The medieval and Renaissance periods in Italy are marked by the discovery of unknown lands, new commercial routes and migration within the Mediterranean world. Our calls for participation invited scholarship on Italian literature between 1200-1600 that examines issues of space and mobility, including topics such as migration, mapping, transnational exchange, colonialism, travel, urban space and the natural world. The LLC Forum on Medieval and Renaissance Italian received many quality abstracts in response to this call for papers, a strong indication of the interest in the subject and the need for extended consideration of its many aspects.
We included three of these abstracts in one of our guaranteed sessions. With this second session on the topic, we wish to accommodate three more promising presentations, and to create an extended exchange with the participants in the first guaranteed session. Here we have collected those abstracts that are especially concerned with urban space and the importance of travel and intellectual exchange between urban centers.
Professor Joseph Stasz demonstrates the collaborative roles of political, artistic, and intellectual spheres in Italian vernacular literary production. He does so by addressing the complex networks of literary transmission present in the late thirteenth century canzoniere MS Banco Rari 217, a work occasioned by Charles de Valois’ journey to Tuscany. Though the document is Pistoian, the manuscript illuminations display Bolognese, and potentially Sicilian, norms; these similarities are posited to reveal a broader trend of mobility for artisans and artistic styles in thirteenth century Italy. Stasz concludes that the manuscript’s collection of tenzoni, or poetic exchanges, exposes an intellectual network responsible for the production of “self-aware” literary material wherein such forms of mobility as physical movement, transmission of thought, and the passage of time are presented on the page.
Professor Teresa Nocita examines the fourteen novelle inserted into the Varii componimenti by Ortensio Lando (Milano, 1510 ca. – Napoli, 1558) as an example of 16th-century Italian literary geography. The author in particular creates a new kind of historical and moral geography in his characterizations of three urban centers: Florence, Venice, and Milan. Exploring the ethical and religious underpinnings of his narrative, Dr. Nocita argues that Lando creates a new kind of anthropological and religious geography that highlights the new societies of Italy during the Counter-Reformation.
Dr. Bili Zhong approaches the relationship between Petrarch and Franciscanism from the angle of urbanized space. He proposes that Petrarch’s self-image as a "wanderer everywhere" is forged not only upon Ulysses, but also the Franciscan travelling. As termed by Julia McClure, the Franciscan history is the history of space: the Franciscan Order is always "on the road." Like the Franciscans, Petrarch’s wandering is not aimless, but with a strong telo. Secondly, both Petrarch and the Order are closely related to the urbanized space. J.V Fleming has pointed out that Francis is not a saint of desert, but a saint in the city. The preaching of the Order is aimed at the city dwellers, too. Likewise, Petrarch’s vita solitaria ends not with the retreat from but the embrace of the world. His secluded life in the countryside is actually a way back to the city, where his dream of a united Italy, the glory of poetry and the independence of humanists can be realized.
Each panel features three presenters who would be limited to 20 minutes each, thereby allowing ample time for unstructured discussion.