Vol. XVI NOTTINGHAM MEDIAEVAL STUDIES Edited by LEWIS THORPE PRINTED FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM BY W. HEFFER & SONS LTD., CAMBRIDGE Z2sn AZ 166CONTENTS EDITORIAL... on a os a oe ae we ony CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH IN MEDIAEVAL ENGLAND Antonia Gransden .. THe Love-MzssENGER IN “Mitun” Constance Bullock-Davies .. a THe OxpesT Eurorean Account Book: A FLORENTINE BANK LEDGER orxaxr GeoffreyLee .. we tenet A NEw FRAGMENT OF “ALIXANDREL’ORPHELIN” Fanni Bogdanow .. Petrarcu in ArquA Lewis Thorpe we - we o we Some or Humpxrey StTaFForp’s Mixirary INDENTURES A. Compton Reeves... a a a oe ae a os we PAGE 20 28 6r NOTTINGHAM MEDIAEVAL STUDIES is published annually on 1 Sep- tember. Contributions to the journal are normally made by members of the academic staff, post-graduate research workers and graduates of the University of Nottingham, but an occasional article is accepted from outside the University. All correspondence concerning the journal should be addressed to the Editor, Nottingham Mediaeval Studies, The University, Nottingham, England. Postal orders and cheques should be crossed and made payable to “Nottingham Mediaeval Studies”, Price £0-75 or $2.50 per yolime.PETRARCH IN ARQUA I possess two etchings of the village of Arqua and the sutrounding hills, undated and unsigned, but presumably of the early seventeenth century. ‘They are illustrations in J. P. Tomasini’s Petrarcha Redivivus, printed in Padua in 1635. The first of these etchings, which is the frontispiece of the book, shows Monte Ventolone in the background. Immediately below the mountain is the citta alta, with the Oratorio della Trinita in the centre, and with seven other buildings lined up side by side, one, towards the right of the picture, obviously being Petrarch’s house. Between the upper and lower town only two dwellings are shown, In the lower town twenty-seven buildings, large and small, crowd along the La Costa road and round the church and its campanile; and from the church a lane leads southwards towards Monselice, just as it does today, passing what Jooks like a Roman milestone on its way. In the foreground is drawn. Laura, holding three laurel wreaths, and leaning her arm on a marble plinth. In the second etching, on page 131 of Tomasini’s book, Monte Ventolone is pushed to the left. The citt& alta again has the Oratorioin the centre, and then. nine buildings in Jine, one of them possibly Petrarch’s house. The La Costa road in the foreground is not built up at all, and there are only seven houses, including the presbytery, round the church and the campanile, Between the lower and upper town, however, seventeen more houses jostle each other in two straggling lines. Tomasini took a copy of his book to Rome and presented it to Urban VIII, who was a Barberini and considered himself a blood-relation of Petrarch’s mother. In 1642 Urban VIII rewarded Tomasini with the bishopric of Cittanova. ‘Petit évéché pour un livre médiocre” remarks acidly the Abbé de Sade in his Mémoires pour la vie de Frangois Pétrarque of 1764-67, clearly thinking little of the man who wrote about Petrarch more than a century before him, Certainly Tomasini’s artists differ considerably over the lay-out of early seventeenth-century Arqua, but it is remarkable that they agree more or less concerning the number of houses, Today, as in 1635, there are two centres of village life in Aqua: thesquarein front of the inn with the Chiesa di Santa Maria at the foot of the hill; and the Piazza di San Marco high above in the upper town. When my wife Barbara and I walked into Arqua one September morning in 1956 we came along the La Costa road and we made our first stop at the Trattoria Petrarca which dominates the lower square. After the hot glare of the dusty roadways, where they wind through the parched hills, one enters the village in deep shadow, almost as though through a tunnel, with a row of more recent houses clinging to an escarpment to the right and a few cottages and then a huge fifteenth-century dwelling to the left, the Palazzo Naccari, which once belonged to the Contarini, This last is a veritable fortress, with a great wooden door and high windows which are never 6970 LEWIS THORPE opened, iron gates which stay padlocked and elderly inhabitants who are never seen; those few who have been inside say that it is a treasure-house of paintings and antique furniture, Across the road stands the house of the frantoio or olive-press, in the facade of which a crescent moon stemma commemorates the fact that here lived a branch of the Strozzi, who came to Padua and Arqua in the time of Dante. From the shadow cast by these buildings one emerges into a blaze of light. Round the little square of the lower town stand the main inn, a grocer’s shop, the recently-opened butcher's shop at the top ofastoneramp, the western end of the Palazzo Naccari and a second inn with a pergola of vines over its entrance. At dawn, on later visits, as we lay asleep in the guest-room of the Trattoria Petrarca, we would gradually become aware of the strange slurring sound of dozens of shoes and boots moving over the cobbles, as the peasants and their wives from outlying farmsteads walked quietly across the square on their way to Mass, this just before the great church-bell began to clang. After Mass, on Sundays, it is in the square that the men assemble in groups, their jackets slung over their shoulders, and their battered trilbies pushed farther back on their heads as their arguments grow more heated. Pairs of magnificent white cows, with huge horned heads and minute udders, slouch slowly across the square, dragging carts heaped high with dung in the morning and with the grape-harvest at night. From time to time a woman passes, a great wooden yoke over her right shoulder and across her back, as she carries home two brimming buckets from the water-tap. Here for an hour or two on Saturday’ afternoons and on election days the only policeman of the neighbourhood stands in his shoddy brown uniform, revolver on hip. Funeral processions cross the edge of the square, coming out of the church and through the parvis and then turning sharply off into the shade of the Monselice road on their way to the campo santo, It is here that the SIAMIC buses make a brief hhalt, sounding their Klaxons as if they were hunting horns; and here that visitors from the outside world stop their cars to enquire the way to Petrarch’s house, The sun moves round the empty sky and finally drops behind the high hill of upper Arqua. It is then that the women bring out their cane chairs and sit for a while in the cool of the evening, while their barefooted children play hide-and-seek in the parvis of the church, Gradually a cool purple darkness flows into the village square. Far into the night small groups of men stand motionless, smoking and discussing the affairs of the village in voices which rise and fall and carry far through the still, warmair. One day is done: and another will soon begin. ~ “As you press back your head and look up at it from the square, Arqua seems a painter's canvas propped at an angle against the wall. The war memorial hill and its grey olive-trees are high above on the left, rough slopes rise higher still to Monte Ventolone on the right and between them runs a great yoke of rock crowned by.the Oratorio. When the sun is about to set the canvas darkens rapidly; and, if the angle is judged carefully enough, the oblong opcning in the Oratorio tower forms a small window against the evening sky, its single bellArqua in the carly seventeenth centur which serves as a frontispiece to Petrarcha Redivivas, J. P. Tomasini, Padua, 1635.PetrarchaRedimiuus. 148 Arqua in earlier times: an etching made from a woodcut. ‘Petrarcha Redivious, p. 13.Petrarcha Redinians. 137 Petrarcha Domus Argu ade Ichnographia gusdem . Petrarch’s house in Arqna in the carly seventeenth century, Peirarcha Redivivus, p. 137.PETRARCH IN ARQUA 7 hanging in the air like a tiny black bat. In the morning or in the early after- noon, the dusty little road begins its steep upward climb in unrelieved sunshine. It sets off between the Trattoria Petrarca and the grocer’s shop, skirts an ancient house built in the fourteenth century as a hostel for mendicants and travellers and still displaying a tiny fresco of San Roceo beside a crucifix, passes a water-tap where village Rebeccas stand and chat as their buckets fill, and so comes to a fork presided over by a Madonna in her small azure shrine. The incline now becomes very steep. In theory mounting traffic takes the right- hand track and cars coming down take that on the left, the Via Jacopo d’Arqua, named after the fourteenth-century surgeon who was bom here, but in practice the latter road is rarely used. Where the hillside falls away, a low wall is shaded at intervals by zizzole bushes, their green nuts ripening gradually to a rich burnt sienna until they look almost like polished pecans; and in the scrub below the wall thirsty-Jooking Muscovy ducks crouch in the dusty shade. The white-washed houses on the other side of the road are interspersed with court- yards, where geese, turkeys and guinea-fowls strut and posture, and where the golden maize lies drying in the sun. Half-way up the precipitous hill is another water-tap; and there one can pause for breath and look backwards and down- wards as from an aeroplane over the lower village and the church of Santa Maria, along the valley to La Costa and far eastwards across the flat alluvial Plains to the distant Adriatic, Soon the two tracks unite and become more steep. A huge man-made eliff rises sheer on the inside, crowned by a lovely villa; and this is matched on the left by the massive wall of the Oratorio. If you wish you can work your way round to this last by a tunnel cut in the rock itself and roofed by the Oratorio walls, or you can climb higher until you reach the tiny Piazza di San Marco. The Piazza is minute and in shade for much of the day. It has two cafés. An early seventeenth-century column with a winged lion reminds you that you are in the Veneto. There is a new town-hall with a post-office at the side. The main feature is the Oratorio della Trinita. This is a small, squat building with a heavy tower and walls which would not disgrace a Norman castle. Through an archway opens the tiny buttressed courtyard, the Loggia dei Vicari, and there on the minute facade are fixed what remains of the stemmi of the noble Padovani who represented the Venetian Republic in Arqua, the oldest being that of Raimondo Soliman of 1588. Upa stairway the grilled gate of the tower stands barred andlocked. The Oratorio, too, is closed. Mass is sometimes said there on Sunday evenings, after a brief tolling of the bell. Someone nearby has the key to the door. My wife and I went in once. It is musty inside, and cramped, and the air is stale: one is left in no doubt that it is many years since the Vicari of the Republic of Venice came here to worship. There are the remains of fourteenth-century frescoes on the walls, a number of faded canvases and a polittico with Saint Augustine in the central panel. The Piazza diSan Marco, the old municipio round the corner and the Oratorio della Trinita, with its tiny loggia where the wind blows and refuse collects, these