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PETRARCH Like Dante, Francesco Petrarca, known as Petrarch (1304–1374), was a Florentine who spent much of his life outside his native city. Petrarch’s role in the revival of the classics made him a seminal figure in the literary Italian Renaissance (see Chapter 12). His primary contribution to the development of the Italian vernacular was made in his sonnets. He is considered one of the greatest European lyric poets. His sonnets were inspired by his love for a married lady named Laura, whom he had met in 1327. Though honoring an idealized female figure was a long-standing medieval tradition, Laura was very human and not just an ideal. She was a real woman with whom Petrarch was involved for a long time. He poured forth his lamentations in sonnet after sonnet:

I am as tired of thinking as my thought

Is never tired to find itself in you,

And of not yet leaving this life that brought

Me the too heavy weight of signs and rue;

And because to describe your hair and face

And the fair eyes of which I always speak,

Language and sound have not become too weak

And day and night your name they still embrace.

And tired because my feet do not yet fail

After following you in every part,

Wasting so many steps without avail,

From whence derive the paper and the ink

That I have filled with you; if I should sink,

It is the fault of Love, not of my art.17

In analyzing every aspect of the unrequited lover’s feelings, Petrarch appeared less concerned to sing his lady’s praise than to immortalize his own thoughts. This interest in his own personality reveals a sense of individuality stronger than in any previous medieval literature.

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Dante’s Vision of Hell

The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri is regarded as one of the greatest literary works of all time. Many consider it the supreme summary of medieval thought. It combines allegory with a remarkable amount of contemporary history. Indeed, forty-three of the seventy-nine people consigned to hell in the “Inferno” were Florentines. This excerpt is taken from canto 18 of the “Inferno,” in which Dante and Virgil visit the eighth circle of hell, which is divided into ten trenches containing the souls of people who had committed malicious frauds on their fellow human beings.

Dante, “Inferno,” Divine Comedy

We had already come to where the walk

crosses the second bank, from which it lifts

another arch, spanning from rock to rock.

Here we heard people whine in the next chasm,

and knock and thump themselves with open palms,

and blubber through their snouts as if in a spasm.

Steaming from that pit, a vapor rose

over the banks, crusting them with a slime

that sickened my eyes and hammered at my nose.

That chasm sinks so deep we could not sight

its bottom anywhere until we climbed

along the rock arch to its greatest height.

Once there, I peered down; and I saw long lines

of people in a river of excrement

that seemed the overflow of the world’s latrines.

I saw among the felons of that pit

one wraith who might or might not have been tonsured—

one could not tell, he was so smeared with shit.

He bellowed: “You there, why do you stare at me

more than at all the others in this stew?”

And I to him: “Because if memory

serves me, I knew you when your hair was dry.

You are Alessio Interminelli da Lucca.

That’s why I pick you from this filthy fry.”

And he then, beating himself on his clown’s head:

“Down to this have the flatteries

I sold the living sunk me here among the dead.”

And my Guide prompted then: “Lean forward a bit

and look beyond him, there—do you see that one

scratching herself with dungy nails, the strumpet

who fidgets to her feet, then to a crouch?

It is the whore Thäis who told her lover

when he sent to ask her, ‘Do you thank me much?’

’Much? Nay, past all believing!’ And with this

Let us turn from the sight of this abyss.”

How does Dante’s vision of hell reflect medieval