Petrarch's Guide to the Holy Land: Itinerary to the Sepulcher of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Francesco Petrarch. Petrarch's Guide to the Holy Land: Itinerary to the Sepulcher of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Ed. and trans. Theodore J. Cachey, Jr. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. 242 pp. index. append. illus. bibl. $37.50. ISBN: 0-268-03873-2.

This edition of Petrarch's short guidebook to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, probably earlier than the sixteenth century editions of Petrarch's Opera commonly referred to as the Itinerarium Syriacum, is presented here in a facsimile of a fourteenth century Cremona manuscript, with transcription and facing English translation. Petrarch's text was written in its entirety or compiled from previous notes, which, in the light of Petrarch's working habits, is most likely. Its production "in three days" (20.0, 159) may be a "brevitas-modesty" topic, which Petrarch used even when referring to the massive De remediis utriusque Fortune, his Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul that occupied him for years. On 4 April 1358 the book was handed in fair copy to a nuncius of Giovanni Mandelli, a man at arms and executive representative of the Visconti (append. 2) who had requested it after Petrarch's refusal to join him and a noble entourage on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Beginning with Genoa, the text follows the west coast of Italy, based on Petrarch's own travels, southward to the Bay of Naples, where he reviews among the many places he visited there Giotto's now lost Royal Chapel frescoes (10. 2, 212). Petrarch owned an "icon" of the Blessed Virgin by the artist (Petrarch's Testament, ed. T. E. Mommsen [1957], 12). The remainder of his directions usque [ad] Ierusalem et Alexandriam (66, nn. 8 and 206) is drawn from literary and scriptural sources, maps and probably also coins and medals in his library which let him armchair travel, quickly, comfortably, safely, and without the seasickness he dreaded (Ep. Sen. ix.2).

The introduction seeks to profile Petrarch's medieval Latin text belonging to an old and well-articulated late antique and medieval subject literature, as a "self-fashioning" force in the national effort in search of identity. This leads far afield and raises questions of approach, documentation, and interpretation that cannot be treated adequately within the frame of a brief review. Information "About the Text and Translation" precedes the illustrations and maps (67-82) and the facsimile (ff. 1r-20r, pp. [84-160]), followed by substantive, helpful notes.

When one looks at the first facsimile with its opening enthymeme (which follows to the letter what Petrarch read in his "tattered" Quintilian)--and sees, reads, and hears the pulsating two and three syllable chains, hallmarks of the text, interlacing with strategically placed prose rhythms as profiling demarcations and compound end cadences, one cannot but regret that the introduction altogether ignores Petrarch's "official" Latin discourse and its textual equilibristics--Guido Martellotti's impalcatura ritmica the medievals looked and listened for. Nevertheless, more often than not, the translation negotiates well the tensions between an artful text that relentlessly tests the limits of its synthetic, inflection-based language, and our analytic idiom in which sentence meaning is primarily controlled by word order (Medieval Latin, ed. F.A.C. Mantello and A. G. Rigg [1996], 89). Perhaps following in the footsteps of an established Petrarchan practice, the English text resolutely treats each language as language, sets native meaning against native meaning, even though sonorities, dynamics, and rhythms may differ, in order to serve as Petrarch's English horn. Thus (proem. 1, 84-85): Sepe premeditata destituunt, / insperata contingunt.

Often what is planned does not take place/and the unhoped for happens.

  (Parallel openings and foreshortened second half sentence; no
  homoioteleuton); / less felicitous (20.4, 158-59):
  facile, tantum ac talibus magistris quantum prosperis sit fidendum
  disces perpetuoque memineris.
  You will easily learn from so many and such great teachers how little
  one has to trust a favorable state of affairs, and you will remember
  forever.
  (Sidestepping the irony [quantum ... sit fidendum]; a modern
  ontological term for prosperis; no alliterative assonant linkage
  [tantum ... talibus magistris quantum prosperis]).

Finally, an apparent misreading needs mentioning: The transcription "Yehsu" of the routine fourteenth-century abbreviation in the scribal Latin rubric (gen., always in Greek letters), also reproduced on the title page, is unusual and not listed in Adriano Cappelli, Lexicon abbreviaturarum (1928).

This first Latin-English version of the Itinerarium is a useful and welcome addition to the canon of Petrarch's works available to the modern English reading public. It is also a well designed, generously illustrated volume, a credit to its publisher.

CONRAD H. RAWSKI

Case Western Reserve University, Emeritus