Imprinted Life discussion

chapters 14-15

Fleeing the abbey of Clairefontaine, Solange makes her way back to Avignon, where she gets commissions to scribe letters and other documents and where she meets the Italian poet Petrarch and his brother Gherardo. She's fluent in Provençal, Latin, and Italian and is busy. The author traces more of Solange and Francesco's whereabouts in Avignon in her essay.

chapters 16-20

Dramatic contrasts keep the story at a peak. There is Petrarch's interest in Laura in the realm of the courtly love tradition. As represented in Novik's novel Muse and in Ruth's essay “Wounded by One of Love’s Arrows”: Petrarch and Courtly Love , Laura is not especially ethereal but Petrarch's writing about her is within that courtly-love tradition. The latter says about Petrarch's human depiction of her,

"...the smallest incidents of everyday life could be transformed into poetry, that they are themselves poetic."

In Novik's fictional character of Solange Le Blanc, the young scribe's cloistered fate is modified when she escapes the Clairefontaine abbey for worldly Avignon. There, the more spiritual orders of Christians are burnt alive, the cloth dyers have purple-dyed arms in their quarter by the lapping paddle wheels of the canal, the papacy displays its worldly goods more often than its virtuous ones, and the absence of literacy opens an opportunity for Solange's living. Petrarch and Solange's relationship mirrors those extremes between the body and spirit, creating children and poetry.

chapters 21-25

Some exciting events in these chapters are Solange's speculative vision about John XXII's paternity of her.

"Full of disgust, I raised my head to look into eyes of lapis lazuli--eyes as bright and familiar as mine had been when they stared out from the Pope's own looking glass." (142-3)

Another memorable event is Petrarch's song memorializing the retrieved glove from his and Laura's meeting: "O bella man, chi mi distingi il core". It's been variously translated and later musical composers created a madrigal and other music from it:

"synthesized performance" of Petrarch's poem "O bella man chi mi distingi il core"

http://www.classicalarchives.com/work...

http://noelakchote.bandcamp.com/track...

http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PI...

http://www.public-domain-poetry.com/f...

A strong tension in this novel is Petrarch's casting his social image as "a poet of spiritual love" (144). Solange expresses unhappiness with that deception. His secrecy about their relationship would make her into an amour. His ploy works as little is known about the shadowy woman in his life and as he is known to posterity thus. Disguising the truth is part of this novel's intrigue, as not only do costumes disguise for differing reasons but so do superstitious beliefs/rituals--the bell-ringing during the severe storm and the mallet and other actions surrounding a pope's death)--disguise truer reasons.

Chapter 27 works well with the extended metaphor of an "eel", beginning with the strong smell of old fish and the desirable idea of an infant in rounded, unripe figs and continuing with "drunken eel" then "An idea arrived, but I could not grasp hold of it -- too slippery and dark it was for me" then "eel pie".