Petrarch's Genius: Pentimento and Prophecy.

Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. ix + 216 pp. $34-95.

This is an idiosyncratic book, whose author's spirited refusal to accept the stereotypes of Petrarch criticism is laudable but unfortunately not fertile, generating a reading that is -- to this reader anyway -- wholly implausible. Boyle lays her cards on the table in the introduction, asserting that our collective failure to take Petrarch seriously as a theologian and prophet is the fault of the theologians who have abandoned him to the ignorant ministrations of literary critics: "The responsibility for misinterpretation thus reverts not to scholars of Petrarch but to those who are not scholars of Petrarch: the theologians who have ignored this and other major authors in the Christian tradition" (10). Literary scholars have posited a divided self, a poetics of idolatry, and a dualism in Petrarch's thought; these notions are inconsistent with correct theology, which does not require renunciation of one's poetic gifts or view human art as rivalling the love of God: "The poetics of idolatry is most especially the invention of a theological naivete. This confuses the fictional Augustinus of the Secretum with the historical Augustine and, more grievously, assumes that the anti-rhetoric of either is normative for Christian faith" (3). Proceeding in the very next sentence to exemplify the confusion between the Augustinus of the Secretum and the historical Augustine that she has just deplored, Boyle goes on to note that the "asceticism of Augustinus that demands Franciscus' renunciation of his poetic gift is spiritual pathology," without however clarifying whose spiritual pathology this is, given that Petrarch wrote the words that Augustinus utters. Boyle then states that the "notion that human art contradicts, obstructs, or rivals the love of God is perverse" (3); counter to such perverse constructions of Christian thought, Boyle, sounding perilously like an apologist for Christianity, informs us that the "authentic experience of God in the Judeo-Christian traditions is not the negation but the fulfillment of human nature," and that "although an antagonistic dualism between human and divine creations recurs in Christian culture, dualism has consistently been refuted, as in the ecclesiastical condemnation of the Manichaean and Albigensian heresies" (3).

Sympathetic as I am in general to the anti-Robertsonian strain in this book, and much as I would like, in particular, to find a paradigm for the Rime sparse that could effectively move us beyond the weary refrain of Petrarch's accedia, what Italian critics call his interior dissidio (Boyle seems unaware that this was a topos of Italian criticism long before it was adopted here), the Petrarch offered by Boyle -- an Italian Ezekiel and harbinger of Erasmus, unassailed by inner doubts and monolithically secure in his humanist cultivation of the sacred status of the poet-vates, in short the "true Apollo" of the first chapter's title -- does not square with the Petrarch I know. To start with, Boyle disregards those aspects of the Secretum that do not fit her thesis; in a further confusion of the status of the Secretum's Augustinus, Boyle asks "Was Augustinus' disapproval [of the laurel] to outweigh [King] Robert's approval? or either external judgement to overbalance that of his own conscience?" (42), leaving one to wonder how the disapproval penned by Petrarch himself and put by him in the mouth of a figure he calls Augustinus can be termed an "external judgment" on the par of King Robert's. Moreover, while I admire Boyle's stated program to "integrate the standard division of labor by which critics read the poetry and historians the prose" (10), her uprooting of the poetry is so radical as to make it unrecognizable; a typical sentence strings together English translations taken variously from the Epistles, the treatises, the Latin verse, and the Italian verse, with no regard for original form, positioning, or language. The Rime, a text of unparalleled formal intricacy, is singularly unsuited to this type of handling. Another serious problem is Boyle's cavalier dismissal of the vernacular tradition. For instance, in order to make the untenable point that Petrarch is singlehandedly responsible for upsetting "the tradition of Christian apologetics that had refuted pagan religion by unmasking Apollo as a demon" (26), Boyle tells us that Dante's apostrophe to the Delphic deity at the outset of Paradiso is "no more serious than similar invocations by classical poets when the religion that had inspired such entreaty dwindled to convention" (30). So much for Dante's long struggle to take his beloved classical authors with him on the road to Damascus.

Boyle's goal throughout is to remove any tension between Petrarch's Christianity and his humanism. To this end, on the one hand, she defuses Petrarch's willful program of secularization by denying the theological reference. For instance, with regard to the tension that Petrarch builds into the day of his enamorment, which he does by making it coincide with Good Friday, Boyle writes that the "description in the sonnet of enamorment would thus refer not to the eclipse of Good Friday but the classical figure of adynaton" (38). On the other hand, Boyle pursues her goal by denying the corporeal reference, so that there is no sin for Augustinus to chastise. Thus, Augustinus' reference in the Secretum to Laura as worn out with excessive childbearing becomes "probably an allusion not to the matron of Avignon but to the source of all poetic invention, Mother Rhetoric herself" (62). By systematically allegorizing all fleshly references out of the texts (in a procedure that is surely open to the charge of incorrect theology as well as to that of heavy-handed literary criticism), Boyle deprives Petrarch's message of its temporal core: where his point is that all things die, even Laura, Boyle removes the cosa bella mortal, at which point, what does it matter that "cosa bella mortal passa, e non dura" (Rime sparse 248)?

Even where Boyle's suggestions are intriguing or her erudition informative, the inflexibility of the interpretive matrix leads to less than convincing results. Thus, the lengthy analysis of canzone 323 (95-112), a poem traditionally taken to be about Laura's death but read by Boyle exclusively as a political allegory regarding the demise of the Church, would be more persuasive if Boyle acknowledged the possibility of alternative readings. By the same token, although the historical material regarding events and sites in Avignon is fascinating, the allegory that it serves is not (Laura, first seen in the church of St. Clare and later buried in a Franciscan convent, becomes "When the clarity of vision that marked Petrarch's vatic vocation failed, he reported his ideal as put to rest in the Franciscan |place'" [140].) Except to the degree that its simplifying and flattening interpretation reminds us that Petrarch's polysemy is real, and cannot be evaded, this book does not succeed in bringing us closer to an understanding of Petrarch's complex genius.