Writing Time: Dante, Petrarch, and Temporality

Abstract

Trecento Italy, the century of Dante and Petrarch as well as the mechanical clock, represented a pivotal moment of innovation to formal measures of time. These creative expressions reflected transforming notions of ingenuity, and of man’s ability to shape the world and time in which he lived. While the mythic awakening of the self-conscious individual in Renaissance Italy has been largely demystified, criticism has tended to overlook the concurrent shifts to the Trecento temporal imagination, born of parallel practices that sought to recover cosmogonic secrets, and thus power over time. An intriguing conceptual connection lies in the multifaceted ingegno (and its Latin ancestor, ingenium), not merely a faculty or talent but a touch of the divine within, the dynamic enactment of which impels movement in, and beyond, time. Privileging the exceptional ingegno of Trecento to Quattrocento Italy, my dissertation engages in a three-part investigation of its manifestations, which evoke temporal tensions in the dialectic between particular and universal, finite ontology and pure existential being. Part one re-examines the mechanical clock, both a symbol and instrument, and its complex relation to bells in Trecento Florence. Informed by these symbols, part two, turning to poetic ingegno, conducts close readings of Dante’s Commedia and Petrarch’s Canzoniere — granting particular attention to the orologio of Paradiso 10, and the circularity of sestina 30, “Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro,” each emblematic of the manner in which the poets reconstitute time. Finally, part three considers the centrality of the human “maker” in the time matrix of Quattrocento Florence, juxtaposing the strategies of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Girolamo Savonarola to maximize, and transcend, finite time. This multidimensional approach not only excavates a more complete image of time in Renaissance Italy, but also reimagines the progression from Dante to Petrarch, and Petrarch to Italian poetry thereafter. The examination, I suggest, illuminates a paradoxical legacy: on one hand, in the glorification of man’s creativity; and on the other, in the existential anxiety of the time-conscious individual, endemic to modern chronophobia. The increasingly abstracted and self-referential time bespeaks a conspicuous absence of the sacred center, anticipating the transience that has plagued modernity.