Literature in Italian, French and English: Uses and Muses of the Vernacular

Abstract

Since the Muses began to walk naked in the sight of men some writers have employed them in high style for moral discourse, while others have enlisted them in the service of love. But you, my book, are the first to make them sing of trials endured in war, for these have never yet been treated in the Italian mother tongue. This is how Boccaccio, at the end of the Teseida (later 1330s), describes the subject of his poem. Like Dante before him, he frequently invoked and referred to the Muses, particularly at points of departure and closure. This passage, however, also shows an acute awareness of the uses of the vernacular, the identity of the author and the status of poetry – three of the issues with which this chapter will be concerned. The Teseida passage also alludes to Dante’s views on the uses of the vernacular. In the first decade of the century Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia had identified the three subjects for ‘illustrious’ vernacular writers as: ‘prowess in arms, the flames of love, and the direction of the will’. Dante had also anticipated Boccaccio’s ‘naked Muses’ to some extent by referring to his vernacular prose commentary on the poems in his Convivio as being like a woman in a state of natural bellezza ( Conv . I, x, 13). Boccaccio’s identification of Latin with clothing, however, is interesting as a reflection of the complicated relationship – the rapprochement , to use Auerbach’s term – between Latin and the vernacular in Italy during the two centuries after Dante.