ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the bookishness of certain poetic works from the later Middle Ages. It deals with two Italian examples, the Vita Nuova and the Canzoniere, because a comparison between them will establish clearly one of the several issues concerned. Dante’s Vita Nuova is in many ways a distinctly bookish work. In the case of the Vita Nuova, the separable items are thirty-one sonnets and canzoni. These poems are also preserved elsewhere as separate items in various collections of Italian lyric poetry, but in copies of the Vita Nuova itself they are firmly anchored into the positions dictated for them by the enclosing prose narrative. The case is otherwise with the Canzoniere of Petrarch, a later collection of lyric poems. The separable items — the lyrics — form a continuous series, arranged in an order uncontrolled by any enclosing narrative and therefore dependent for its preservation upon the scrupulosity of the scribes.
