creator: Fordyce, Cristiana Francesca
description- – In mid-thirteenth century Florence, the power of the word ensured the livelihood of virtually every citizen. From moral issues, to political ideology, to profit economy, the new landscape of the communal city was strictly interwoven with the activity of the word. The profit economy meant that language and merchandise shared the same destiny, each forever split into a double reality of intrinsic value and an evaluation attributed by the market and common repute. The bourgeois intellectual, while an offspring of this society, found himself in open conflict with his civic milieu and its values. Despite the symbiotic relationship that the city and its intellectuals had reached in the rhetoric of Brunetto Latini, by the end of the thirteenth century the bourgeois intellectual was ready to claim his autonomy from the civic collective and the hegemonic forces of common repute. Motivated to preserve personal interest over the bene communis, the intellectual elected to privilege the personal truth of intelligere over the profit economy ideology of facere. The conflict generated a complete revolution in language. The rhetorical discourse of persuasion was challenged by the argumentative demonstration of the compromised supremacy of the intellectual. Intellectuals like Compagni, Cavalcanti and Boccaccio employed the ars disserendi, the discourse of individual truth, independent from the approval of its audience, to oppose the ars dictaminis, the language of the communal chancery and the profit economy. Dialectic, which from Abelard to Ockham, had proven to be the privileged language of the mind, an exercise of personal intention, and an efficient system to judge reality, became the only tool available to overcome the force of fortuna. Dialectic made it possible for the bourgeois intellectual to challenge the city with the citizenship of the mind.
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