How to Train Your Audience: Staging License and Licentiousness in Petrarch's Speeches

• In Event: Complexities of Rhetoric in Italy and Beyond

Abstract

This presentation will explore Petrarch’s lifelong engagement with the fine line between poetic license and licentiousness in public speech, from his 1341 Coronation Oration to his 1373 invective Against a Detractor of Italy. Drawing on theories of rhetorical decorum in Cicero, Quintilian, Horace, Augustine, and especially Lactantius, Petrarch identifies these rhetorical modes as problematic precisely for their public dimension. But the poet-orator plays with the ambiguities of the relationship of obscenity and the stage: the term can denote either what must not happen in the audience’s view, or that which may only happen in the artificial space of the stage. Petrarch takes the stage (and not just the forum) as a figurative setting for his most exuberant, potentially licentious speech. His aim is to cultivate a public capable of discerning what crosses the rhetorical line.

Author

• Maggie Fritz-Morkin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill