An Excerpt from “Petrarch’s Penitential Psalms and Prayers,” edited and translated by Demetrio S. Yocum

Throughout Petrarch’s work, there is an undercurrent of tension between the secular and the sacred. Winner of the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies, this captivating new translation of the Psalms and the Prayers, Demetrio Yocum turns to a previously overlooked area of Petrarchan studies to open a window on the scholar’s innermost religious thoughts.

Attempts at rewriting, translating, paraphrasing, and versifying Scripture in general, and psalms in particular, were not original to Petrarch. Although his psalms provided a first and unique model that was later imitated by numerous authors, mainly in the vernacular, Petrarch’s psalms should be seen within a much larger context of Christian liturgical, para-liturgical, and devotional literature that had circulated widely since the fourth century and that was either based on Scripture or inspired by it. Petrarch’s devotiuncula is also part of the apparent growth of private piety in the late Middle Ages, and is closely related to the development of silent reading, which grew exponentially with the rise of portable books of prayers.

Already Latin Christian poets of late antiquity, following the lesson of classical rhetorical schools and expert orators trained in the exercise of paraphrase, had begun to versify biblical narrative following a variety of stylistic procedures and for diverse purposes. Christian paraphrasts followed the exegetical methods of the Church Fathers and for them imitatio and biblical versification were, on the one hand, didactic, with the main goal being to offer moral and doctrinal commentary without altering the biblical message. On the other hand, it was clearly intended as an ascetic and devotional practice intended to nourish the soul, and to prolong prayer and contemplation while being engaged in the act of writing.

Petrarch was familiar with many of the late Latin Christian authors and mentions several of them in Fam. 10. 4 (after giving precedence to those he calls “duces” (authorities), namely Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome), as those “who made use of poetry and rhythm”: Prudentius, Prosper, and Sedulius of whom “we have none of their prose and only a few works in verse.” A more detailed account of these early Latin versifiers is offered in the tenth eclogue of the Bucolicum Carmen in a section where, in keeping with the eclogues’ overall agricultural metaphor, Arator, Prudentius, Sedulius, and Juvencus are seen as cultivators of poetry who, however, despite the fertility of the land are unable to grow a “laurel” or “any green for a garland” because their “voices were weak,” a clear reference to their inadequate poetic style.

If the late Latin Christian poets are deemed inadequate as auctoritates, Petrarch’s psalms reveal a clear indebtedness to the classical authors he championed throughout his life: Cicero, Horace, Ovid, and others as several scholars have pointed out. However, the allusions and references to these models are distinctly filtered through a Christian understanding of life –with all its joys and sorrows– death, and salvation. The overlapping of citations and topoi from the classical auctores is a constant in Petrarch’s oeuvre where the convergence of classical, patristic, and Scriptural sources points to Petrarch’s central belief in the universal nature of humankind’s deepest aspirations, ideals, and torments. It is on the basis of a dignified view of the human condition that Petrarch can envision the continuity between classical culture and Christian knowledge, thus opening the door to humanist studies and the Renaissance.

A closely related poetic genre with which Petrarch was very familiar was Christian Latin hymnody. The earliest Latin hymns, influenced by the Eastern hymnodic tradition, can be traced as far back as the fourth century. Hymns started to be incorporated in the Christian mass and Benedictine liturgy from the sixth century onwards, while a significant development in hymn production and diversification came with the development of the Divine Office. Alongside the various hymnodic compositions incorporated in the mass and liturgical worship (tropes, sequences, versus), we find para-liturgical (rondelli, motets) and non-liturgical compositions like the pia dictamina (or “rhythmi”) that became widespread throughout Europe starting in the eleventh century. Pia dictamina, which were meditative, panegyrical rhythmically-structured hymns intended for private meditation and at times accompanied by melodies, are of particular interest as their popularity increased in the fourteenth century. Drawing on various sources, such as the Bible, sermons, commentaries, and legends, these hymns include elaborate and lengthy versified rosaries (with fifty strophes for the fifty “Hail Marys” of the Rosary), sets of official parva, and rhythmical psalters with 150 strophes mostly centered on Christ or Mary.56 The popularity of the pia dictamina is without a doubt linked to the emergence of new forms and expression of secular devotion across Europe (in particular the devotio moderna movement), including new forms of meditative practices that originated in reformed monastic orders like the Carthusian. Their diffusion was also the result of the ever-widening circulation and production of prayer books and, later, books of hours and breviaries.

Milan was the center of Ambrosian (and pseudo-Ambrosian) hymnody, which Petrarch knew well, as hymns were included in most breviaries and books of hours of the time. The first Petrarchan attempt at devotional paraphrase, through the typical techniques of transposition, amplification, abbreviation, can be seen in Dvs. where, as noted earlier, a prose rendition of Ambrosian hymns is central to the prologue describing the solitary life of the country dweller regulated by the daily reciting of the divine office.

(excerpted from the introduction)

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