tensionbetween the courtly approach to women that we find in his youthfullyrics, in which the female figure serves to arbitrate male behavior andexists functionally only as a predicate to the male lover-poet, and themoralizing approach we find in late poems like Doglia mi reca, inwhich women are arbiters of themselves and exist in the poem as po-tential users of poetry in their own right. Beatrice reflects that tension,for she is a hybrid figure: a composite whose elements come bothfrom the courtly tradition and the moralizing allegorical and didactictradition in which female abstractions like Boethius’s Lady Philosophyspeak with authority and vigor. Moreover, Beatrice’s hybrid nature isemblematic of the complex and anything but homogeneous portraitof women’s lives and desires that emerges from the Commedia: if allits diverse figures and varied perspectives were synthesized, we wouldsee, I believe, a text that is neither fundamentally misogynist nor freeof misogynist elements.10

To get some purchase on Dante’s Beatrice we must follow the pathof Dante’s own development, a path that has its origins in the lyriccourtly poetry of Dante’s youth. This path, which in my opinion isthe prime access route for understanding the Beatrice of the Comme-dia, has been critically undervalued in the American critical tradition,which has shown more interest in the biblical/typological/allegoricaltradition and in the classical intertextuality of the Commedia than inits vernacular counterpart.11 It is precisely the vernacular tradition ofcourtly romance, and especially courtly lyric, that I believe providesthe single greatest impetus for Dante’s creation.

The Beatrice of the Commedia conserves many of the erotic mark-ers of the lady in the courtly lyric and, like the lady in the courtlylyric, her poetic existence is predicated on the needs of her lover-poet.Beatrice’s behavior in the Commedia is always centered on Dante. Al-though the poet’s use of a young Florentine woman as his vehicle toGod is indeed an affirmative representation of the role of women, wemust also acknowledge the fundamental limitation—from a feminist

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perspective—that is inherent to the figure of Beatrice: she exists forDante, whose needs she serves throughout the Commedia. In a pro-found sense, she does not exist for herself in this poem; her historicity,while figuratively and conceptually essential, is not accessed, as is Fran-cesca’s. As Jacoff and Stephany note, ‘‘Beatrice’s historicity in theCommedia is largely confined to the history of her relationship toDante and to Dante’s earlier poetry.’’12 Nor does she have made avail-able to her, for instance, the options implicitly available to the ladieswhom Dante addresses in his (anti-courtly) moralizing canzone Dogliami reca. Beatrice does not have the option of erring, of sinning, or forthat matter of fully living. The limitations imposed on the figure ofBeatrice are the limitations imposed on the courtly lady; they are cul-turally derived from the same matrix, the courtly ideology that exaltsthe lady as a Platonic ideal, rather than viewing her as a human agentwith her own inner life and subjectivity. She is supreme, but within acontext in which the frame of reference is entirely determined by theneeds of the lover-poet.

On the other hand—and this is why Dante’s Beatrice is an anoma-lous hybrid—within the Commedia she possesses an absolutely unpre-cedented and masculine authority. Most importantly, she exerts thisauthority in language, in speech: she develops from the silent icon ofstilnovist courtly verse to the talkative figure I once labeled ‘‘Beatrixloquax.’’13 And her speech is not restricted to the private, courtly, orerotic codes; it inhabits many different discursive domains, and allauthoritatively. The hybridity—or, as Victoria Kirkham puts it, ‘‘an-drogyny’’14—of the Commedia’s Beatrice finds its emblem in Paradiso$, where, in the space of two verses, she both rays her lover with asmile ‘‘such that it would make a man happy in the flames,’’ andthen—in the very next verse—uses that same mouth to begin a speech(on providential history, Adam’s sin, and Christ’s redemption) withthe words ‘‘according to my infallible judgment’’ (secondo mio infalli-bile avviso [Par. $.%&]). The use of the word ‘‘infallibile’’ for femalespeech is in itself stunning, given the long and documented traditionof female speech as the special focus and target of misogyny. More-over, this is the Commedia’s only use of ‘‘infallibile’’ for human speechof any sort, male or female.15

Beatrice’s speechifying has put off the historically mostly malecommentators of the Commedia. We note one critic’s claim that the‘‘Beatrice [of the Vita nuova] appears far more persuasive, enigmatic,

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explosive, than the recreated and cantankerous figure’’ of the Purgato-rio.16 To this we must reply that the ‘‘explosive’’ Beatrice of the Vitanuova is silent, while the ‘‘cantankerous’’ Beatrice of the Commediaspeaks. Ferrante illuminates Dante’s unorthodox handling of Beatricein the Commedia, explaining that Dante puts her ‘‘in a role which isspecifically forbidden to women by major theologians, as priest, asconfessor and teacher of theology.’’17 Ferrante continues: ‘‘It is a curi-ous anomaly of Dante criticism that Beatrice is accepted as a symbolof theology by most critics, even as a Christ figure by some, and thatshe is also recognized by most as a real historical woman Dante knew,yet no one has questioned Dante’s use of a real woman, rather thanan abstraction, to teach theology, in flagrant defiance of Paul’s injunc-tion, frequently echoed in the thirteenth century, against womenteaching’’ (‘‘Dante’s Beatrice,’’ $).

‘‘Beatrix loquax’’ is an attempt to distill the fundamental binarythat goes into constituting Dante’s hybrid Beatrice: to the extent thatshe is a beatifier, Beatrice may be seen as a theologized variant of acourtly lady, a figure created to dispense beatitude on those withwhom she comes into contact, in a tradition of theologized courtlinessthat Dante inherits from Guido Guinizzelli and thereafter expands. Inthis respect, Beatrice’s gender is the residue of her original textualidentity as a courtly lady—the quintessential courtly donna. However,by making his Beatrice so talkative, and so authoritative, Dante sub-verts the icon of the courtly lady. He creates a radically new construct:while the traditions Dante inherits boast female abstractions like Boe-thius’s Lady Philosophy who speak authoritatively, in a voice that iscoded as non-gender-specific—that is, masculine—and female nonab-stractions who either do not speak or speak within the province of thegender-specific, in Beatrice Dante creates a historicized object of de-sire, not a personification, who yet speaks. Indeed, in the Paradiso shespeaks like a man, free from the content or modality normatively as-signed to female discourse.

There is a history to this trajectory, of course, stepping-stones onthe way to the Commedia. This hybrid model of authoritative speechwedded to courtly conventions has its roots in that paradigmaticallyhybrid text, the Vita nuova. One stepping-stone, frequently noted, isthe unelaborated but nonetheless suggestive last verse of the sonnetAmore e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa. According to this verse, the processof love being awakened in a noble heart that occurs in men occursanalogously in women: ‘‘E simil face in donna omo valente’’ (And a

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worthy man has the same effect on a lady) ($%). Another stepping-stone is the episode in which Dante is sharply questioned by unnamedbut quick-witted Florentine ladies in a way that shakes him from hiscomplacent self-indulgence and alerts him to his true quest: not towrite about himself but to praise Beatrice (Vita nuova XIX, $#). Thecomplex role assigned these ladies is emblematic of the Vita nuovaitself, a text in which Dante embeds his early lyrics into a prose framethat ideologically repositions and reconceptualizes them. These ladies,who belong to the prose narration, not to the lyrics, are given thework of cutting through the rhetorical stance of the courtly lover andpointing out the narcissism in his work. They do this work by speak-ing, and they speak in a way that certainly is novel with respect toDante’s lyrics. Lyric conventions also contribute to this episode, andadd another dimension to its hybridity by crossing the Florentine la-dies with a lowly shepherdess: Dante has borrowed here from the mostnoncourtly of lyric genres, the pastorela, where the shepherdess’s wordsserve as a reality principle for the knight. The barbed and insight-inducing words of the Florentine ladies—not Beatrice’s, we note, forshe remains in the silent space of the lyric grande dame—affect Danteas the shepherdess’s affect the knight. These ladies certainly speak.However, they speak about him—his moral state, his behavior—whichmakes them functionally still courtly ladies.

All of these strands—from the Boethian allegorical model to thesharp-tongued shepherdess of the Provencal lyric tradition—maketheir way into the Beatrice of the Commedia. Dante’s starting pointfor this figure is the theologized courtliness of the Vita nuova, nowmade explicit, indeed made literal: in Inferno & Beatrice is one of‘‘three blessed ladies’’ who ‘‘care’’ for Dante ‘‘in the court of heaven’’(tre donne benedette / curan di te ne la corte del cielo) (Inf. &.$&%–&').This Beatrice has thus modulated from the aloof lady of the lyricsinto a literal ‘‘care-taker’’: Dante accomplishes this transformation bygrafting romance elements onto the lyric template he is working within Inferno & (as he will do also in the case of Francesca). Then, tothe lyric/romance mix, Dante adds the theological/biblical dimension.Inferno & both invokes the Vita nuova, whose theologized courtlinessit emulates, and it moves beyond the Vita nuova into what for Danteis new terrain: where the Vita nuova theologized the lyric tradition, inInferno & Dante theologizes a courtly composite made up of both lyricand romance elements. In this way he arrives at a Beatrice who caresfor Dante as one of the blessed ladies in the court of heaven.

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The portrait of Beatrice in Inferno $ seems fully consonant withher courtly, and specifically, lyric past: the verses with which Vergildescribes her—eyes more shining than a star, smooth, soft dictionemanating from an ‘‘angelic voice’’—have clear stilnovist antecedents,as has often been noted.18 But the interesting point for me here is onethat has been less remarked, and it is that, while couching his descrip-tion of Beatrice in the language of the lyric tradition from which shederives, Dante just as surely breaks with that tradition.19 He rupturesthe connection of the Commedia’s Beatrice to her lyric past by havingthis Beatrice use her angelica voce—by having her speak. Because weare in hell, and Beatrice does not enter hell, her speech is reported byVergil, but it is her speech nonetheless; it is reported verbatim and ittakes up most of the canto. The fact that she speaks is central, just ascentral as the impulse that moves her to speak: she is moved by love,and the same force that moves her to leave heaven on Dante’s behalfalso causes her to speak. The famous verse in which Beatrice states thecause of her motion and her purpose makes it equally clear that herpurpose is intimately bound up with her speech: ‘‘amor mi mosse, chemi fa parlare’’ (love moved me, which makes me speak) (Inf. $."$). Inthis declaration that love moved her and makes her speak, Dante bothconjures Beatrice’s past and scripts for her a radically new future. Thisfuture, which will unfold in the Commedia, is contained in the verbparlare, a verb betokening an activity utterly alien from the agenda ofthe lyric lady.

To be sure, as a lyric lady, Beatrice is much less monolithic aconstruct than readers of the Commedia suspect. For instance, she isfar from universally benign. In one of Dante’s early canzoni, Lo dolo-roso amor, she is so fearsome—and so far from beatific—that she pro-vokes the lover’s anguished cry: ‘‘Per quella moro c’ha nome Beatrice’’(I die for her whose name is Beatrice) (#%). For all the lyric Beatrice’spower of life or death over the lover, however, it is the conventionalpower of the lyric lady: it exists solely in the private sphere, the sphereof eros. In another early canzone, E’m’incresce di me, she is equippedwith a full arsenal of Cavalcantian erotic weaponry, including homi-cidal eyes. These she lifts as she vanquishes the lover’s soul with a cryof cruel triumph:

ed alza gli occhi micidiali, e gridasovra colei che piange il suo partire:‘‘Vanne, misera, fuor, vattene omai!’’

(E’ m’incresce di me, %&–'#)

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And she lifts her homicidal eyes, and screams over her [the lover’s soul] whichlaments at departing: ‘‘Go away, wretch, get out, away with you now!’’

The words that Beatrice speaks here belong to the stylized and conven-tional diction of the erotic battle zone, and are similar to phrases putelsewhere in the mouth of a triumphantly cruel Love. Again, there isno public dimension to the words she speaks, no resonance for anylife—or death—beyond that of the singular lover.

Although the lyric Beatrice does not yet inhabit a public dimen-sion through her speech, Dante does begin to construct the rudimentsof such a dimension in these early canzoni, in the sense that he setsher existence against a historical, and indeed even eschatological,framework. In E’ m’incresce di me, the birth of the lady who possesses‘‘homicidal eyes’’ is described in language resonant of the Vita nuova:

Lo giorno che costei nel mondo venne,secondo che si truovanel libro della mente che vien meno,la mia persona pargola sostenneuna passıon nova,tal ch’io rimasi di paura pieno . . .

(E’ m’incresce di me, $"–%#)

The day that she came into the world, according to what is found in thebook of my mind that is passing away, my childish body sustained a newemotion, such that I remained full of fear . . .

Dante here fuses elements—miraculous birth and Cavalcantian fear—that in the more canonical texts, Vita nuova and Commedia, are keptrigorously separate. From the point of view of the incremental con-struction of the Beatrice of the Commedia, it is important to note inthis early Cavalcantian canzone the treatment of Beatrice’s presence,in this case her birth, as a historically and cosmically miraculous eventas well as his juvenile susceptibility to a ‘‘passıon’’ defined as ‘‘nova,’’that is, miraculous, unexpected, totally new.

In the canzone Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore, Beatrice is theobject of universal praise. God himself, speaking in direct discourse tohis angelic choirs, praises her. In Inferno # she is praise incarnate, de-fined as ‘‘loda di Dio vera’’ (true praise of God) (Inf. #.&'!); in otherwords, her being testifies to God’s greatness—she praises him ontolog-ically, merely by existing. In this respect, as in so many others, criticshave read Inferno # as a continuation of the Vita nuova, where the

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lover-poet learns to find his happiness ‘‘In quelle parole che lodano ladonna mia’’ (In those words that praise my lady) (VN #$.%). The poetdoes the praising in this model; his is the active voice. She is praised,in the passive, or she is praise incarnate, by existing—not by speaking.

Inferno & both continues and breaks with this model inheritedfrom the stil novo and the Vita nuova, in that Dante both continuesthe ‘‘praise style’’ of the Vita nuova and starts something new, whichhe does by putting Beatrice in the active role. Having first assignedher the verb parlare in ‘‘amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare’’ (Inf. &."&),Dante immediately follows up by assigning her—the erstwhile bene-ficiary of the praise-style—the verb lodare as well, with the result thatthe long-time object of praise becomes the active giver of praise. Thus,Beatrice follows her great statement ‘‘amor mi mosse, che mi fa par-lare’’ by telling Vergil that she will praise him to her lord for havinghelped the pilgrim on her behalf: ‘‘Quando saro dinanzi al segnormio, / di te mi lodero sovente a lui’’ (When I am before my lord, I willfrequently praise you to him) (Inf. &."!–"'; italics mine). These areverses that have captured critical attention, including mine, in the con-text of the drama of Vergil; we have wondered if Beatrice can legiti-mately promise to praise a damned soul.20 In the same way that I havethought about verse "&, ‘‘amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare,’’ withinthe economy of the Commedia’s extraordinary emphasis on speechwithout focusing on the significance of a courtly female speaker, so Idid not notice the signficance of the verb lodare being placed in themouth of the stilnovist lady. With ‘‘di te mi lodero’’ Beatrice takes ona new mantle and a new role: rather than passively being praised, sheis actively doing the praising (note the heightened reflexive forms, ‘‘milodero’’), and so becoming Dante’s Beatrix loquax.

* * *The figure of Beatrice is a complex hybrid, a mosaic constructed

out of the tesserae of many different traditions, who conserves manyof her courtly traits while simultaneously demonstrating a mature re-configuration of the gender paradigm inherited from the courtly lyric.Dante also acts as the historian of record for women in the Commedia,as he does in the case of Francesca da Rimini—and for many otherwomen as well. Moreover, in sharp contrast to the courtly poetry ofhis youth, Dante’s portraits of women in the Commedia, howeverbrief, explore their subjectivity and assign moral agency. He seemsparticularly drawn to cases of marital and family abuse: we think of Piain Purgatorio ! and Piccarda in Paradiso !. I predict that a historicized

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unpacking of Dante’s representation of Piccarda, analagous to what Idid with Francesca, will prove very fruitful, for Dante signposts theconnection of Piccarda to Francesca and to issues of compulsion andthe will through his use of the Nicomachean Ethics in forging his con-trapasso for Inferno $.21 Aristotle’s examples of compulsion—‘‘if hewere to be carried somewhere by a wind, or by men who had him intheir power’’—resonate not only for Inferno $ but also for Piccarda inParadiso !: Piccarda narrates a story according to which ‘‘men had herin their power’’ and precipitates a lengthy meditation on compulsion,not in its more rarified ‘‘Desire-compelled-me’’ variant, but in thebrutally stark forms of the physical coercion imposed upon her. Whilethere are famous women in the Commedia, such as Clare of Assisiand the Empress Constance, the text engages more fully with womenotherwise consigned to historical oblivion; even Beatrice Portinari fallsinto this category.22 Any serious assessment of Dante’s role in the his-tory of women will have to take the measure of this engagement.

In the Commedia women explode the courtly code by becomingspeakers, in the case of Beatrice a veritable Beatrix loquax, and in Boc-caccio’s texts as well women are endowed with language. Boccaccio’sworks range from early courtly works in the vernacular to the misog-yny of the later Corbaccio, also in the vernacular, and the Latin ency-clopedic De mulieribus claris. At the center of this great woman-oriented literary production stands the Decameron, in which Boccacciodefends his targeting of female readers precisely on the basis of theirgreater need and his greater utility. Women are cloistered and en-closed, constrained by the wishes of their families and immured intheir rooms, while men have access to a host of distracting activities:‘‘men, if they want, are able to walk abroad, see and hear many things,go fowling, hunting, fishing, riding and gambling, or attend to theirbusiness affairs’’ (Decameron, Proemio, %&). This dichotomy betweenthe relative access of men and women to the benefits of human andsocial intercourse—including sexual—is the ethical template on whichBoccaccio constructs his masterpiece.

As we saw in ‘‘Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante andGuittone d’Arezzo,’’ the previous essay in this volume, there is a directline from the conclusion of Guittone’s canzone Altra fiata, with itsconcern for and commitment to language that will be of moral andpractical utility, to the central passage in Dante’s Doglia mi reca, inwhich Dante says that he will now write more clearly in order to be of

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greater use to his female audience: ‘‘perche lo meo dire util vi sia.’’Utility is a key feature of this tradition, clearly articulated in Boccac-cio’s Decameron, another text addressed, not just once or twice butconsistently and indefatigably, to women. Boccaccio defends his tar-geting of female readers precisely on the basis of their greater need.Women are cloistered and enclosed: ‘‘ristrette da’ voleri, da’ piaceri,da’ comandamenti de’ padri, delle madri, de’ fratelli e de’ mariti, il piudel tempo nel piccolo circuito delle loro camere racchiuse dimorano’’(constrained by the wishes, the pleasure, and the commandments oftheir fathers, their mothers, their brothers and their husbands, most ofthe time they remain enclosed in the small compass of their rooms)(Decameron, Proemio, $%). Therefore, argues Boccaccio, women havemost need of what he has to offer; indeed, his discourse will be ofgreatest utility to them:

E quantunque il mio sostentamento, o conforto che vogliam dire,possa essere e sia a’ bisognosi assai poco, nondimeno parmi quellodoversi piu tosto porgere dove il bisogno apparisce maggiore, sı per-che piu utilita vi fara e sı ancora perche piu vi fia caro avuto. (Deca-meron, Proemio, &)

And though my nourishment, or comfort if we want to call it such,may seem to the needy to be rather slight, nonetheless it seems to methat it should be offered more readily where the need seems greatest,both because it will be of greater utility in that quarter and because itwill be more appreciated.

As he embarks on his book Boccaccio states that the ladies whoread it will be able to derive from it both delight and useful counsel:‘‘utile consiglio’’ (Decameron, Proemio, $'). And he ends the Deca-meron on the same note, turning again to his female audience andasking us to remember him, if what we have read has proven of anyservice: ‘‘E voi, piacevoli donne, con la sua grazia in pace vi rimanete,di me ricordandovi, se a alcuna forse alcuna cosa giova l’averle lette’’(And you, sweet ladies, with His grace remain in peace and rememberme, if some benefit has come to some of you from reading these)(Decameron, Conclusione dell’Autore, ()).

In ‘‘Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi: Toward a SexualPoetics of the Decameron,’’ chapter $! in this volume, I endeavored toshow that, for all its programmatic ambiguity, the Decameron does

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indeed offer benefits to its female readers. Boccaccio uses verbs tosignify male freedom in the Proem of the Decameron, where we findthe alignment of deeds and verbs with men. The pains of love arealleviated for men, says Boccaccio, because, while women are forcedinto immobility that increases melancholy, men have access to a hostof distracting activities, expressed as nine successive infinitives: ‘‘percio che a loro, volendo essi, non manca l’andare a torno, udire e vedermolte cose, uccellare, cacciare, pescare, cavalcare, giucare o mercatare’’(so that men, if they want, are able to walk abroad, see and hear manythings, go fowling, hunting, fishing, riding and gambling, or attend totheir business affairs) (Decameron, Proemio, $%). These same activitiesare used throughout the Decameron to generate metaphors for sex,with the result that the text is hard-wired, through the metaphors thatequate sex with various masculine activities, to contaminate the worldof women and the world of men, allowing women access to the maleworld of mobility, deeds, and accomplishment. The Decameron’s sex-ual metaphors are literal bridges between two gendered activities thatare accorded different status and worth along gender lines: the meta-phors serve to transfer or carry over some of the worth accorded men’swork to women’s work, thus transferring to women some of the sym-bolic worth accorded to men.

My point here is that the Decameron can be inscribed within aspecific tradition, which, if not in itself feminist, is arguably the tradi-tion in which feminism could later take root. This is the tradition inwhich female interlocutors are not just tropes, not just part of thepoet’s self-construction, as they are for courtly poets. Standing be-tween courtliness, on the one hand, and misogyny, on the other, thisis the tradition that is moralizing, didactic (to the point of frequentlybeing paternalistic and obnoxious), utilitarian, pragmatic—and thattruly addresses issues of women in society. This is the tradition whosehallmark is a stress on the utility of discourse, a feature of the Deca-meron that has not typically been connected to its protofeminism butthat I would firmly connect to a certain kind of writing to and aboutwomen. This current of Italian letters—pragmatic, moralizing, andfully committed to the utility of poetic discourse—culminates in Boc-caccio, an author for whom the issues of women and their place insociety are never peripheral.

I am suggesting that we can identify the moralizing, utilitarian,pragmatic strand of Italian letters—starting with Guittone d’Arezzo

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and going forward to Boccaccio—as the more open and progressivetoward women. It is extremely interesting, from this perspective, thatPetrarch did not write such poems. His vernacular output does notinclude poems like Altra fiata and Doglia mi reca; his moral poems,political poems, and poems of friendship engage men rather thanwomen. Moreover, when Petrarch turns Boccaccio’s programmaticallyambiguous Griselda story, the last story of the Decameron (#$.#$), intoan exemplum of exceptional wifely obedience with the prefatory wordsDe insigni obedientia et fide uxoria, he also translates it into Latin,indicating that his target audience is not female. He is not trying tobe useful to women, but to participate in a cultural discussion overthe heads of women23—not sotto benda but sopra benda. While Boc-caccio, a master of verisimilitude, eschews the verisimilar in his vernac-ular tale, and thus makes it harder for even a misogynist to see silentGriselda as a good wife in any normative, nongrotesque sense, letalone for a female reader to identify with her (and he widens the avail-able hermeneutic spectrum by adding Dioneo’s strong critiques ofboth Griselda and her husband), Petrarch goes to great lengths tomake Griselda’s circumstances less offensive, not stripping her nakedin public, allowing her opportunities for speech, and working ‘‘tosoften the harshness of the marquis’s actions,’’ so that Griselda canserve more readily as the type of an obedient wife.24 The next chapterin a gendered history of Italian literature will have to deal with thesignificance and influence of Petrarch’s remarkable—and in my opin-ion remarkably regressive—traslatio.

Put very succinctly, I would take my analysis here as yet one moredemonstration—this time in the area of gender roles—of what itmeans that Petrarch triumphed over Dante as the model for subse-quent generations of Italian poets. Petrarch forged his identity againstDante’s by going back to the courtly paradigm that Dante abandoned,thus institutionalizing a model of gender relations that endured forcenturies and that, through the extraordinary internet that was Euro-pean literary Petrarchism, became a cultural trope. To go back to thecase of Francesca, we could say that the reading of Inferno % that ulti-mately emerged—depoliticized and stripped of much of Dante’sagenda—is precisely a Petrarchan reading. Dante took on the task ofbeing the historian of record with respect to Francesca’s story, andwhether or not his treatment of her can be classified as ‘‘feminist,’’ itis certainly culturally anomalous in the respect and dignity accorded

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the personhood of the dynastic wife, a dignity that derives from thetext’s commitment to her historicity, her identity, her self. The com-mitment to female historicity and selfhood is not a feature that weassociate with Petrarch, however, and it is Petrarch who set the agendafor the subsequent Italian literary tradition.

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Gente noiosa, Guittone goes so far as to script a dialogue between himselfand his beloved, so that high rents and love coexist in one poem.

$%. These verses—‘‘e qual armito e quel che se tenesse / s’una pla-gente donna el richedesse / com’om fa lei’’ (Ahi lasso, #!–#")—seem likea distant precursor of the story of Alibech (Decameron #.$&)!

'&. Ahi lasso, !!–!(: ‘‘falla e fa donna fallare; / adonque che dirittoha ’n lei biasmare?’’

'$. Ahi lasso, )#–)%: ‘‘Vale per se: nent’ho detto a sembrante; /apressoval che fa l’omo valere: / che ’ngegno, forzo, ardimento, podere /e cor detutto ben mettere avante / donali donna en su’ amorosa spera; /for che elnon saveria quasi altro fare / che dormire e mangiare.’’ Note the stress onworth, valere: we saw a man’s worth—a poet’s worth, a lover’s worth—inGuittone’s signature canzone, Ora parra, and now we see a woman’sworth in Ahi lasso.

*+,-. ,+ /012,-3 $"

*+,-. ,+4135 1 6-*5-3-5 07.,+38 +9 7,1:71* :7,-31,;3- ,47,0 1 57./;..7+* +9 51*,- ’. <-1,37= :+>;1=

This essay, not previously published in this form, takes its frameworkmaterial from ‘‘Lifting the Veil? Notes toward a Gendered History ofItalian Literature,’’ in Medieval Constructions in Gender and Identity: Essaysin Honor of Joan M. Ferrante, ed. Teodolinda Barolini (Tempe: ArizonaCenter for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, '&&(), $"%–%&, and inte-grates it with new work on Beatrice. Condensed versions of this materialare also available in my entries ‘‘Dante Alighieri’’ and ‘‘Italian Literature’’in Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia, ed. MargaretSchaus (New York and London: Routledge, '&&").

$. We do well to bear in mind that Joan Ferrante’s pioneering vol-ume, Woman as Image in Medieval Literature from the Twelfth Century toDante (New York: Columbia University Press, $%)(), was published morethan thirty years ago.

'. A historicist reading of this sort is a logical development once onehas ‘‘detheologized’’ one’s reading of the Commedia, as I proposed doingin The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante ($%%'). In the case of In-ferno (, detheologizing allows one to postulate interpretive categories morecomplex than ‘‘Dante places Francesca in hell, so his view of her isnegative.’’

#. For a full discussion of Guittone’s Altra fiata and Dante’s Dogliami reca from this perspective, see in this volume ‘‘Sotto benda: Gender in

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the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo (With a Brief Excursus onCecco d’Ascoli).’’

!. See my Dante’s Poets, #$$, and the following chapter.%. In treating the Commedia’s Vergilian problematic, it is useful for

critical purposes to separate two sets that Dante intertwines: in one set weplace Dante’s deformations and revisions of Vergilian texts, notably theAeneid; in the second set we place his handling not of Vergil’s texts but of‘‘Virgilio,’’ the character invented for the Commedia. See, in this volume,‘‘Minos’s Tail: The Labor of Devising Hell (Aeneid ".!&'–&& and Inferno%.'–#!).’’

". The bond between mother and infant possesses an almost eroticcharge: ‘‘[T]wo people do not gaze into each other’s eyes without speechfor over ten or so seconds unless they are going to fight or make love oralready are. Not so with mother and infant. They can remain locked inmutual gaze for thirty seconds or more’’ (Daniel Stern, The First Relation-ship: Mother and Infant [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,'())]).

). Rachel Jacoff, ‘‘The Tears of Beatrice: Inferno **,’’ Dante Studies'$$ ('(+#): '–'#; quotation at +.

+. Marianne Shapiro, Woman Earthly and Divine in the ‘‘Comedy’’ ofDante (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, '()%), '$!.

(. See F. Regina Psaki, ‘‘The Sexual Body in Dante’s Celestial Para-dise,’’ in Imagining Heaven in the Middle Ages, ed. Jan S. Emerson andHugh Feiss (New York: Garland, #$$$), !)–"'; quotations at %#, %+. Seealso eadem, ‘‘Dante’s Redeemed Eroticism,’’ Lectura Dantis '+–'( ('(("):'#–'(, and eadem, ‘‘The Sexualized Body in Dante and the MedievalContext,’’ Annali di storia dell’esegesi '& ('(("): %&(–%$.

'$. It is hard to disagree with Victoria Kirkham when she notes, in‘‘A Canon of Women in Dante’s Commedia,’’ Annali d’Italianistica )('(+(): '"–!', ‘‘a vein of misogyny that shoots beneath the surface of theentire poem’’ (&!). I am less persuaded by Rachel Jacoff ’s view that thefemale is the figure of transgressive desire in the Commedia, that there isno ‘‘image of female desire that is not in and of itself transgressive’’ ('!#);see Jacoff, ‘‘Transgression and Transcendence: Figures of Female Desirein Dante’s Commedia,’’ Romanic Review )( ('(++): '#(–!#.

''. For instance, in ‘‘The Tears of Beatrice’’ Rachel Jacoff suggeststhree layers of interpretation for the weeping Beatrice: the traditional‘‘sentimental’’ and ‘‘psychologizing’’ interpretation, an existing classiciz-ing literary interpretation, and then the biblical intertext that she adds,thus offering us a Beatrice whose construction incorporates elements ofpsychological realism, classical intertexts, and finally a biblical/typologicaldimension.

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$%. Rachel Jacoff and William A. Stephany, Inferno % (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, $&'&), %#. They note further: ‘‘In theplaces where Beatrice comes closest to describing herself (Purgatorio (((,$%$–)', (((*, !&ff.), she is still speaking of herself only in relation toDante’’ (%").

$). The Undivine Comedy, )+)n)".$!. ‘‘Beatrice’s androgyny, on the other hand, openly increases her

power and enhances her being’’ (‘‘A Canon of Women,’’ )$).$#. The adjective appears otherwise only to qualify God’s ‘‘infallibil

giustizia’’ (Inf. %&.#").$". Robert Pogue Harrison, The Body of Beatrice (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, $&''), $&.$,. See Joan M. Ferrante, ‘‘Dante’s Beatrice: Priest of an Androgy-

nous God,’’ Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, OccasionalPapers % (Binghamton, N.Y.: CEMERS, $&&%), )–)%.

$'. On the stilnovist elements of Inferno %, see Dante’s Poets, '; forthe grafting of lyric and romance elements in cantos % and #, see ibid.,'–$+.

$&. Jacoff and Stephany comment: ‘‘Yet there are clear advances overthe Vita Nuova’s version of Beatrice; Canto ** reveals a Beatrice who initi-ates action and who speaks, unlike the distant figure of Dante’s youthful‘libello’ ’’ (Inferno %, )').

%+. Dante’s Poets, &. Jacoff and Stephany note that Beatrice’s promise‘‘takes part of its meaning from the value of praise as a speech act as Dantehad earlier defined it in the Vita Nuova’’ (Inferno %, $").

%$. See in this volume ‘‘Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinc-tions in Matters of Love): Inferno # in Its Lyric and AutobiographicalContext’’ for Dante’s use of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in making thecontrapasso of Inferno #.

%%. Of course, Beatrice’s full—historical—name comes to us fromBoccaccio, not Dante, so the issues of our acritical reliance on Boccaccioas a source that are discussed elsewhere in this volume (see especially‘‘Editing Dante’s Lyrics and Italian Cultural History’’ and ‘‘Dante andFrancesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender’’) apply here as well.

%). In ‘‘The Griselda Story in Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer,’’ inChaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, $&')), %)$–!', Robin Kirkpatrick inscribes thestory into the tradition of ‘‘humanist antifeminism,’’ adding cogently that‘‘Griselda would have made the perfect wife for a humanist’’ (%)%).

%!. The citation is from the still-useful work of J. Burke Severs, TheLiterary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale (New Haven: Yale Univer-sity Press, $&!%), $). Kirkpatrick comments on ‘‘the almost total silence’’

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of Boccaccio’s Griselda: ‘‘In Petrarch and Chaucer, Griselda is allowed tospeak with some eloquence about her position. But Boccaccio time andagain emphasizes the brevity of her responses. Which is the more strikingin that throughout the Decameron Boccaccio’s heroines have never beenat a loss for words in their own defence, either the witty word of a Ma-donna Filippa or the tragically composed rhetoric of a Ghismonda.Though Griselda’s silence has occasionally a hieratic quality to it, it isalso, in the context of the whole Decameron, somewhat sinister and per-verse’’ (#$$).

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