Fabian Alfie. Comedy and Culture: Cecco Angiolieri's Poetry and Late Medieval Society.

Fabian Alfie. Comedy and Culture: Cecco Angiolieri's Poetry and Late Medieval Society. Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2001.

Fabian Alfie's book-length study of the prolific Sienese poet Cecco Angiolieri seeks to correct previous work on this poet in two major ways: to refute the notion that Cecco's poems present the poet himself, and to demonstrate that his poetry--and comic poetry generally--did not exist in isolation from the more serious literature of its time. Both are quite plausibly argued in a clear and accessible style.

With regard to the first matter, Alfie takes issue with critics who have read the poems as autobiographical statements, proposing that Cecco instead fashioned a persona of the good-for-nothing fellow. Thus out-of-character poems or those that seem to express different "facts" about the poet need not be subtracted from Cecco's attributed works (as they have sometimes been) but rather reveal the fictitious nature of the portrait. Moreover, the scattered circulation of the poems undercuts some scholars' attempts to form them into a sequence that might reveal or create a chronology of the poet's life. While acknowledging that some of the details presented in the verse may indeed represent truths about Cecco's situation, Alfie cautions against a "Romantic" reading that has produced "the Cecco legend," turning his attention instead from the poet's life, about which little is known, to the variety of literary sources that Cecco mined for his own varied poetry: Provencal lyric, Sicilian sonnets, and contemporary Florentine writing.

Cecco's poetry is viewed as "a literary game," which mocks various poetic postures, reusing the lofty vocabulary of amatory verse in conjunction with cruder language to reveal the rhetorical fictions of idealizing--or of his own cynical--love. The element of vituperation, a comic upside-down feature in a society anxious about reputation, had its model already in Provencal verse and the thirteenth-century poems of Rustico di Filippo, and can be linked as well to lovers' complaints about cruel ladies. Cecco's contribution to vernacular lyric, Alfie claims, was the combination of satirical vituperation with the amatory tradition's first-person character. The series of imprecations against his father merely creates a variation on Meo dei Tolomei's similar vituperations of his mother and sister. Cecco presents himself satirically as a negative example, a rogue or a fool, and expects his readers to understand the irony of that self-portrait in the context of shared mainstream values. The descriptions of a life of poverty, for example, are to be read in the context both of the Franciscan movement and of the mercantile horror at a poverty seen as the consequence of foolish, self-destructive behavior; Cecco's poverty is used both to denigrate himself and to poke fun at clerical hypocrisy. His love-relationship comically reverses the adoration of a heavenly lady by showing the poet irrationally enslaved to a vulgar, self-serving plebian. Attending solely to Cecco's connections with vernacular traditions, Alfie says nothing about possible connections with Ovid's ironic persona, frustrated both by love and by a lack of money, or with Plautus's use of young men who wish their fathers would drop dead instead of blocking the son's access to money, sex, and drink. Since this study indicates that Cecco knew some Latin, the limitation to vernacular traditions seems unduly restrictive. Including them might also strengthen the claims that this comic poetry was not marginal and ignored but part of the mainstream literary culture.

Besides tracing Cecco's sources, Alfie discusses at length his interrelations with contemporary poets in order to make the case that there was not a separate "comic school" nor a separate audience of tavern-hiving drunkards and gamblers for these verses. The upside-down world of comic poetry implies a shared "normal" world. Cecco's poems were copied and circulated together with other types of poetry and include the occasional learned reference. Not only did Cecco engage in poetic exchanges with other poets, such as Simone and Dante, but he may even have influenced particular bits of Dante's Vita nuova and Commedia. Boccaccio's reference to him in the Decameron indicates that Cecco continued to be known about in literary circles after his death.

Alfie's study is generally persuasive but problematic in certain ways. The initial discussion of medieval definitions of comedy is not obviously useful; it leads primarily to the conclusion that Cecco's comedy does not match these definitions. The debate with previous critics and scholars who read the poems autobiographically is strung out repetitively through many chapters, rather than being dealt with in one introductory locus. Alfie gives ironic or parodic readings even of poems that he agrees could apparently be taken straight as examples of amatory lyric; and even though he emphasizes the variety of Cecco's experiments, not until nearly the end of the book does he briefly admit that not every poem is necessarily ironic. Similarly, Alfie assumes that Cecco expected one correct reading of his poetry, although given the actually varied critical responses to his work and the always inherent problems of irony and parody, this expectation seems naive. Finally, I disagree with Alfie's reading of certain verses: e.g. does "Qualunque ben si fa" "call for the murder and destruction of all those who do not love" (67) or state that such persons can be said to be dead? Are not the "cenni" of "Amor, poi che'n sl greve passo" the gestures of spectators rather than of the lover (70)? Do not the "maitinate" of "Se tutta l'acqua" refer to matins, i.e., prayers, rather than to albas (80)? And surely the second quatrain of "In questo mondo chi non ha moneta" says not that money makes one a poet but rather that rich men, unlike poets, do not need to beg for money. Granted the language is often hard to parse, and these particular disagreements do not affect the over-all efficacy of the book's argument. This is certainly a useful contribution to our understanding both of Cecco's work and of the broader literary culture around 1300.

JANET LEVARIE SMARR 

University of California/San Diego