De vulgari eloquentia: structure and content
Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, written between 1304 and 1305, is a treatise in Latin which aims to provide a systematic description of the eloquence of the vernacular. The plan was for four books, but the work was left unfinished at Chapter XIV of Book II: the author had intended Book III to focus on vernacular prose, and Book IV on the comic style.
In Book I, which is more markedly philosophical and linguistic in orientation, Dante asserts the superiority of the vernacular, a natural language acquired spontaneously, compared with Latin, an artificial language, a grammatica, which had emerged to cope with the linguistic fragmentation resulting from the divine punishment for the tower of Babel. Dante then identifies the three European languages, the languages of oc, oïl and sì, concentrating on the last of these. Examining fourteen dialect varieties within the Italian peninsula, he notes that none of them coincides with the volgare illustre, the illustrious vernacular which must be cardinal (the cardine or pivot around which the others revolve), stately (worthy of the royal palace) and courtly (inspired by courtly behavioural norms), capable in scope, therefore, of surpassing the municipal. Nonetheless, he continues, an ideal linguistic variety of this sort virtually exists, as in the lyric poetry of a number of excellent poets: the authors of the Sicilian school, Guinizzelli, Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, Cino da Pistoia and Dante himself. Book II takes the form of a treatise on poetics and rhetoric, in which the themes pertinent to the illustrious vernacular (salus, venus and virtus) and its fundamental metrical features are set out (with a detailed analysis of the canzone), as are its rhetorical, syntactic and lexical characteristics. While referring also to classical and medieval sources, the De vulgari is a profoundly innovative statement on rhetoric; through the many observations on poets of Dante’s own time, it is also the first example of literary history and authentic militant criticism.
