Petrarch’s Guide to the Holy Land

Theodore J. Cachey, Jr.

Description

In the early spring of 1358 Francis Petrarch was invited by his friend Giovanni Mandelli, a leading military and political figure of Visconti Milan, to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Pleased at the invitation, Petrarch nevertheless declined to undertake the journey. Fear of the sea, of shipwreck, and of “slow death and nausea worse than death” held him back. While Petrarch would not make the literal journey he offered Mandelli a pilgrimage guide instead of his companionship: “nevertheless, I shall be with you in spirit, and since you have requested it, I will accompany you with this writing, which will be for you like a brief itinerary.”

Composed over three days between March and April of 1358, the Itinerarium ad sepulchrum domini nostri takes the characteristic Petrarchan form of an epistle to a friend. Delivered to his correspondent in the form of an elegant booklet, the work presents a literary self-portrait that was meant to stand as “the more stable effigy of my soul and intellect” as well as “a description of places.” Although the Holy Land is the ostensible destination of the pilgrimage, more than half of this charming guidebook is devoted to Petrarch’s leisurely and loving descriptions of Italy's physical and cultural landscape. Upon reaching the Holy Land, Petrarch transforms himself into one of the greatest ten-cities-in-four-days Baedekers of all time, as Mandelli and the reader race through sacred landmarks and sites and end up, not at the sepulchrum domini nostri, but at the tomb of Alexander.

Theodore Cachey has prepared the first English-language translation of the Itinerarium. Based on an authoritative 14th-century manuscript in the Biblioteca Statale of Cremona, which is, according to the explicit declaration of the scribe, a copy of Petrarch’s 1358 autograph, the translation is accompanied by the manuscript reproduced in facsimile and by a transcription of the Latin text. Cachey’s extensive introduction and notes discuss Petrarch’s text within the multiple contexts of travel in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and contemporary political and cultural issues, including Petrarch’s relation to emergent forms of “cartographic writing” and Renaissance “self-fashioning.” Petrarch’s little book reveals him to be a man of his time, but one whose voice speaks clearly to us across centuries. The Itinerarium is a jewel rediscovered for the modern reader.

Sujets

• Medieval
• Religión
• Edad Media
• Israel
• Travel
• General officer
• Middle East
• Middle Ages
• Italy
• My Last Duchess
• Religion
• General
• History
• Translation
• Renaissance

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268207663
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 25 Mo

Extrait

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~r.-un-.aattab,JIWIN1 Facsimile edition of Cremona, Biblioteca Statale,
Deposito Libreria Civica, manuscript BB.1.2.S
With an Introductory Essay, 1ranslation, and Notes by
THEODORE J. CACHEY, JR.
University of Notre Dame Press
Notte Dame, Indiana Copyright © 2002 by University of Notre Dame
Published by the University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
w.ndpress.nd.edu
All Rights Resered
The fcsimile edition of Cremona, Biblioteca Statale, Deposito Libreria Civica,
manuscript BB.1.2.5, reproduced on pages 84-1 60 is reproduced by permission of the
Italian Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali,
Biblioteca Statale di Cremona,
Deposito Libreria Civica.
FRONTISPIECE
First page of Petrarch's Itinerrum.
Cremona, Biblioteca Statale, Deposito Libreria Civica, manuscript BB.1.2.5, £ Ir.
(By perission o the Minister per i Beni e lAttiita Cultur li, Biblioteca Statal di Crmona, Deposito Libr ria Civica.)
Book design by Nancy Berliner
Jacket design by Hafz Huda
Set in type by Berliner, Inc., New York, New Yrk
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A record of the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is
available upon request fom the Library of Congress.
This e-Book was converted from the original
source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who
notice any formatting, textual, or readability
issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at
[e-mail].
. For my mother and father LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1x
INTRODUCTION 1
APPENDIX 1 51
Early Dissemination and Reception of the Itinerarium
APPENDIX 2 57
Mandelli and Petrarch, Military and Court Life
ABOUTTHETEXT AND TRANSLATION 63
ILLUSTRATIONS 67
ITINERARIUM AD SEPULCHRUM DOMINI NOSTRI YEHSU CHRISTI 83
ITINERARY TO THE SEPULCHER OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST
NOTES TO THE TEXT AND TRANSLATION 163
BIBLIOGRAPHY 205
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 217
INDEX OF PETRARCH'S WORKS 219
GENERAL INDEX 225 ILLUSTRATION 1 pg 69
Autograph manuscript page of Petrarch's Bucolicum Carmen
ILLUSTRATION 2 pp 71-72
Ulysses as a medieval pilgrim
ILLUSTRATION 3 pg 72
The sacra catino (Holy Grail)
ILLUSTRATION 4 pg73
Portolan chart ofltaly
ILLUSTRATION 5 pg 74
Portolan chart of Italy depicting the northern Tyrrhenian coast
ILLUSTRATION 6 pg 75
Portolan chart ofltaly depicting the central Tyrrhenian coast
ILLUSTRATION 7 (A AND B) pp 76-77
The Grotto of Naples
ILLUSTRATION 8 pg 78
Virgil's tomb
ILLUSTRATION 9 pg 79
Portolan chart ofltaly depicting the southern Tyrrhenian and Ionian coasts
ILLUSTRATION 10 pgBO
Medieval mappamundi, T-O map
ILLUSTRATION 11 pg81
Medieval mappamundi, Y-O map
ix INTRODUCTION
v0iat is not a journey?
Tzvetan Todorov
Every narrative is a travel narrative.
Michel de Certeau
The mental and material aspects of travel have been in tension from the beginning of
history across a wide variety of cultural contexts. Dominant intellectual traditions have
tended to disparage the physical journey and movement in space in favor of the Stoic
and Christian, as well as Eastern, preference for interior travel and explorations leading
to the discovery of an immensity within. Lieh Tzu, a Taoist author of the fourth century,
observed: "Those who take great pains for exterior journeys do not know how to or­
ganize visits that one can make inside oneself." And Francis Petrarch, standing at the
summit of Mt. Ventoux, read aloud from his copy of St. Augustine's Confessions (book
10 ): ''And they go to admire the summits of mountains and the vast billows of the sea
and the broadest rivers and the expanses of the ocean and the revolution of the stars
and they overlook themselves" (Fam. 4.1). The desire and aspiration for freedom from
the limitations of space and time has informed an irreducible resistance to physical and
material travel, favoring instead journeys of the mind and spirit-the motionless quest.
The ongoing interaction between mental and material travel constitutes a complex
relation of mutual reinforcement, particularly in the West, where the relative geographi­
cal stasis of the Middle Ages was followed by the mobility of the modern period, whose
political and scientific appropriations of space on a global scale have characterized the
last half millennium. Coming at the "end of the journey," after five centuries of material
geohistorical exploration, discovery, and conquest, and during a period of renewed
1 2 Introduction
space-time compression owing to the twin forces of globalization and technology, we
have grown increasingly sensitive to the interrelation between mental and material
travel. Consequently, anthropologists, historians of travel, and students of travel liter­
ature are exploring the possibility of new perspectives on the role of travel in history
and are considering the complex interaction of spatial and textual topographies in both
1 their material and mental aspects. These emerging critical perspectives enable a new
appreciation for the role of Petrarch in the history of travel.
Petrarch's relation to travel has been generally neglected by Petrarchan criticism, in
spite of the fact that Petrarch defined himself as a "peregrinus ubique" (a pilgrim every­
where), and one distinguished critic has characterized him as an "irrequieto turista"
2 (an anxious tourist). Both the reality and metaphor of travel are found everywhere in
Petrarch's life and works. An Augustinian notion of life as a pilgrimage is pervasive in writings, and the poet's incessant travels are recorded and memorialized
throughout his texts. Nevertheless, Petrarchan travel has, with rare exceptions, been
treated only in passing in the critical literature)
Symptomatic of this neglect, Petrarch studies have suffered from the marginaliza­
tion of Petrarch's contribution to the medieval genre of the pilgrimage itinerary, the
Itinerarium ad sepulcrum domini nostri Yehsu Christi (Itinerary to the Sepulcher of Our Lord Jesus
Christ). Composed over three days between March and April 1358, the work takes the
characteristic Petrarchan form of an epistle, addressed in this instance to a friend,
Giovanni Mandelli. A distinguished military and administrative figure at the Visconti
court in Milan, Mandelli planned to undertake a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and in­
vited Petrarch to join him.4 Petrarch wrote this "brief itinerary" (as he describes it in
the proem to the work) to accompany Mandelli on his journey and to stand in for the
poet, who would not join the pilgrimage, as he explicitly states in the work's proem, be­
cause he feared storms at sea. One might expect this contribution to one of the most
important genres of medieval travel writing, by one of the most inveterate travelers and
travel writers of the late Middle Ages, to have attracted greater scholarly attention. In
exploring why it has not, we gain insight into the relation between material and liter­
ary travel and their contribution to the development of an Italian cultural identity, as
well as a critical context from which to undertake a fresh consideration of the work.
Italian Literary History of Travel
If the inadequate state of studies on the Itinerarium-for a long time in fact
considered somewhat the Cinderella of Petrarch's writings-may displease
the literary critic and philologist, those concerned with historical matters
must lament this lack of interest because it constitutes an eloquent
symptom of the deafness of Italian scholarship faced with the testimonies
relative to the pilgrimages in the Holy Land.
5 Franco CardiniIntroduction 3
Historians have made significant progress since Franco Cardini lamented the schol­
arly neglect of the tradition of travel to the Holy Land, thanks to Cardini's own work
6 and to that of his circle of Italian medieval historians. Nevertheless, the "Cinderella"
status of Petrarch's Itinerarium endures. A critical edition of the work is still not avail­
able, and even the title of the work is a topic of some unresolved controversy (see About
the Text and Translation). Cardini's call to action points to a neglect of Italian medieval
travel that is broader than that of the Petrarchists.As G. R. Cardona wrote in a seminal
essay on Italian travel literature, "Italian literature does not willingly include in its canon
the journeys with which it is nevertheless rich .... In the literary histories there is lack­
ing therefore a chapter on travel.''7 Indeed, Petrarch's Itinerarium, like other pilgrimage
texts of the Italian Middle Ages, belongs to a type of writing that has long been deval­
ued by canons ofltalian literary historiography, which have traditionally excluded travel
literature from their jealously classicizing precincts.
This historiographical resistance to travel has everything to do with the peculiar
nature and history of Italy's cultural construction as a national identity. If Italy had had
another history-a national political history dating from the Renaissance instead of
from the nineteenth century-and had that history been informed by the profound eco­
nomic and political impacts of early modern colonial travel as were the histories of
France, Spain, and England, a work like Petrarch's Itinerarium might have enjoyed a dif­
ferent critical fortune. Instead, emerging from the Renaissance with a legacy of literary
monuments rather than foreign conquests and colonies, Italy existed as a quintessen­
tially literary territory, and without a national pol