THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY IN THE

VITA NUOVA

Few texts of the Italian Middle Ages have been the object of

persistent fascination among scholars as much as the Vita Nuova.

It is quite likely that this fascination stems from the text's elusive-

ness, from a shared sense of the narrative's stubborn refusal to

yield its secret. It is more than a curiosity, for instance, pointing

out that most of the recent critical studies of the "libello"

uniformly probe over and over again its doctrine, structure and

rhetorical traditions, and yet they still present themselves as

avowedly essayistic, in the etymological sense of affording only

complexities.1

If one, however, were to view this critical gesture as

the mark of an exegetical practice authentically aware of the

pitfalls lurking behind the claims to definitive statements, one

would be quickly disappointed. Judging from its rapidly growing

bibliography, it seems that the essay genre is a misnomer, for the

Vita Nuova appears to be all too intelligible and its meaning

quickly available to its readers. It should also be added that

however contrasting the various interpretive perspectives pretend to

be, the actual differences in interpretation are peripheral and

usually they amount to deciding which thematic strand, cultural

code or theological formulations should be emphasized over

another. The commonly held view, coming forth in a variety of

critical vocabularies, is that the Vita Nuova tells the story of a

growth of a poet-lover, a conversion, in effect, from secular

theories of love and their correlative poetic practices (identified,

for instance, with the Provençal conventions) to a perspective

whereby a theology of charitas and a poetic language adequate to

it are attained.2

In short, the text is read as a sort of a prolego-

menon to what the critics assume to be the imaginative and

visionary order celebrated in the Divine Comedy.

My aim in the following pages is not to argue with these

readings in the name of some myth of substantial uniqueness of a

text or of the heterogeneity of works of literature in relation to

their traditions. My aim, instead, is to focus on the Vita Nuova, by

what is at times a simple paraphrase of Dante's own language, as a

parable of a poetic apprenticeship. It is well known that the story-

3

tentative, open-ended interpretations of the Vita Nuova'©s textual

4

line explicitly relates the development of a young boy into

manhood; that it insists that at one moment or another the

protagonist was under certain illusions which he had to shed; that

it also states that the lover did not always understand what his

experiences in his past meant. Time is essential to his growth and

the text, aptly enough, begins under the aegis of memory: it tells

the story of an interpreter who from the viewpoint of the present

searches the dark regions of his own memory. But what is the

object of this apprenticeship? What kind of knowledge is the

protagonist-interpreter after? His goal, as declared in the final

paragraph of Vita Nuova, is to write of Beatrice that which has

never been written of any other woman. The goal is sustained by a

verb of hope, "spero." The image of hope, a verb which is

oriented to the future, reverses the memorative structure which

from the beginning governs the movement of the narrative and

opens it to the future. Since the paragraph speaks of a "mirabile

visione" which the lover had, it is possible to speculate that

Dante's project is no longer a retrieval of the past, but a visionary

poetry which belongs to the future. On the face of it, this is an

imaginative leap from the world of deceptive signs, empty images

and hallucinations which run through the Vita Nuova. I hope to

suggest, however, that Dante's project, as stated in the final

paragraph, is a re-discovery of the imagination as the essential

feature of poetic language.

The preamble to the text announces the metaphoric

complications which will be progressively unfolded by the story:

In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria dinanzi a la quale poco

si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita

nova. Sotto la quale rubrica io trovo scritte le parole le quali è mio

intendimento d'assemplare in questo libello; e se non tutte, almeno

la loro sentenzia.3

We are placed right from the start in the court of memory, the

oculus imaginationis, as a classical mythographic motif has it, a

boundless chamber where phantasms and images dwell.4 The

references to memory, the mother of the muses, is a hint, here not

fully articulated, of the link between memory and poetry. More

cogently, it signals that this is a temporal apprenticeship: to learn

for Dante, as well as for Plato, is to remember. But Dante's

Platonism in this context stops here. The search, the importance of

5

which is emphasized by the repeated forms of the verb "trovare"

in the paragraph, will transcend recollection. The protagonist does

not simply remember, but interprets the signs of the past.

The first experience of the apprenticeship is the decisive

encounter between Dante and Beatrice. The inner sense of what is

related in chapter two emerges when we look at it in conjunction

with chapter three. Both chapters deal with the operations of the

imagination: in the first vision of Beatrice the lover's spirits are so

strangely affected that Dante is under the sway of love "per la

virtù che li dava la mia imaginazione." Chapter three recounts

Beatrice's second appearance, nine years after the first one, and

her greeting the lover. Thinking of her, the lover falls asleep and

has a "maravigliosa visione," which he decides to make known to

many of the famous poets of the time. The sonnet, "A ciascun'alma

presa e gentil core," dramatizes, as is well known, how Love holds

the poet's heart in his hand and, after waking the lady, feeds it to

her. The sonnet was answered by many, among whom Guido

Cavalcanti who sent Dante a sonnet in which he explicates the

content of the dream vision. Guido's "Vedeste, al mio parere,

onne valore," marks the beginning of their friendship.5

The friendship between the two poets is a constitutive category

of the Vita Nuova: Friendship comes forth as a metaphor for an

intellectual conversation, for a certain benevolence of minds on

account of which the two friends, in good will, "turn together,"

exchange and communicate ideas, share the secrets of their craft,

decipher and penetrate each other's fablings. From this point of

view we must say that there is a drastic opposition in the Vita

Nuova between on the one hand, Beatrice, the beloved, who

eventually will not respond to or even acknowledge her lover, and

in whose presence he will be unable to speak, and, on the other

hand, Guido, the friend, with whom Dante will communicate

thoughts and will probe the significance of things and words. But

in spite of the assumed transparency in their intellectual

correspondence, Guido's interpretation of Dante's vision, like

those of all the others, is in error: "Lo verace giudicio del detto

sogno non fue veduto allora per alcuno, ma ora è manifestissimo a

li più semplici."

The interpretation appears wrong now from the perspective of

the narrator. What was wrong with it? What Guido had

understood is that in his dream vision Dante had seen Love, which

eventually will live (and here Guido's language shifts to the present

6

tense, in contrast to the past absolute of the account of the dream)

in a place "dove noia more, e tien ragione nel cassar de la

mente."6

Guido, in short, discovers an abstract, immutable truth

and a general, objective thought in Dante's dream; he transforms,

that is, the irreducible particularity of the oneiric experience to the

atemporal generality of an idea. Now the narrator admits that this

transposition of love to a realm of disembodied intelligence is a

philosophical illusion which simply betrays and bypasses the

violence of the scene.

There was another reading of "A ciascun'alma presa" to

which Dante does not explicitly refer in the Vita Nuova. Dante da

Maiano also sent the poet a sonnet, "Di ciò che stato sei

dimandatore," in which he gives Dante medical advice as how

to get rid of the heat that tortures him.7 Dante da Maiano's

response is not some Galenic exposition of the origin of love

starting, say, from the ingestion of the heart; rather, he simply

recommends the lover to wash "la (tua) coglia largamente."

Clearly this medical opinion is also in error; it is, however, of

interest because it echoes the physics of love alluded to in chapter

two, where Dante treats the various spirits, the vital, animal and

natural, as material substances which link the senses to the

perceived objects. Dante da Maiano's response is of interest, in

effect, because it prolongs Dante's own understanding about the

material mechanism of his love. Only now can the narrator

understand that the signs and images of love are neither material,

physical facts, symptoms of a literal imbalance of elements and

humors, as Dante da Maiano and in a way even Cavalcanti would

have it, nor are they purely contingent, insubstantial tortures, as

also Cavalcanti apparently in contradiction with his materialism

has it, which will cease in the speculations of the possible intellect.

The narrator discards the false objectivity and the explicit

significations of these two forms of understanding. Against the

materiality of one and the abstraction of the other Dante is

involved in probing ever-equivocal signs, disguises and masks

through which love and poetry come into being. Thus, the text's

next step is to show how the lover strives to keep his love a secret,

conceal it (as if it were a troubadoric drama) from malicious

gossip. Hence the contrivance of the lady of the screen, a screen

that becomes so completely the defense to the identity of the

beloved that Beatrice herself will end up denying the lover her

greeting. But this is a provisional impasse. The lover's dejection,

7

ensuing from Beatrice's denial of "salute," issues into a vision of

Love telling the lover that it is time to put aside all simulacra. The

lover is enjoined to write poems adorned with "soave armonia,"

but the words are still a "mezzo," a vehicle by which he can

convince his lady of the firmness of his love. After carrying out

Love's commandment, Dante is caught in a battle of thoughts: he

literally does not know which way to take. The poetic crisis, which

finds its epitome in the lines "ond'io non so da qual matera

prenda;/ e vorrei dire, non so ch'io mi dica./ Così mi trovo in

amorosa erranza!" revolves around the conviction that the lady is

unlike other ladies whose hearts can be easily moved to change

their attitudes. This sense of the uniqueness of the lady is at odds

with the variety of thoughts that Love suggests. Since "nomina

sunt consequentia rerum" there ought to be a direct link between

love and its effects as he surmises in the face of the conflicting

feelings he experiences.

The next chapters of the Vita Nuova map the effort to

understand and define the essence of Love as well as find the

language, which Love inspires, adequate to the unique object of the

poet's love. This turns out to be the poetry of praise, which finds

its full expression in the canzone "Donne ch'avete intelletto

d'amore." The poem comes to the lover as he is "passando per un

cammino lungo lo quale sen già un rivo chiaro molto." So few are

the concrete references in the narrative that one must wonder as to

reasons why Dante would mention the river in this context. The

will to write is so intense that the tongue spoke "quasi come per se

stessa mossa." The river, in a sense, explicates the process of

creation, the easy flow from a source, a movement that transcends

itself, and that is always the same by being always different. The

canzone that follows, conventionally taken to be the turning point

in Dante's search for a style of the Vita Nuova, celebrates the

newly found inspiration. The rhetoric of praise for Beatrice, a

woman for whom Heaven and Earth compete, does not, however,

pay off. Ostensibly, the language of praise conveys the lover's awe

and submission to a reality that transcends him. But praise is also a

strategy by which one invests the beloved with qualities and values

so that one may have a response, or in the terms of chapter XXI,

so that one may awaken Love and bring him into existence.

The discovery of Beatrice as the unique figure of love stumbles

against the awareness of her mortality. Chapter XXIII relates

exactly how the lover, afflicted by a painful disease, first thinks

8

that some day Beatrice will die, "di necessitate convene che la

gentilissima Beatrice alcuna volta si muoia." The thought in turn

engenders a presentiment of the poet's own mortality: "Tu pur

morrai." This is the only time in the text that a grammatical future

tense is used. Why does Dante yoke together death and the future,

the importance of which is marked by the unique occurrence of a

grammatical shift? In a way, Dante perceives his world as caught

within the horizon of time and finitude. At this point of the text

the future issues into death, the fearful time of severance, of

Beatrice's and the poet's physical existence detached from

themselves and each other's. This physical severance turns into a

laceration of the imagination, what could be called a semiotic

delirium whereby images are split from their referents: "Così

cominciando ad errare la mia fantasia, venni a quello ch'io non

sapea ove io mi fosse; e veder mi parea donne andare scapigliate...,"

eclipse and earthquakes. Earlier a bond was posited between words

and things; now death is the cutting edge that lays bare the

precariousness of any correspondence between the two.

The wild dreaming of chapter XXIII is provisional, and the

next two chapters provide an extended musing on metaphoric

language, which for Dante is also a pretext to register his deeper

arguments with Guido Cavalcanti. In chapter XXIV, in fact, Dante

first sees coming toward him a gentlewoman, who had been much

loved by "questo mio primo amico." Her name was Giovanna, but

because of her beauty she had been given the name Primavera,

which means Spring. Looking behind Giovanna, Dante sees

coming Beatrice. The succession of the two women suggests a

further link to his mind: Giovanna's nickname, Primavera, means

"she will come first," an etymology which is endorsed by the

meaning of her real name, from John, who preceded the coming of

Christ. It is because of the explicit Christological resonance of the

passage that Beatrice is said to play a Christ-like role in the Vita

Nuova. At a more literal level the text posits a likeness between

Love and Beatrice: "E chi volesse sottilmente considerare, quella

Beatrice chiamerebbe Amore, per molta simiglianza che ha meco."

Reflecting on this encounter Dante decides to "scrivere per rima a

lo mio primo amico (tacendomi certe parole le quali pareano da

tacere), credendo io che ancor lo suo cuore mirasse la bieltade di

questa Primavera gentile . . . "

What is at stake in the passage, I submit, is the issue of

figuration, which extends into the next chapter's discussion of

9

metaphor. More to our concern, the implication of the prose

passage is that Guido possibly no longer thinks of Giovanna as the

object of his love: this figure of love has no enduring value and he

may have discarded it. Cavalcanti's sense of the shiftiness of desire

is so radical that his famous "Donna me prega" is its conscious

elaborate account, and we must briefly turn to it to grasp the

generalized formulations about the relationship between desire

and knowledge.8

The contingency of love is openly stated by Cavalcanti as he

assigns love to the sphere of memory, a faculty which is in the

sensitive appetite and is the emblem of time. This love is not the

child of Venus, which in turn is the daughter of Saturn-Chronos,

but descends from Mars and leads to death. By deploying the

language of natural philosophy Cavalcanti also adds that love

originates from a form which has been perceived and, later, finds

its dwelling place in the Possible Intellect. As in "Vedeste, al mio

parer, onne valore," here too, Love is said to lose its accidental

material attributes and to shine in the eternal light of the Intellect.

The disfigurations and alterations that Love produces in the lover

("Move, cangiando color, riso e pianto,/ e la figura con paura

storna;/ poco soggiorna;...") find their counterpart in the poet's

awareness of the impossibility of providing an adequate image for

it. The last two lines of the second stanza seal this insight: "Non

ha diletto-ma consideranza;/ sì che non pote largir simiglianza."

Unlike Cavalcanti, Dante asserts Beatrice's "simiglianza" to

Love. His quest is not for minds partitioned from bodies, but for

intelligences which are incarnated in accidental, material bodies.

The quest must pass through bodies: already in chapter VIII of the

Vita Nuova he confronts the dead body ("la morta imagine

avvenente") of one of Beatrice's friends. The scene prefigures the

presentiment of Beatrice's own death, a vision which produced a

disorienting experience in the lover, but in chapter XXIV Beatrice

is acknowledged as the one whose name is Love, even if she may

already be in the shadow of death. For Cavalcanti death is the

boundary of love, the perspective from which whatever has not the

fixity of thought (images, sensations, time) is valueless. For Dante,

instead, the figures, however ephemeral they may be, cannot be

bypassed.

Chapter XXV, in effect, places the metaphor in the

imaginative region where life and death meet. The point of

departure of Dante's reflection is to explain his own poetic practice

10

of referring to Love as if it " . . . fosse una cosa per sè, e non

solamente sustanzia intelligente, ma sì come fosse sustanzia

corporale: la quale cosa, secondo la veritate, è falsa; chè Amore

non è per sè sì come sustanzia, ma è uno accidente in sustanzia. E

che io dica di lui come se fosse corpo...". The body of love is

suggested by attributing to Love various faculties such as laughing

which in truth is a property of man, " . . . le quali cose paiono essere

proprie de l'uomo, e spezialmente essere risibile." The phrase

echoes, I would like to submit, a classical discussion of metaphor.

Both Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas refer to laughter as the

property of man. "Homo ridet" has a proper sense; to say,

instead, "pratum ridet" is a metaphor to describe the coming of

spring.9 The attributes of corporeality to Love, Dante goes on, are

only metaphoric, not literal, the way physicians, for instance,

would think of it. The use of "figura ο colore rettorico" is the

prerogative of poets, who have traditionally spoken " . . . a le cose

inanimate, sì come avessero senso e ragione . . . ". Both Vergil and

Lucan are also singled out for making inanimate objects speak to

animate beings or the other way around.

It is this radical metaphoricity which is here expounded that

accounts for the ghostly impression we get in reading the Vita

Nuova: substances are spiritualized, bodies are dematerialized,

essences are incarnated in luminous bodies, physical surroundings

have nothing opaque about them, ideas are refracted through

images and sensuous qualities and lose their abstractions. This

ghostly world, where everything is a sign which the interpreter

obsessively registers, finds its sublime revelation in the sonnet

transcribed in chapter XXVI.

Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare la donna mia quand'ella altrui saluta, ch'ogne lingua deven tremando muta, e li occhi no l'ardiscon di guardare.

Ella si va, sentendosi laudare, benignamente d'umiltà vestuta; e par che sia una cosa venuta da cielo in terra a miracol mostrare.

Mostrasi sì piacente a chi la mira, che dà per li occhi una dolcezza al core, che 'ntender no la può chi no la prova:

e par che de la sua labbia si mova un spirito soave pien d'amore, che va dicendo a l'anima: Sospira.

11

Written in the "stilo de la loda," which the poet retrieves, the

sonnet describes Beatrice's passage as a luminous apparition.

Viewed by some as "one of the most beautiful angels of Heaven,"

Beatrice is, to use the term of a contemporary writer, an epiphany.

As she passes, she suspends the conditions and laws of the

ordinary world and the world stands still. The anaphoras,

alliterations and the slow cadence of the lines create an incantatory

mood and make the powerful joy which is felt at Beatrice's vision

resonate: the interplay of silence (every tongue, we are told, turns

mute) and sound converges on the final hushed "sospira." There is

in the sonnet a process of internalization as it moves from the

evocation of the outside world, where Beatrice appears undefined

as a "cosa," into the heart of the beholder, to the moment when

the spirit tells the soul to sigh. In this process the real world

vanishes and any distinction between things and essences collapses

in Beatrice, who could be called the point of fusion of signifier and

signified.

The joy that emanates from Beatrice's beauty is short lived.

Chapter XXVII turns to Beatrice's actual death, which the

narrator interprets (Chapter XXIX) as an event of cosmic

proportions. From a strictly poetic point of view Dante is

confronted with a central problem. Now that Beatrice has

physically vanished from the world, the text faces the issue of

images voided of any concrete referents. The death of Beatrice

means that images of her have become cadavers of a past. But how

does Dante dramatize, first of all, this problem?

Immediately following the canzone "Li occhi dolenti," which

describes the effects of Beatrice's death on the lover — his grief,

the torture of her memory, the power of her name and his

loneliness — Dante records a series of experiences which have not,

to my knowledge, been given adequate attention. In chapter

XXXII we are told that a close friend of his (the best after Guido),

who is also a relative of Beatrice's, begs the poet to write something

for him about a lady who had died, pretending that it was not

meant for Beatrice. The poet composes a sonnet, a sort of planctus

in which he expresses his sorrow in a way that " . . . paresse che per

lui l'avessi fatto....". The chapter that follows explains Dante's

decision to write two stanzas of a canzone, one on behalf of his

friend, the other for himself. At the first anniversary of Beatrice's

death (chapter XXXIV) the lover is shown while he is sketching

figures of angels on some tablet. He is so deeply absorbed in his

12

thoughts that he is not aware of the presence of some men who

have been watching him. Apologetically he says that "Altri era

testè meco, però pensava." He then transcribes the two beginnings

of a sonnet about his lady's presence in his memory. The memory

of the past makes him look so distressed (chapter XXXV) that he

arouses the pity of a "gentile donna," and for fear of revealing the

wretchedness of his life he leaves the place. The woman's

complexion and pale color (chapter XXXVI) remind him " . . . de la

mia nobilissima donna, che di simile colore si mostrava tuttavia."

The next two narrative divisions stage the lover's battle of

thoughts. The memory of Beatrice is threatened by the lover's new

encounter: actually the pleasure he feels at seeing this new woman

impels Dante to suspect that this is a new love for him. A powerful

vision of Beatrice, as she first appeared to the young Dante, induces

repentance. Chapter XL describes the sight of pilgrims who journey

from distant lands to Rome where they hope to see the "imagine

benedetta," the Veronica, as we are eventually told in Paradiso

XXXI, left by Jesus as "essemplo de la sua bellissima figura."

Dante writes a sonnet which in fact is an apostrophe to the

pilgrims passing through the city unaware of the weight of grief the

city has to bear for Beatrice's absence. By reversing the pilgrims'

physical journey, the subsequent chapter relates the lover's own

journey of the mind to the place where Beatrice dwells. Finally, the

lover experiences a "mirabile visione" and resolves to say no more

of Beatrice for the time being.

The pattern I have summarily delineated re-focuses on the

issue that is central to the Vita Nuova. The lover is bound to a

world of pure images and representations. The pilgrims go to

Rome to see Christ's image; the lover draws the picture of an angel

or is absorbed in the images of his memory. But the section also

dramatizes the lover's predicament: in a world of images the fabric

of stable references seems to be on the verge of dissolving and no

necessary bond seems to exist between images and their referents.

The lover discovers that the destination of his texts can be

arranged and simulated. Early in the narrative (chapter V) the lady

of the screen was a strategy of deception to protect the purity of

the poet's love for Beatrice, but there too, the simulation acquired

a reality that creates a crisis between Beatrice and the lover. Now

Dante has to warn us that on careful examination of the two

stanzas of the canzone he writes for his friend one can clearly see

that "diverse persone parlano." More cogently, Dante now

13

discovers that the persistence of memory is endangered by forget-

fulness, that his love can be replaced, and that for all her

uniqueness, the image of Beatrice can be doubled by the "donna

gentile."

The awareness of the constitutive ambiguities of the language

of representation ushers in the imaginative leap of the final

paragraph of the Vita Nuova; at this point the Vita Nuova more

than a selection of reminiscences from the past is the adumbration

of the book to come, the book of the future — "spero di dicer di

lei quello che mai non fue detto d'alcuna." We are not given a

description of the "mirabile visione." We are simply told that the

mind cannot grasp it nor words yet tell of it. This is the journey of

the poetic imagination, the conviction of poetry's absolute privilege

to be the profound means of exploring the world of the dead and

bring them back to life. The Vita Nuova begins by resuscitating the

images of memory, as if memory were the path to essences, and

ends with a visionary venture into the future. The future, earlier,

was at one with death; now it is the project to write. To the inter-

pretability of memory, Dante substitutes the enigma of the future.

In the openness of the Vita Nuova's end, he also gives up the

thought of the poet who passively waits for inspiration, and

promises, on the contrary, to strive and study in order to write.

The imagination is unveiled not just as a power to give a replica of

one's thoughts and impressions. It is the activity that "places" the

poet between images and their referents, in the heart of the split

between the two, from where the poet can seek unknown worlds

and prepare for the future possible encounter with Beatrice across

the barrier of death. In this most tantalizing of paragraphs Dante

yokes together his notion about what love and writing are: an

exploration of unknown but possible worlds; two activities that

mobilize memory, set the soul in motion, question the reality of

our vision, seize the imagination but also force us to think beyond

the limits of images and appearances. Finally the two activities

project encounters that can do violence even on our ready-made

thoughts about what both love and writing can turn out to be.

GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA

_______

Cornell University

NOTES

14

1

(Princeton, N.J., 1929); Charles S. Singleton, An Essay on the "Vita

Nuova" (Cambridge, Mass., 1949); Mark Musa, "An Essay on the 'Vita

Nuova'," in Dante's Vita Nuova (Bloomington and London, 1973);

Jerome Mazzaro, The Figure of Dante: An Essay on the "Vita Nuova"

(Princeton, 1981). 2

This motion is largely shared by the commentators mentioned in

note number one. For a more technical account, see D. De Robertis, Il

libro della Vita Nuova (Firenze, 1961); see also the introductory remarks

by Edoardo Sanguineti in Dante, Vita Nuova, ed. E. Sanguined (Milan,

1977), esp. pp. XV-XLIII. 3

I am quoting from Vita Nuova-Rime, a cura di Fredi Chiappelli (Milan, 1973).

4

For this motif see Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago,

1966); cf. also the study by M.W. Bundy, The Theory of the Imagination

in Classical and Medieval Thought (Urbana, 1927). 5

I am quoting from Guido Cavalcanti, Rime, a cura di M. Ciccuto

(Milan, 1978). 6

The alternation between past and present is the main technical

feature of the sonnet: "Vedeste, al mio parere, onne valore/ e tutto gioco e

quanto bene om sente,/ se foste in prova del segnor valente/ che

segnoreggia il mondo de l'onore,/ poi vive in parte dove noia more,/

. . ." Cavalcanti, p. 140. 7

For the sonnets in response to Dante's first sonnet, see Vita Nuova,

ed. Chiappelli, pp. 79-80. 8

The bibliographical items of major importance to our discussion are

the following: M. Casella, "La canzone d'amore di Guido Cavalcanti,"

Studi de Filologia italiana, 7 (1944), pp. 97-160; Bruno Nardi, "Dante e

Guido Cavalcanti," and "L'amore e i medici medievali," in Saggi e note

di critica dantesca (Milan and Naples, 1966), pp. 190-219, 238-67. See also

Nardi, "L'averroismo del primo amico di Dante," in Dante e la cultura

medioevale, 2nd ed. (Bari, 1949), pp. 93-129. For an entirely different

perspective see J.E. Shaw, Guido Cavalcanti's Theory of Love (Toronto,

1949). Cf. also G. Favati, "Guido Cavalcanti, Dino del Garbo e

l'averroismo di Bruno Nardi," Fiologia Romanza, II (1955), pp. 67-83. See

also the more recent M. Marti, Storia dello Stil nuovo (Lecce, 1974), II,

pp. 377-418 as well as G. Favati, Inchiesta sul dolce stil nuovo

(Firenze, 1975). 9

Aristotle, Parts of Animals, XXI, trans. A.L. Peck (Cambridge,

Mass., 1961), III, 10, p. 281; St. Thomas Aquinas, In Epistolam adGalatas, IV, lectio 7, in Opera Omnia, ed. S.E. Fretté (Paris, 1889), XXI,

230.

See, for instance, J.B. Shaw, Essays on the "Vita nuova"