ABSTRACT
Part Five (“Long Commentary on Donna me prega”) is a detailed verse-by-verse commentary on Donna me prega, one of the outstanding monuments of Italian literature and among the most notoriously difficult (and most thoroughly misinterpreted) texts in the Western canon. Virtually all commentators agree that Cavalcanti casts love in a negative light. Assuming that the poem amounts to an attack against love, they usually attribute to the canzone one or both of the following tenets: love ought to be avoided because it interferes with our reason, that is, with our power to make free and proper ethical choices; love ought to be avoided because it impedes our intellect, that is, our power to attain scientific knowledge of objects of theory. Yet the canzone has little to do with this assertion concerning the relation of emotion and reason. We will see that, for Cavalcanti, it is precisely to the extent that humans do not love that they fail to lead human lives. Cavalcanti embraces Averroes’s theory of love as rational choice. Averroes develops a conception of emotion (“loving and hating”) and reason (“thinking”) as two aspects of the same uniquely human power, according to which it makes perfect sense to speak of the emotionality of reason and the rationality of emotion. This fusion of emotion and reason helps us see that Cavalcanti, normally considered a poet of tragic emotional disorder, can rightly be called the poet of the rational emotional animal. Positing this theory as the guiding principle for reading Cavalcanti’s canzone leads to the recognition of its remarkable coherence and the formulation of an unprecedented interpretation: the poem does not blame love for its irrationality (as virtually all previous commentators have claimed) but praises love as paradigmatic of rational human flourishing.
