Linguistic Theories in Dante and the Humanists: Studies of Language and Intellectual History in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy.

This study examines humanist treatments of the questione della lingua which were spurred by a March 1435 debate in Florence. Among the participants, all members of the papal chancery, were Biondo Flavio, Antonio Loschi, Poggio Bracciolini, Andrea Fiocchi, Leonardo Bruni, and Cencio Rustici. The debate concerned the language in ancient Rome: was the linguistic state monolingual - the learned speaking a more refined Latin than the rest of the population - or bilingual - Latin and a true vernacular coexisting? While the various treatises written by some of the participants in the debate and later treatments of the subject have received much critical attention, earlier studies, with the exception of Mirko Tavoni's Latino, Grammatica, Volgare: Storia di una questione umanistica (1984), are more limited in scope. Mazzocco's book seeks to provide a more comprehensive account of the positions adopted on this topic by Biondo, Bruni, Guarino, Poggio, Filelfo, Valla, Alberti, Landino, Lorenzo de' Medici, and other intellectuals. Mazzocco's other objective is to establish the extent to which Dante's remarks on language in the Convivio and the De vulgari eloquentia shaped humanists' linguistic theories. While Mazzocco provides a clear account of the interconnections among humanist considerations of the topic, his contention that Dante directly shaped the thinking of figures like Bruni is less convincing.

Mazzocco's claims concerning Dante's influence are based on a comparison of texts, which provides some general parallels. His argument fails to take into consideration the limited diffusion of the Convivio and the De vulgari eloquentia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The earliest traces of a manuscript tradition for both works go back no further than the end of the fourteenth century. There are only five extant manuscripts of the De vulgari eloquentia. Only Giovanni Villani and Boccaccio (whose knowledge was likely secondhand) mention the De vulgari eloquentia, in the Cronica and Trattatello in laude di Dante respectively. Given the limited diffusion of the Convivio and the De vulgari eloquentia, the question of Dante's influence on Bruni and other humanists needs to be better established and contextualized. Moreover, when fourteenth-century writers (Pietro Alighieri, the Ottimo commentator) allude to the Convivio, they tend to treat this treatise as an appendage to the canzoni they explicate. The commentary was considered quite secondary to the poe,ms themselves. If, as Mazzocco argues, Bruni was "unquestionably familiar" (214) with the Convivio, the use he makes of it was highly unusual, and this in itself ought to be examined. Finally Mazzocco's discussion of Dante's ideas on the comic genre and the development of vernacular poetry in the De vulgari eloquentia fails to take into consideration recent work on the subject by Zygmunt Baranski, Marianne Shapiro, and Henry Ansgar Kelly. Mazzocco's argument would have benefitted from a consideration of other works which helped diffuse Dante's ideas, notably fourteenth-century commentaries and Boccaccio's Trattatello.

Mazzocco is on firmer ground when presenting each humanist's opinion on the language or languages spoken in ancient Rome. Particularly illuminating is Mazzocco's discussion of how Poggio's adherence to a Ciceronian aesthetic influences his reading of Quintilian's remarks on the proper speaking of Latin. While Mazzocco provides a clear overview of the permutations of each writer's position, his illustrations of the historical context of these works is less satisfactory. Little attention is devoted to clarifying the sociocultural circumstances surrounding the composition of each work, much less to the intellectual circles in which the writers themselves moved. Mazzocco, for example, remarks that "a certain Niccolo di Francesco della Luna" (91) influenced Landino's and Lorenzo de' Medici's ideas on the "future development of the Florentine vernacular" (101). Given that Niccolo della Luna was at the center of a circle with close ties to Donato Acciaiuoli, Palla Strozzi and Francesco Filelfo in Milan, this observation bears closer scrutiny. Similarly, Mazzocco, in discussing Landino's efforts to establish the "cultural supremacy of Florence" (98) in the proemio to his 1481 Dante commentary, makes no reference to the antagonistic role played by Nidobeato in his controversial remarks concerning the supremacy of the romagnole dialect in his 1478 Dante commentary. As Carlo Dionisotti has pointed out, Florentine intellectuals tended to view Nidobeato's promotion of the romagnole dialect as a "provocazione linguistica."

This is a suggestive topic, and one hopes that Mazzocco's study will provoke further consideration of humanist treatments of the questione della lingua before Bembo.

Deborah Parker UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA