Rereading Lucan: Reception(s) of the "Bellum Civile" in Fourteenth-Century Italy

My dissertation reappraises the reception of Lucan's Bellum Civile in fourteenth-century Italy and especially in the Latin and Italian works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. I investigate how the "tre corone" approached the figure of Lucan as a poet and refashioned his poem to support their diverse literary, political, and philosophical agendas. Throughout the dissertation I make use of late-medieval exegesis of Lucan and writings by "minor" Trecento authors, in order to assess how the Bellum Civile was interpreted in fourteenth-century literary culture more generally. Rejecting previous scholarly assumptions, I argue that the Bellum Civile was a major source of inspiration for the articulation of early-humanistic concepts of literature, ethics, and politics. When discussing the specific features and functions of Lucan's fourteenth-century reception, my study demonstrates that the Bellum Civile was interpreted and reused in profoundly different ways. The poem was read variously as both a pro-Caesar and an anti-Caesar work, and redeployed to both authorize and criticize autocracy; in a related development, Lucan’s poem was regarded as exemplifying different notions of "tragedy". Furthermore, I contend that it is possible to identify a shift in the way Lucan and his work were regarded between the early and the late fourteenth century: in the latter part of the Trecento, a greater emphasis was placed on Lucan's biographical history and on the contrast between Lucan's and Virgil's epics. While drawing on the methods and approaches of philology, literary criticism, and intellectual history, as applied to medieval and humanist textual culture, my analysis also takes into account recent studies on Lucan and reception theory. Contemporary critics [Brisset, Johnson, Masters, Bartsch] have complicated previous interpretations of the Bellum Civile, pointing out that Lucan's poem is characterized by strong internal tensions which produce a fragmented narrative, at war with itself, and that the poem contains both an anti-Caesar and a pro-Caesar discourse. In line with recent work on classical reception [Martindale, Hardwick], which emphasises how texts are continuously redefined by readers, my study identifies and analyzes the remarkable diversity of ways in which the Bellum Civile was received in fourteenth-century Italy, explaining it as motivated by both the innate complexity of the poem and the differing interests which late-medieval and early-humanist authors brought to the study of Lucan's text. My first chapter reassesses the redeployment of the Bellum Civile in Dante's literary corpus. While keeping the Comedy as my main point of reference, I focus closely on Dante's other, less-studied works (especially Monarchia, Epistles, Convivio). I point out that, partly in line with high-medieval Latin commentators and unlike later humanists, Dante combines Lucan's and Virgil's "high-style" poems as consonant with, rather than opposite to, each other, and regards the great ancient epic poets as belonging to the same literary and moral universe. Lucan's and Virgil's texts are refunctionalized to support Dante's philo-imperial agenda; in so doing, Dante overturns the pessimism of Lucan's historical account and effaces the contrast between Roman Republic and Empire. Moreover, Dante appropriates Lucan's figura as a Stoic philosopher in his social-philosophical criticisms of riches. My second chapter claims that, unlike Dante, Petrarch adopts a strongly biographical approach to Lucan: basing himself on Suetonius, he highlights Lucan's moral shortcomings and emphasizes the concept of his rivalry with Virgil. Nevertheless, Petrarch views Lucan as an important exponent of the epic canon and places him alongside, though firmly subordinate to, Virgil. Moreover, Petrarch does not regard Lucan as a single-mindedly anti-Caesarian writer, as scholars once held; rather, he reads the Bellum Civile as simultaneously sympathetic towards, and critical of, both Caesar and Pompey. Petrarch exploits the intrinsic tensions of Lucan's text to trace a persistently ambivalent portrait of Caesar and to give voice to his ever-present hopes and anxieties about "Caesarist" autocracy. Lucan's poem, and the story of Pompey in particular, is rearticulated by Petrarch as a powerful source of tragic pathos. Finally, Petrarch points to Lucan as an authority on ethics, although he dilutes the rigor of the poet's Stoicism, sketches the limits of his pagan thought, and translates many Lucanian concepts into metaphysical, Christian terms. My third chapter shows that Boccaccio follows Petrarch in condemning Lucan's moral attitudes and challenge to Virgil's primacy, while yet always naming Lucan as a major ancient Latin poet and an emblem of high style. What Boccaccio stresses is, rather, the fundamental difficulty of classifying Lucan's poetry according to well-defined conventions of genre and style. For Boccaccio, the Bellum Civile is first and foremost the "tragedy" of Pompey, whose dramatic vicissitudes he himself commemorates with pity and admiration. The pro-Guelph Boccaccio reads the Bellum Civile mostly as expressive of Republican sentiments and embraces Lucan's criticism of Caesar at least in part; however, his approach to Lucan's text is not strongly politicized. Boccaccio's interest in the Bellum Civile is at the same time poetic and erudite: he reuses the poem both as a repertory of literary motives and as a mythological, historical, and geographical source; what is more, he produces a systematic theoretical attempt to explicate the multifarious meanings of the ancient myths transmitted by Lucan and other classical poets.

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