Guido Cavalcanti : the other Middle Ages / Maria Luisa Ardizzone.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

While other scholars have noted Cavalcanti's Averroism, Ardizzone is the first to analyse it in light of sciences such as optics or logic, focusing on new issues of intellectual debate of Cavalcanti's time, as, for instance, the medieval theory of matter.

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CHOICE Review

Over the last several decades, Cavalcanti's notoriously complex canzone Donna me prega has become a touchstone both for interpretative analysis of the medieval Italian vernacular poetic tradition and for the insertion of that tradition into a specific cultural (philosophical, scientific) context. Ardizzone (NYU) now fuses these two approaches, with consistently interesting results. She begins by examining Cavalcanti's metaphorics of love and then undertakes a detailed reading of the poem against the background of medieval vision theory and theories of matter, pleasure, and the intellect. A final chapter examines the centrality of Cavalcanti's work in the poetic thinking of Ezra Pound. Ranging widely across the intellectual landscape of the late Middle Ages (Averroes, "radical Aristotelianism," the trecento commentary tradition, Dante's Inferno) and engaging skillfully with 20th-century scholarship, this book is as dense and demanding as the poem that is its subject; but it is also the most substantial work on Cavalcanti to appear in English in a good many years. Highly recommended for collections in Italian literature and medieval studies serving graduate students, researchers, and faculty. S. Botterill University of California, Berkeley