Trobar clus in the Early Italian Lyric: Textual Enclosure, Social Space, and the Poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo

Abstract

Stylistic difference has long been a useful category of critique in troubadour studies, but, for thirteenth-century Italian poetry, has traditionally been subsumed by considerations of Dante’s ‘inspired’ poetics. This essay recuperates trobar clus, the rhetorically complex style of composition in troubadour song, for the Italian context by exploring the implications of textual closure in the poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo. Following the precedent established by Marcabru, Guittone excludes potential readers (the ‘Gente noiosa e villana’ of Arezzo) by composing obscure and parodic poems, but also opens a textual enclosure that protects virtue from the moral and economic degradation of Italy’s urban centres. His cleaving of signifier from signified runs contrary, however, to the Comedy’s metaphysics of language and thus guarantees his poor treatment in Dantean liteary history.