Commentary Purg XXVIII 43-48

Dante sees that Matelda is 'in love' and wants to understand what she is singing.  The response of Venturi (DDP Venturi.Purg.XXVIII.43) indicates that the current debate was already in progress nearly 300 years ago.  He takes Matelda to be singing 'of divine love and not, as some ignorant fools understand, of the bestial kind.'  However, many commentators, aroused by the sensual tone of the protagonist's responses, disagree.

      The first major use of Guido Cavalcanti's poem, 'In un boschetto trova' pasturella' (In a little wood I came upon a shepherd girl), to amplify the meaning of this scene was made by Charles Singleton (Sing.1958.1), pp. 214-16, even if he was not the first to call attention to its importance here (see Scartazzini [DDP Scartazzini.Purg.XXIX.1]).  This ballata is in a genre worked previously by dozens of French and Provençal poets, a genre in which poets who more usually wrote songs about unattainable ladies had their 'revenge,' as it were.  The pastourelle or pastorella (the genre is named for the willing and socially unimportant shepherdess it celebrates) generally, as in Cavalcanti's lyric, has a high-born protagonist ride into a clearing in a wood where he finds a lovely and willing young woman who gives him sexual pleasure at his merest request (indeed, in Cavalcanti's poem, it is she who proposes the amorous encounter to him).  Any study of this ballata makes it immediately clear that Dante had it on his mind as he composed this canto.  But see Poggioli (Pogg.1962.1), who only gingerly accepts the likelihood of so contemporary and erotic a connection, since he is more interested in the more sedate influence of the classical tradition of the locus amoenus (pleasant place, the pastoral escape from 'civilization').  And see, opposing the view that Matelda is a 'pastorella' in any meaningful way, Grimaldi Pizzorno (Grim.1994.1).  See also Chiamenti (Chia.1999.2), who argues that the generic identity of the lyric moment is better understood as reflecting the reverdie than the pastourelle.  It nonetheless clearly reflects a very particular poem of Guido Cavalcanti that happens to be a pastorella, as Barolini recognizes (Baro.1984.1), pp. 148-53.  For a wider sense of the generic classifications of the pastourelle see Cepraga (Cepr.2000.1).

      Awareness of Cavalcanti's poem as germane to Dante began with the Anonimo Fiorentino (DDP Fiorentino.Purg.XI.97-99), who merely mentions the poem in his note detailing Cavalcanti's works.  Gregorio Di Siena (DDP Siena.Inf.II.55) was the first to point out that the opening line of the next canto ([Purg XXIX 1]), 'Cantando come donna innamorata' (like a lady touched by love she sang), derived from Guido's pastorella, the verse 'cantava come fosse 'nnamorata'; he also argued that Dante had already cited the second verse of Guido's pastorella in Virgil's description of Beatrice in Inferno II.  If he is correct, Dante would then have borrowed Guido's frankly sensual portrait of a young woman to describe ladies of a far more spiritual inclination.  Scartazzini (DDP Scartazzini.Purg.XXIX.1) was the first to suggest that many elements of Cavalcanti's poem were active participants, as it were, in Purgatorio XXVIII.  Bosco (DDP Bosco.Purg.XXVIII.63-68) offers the fullest treatment found in the commentaries, but does not acknowledge his predecessors.

      Once we see Guido's poem behind Dante's we can also discern an authorial strategy behind its presence.  Matelda does not come as a shepherdess, but as the unfallen Eve, virginal, upright, completely uninterested in sex.  It is the protagonist, his head full of Cavalcantian sexuality, who imagines that she is in love with him, just like a pretty pastorella.  It will take him some time to discover the wrongness of his view of her, and some of his readers have yet to make that discovery.  For the view that Dante's sexual desire for Matelda is 'innocent and happy' see Dronke (Dron.2001.1), pp. 94-95.  Kirkham (Kirk.1993.1), p. 424, also believes that she represents sensual love (she is 'thoroughly sensual and Venerean').