Petrarch's Laurels.

Petrarch's correlation of Laura and laurels in his Rime sparse has provoked readers since the fourteenth century to comment upon the vertiginous possibilities of its dramatic and symbolic import. In a famous letter to Giacomo Colonna (Familiares 2.9), Petrarch strenuously denied his respondent's suggestion that Laura was not a real person at all, and that his representation of her was wholly metaphorical, evoking the crown of imperial victory or the laurels of poetic accomplishment. Laura's status as fictive, symbolic, historical, or otherwise has intrigued commentators ever since. Sara Sturm-Maddox's conscientiously detailed book examines in the Rime sparse virtually every passage that offers clues to Laura's figural identity, and it concludes usefully that the coherence of her multiple representations has overlapping moral, rhetorical, poetic, and philosophical significance. Sturm-Maddox achieves her ends internally by relating Petrarch's poems in morte di Laura to those in vita di Laura, and externally by relating their topical features to those in various forerunners from antiquity through the late Middle Ages, up to and including Dante.

The book's argument unfolds in two parts. The first assumes that "in the absence of [a historical] Laura there is the image of [a textual] Laura" (26), and it studies the latter against paradigms of Ovid's Daphne, the sovereign beloved of fin'amors, and the donna angelicata of Dante and the stilnovisti. Laura's singular invulnerability, her sovereign inaccessibility, and her resolute chastity give way to metamorphoses that are by turns lyric, moral, and emblematic. Her representation evokes the landscape of Vaucluse, a raw, untamed setting apt for the representation of desire. The latter in turn compels a chiaroscuro effect, where "the pervasive presence of shade or shadow heightens by contrast the insistence throughout the collection on the light that is their necessary condition" (115). The book's second part pursues moral choices that Laura's changeability, the isolation of Vaucluse, and the spiritual condition of darkness bring forth. The destination of Petrarch's "amorous epiphany" (193) is the summum bonum that his final role as the Virgin's troubadour confirms. Petrarch's narrative itinerary of sin-repentance-redemption is henceforth "not linear but in a special sense specular" (234), in effect projecting a synchronic cosmology of the here-and-now that rivals earlier Christian cosmologies of transcendent sublimation.

Sturm-Maddox usefully contextualizes individual poems among Ovid, Chretien, the Roman de la Rose, Dante, and others, but she chiefly constructs a phenomenology of the lyric text as a whole. Her analysis draws together a vast array of passages exemplifying the laurel topos, often from disparate parts of the collection, juxtaposing poems that are early and late. One result is to encourage a broad-ranging view of the stability, solidity, permanence, or at least continuity of Petrarch's thought. Reinforcing the effect of substantial unity is a prodigious amount of documentation in reference to earlier scholarship. The rich vein of footnotes offers a goldmine of bibliographical information but some incautious citations juxtapose positivist philology or historicist interpretation with poststructuralist speculation as though there were substantial agreement among them. There isn't. The history of Petrarch's reception shows a variety of different Petrarchs registered in different readers' minds' eyes. Part of the fascination of calibrating a relation between the poet's Laura and his laurels derives from the discordant and discrepant possibilities of understanding them. Sturm-Maddox's thoughtfully considered, engagingly written book adds to the fascination by proposing one powerfully unified point of view. Subsequent Petrarch reception will have to take it into serious account.