Outtakes

This post-Thanksgiving blog post will be briefer than most - just a nod to the inevitable detritus and discarded verbiage that results from editing a book-length manuscript.

I haven't read a certain famous work of fiction that has been making the rounds of late, but I understand that in it, a certain young woman has a habit of biting her lip.  Frequently.  I understand this from the many spoofs, satires, and good-natured ripoffs that keep cropping up.

So, if a little authorial tic like that can find its way into a wildly popular, um, novel, perhaps it's not too surprising that most authors seem to have favorite "bits of business" with which they tend to pepper their prose, only to have to weed them out later, grumbling all the while.

Mine was nodding.  Any time I wanted a character to do something nonverbal, that character wound up nodding.  It was genuinely alarming to see how often people in my book nodded, sometimes several times to a page.  When I read the work aloud (and thank goodness I did!), I realized I had created a historical novel peopled with medieval bobbleheads.

Medieval bobbleheads

Well, that just wouldn't do.  So I made use of a wonderful editing tool, which I call the "Search and Destroy" feature.  I searched for "nod" and ruthlessly deleted it, substituted other things, rewrote sentences or entire paragraphs, and eradicated nodding from my characters' nonverbal lexicon.  Mostly.

A writer friend tells me her particular tic is pausing.  When her characters need something to do, they pause.  I've never noticed this in the drafts of her work that I've read, so she must weed it out early, but I can imagine that left in place, such a habit would result in a sort of stop-action, amateur claymation effect for the reader.

That Search and Destroy feature is handy for other things, too.  I let too many sentences begin with "There is" or "There are."  I know better, but it's a careless habit that still sneaks into my writing.  A global search both reveals the scope of the problem, and gives the author a chance to do something about it, before the manuscript sees the light of day.

It's also great for renaming.  I had a "placeholder" name for a character; I liked it, and I thought it suited her, but I hadn't yet checked to see if it was in use in my period.  It wasn't, or at least I couldn't document it.  So I picked a new name and globally replaced the old one.  Very useful, though I tend to forget I've done it and wonder who this stranger in my book might be. 

And when additional research revealed that I needed to change the heraldic colors of one family I was writing about, Search and Destroy did the job, wiping out the old colors and replacing them with the new ones.  (I did accidentally change the color of the wall hangings at the same time, but I went back and fixed it.)

But the most puzzling habit I've found in my own writing is my tendency to have a character in two places at once.  This is an artifact of rewriting; you rewrite a scene, or a part of a scene, and forget that something also needs to change in what goes before it or comes after it.  Thus, I wound up with a young woman in my book sitting on a window seat and sewing - directly across from herself, sitting on the other window seat and sewing.  Oops.

And I had a poor fellow, a secondary character, who I needed to use in a particularly dramatic scene, but I kept reworking it, trying to get it the way I wanted it.  The result?  Bicci was at the side of my protagonist as they walked toward Bicci, all the while Bicci was off somewhere else trying to find Anselmo.  Bicci was a talented sort of guy, but being in three places at once was too much, even for him. 

I found more systemic problems, many of them, but these are enough to give you a taste.  I've promised myself that I will never attempt to give advice to other writers - I firmly believe that there are as many right ways to write as there are writers, or maybe even as many right ways as there are individual writing projects - but just this once, I'll break that rule:  read your stuff out loud.  You'll be appalled, but you'll be glad you did it.

Images in this post include a photo of mine, and two public-domain images altered slightly by my husband.

La Compiuta Donzella: 13th c. Poet, or Legend?

La Computer Donzella

First, let me explain.

The above image was the result of one of those misheard comments, when I was chattering away about La Compiuta Donzella and my listener thought I said La Computer Donzella.  It was a rather irresistible thought; hence this picture.  (All credit--or is it blame?--is due to my husband Tim for this one.)

But she was not La Computer Donzella.  She was - or possibly wasn't - a woman who lived in the 13th century in Florence and who wrote poetry.   And what do we know about her?

Nothing.

We don't even know if she really existed.  Some scholars have thought that she was nothing more than the fanciful creation of male poets, while others believe she was a real woman (though Compiuta may have been a pseudonym rather than her actual name) who did write the three surviving poems ascribed to her.  If she did exist, she is the first woman known to have written poetry in the Italian vernacular.

Playing music

And me?  I think she was real.  Otherwise, I find it difficult to imagine why several well-known (and male) poets of her day wrote poetry and letters to her.  But perhaps they were even more fanciful than we know, and the whole thing was an elaborate setup.


In lieu of a portrait, let's look at the best known of her sonnets, in which she begins by writing (with what one editor, Luciano Rebay, calls "moving simplicity and consummate poetic skill") of the beauties of spring and of love.  But in the eighth line she changes her tone, and the poem becomes a complaint, a lament.  Here's a translation by Rebay:

In the season when the world leafs and flowers,
Joy grows in all gentle lovers,
They go together to the gardens, while
Little birds make sweet song,
All free-hearted people fall inlove,
And every man steps forth to serve,
And every maiden lives in joy.
As for me, miseries and tears abound.

For my father has put me in a quandary,
And keeps me often in terrible pain:
He wants to give me--forcing me--a husband.
and I have neither wish nor will for this,
And in great torment I live every hour:
So that neither flower nor leaf rejoices me.

Defending the castle

Fighting

Who was she?  "Donzella" suggests that she was a maiden, a damsel, an unmarried woman.  "Compiuta," which was actually in use at the time as a female name, means something like Capable or Competent, with a suggestion, too, of learned skill; maybe Accomplished would come closest.  And that is why I've sprinkled this post with images of other compiute donzelle from the middle ages, since it is not possible to offer you a portrait of the poet herself.

When and where did she live?  The "where" is a little easier than the "when."  Her Tuscan dialect places her in or near Florence.  The "when" is trickier, though.  It appears that she was active in the latter part of the 13th century, and some have guessed that she died around 1300.  But that still leaves us guessing.  Did she die young, possibly in childbirth?  Did she live to a ripe old age?  When was she writing her sonnets, which speak of the plight of a young woman whose fate is in someone else's hands?

Building

We can hazard some guesses based on what we know of the men who corresponded with her.

First was Guittone d'Arezzo, who many consider the most prolific and influential poet of the Italian vernacular before Dante.  We have a surviving letter from Guittone to the "Donna Compiuta," praising her poetic gifts and offering her his devotion and admiration.

Teaching geometry

Guittone, a Guelf (the minority party in Arezzo), fought and lost at the battle of Montaperti in 1260, after which he chose to exile himself from his native city.  In the mid 1260s he underwent a religious conversion, left his wife and children, and joined a new religious order (the Milites Beatae Virginis Mariae, or Frati Godenti, a lay order founded to promote civic harmony in a time when such was a rare commodity).  If we assume that his letter to La Compiuta Donzella was written before his conversion, that means she was known for her poetry by, say, 1262-1263.  It also means she was married; he wrote Compiuta Donna rather than Donzella.

Maestro Torrigiano wrote her two letters.  In one, he dubbed her the "divine Sybil" and wondered whether the presence of such talents in a woman was unnatural, or possibly miraculous (but he probably meant that in a nice way).

But figuring out dates on Torrigiano is tricky.  Some historians say he was the prominent physician and medical scholar from Florence who was often known by the Latin version of his name:  Turisanus.  If so, he was a student of Taddeo Alderotti (see last blog post) in Bologna, and he had a reputation as a formidable scholar, albeit one who had really bad luck in actually curing patients.  But biographical information, including dates, is a bit garbled.  Filippo Villani, Florentine chronicler and Torrigiano's biographer, appears to equate him with a master who taught medicine in Paris as late as 1350, yet Taddeo Alderotti's student Turisanus died in 1319.  If the doctor was indeed La Compiuta Donzella's admirer, he may have been born somewhere in the 1240-1250 range.

Turisanus

The third man is even harder to pin down.  We have an anonymous poem which addresses her (this time as "Compiuta Donzella," so, not yet married) in a manner consistent with the conventions of courtly love, and to which she replied with pleasant courtesies and compliments.  Some historians believe this anonymous poet was Chiaro Davanzati, a member of a prominent Florentine family (the Palazzo Davanzati still stands in Florence, now a museum to the medieval Florentine home, with wonderful displays of furnishings and textiles).

Chiaro, too, fought in the battle of Montaperti (1260), so he must have been born not much later than about 1240.  He died in 1303.

Taking all this into account, I believe that La Compiuta Donzella was probably born in the 1240s, and that she was married by around 1263 or thereabouts.  But it's all guesswork.

A bit of historical context:  the battle of Montaperti was fought between the Ghibelline (imperial) forces and the Guelf (papal).  The Ghibellines won, inflicting great damage on the Guelf army and, it was said, making the river Arbia run red with blood.  Prominent Guelf families were exiled from Florence, and the triumphant Ghibellines took over, destroying Guelf palaces and towers and seizing other property.  It was, however, the Ghibellines' last hurrah in Florence.  A mere six years later, one year after Dante's birth (his Guelf family had apparently not been prominent enough to suffer exile), the battle of Benevento restored Guelf supremacy and the tables were turned - Ghibellines were exiled, and the formerly exiled Guelfs returned in triumph and began wreaking havoc on the Ghibellines' property.  The Ghibellines were never again to prevail in Florence, which remained staunchly Guelf, although the Guelf party split into two warring factions toward the end of the thirteenth century.

One wonders:  was La Compiuta Donzella's family Guelf or Ghibelline?  Were they exiled, either after Montaperti or after Benevento?  If, as we surmise, she was in her prime when Dante was born (1265), did she live long enough to see him transform Italian poetry?

Hunting

La Compiuta Donzella's second surviving poem, by the way, also concerns marriage, only this time she is expressing a desire to leave the world and to enter a convent and serve God, but her father is having none of it.  She complains that the world is full of corruption and of falseness.  It is "the world of lies" where all is "mad and false and vile," in the translation by Leonard Cottrell.

We have no idea whether these few graceful works of poetry are truly autobiographical, or whether they simply represent poetic conventions.  The "malmaritate" (badly married) songs were very popular, some tragic, some quite funny.  It's certainly possible that the lady's father was in reality a very nice man, wanting only the best for his daughter.  Maybe.

We don't know much more about La Compiuta Donzella than we did when we began exploring the possibilities, but looking at her life does provide a good example of scholars making educated guesses.  It makes you wonder, though--how many other women wrote about their lives, in prose or in verse, only to have their words disappear with time?  She can't have been the only one.

After all, as it's often said, "Anonymous was a woman."

Images in this post are in the public domain because more than 100 years has passed since any possible copyright expired, except for the oddity at the top, which is property of Tim Heath.

A Medieval Doctor and His Career

Taddeo Alderotti was something of a rock star among 13th century physicians.  A brilliant teacher and a skilled medical practitioner, Taddeo was also well versed in philosophy.  He held that medicine derived its principles from (and was there a subdivision of) natural science, and thus natural science and logic were a necessary foundation for the study of medicine.

Much in demand for his medical skills, Taddeo demonstrated another formidable skill as well:  the art of making money.  It was this latter talent that earned him a mention by Dante, who in his Paradiso 12:82-85, put these words into the mouth of Saint Bonaventura, speaking of Saint Dominic: 

Non per lo mondo, per cui mo s'affanna di retro ad Ostiense ed a Taddeo,     ma per amor della verace manna

 in picciol tempo gran dottor si feo...

Not for the world, for whose sake they labor now, following the man from Ostia and Taddeo, but for love of the true manna,

in short time he became a great teacher...

(trans. Robert M. Durling)

 (The Ostian in the quote above is Enrico di Susa, a very successful scholar of canon law who became Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia and Velletri in 1262.)

Taddeo taught students who became the next generation of rock star doctors, and he treated patients ranging from a blacksmith to the pope, with stops in between at Florentine noblemen, a Venetian doge, a natural son of Emperor Frederick the Second, and a bishop who was himself an eminent physician, thus making Taddeo a physician's physician.  He treated men and women, old and young, all over Italy, both in person and as a consultant to their own physicians.  (Most of them did have in common a certain amount of wealth, for Taddeo did not come cheap.)  He wrote health regimens and consilia, detailing his recommendations for living a healthy life.

Two well-known anecdotes about Taddeo may give a little of the flavor of his time, and possibly also of the man.  One pertains to his teaching, the other to his medical practice.

First, there was the time that Taddeo cautioned his students against eating petronciani (eggplant, probably) on the grounds that it would cause madness.  One of his students disagreed, and, to prove his point, ingested eggplant and returned to class to announce that he was not at all mad.  And then he raised his garments and mooned Taddeo.  So - whose point did he prove, exactly?  (I think the usual conclusion here is that such behavior was not standard in a 13th century medical school classroom.)

And secondly, a chronicler reports that Taddeo had been called in on a difficult case, that of a nobleman who was seriously ill.  Taddeo believed that his patient was on the mend, so over the protests of his assistants, who were less sure of the outcome, he went home to get a good night's sleep.  When he returned the next morning, the patient was at death's door, and distraught family members were making wild threats, such as - horror of horrors - withholding the fee.  Taddeo looked around the sickroom, spotted an open window, and rounded on them:  had he not told everyone present that the windows had to be kept closed?  Therefore, the unfortunate change in the patient's condition was no fault of his.

Taddeo was largely responsible for taking medical education out of dusty translations of ancient texts and into the sickroom, teaching at the patient's bedside. He believed in taking a patient's medical history.  He advocated a scholastic and dialectical approach to medical teaching, and his methods to a large extent shaped medical education at Bologna, a curriculum which was in its infancy at the time he arrived there.

He got wildly excited about the medicinal benefits of distilled alcohol, including its use as an antiseptic, which to the modern mind seems like good sense indeed.  However, if you were his patient and you were suffering from epilepsy, his prescription might have been a concoction of burned human bones, wine, and peony juice, along with pills which included the gallbladder of a beaver and bear's testicles.  If that didn't appeal, you could try an alternative:  the liver of a wolf, burned and powdered asses' hooves, and the blood of a tortoise.  Bear in mind, he lived in a time when physicians believed in the evil eye (especially among elderly women, whose humors were considered to be cold and dry), and when people believed that the glance of a menstruating woman could cloud a mirror. 

Taddeo's Life

We have wildly divergent birthdates given for Taddeo.  I've seen dates as early as 1206 and as late as 1223, which means that when he died in 1295 (that one we do know), he was somewhere between 72 and 89.  He was a Florentine, probably from a family of modest means - it's said that as a child he sold church candles. 

He was teaching at the university in Bologna by the early 1260s.  Since in 1260 he would have been at least 37 and possibly as old as 54, this suggests that he may have begun his medical training later than most.

We'll take a closer look at both his teaching and his practice in a moment, but first I'll tell you what little we know about his life. 

He never lost his connection to his native Florence, although he spent his entire career based in Bologna and died there.  His wife, Adela, came from a Florentine family; they were wed in 1274 (when he was somewhere between 51 and 68).  They had a daughter, Mina, born around 1280, who married into the prominent Pulci family in Florence, bringing with her a sumptuous dowry of 1000 gold florins.  Taddeo also had a natural son, Taddeolo, who he legitimated in 1290.

It appears that he may have suffered some incapacitation in the last couple of years of his life, during which time he quarreled bitterly with one of his students (see Students, below).  He may have grown "manipulative and suspicious" in those years, as historian Nancy Siraisi surmises based on his numerous wills and the secrecy with which he surrounded his final will.

That will left large charitable bequests to the inform, sick, and aged poor, as well as a legacy to every hospital in Bologna.  His library of medical and philosophical books he left to the Franciscans and the Servites, and his body was laid to rest in the Franciscan church.


Taddeo's Students

We know the names of six of Taddeo's students, because each of them made a name for himself in his own right.  Here, as a sampling, I give you brief descriptions of the careers of two of these men, both of whom were noted for their contributions to anatomy.  A third student, Dino del Garbo, will merit a separate blog post for some of the odd and mysterious twists and turns his life took.

Bartolomeo da Varignana, the well-to-do son of a physician, did some forensic work for the city of Bologna, including (with four other physicians) conducting an autopsy to shed light on the suspicious death of a nobleman in 1302 - one of the first forensic dissections of the middle ages.  Caught up in the politics of his time, Bartolomeo, a White Guelf, was banned from Bologna in 1311 and joined Emperor Henry VII in his Italian travels.  Upon Henry's sudden death in 1313, Bartolomeo defended Henry's confessor against charges that the emperor had been slain by a poisoned host.

Mondino de'Luzzi, 1275-1326, was the son of an apothecary.  His family was Florentine but moved to Bologna while Mondino was a small child.  Mondino was a major figure in the history of anatomy, and may have performed dissections with his own hands, instead of looking on and directing his assistants, as had been the practice.  Known as "the restorer of anatomy," he played a major role in reintroducing the practice of public dissection.

Taddeo's Teaching Career

Taddeo's teaching at Bologna was so successful that he and his students were granted the same privileges afforded Bologna's elite, the students of law.  Although he was not a citizen of Bologna, the city granted him tax exemption and allowed him to purchase property.  One account states that he was even granted citizenship in 1289.  There is considerable evidence that his teaching colleagues respected him and valued him as a colleague, and chose him on various occasions to serve as arbitrator of their disagreements or guarantor of their agreements. 

Although the city of Bologna valued his teaching, it also liked having him practice medicine there; he may have been part of a team of forensic physicians called on when legal proceedings required a professional evaluation of a wound or the determination of cause of death.  Both Perugia and Venice vied with Bologna for his services, but unsuccessfully.  (He did agree to go to Perugia for a huge salary, but once there demanded even more.  Perugia's rulers refused, so he returned to Bologna.)  Bologna paid him well, his students paid him even better, and he had the freedom to travel to distant places at his pleasure, there to collect still more substantial fees.


Taddeo's Patients

In addition to the patients he saw in person, Taddeo offered his advice via letter to many other Italian physicians.  He traveled, when the price was right, to other cities to see patients in person.  As I mentioned above, he treated a wide range of people, but I'd like to take a closer look at two of his patients:  Pope Honorius IV, and Corso Donati.

Pope Honorius IV, born Giacomo Savelli, held the papacy for only two years.  Born in 1210 in Rome, he died in 1287.  Even at the point where he became pope, gout had incapacitated him, and he was unable to stand or to walk.  In fact, when he said mass he was unable to elevate the host without the help of a mechanical device to lift his hands.  Thus, when Taddeo was called to come to Rome and treat the ailing pope during what proved to be his final illness, no one would necessarily have expected a miraculous cure; the pope's health had been too poor for too long.  Taddeo went, and he commanded the princely sum of 100 ducats a day for his services.  My source says he eventually walked away with 10,000 ducats, a huge amount of money, so he must have been in attendance on the pope for 100 days.  Although Taddeo was probably not the only physician summoned, it was a signal honor to be called.

Honorius IV

Corso Donati, the turbulent Florentine nobleman who was distantly related to Dante by marriage, apparently was both friend and patron to Taddeo, who wrote a health regimen especially for him.  It incorporated much of the same sorts of advice Taddeo proffered to others in his many written consilia, but was specifically tailored to Corso's needs.  The regimen was probably prepared for Corso during one of his tenures as podestà (a city's chief magistrate, hired from outside the city for a short term, typically a half year).  Corso held that position more than once, and also served as Capitano (another high city office, similarly filled from outside the city in the interest of avoiding bias).  Corso served in one or the other of those offices in 1283, 1284, 1285, 1288, and 1293.  Historians suggest the latest of those dates as the likeliest for the creation of this remarkable book of health advice.  Corso in 1293 would have been in his low forties; he suffered from gout. 

And what did Taddeo advise Corso to do?  Well, among other things, he was advised to wear fine clothing, because the soul rejoices in it; to drink a "subtle and fragrant" white wine; to surround himself with pleasant aromas; to look at beautiful things; to remember pleasant experiences; and to strive for a cheerful disposition.  He also offered general hygiene advice:  stretch in the morning after waking, clean face and teeth, comb hair, walk 1000 steps after eating.

He offered dietary advice as well.  His usual included avoiding bread hot from the oven, and also avoiding cheese, some (if not all) fruit, and fish taken from still water.  Diet should consist of poultry and veal, with moderate amounts of herbs and vegetables.  He generally favored dry cooking methods (though in Corso's case he did advise soup), and he even prescribed specific mixtures of spices.

(Corso may have been less pleased at being told to avoid overeating and overindulgence in sexual intercourse during the summer, practices which Taddeo apparently thought Corso likely to engage in.)


Taddeo on Distillation

And last but not least, we should take a look at Taddeo's extraordinary devotion to the art of distillation.  He wrote a treatise on distillation of wine, a process that had been known since the 12th century but which Taddeo was the first to use medicinally.  And he used it a lot.

A 17th century distillation manual

Here's Taddeo on distillation:

Its glory is inestimable; it is the parent and lord of all medicines, and its effects are marvelous against all cold affections.

 Aqua vitae had endless uses, according to Taddeo.  It could prevent grey hairs and restore youth.  You could drink it, apply it topically, or sniff it.  It could be used to treat eye problems, toothache, facial tics, certain headaches, bronchitis, sciatica, dysentery, quartan fever, gout, and sterility of cold origin.  Not to mention cancer and fistula, plus it has the ability to expel poisons.  Here's his recipe against melancholy and sadness:

A half spoonful (of aqua vitae) every morning, taken on an empty stomach, together with a small dipper of fragrant wine, makes a man glad, merry, and happy, and strengthens all the animal virtues against all thick and turbid spirits.

 One might wonder just how big a spoon he was talking about, and how big a dipper, but hey - it could work.  And on that note, we'll leave Taddeo Alderotti, rock star doctor of the 13th century.

Images in this post are in the public domain, either by virtue of being sufficiently old or of having been placed there by the copyright holder.

So - what's it about?

I'm delighted to announce that A Thing Done is now a thing published.  The people at Fireship Press have been a joy to work with.  I love the cover, and I've had all the support and editorial expertise anyone could ask for.  And now it's available for purchase - Kindle and Nook versions first, other ebooks and paperback to follow soon. 

Naturally, the first thing everyone asks is, "What's it about?"  That question isn't as easy to answer as you might think.  Here, then, is the blurb on the back cover of the book:

In 1216 the noble families of Florence hold great power, but they do not share it easily.  Tensions simmer just below the surface.  When a Jester's prank-for-hire sets off a brawl, those tensions erupt violently, dividing Florence into hostile factions.  A marriage is brokered to make peace, but that fragile alliance crumbles under the pressure of a woman's interference, a scorned bride, and an outraged cry for revenge.  At the center of the conflict is Corrado, the Jester, whose prank began it and who is now pressed into unwilling service by both sides.  It will take all his wit and ingenuity to keep himself alive, to protect those dear to him, and to prevent the unbridled ambitions of the nobles from destroying the city in a brutal civil war.

Yes.  That is what the book is about.  But in addition, it is about several remarkable human beings; it is about a complex political situation; it is about some very human conflicts and emotions.  If I had to find a single pithy phrase to nail down the theme of the book, it would probably be "human resilience."

Nothing in what I've just added, though, distinguishes it from a novel set in 2012.  What else is A Thing Done about, that makes it a historical novel?

Here are a few thoughts on that.  They may seem trivial, but I think they add up to something that readers of historical fiction are looking for.

It's about the food they ate.  Roast mutton in January and roast lamb at Easter.  Onions, baked in the coals and eaten with salt and vinegar.  Feast meals and fast meals.  A delicate ricotta pie.  Chickpea fritters purchased from a street vendor.  Soups and stews, and a frittata that scorched while its cook was listening in on an interesting conversation.  Sausages and eel pies.  Quince paste and almonds.

Cooking dinner

It's about the clothes they wore.  A jester's hat.  A chicory-flower blue dress purchased from a used-clothing vendor and lovingly refurbished.  White garments for a baptism, even if they had to be rented.  A fool's motley.  A magnificent scarlet overdress.  A much-mended red tunic.  Boots and cloaks and purses and rings.

Men's and women's clothing

It's about the animals they encountered every day.  A flea-bitten dog who loves to chase rats.  A gray cat who is an expert mouser.  A horse with attitude.  An owl.  Hunting dogs.  Mice in the kitchen.

Horses with attitude

It's about the homes people lived in.  Central hearths, and portable braziers for heating other rooms.  Windows covered with stretched and treated cloth.  Faded frescoes on walls.  Candles for lighting.  Loggias.  Forbidding stone towers, looming over the city.  Makeshift additions to upper floors, jutting out and blocking the sunlight from the street below.  Privies flushed with kitchen waste water. 

Loggia

It's about daily chores.  Buying food in the market, and cooking it.  Sewing, spinning thread, mending, and embroidering.  Laundering garments and linens and hanging them to dry.  Fetching water, from a well or a fountain. 

Making garments

It's about the role of the church.  Holy Week rituals.  Processions of penitents.  Mass baptisms on the day before Easter.  Funerals.  The role of the parish church in the life of the city.  Pervasive beliefs and assumptions.

Penitential procession

It's about entertainment and pleasure.  Juggling and jesting.  Storytelling.  Music, sung and played.  Acrobats and stilt-walkers.  A portative organ, a harp, a flute, a vielle, a pipe and tabor.  Neighborhood taverns.  Feasts and games of skill. 

Entertainment

It's about young people.  Children at their lessons.  Children listening to stories from Aesop.  A spotted-faced adolescent already in training for the church.  A baby lulled to sleep in a cradle that rocked her from head to foot, rather than side to side.  Infants awaiting baptism, fed goats' milk through hollowed cow horns.

Children with their parents

And it's about the city of Florence.  Crowded streets, overhanging bits of buildings, narrow dark alleys.  People forced out of the way by others passing on horseback.  The ancient Baptistery.  Beggars on the streets and in the porches of churches.  The bridge across the Arno, shops lining either side.  The battered statue of Mars.  The cathedral, Santa Reparata.  Church bells measuring and dividing the day.  Streets bristling with soaring towers, vital to both defensive and offensive urban warfare.  A bustling marketplace.  Small parish churches, nestled in the neighborhoods where their patrons had their palaces.

Florence

These are some of the things that it's been my pleasure to learn and write about, and I hope they add something to the book for its readers.

And now that A Thing Done is indeed done, it's time for me to move on to the next project, which takes place about two generations later.  Onward!

Images in this post are in the public domain by virtue of long-expired copyright (if there ever was one).

"You must come..."

Recently I got to thinking about town criers in medieval Florence.

Now, I realize that this is not exactly the sort of thing that invades people's consciousnesses very often, but once in a while these things do crop up.  This time, it stemmed from last week's blog post, in which I mentioned in passing that Dante's brother-in-law, Leone Poggi, was a town crier in Florence.

And then it dawned on me:  when Dante was forced into exile as a result of (probably spurious and certainly politically motivated) criminal charges, somebody - some town crier, in fact - had to make the rounds and publicly announce the sentence.  Had to bring the bad tidings to Dante's own home, not to mention the public piazzas and other busiest parts of the city.

Was it his brother-in-law who got stuck with this awkward task?  If it was, wouldn't that likely make things really difficult the next time the whole family got together to celebrate a feast day?  What would Dante's sister - Leone's wife - have thought?  What about Dante's wife, Gemma?  Sounds like a perfect recipe for family discord, doesn't it?

So I looked it up.  And was relieved to find that it was not Leone who got assigned the job, but one of his five colleagues, a fellow named Duccio di Francesco.  But of course, by the time I came across this reassuring tidbit of information, I was hooked, and found myself deeply engaged in trying to figure out the byzantine workings of this aspect of the Florentine justice system.  Never mind the system as a whole - entire books have been written tracing Florentine law to its origins in Roman law and Germanic tribal law.  I was concerned, at least for now, with the communication flow.

What I learned first was that it was all much more codified, and more complicated, than I would have guessed.

For one thing, there is some confusion in some of the histories about whether the nuntio and the bannitore (or banditore) were the same, or whether they were different offices.  The nuntio is a messenger who brought official notification to people in writing; the bannitore was a herald who made public announcements of the city's official proclamations, but who also bore responsibility in some cases for bringing this information directly to an individual.  There is no reason why one man could not have performed both functions, yet it appears that (for most of the time, anyway) these were two separate offices.  

The nuntio had to be a Florentine citizen, and had to have been resident in the city for at least ten years.  He took an oath of office, posted a bond, and proudly wore a peaked wool cap decorated with four Florentine lilies, a symbol of office legally reserved for these civil employees.  I do not know how many nuntii the city employed at any given time; it probably varied with the city budget.

The nuntio, when a person was accused of a crime, had the job of finding the accused and handing him a document which included the name of the judge of the case, the crime with which the recipient was accused, an invitation to present himself to the court within a specified time period, and the name of the messenger.  This would typically be the first legal contact with the accused.

The bannitore, on the other hand, was one of a select group of six, one for each sesto of the city.  Elected annually by the signory of Florence, these elite employees were required to be Florentine citizens, and they were required to identify their families.  A bannitore had to be able to read and write, he needed to possess a "light and clear voice" and he had to own a small silver trumpet and be able to play short fanfares on it, to call people to hear his announcements.  He needed to provide a good horse, one not also registered in the cavalry (no double duty here), and worth at least 20 florins of gold. (This was necessary because he would also be riding out to the suburbs and the surrounding countryside to perform his duties.)

If he met these exacting requirements and was chosen for the job (which, by the way, in 1307 paid exactly as much as a city trumpeter received, 3 lire per month), he would receive a new outfit of clothing twice a year, in a single color (either green or scarlet), and would be given a silver ornament called a maspillos to wear around his neck. 

(I've often thought that medieval livery had something in common with bridesmaids' dresses - just fine for its intended purpose, but not much use for anything else.  Maybe that was the idea.)

His duties included announcing fairs and festivals, meetings of councils, levies of taxes, militia parades, bankruptcies, public auctions, and criminal and civil sentences.  Prior to each announcement, he had to sound his trumpet call three times to call the people together.  He was required to make his announcements at the gates of the city officer's palace, at the church of Or San Michele, and at a minimum of two public locations in each of the city's districts.  Certain announcements concerning individuals (legal sentences, bankruptcies of individuals) had also to be announced near the individual's home.

Let's take a moment to talk about Florence's most famous bannitore, Antonio Pucci.  Antonio, however admirable he may have been as a bannitore, was actually famous for his poetry, but his public career is nonetheless interesting.  The son of a bronze caster who specialized in church bells, Antonio became a bellringer for the city, beginning in 1334, when he was probably about 25.

Perhaps he rang the city's bells to celebrate the victory of the Florentine militia over Padova in 1337, or the overthrow of the Duke of Athens in 1343.  When the Black Death struck Florence with brute force in 1348, could it have resulted in the bannitore post opening up for Antonio?  We don't know, but we do know that he continued overlapping both jobs for a while, and served as a bannitore for nearly twenty years. 

 In both of his public positions he would have been privy to the decisions of Florence's governing elite and would have played a role in communicating those decisions to the populace.  Perhaps his job put him in a good position to observe the foibles of his fellow Florentines, because his poetry reflected some wry observations, like the one about the poultry vendor who sold him a dry old hen, or the ode to a notoriously sloppy barber.

But getting back to communications and to Dante's legal woes, I found an interesting breakdown of exactly how the legal process worked in Dante's case, in a book called Contrary Commonwealth:  The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, by Randolph Starn.

Dante, a member of the White Guelf party who had recently served as a member of Florence's ruling body, was in Rome as part of an official Florentine delegation to the Pope when the exiled Black Guelfs triumphantly re-entered Florence and turned the political tables, targeting prominent White Guelfs for retribution.  I'll summarize the steps of their legal assault on the absent Dante here:

Step One:  Messer Cante Gabrieli of Gubbio, the podestà (the foreign rector, or chief magistrate, chosen to serve for a half-year term, and in this case very much allied with Dante's political foes), appointed messer Paolo of Gubbio as special judge of crimes committed by public officials.

Step 2:  Messer Paolo initiated proceedings and investigations against several of those who had recently served in the White Guelf government, and brought charges against Dante and three co-defendants:  messer Palmiro Altoviti, Lippo Becchi, and Orlanduccio Orlandi.  The four were accused of crimes-in-office including extortion, corruption, misappropriation of funds, fraud, accepting bribes, and plotting rebellion.

Is there any surviving evidence of any truth to these charges?  No.  They appear to have been wholly politically motivated.  We cannot know for sure whether any specifics were cited, but if they were, they did not survive in the record.

Step 3:  The court cited Dante and the other three and sent a nuntio (messenger) with written instructions, ordering them to appear by a certain deadline.  Dante, you will recall, was in Rome at the time, probably with no direct knowledge that these things were going on.  Thus, the nuntio would not have been able to hand him the document, and instead would have affixed it to the front door of Dante's home.  All attempts to deliver the document would have been scrupulously recorded.  At this point, Dante's legal status was that of citatus - a person accused of a crime.

Step 4:  When Dante and the others did not respond, they were subject to being "called under the ban" (cridatio in bannum).  It was at this point that the town crier, in this case Duccio di Francesco, rode forth on his horse worth at least 20 gold florins, blew three blasts on his silver trumpet, and voiced his message:  "You must come."

He did this in a number of locations around the city, including just outside Dante's home.  He must have done it at least twice in January 1302.  He noted Dante's previous failure to appear (the fact that he was in Rome didn't count) and placed the poet under the ban of the commune of Florence; he was now required to pay a fine of 5000 florins within three days (though 15 days would have to pass before further action could be taken), and this was true even if he returned and proved his innocence, which would have been difficult under the circumstances, and would probably have exposed him to torture to elicit a confession.

Dante's status was now that of bannitus.

After the total of 18 days had passed, thanks to Duccio's efforts, Dante's status was exbannitus pro maleficio, meaning that he was considered a confessed criminal due to his contumacy (failure to appear).  He had no right of appeal, and he had lost the rights of citizenship.  Any citizen could assault or even assassinate him with impunity, provided the attack took place within Florentine territory.

And Dante may still not have known what was happening. 

Step 5:  On 27 January 1302 the magistrates pronounced a definitive sentence:  since Dante and the others had not appeared to contest the accusations against them (probably a good idea on their parts, all things considered), they were considered confessed criminals and sentenced to pay the 5000 florins in fine within three days, plus any illicit gains to any legitimate claimants.  If they did not - and how could they? - their property was to be confiscated and destroyed.  Even if they did somehow manage to pay that vast sum of money within three days, they would still have been confined outside Tuscany for two years and banned forever from public office in Florence.  It was now too late for innocence.

Step 6:  The sentence was formalized and officially recorded by the court notary (ser Bonora da Pregio).  Duccio di Francesco was among the witnesses.

On 10 March 1302, Dante and 14 other White Guelfs were sentenced to death by fire, should they ever return to Florentine territory.  In 1311, an amnesty offered to those condemned in 1302 required an act of public penance, which Dante refused to perform.  In 1315 he and his sons were proclaimed rebels and sentenced to be decapitated if they were captured.  (One wonders if this superseded being burned at the stake.)  On each of these occasions, the steps above (notification, public announcements, passage of a specified amount of time) were undertaken yet again.

The outcome?  Dante never returned to his native Florence.  He died in Ravenna in 1321, having written his masterwork La Commedia while living in exile.

In 2008, the city council of Florence finally got around to voiding Dante's sentence.

*

Today, this blog has been in existence for exactly one year!  Its readership has been growing, slowly at first, but faster all the time.  We've covered a vast variety of topics, most of them at least loosely related to research - the process or the results.  It's been fun, and I hope my readers have enjoyed it, too.

But although the blog is a year old, the little follower thingie on the right side of the page is only a couple of weeks old.  If you'd like to help me celebrate this important milestone, perhaps you'd consider doing so by choosing to follow the blog.  

Or, to be just a tad irreverent about it:

Follow this blog, or the peacock gets it!

Images in this post are in the public domain by virtue of having expired copyrights.

Who was the historical Beatrice?

Dante and Beatrice, 15th century

Today I'd like to see what we can figure out about the real woman behind Dante's inspiration and muse, the beautiful and otherworldly Beatrice.  She was the focus of Dante's adoration from a distance, his beloved - his lady, in the parlance of the medieval culture of courtly love.

• But first, one quick announcement:  I've recently added a "follower" thingie up on the top right corner of this blog, and if you're someone who visits here from time to time, I hope you'll choose to follow it.  I probably should have enabled this at the outset, but I didn't, and now I'm trying to catch up.  Thank you.

Please follow this blog...

Returning you now to your regularly scheduled blog post, we were about to talk about Beatrice.

Often I find myself staring at a mass of dry facts - dates and names and incidents - and sifting through them as I search for the human beings in the factual record.  Searching for the story.

But in the case of Dante's Beatrice, "the glorious lady of my mind," as he called her, it's the other way around.  We know next to nothing about the historical woman, yet her name endures in legend, in art, in music, in poetry.  A particular favorite among 19th century romantics, as you can see from the art in the rest of this post, poor Beatrice is awash in sentimentality.  I suspect this would have left a young medieval Florentine woman bemused, at best. 

Marie Spartali Stillman, 1895

So who was she?  What do we know?  We know that Dante exalted her; that he vowed to write about her "what has never before been written about any woman."

But we don't know with certainty that she even existed.  There have been scholars who insist that she is wholly allegorical, or metaphorical, or some such thing.  Most, however, seem to accept the word of Dante's son Pietro and of Giovanni Boccaccio that Beatrice was indeed a real woman:  Beatrice, usually known as Bice (that's BEE-chay, rhyming with eBay, not with mice, lice, or rice), the daughter of Florentine banker and philanthropist Folco Portinari.  (Her full name would be pronounced Bay-ah-TREE-chay.  Not that these phonetic renditions capture the vowels properly, but you get the general idea.)

Washington Allston, 1819

I'm going to accept that Bice was indeed Folco's daughter.  And since we know so little about her life, her personality, or even her physical appearance, I'm going to try to see how much I can glean indirectly from the historical record - what we can learn about her family, her times, her situation.  It's not solid biography, but it may take us in some interesting directions.

Pietro Alighieri tells us that Bice is of the Portinari family, and Pietro should have known.  He was one of the first commentators on his father's work.  It seems unlikely to me that he would have erred in this.

As for Giovanni Boccaccio, author of The Decameron and early Dante scholar, he tells us that Bice was the daughter of Folco Portinari.  Boccaccio was only eight years old when Dante died in 1321, but he did his research well.  He was acquainted with Andrea Poggi, Dante's nephew (son of Dante's sister, whose name we don't know, and her husband Leone Poggi, a bannitore or town crier), who was said to look remarkably like the poet; also, Boccaccio's stepmother Margherita Mardoli was a cousin of Bice's.

Dante encounters Beatrice, Henry Holiday, 1883

From Dante's own work (La Vita Nuova, in which the poet arranges his early poetic works and his running commentary on them in a sequence that is somewhat autobiographical), we know that Bice was about a year younger than Dante, which means she was probably born in 1266.  We know, too, that she died in 1290, at only 24 years of age.  Dante tells us, in one poem, that she did not die of fever or chills, but he doesn't tell us what she did die of.  Scholars have guessed that she died in childbirth. It's not illogical to assume that of a young married woman in a time when pregnancy and childbirth were very risky for a woman, but it's always possible she died of something else.  After all, even in 1348 a few people managed to find things other than the plague to sweep them away. 

Poul S. Christiansen, 1895

What about her family?  The Portinari were wealthy bankers, and their political background was Ghibelline.  By Bice's time, however, Florence was solidly Guelf, and most of the former Ghibellines, particularly the businessmen, had managed to change their spots accordingly.  Folco must have succeeded, because he served Florence as Prior several times.

Folco, in addition to serving his city as an elected official, was a generous supporter of many charities, including his parish church of Santa Margherita, but he is perhaps best known and remembered for founding the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, which is still operating in Florence today.  His family provided the hospital's main financial support for several generations after Folco endowed it in 1288.

Some say that Folco was given the idea by a servant, one monna Tessa, who is sometimes described as Bice's nurse.  Some have even said that he founded the hospital in self-defense, because his servant kept bringing sick people home and installing them in his house so she could care for them.  Monna Tessa, the wife of a saddle-maker named Ture, founded the Order of the Oblates in 1288 while employed by the Portinari.  These Third Order women worked in Folco's hospital and in other settings, caring for the ill and the elderly as an act of charity. 

Dante and the friends of Beatrice, Marcel Rieder, 1895

Bice's mother, Cilia dei Caponsacchi, was also from a Ghibelline family.  The Caponsacchi, unlike the Portinari, were classified as magnates, a legal category in medieval Florence which suggested that they were among the powerful and wealthy families who not infrequently took the law into their own hands (and in fact we do know that members of the Caponsacchi were involved in magnate-style violence in the 1280s).

Laws designed to curb the lawlessness and fractiousness of the magnates began to be passed in the 1280s, and continued through the famous Ordinances of Justice in 1293, by which time magnates were barred from holding public office, required to post monetary bonds against the potential bad behavior of their families, and severely penalized if they caused harm to one of the popolani (the non-magnate population).  In 1293, some 72 Florentine families were designated magnates.  (A definition of magnate from the 1280s included any house which had had a knight among its members in the previous twenty years, those which public opinion considered to be magnates, and any that had already been so designated by any previous law.)  Magnates could be of the nobility, but very wealthy merchants who emulated the behavior of the nobles, such as the Bardi family into which Bice married, could also be so designated.  (I keep a list of these families on my refrigerator for quick reference, and yes, they are indeed my refrigerator magnates.)

Gustave Doré, 1857

Folco predeceased his daughter Bice by less than a year.  His last will and testament survives, telling us much about his family.  At the time of his death in 1289, Bice was married and so was one of her sisters:  Ravegnana was married to Bandino dei Falconieri, and they had one son, Niccolò.  (Bandino was brother to Saint Giuliana Falconieri, 1270-1341, who founded a Servite tertiary order in 1305.)  Two of Bice's brothers must have been adults at this time, as they were named as tutors for their younger siblings:  Manetto and Ricovero.  Younger siblings, probably listed by order of birth within gender, were Folco's sons Pigello, Gherardo, and Iacopo, and his daughters Vanna, Pia (or Fia), Margarita, and Castoria.  So, we know that Bice came from a large family.  We also know from this will that Folco was wealthy enough to dower his daughters generously and provide for his sons, as well as for his widow, his natural sister, many charitable causes, and his hospital. 

Carl Wilhelm Friederich Oesterly, 19th century

Folco and other members of his family were buried in the family vault at Santa Margherita  (now known as the Church of Dante).  For a very long time it was believed that Bice was also interred there, but recently scholars have been saying that it was more likely she would have been buried with her husband's family, in Santa Croce.

James Blake, 1800

Let's now take a look at Bice's marriage.  Until fairly recently it was believed that she married Simone (called Mone) dei Bardi, a member of the great magnate banking family, when she was in her late teens, but recent discovery of an earlier document which she had signed as Simone's wife suggests that she was already married by the time she was fifteen.

There exists some doubt about which Simone she wed (since the Bardi seemed to have several Simones in every branch and every generation), but there is substantial agreement that it was Simone son of Geri, and that he was a knight and a man who served more than once in high elected office in Florence. 

Andrea Pierini, 1853

Did Bice have children?  We don't know.  We do know that Simone di Geri had at least three children, but we don't know whether their mother was Bice, or his second wife, Bilia (Sibilla) di Puccio Deciaioli.  We do know that Simone's daughter Ceccha (Francesca) married Francesco di Pierozzo Strozzi in 1313.  If Ceccha was born to Bice, who died in 1290, she would have been at least 23 at her marriage - not impossible, but older than the usual pattern with magnate families, where daughters tended to marry young.  Simone also fathered Bartolo and Gemma (who married either a Medici or a Baroncelli, depending on which account you believe).

What about Bice's friends?  We know from Dante's poems and commentary that she had a friend called Giovanna, nicknamed Primavera ("Springtime"), who was the ladylove of Dante's "first friend" Guido Cavalcanti, a poet and nobleman (yes, from a magnate family).  Another woman associated with Primavera and Bice in a poem was Lagia, the ladylove of another poet, Lapo Gianni.

And it seems distinctly possible, even probable, that Bice knew the young woman who was to become Dante's wife - Gemma Donati (the Donati were the magnates to end all magnates).  They were neighbors, they were more or less the same age, and Florence was not such a big city, nor its young women so protected in those years, that the two would not have known one another.  They may have spent time together; they may have been schooled together; they certainly attended the same small parish church.

Philipp Veit, 1817-1827

We know where Bice lived - only a few doors away from Dante (today's Banca Toscana is built on the land where Folco's house once stood).  And we know that she became much less available to Dante as an object of daily devotion after she married Mone dei Bardi, because the Bardi lived across the Arno. 

And that's what I've been able to learn.  So little, really.  Over 700 years ago there lived in Florence a young woman known to everyone as Bice.  She came from a large and wealthy family, she married young, she died young.  She may have been beautiful.  She certainly was, to one young poet who has made her immortal. 

Images in this post are in the public domain by virtue of more than a century having passed since the deaths of their creators.