Content area
Abstract
This dissertation examines how Petrarch's and Boccaccio's major poetic works critically assess both literature as an autonomous discipline and the poet as the heir of the moral philosopher. As the ragione of medieval philosophy is dubitative in nature, implying the art of reasoning in a disputational form, and thus putting into question the idea of a universal truth, ragionare is a key-verb of coeval poetry and prose, where sub-genres largely shaped according to the structures of debate, judgment, evaluation proliferate. I show how the definition of the literary work as a ragionamento relates poetry to the realm of rational discourse and implies its double nature, discursive and logical. Inherited from the earlier tradition, the poetic ragionare was significantly charged with new meaning by Dante: most of his lyric poetry considered love as a form of sapientia rationally governed, and identified it with ragione, with philosophy itself. While Petrarch and Boccaccio shared the idea of literature as a colloquy, a ragionamento among friendly intendenti, they rejected a tradition that had made of poetry the ground for philosophical speculation in argumentative form: Boccaccio's literary canonization of Dante, as I show, occurs at the expense of Dante-the-dialectician, who is “censored” in order to promote Dante-the-poet as a moral philosopher instead. By appropriating and undermining the forms of syllogistic argumentation in his poetic works, Petrarch challenges the disputational mode of Aristotelian philosophers and of XIIIth century philosophical poetry, namely Dante's poetry of the Convivio. Boccaccio's Decameron is a study on the limits of knowledge, a questioning of the possibilities of interpretation and judgment in logical terms (the search for a ragione in events has to face the lack of a linear relation between causes and effects), an ethical manual portraying the act of reasoning as a form of mundane, and therefore ambiguous, Prudentia. The figure of Ulysses, paradigmatic of both Prudentia and curiosity, stands as the image of the search for knowledge fictionalized by the Decameron, where the proving through experience replaces logical demonstrations, but also fictionalizes some of the ethical and philosophical standpoints recurrent in Petrarch's own writings.
