Dante Alighieri Science Communicator

This paper deals with the issue of communication and dissemination of scientific knowledge outside the circle of specialists. In particular, in the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, we will focus on the program for the popularization of knowledge outlined by Dante in the Convivio and De Vulgari Eloquentia, as well as several examples taken from his Divine Comedy concerning mathematical and natural sciences. Some solutions for communicating science proposed by Dante, such as the explanations of principles and scientific methods within a narrative framework (now often called the storytelling method), in addition to dialogues between characters, anticipate methods for science communication used by several authors after him. Examples are provided to show the depth of Dante’s knowledge concerning the basic concepts and methods of mathematics, physics and natural sciences (such as chemistry, meteorology, astronomy etc.). In addition, the examples demonstrate how effectively Dante used analogies and metaphors taken from sciences within his poetry.

“accipiendo vel compilando ab aliis”: De vulgari eloquentia 1.1. Reading Dante with Dante: A contribution to Dante’s theory of language

This article analyzes Dante’s theory of language and considers at first a few fragments of Dante’s Latin treatise on the vernacular, reading them in light of their ancient-medieval contexts. This reading allows part-modification of the critical discourse about Dante’s theory of language. The article argues that Dante’s discussion did not start in the De vulgari eloquentia, as is commonly assumed, but was at first introduced in the Vita nuova. Recent studies show that the theme of laude in the Vita nuova includes a linguistic theory and a discourse on the deep structures of language. Focussing on specific words, considering them in light of the ancient-medieval background, the article organizes a transverse reading that considers layers of Dante’s discourse on language from the Vita nuova to the Commedia not yet explored and evaluated.

Comic Culture

The comic pervaded the culture around Dante, offering him a model of literature that he explored throughout his life. For centuries, medieval literary theorists had defined literature as a subset of ethics, with tragic literature communicating the praise of the virtuous, and comic literature conveying the blame of the sinful. The definitions of comic and satiric literatures overlapped such that the two genres could not be fully distinguished from each other. Comic elements appear throughout Dante’s literature, from his lyric poems to the derision of the Italian dialects in De vulgari eloquentia. Nowhere is the influence of comic literature clearer than when dealing with his masterpiece, the Commedia. From the invectives in Inferno to the tirades against ecclesiastical corruption in Paradiso, the author of the Commedia is committed to decrying the flaws of the sinful.

Dante in Caribbean Poetics: Language, Power, Race

This chapter considers the reception of Dante in Caribbean literature. It explores the works of two seminal Afro-Caribbean poets, the Barbadian Edward Kamau Brathwaite and the Jamaican Lorna Goodison, examining their relationship to Dante’s Commedia and De vulgari eloquentia. The chapter discusses the import of these two texts and of the figure of Dante in the articulation of Brathwaite’s seminal concept of ‘nation language’ and in Goodison’s theorizations of rhetoric, which highlight the epistemic dimensions of language, particularly in the colonial and postcolonial contexts. The chapter shows how the figure and work of Dante have been instrumental for these two writers in their exploration of the entangled concerns of language, race, and power in the colonial continuum. In so doing, the chapter highlights similarities, while underscoring differences, between Caribbean poets’ engagement with the figure and work of Dante and the reception of the Italian poet among African-American writers.

The New Homer (Ultraviolet Colophon)

This chapter begins with Boccaccio’s portrait of Dante as Homer in an image now visible only under ultraviolet light in the last pages of his first manuscript collection of Dante’s vernacular works. This visual image reflects Boccaccio’s dedication to celebrating Dante as the new Homer, who establishes the foundations of the new vernacular tradition by putting his lyric in the tradition of classical texts—a move Dante justifies by including the ‘divisions’ to show the sophistication of his poems. Examining Dante’s reprisals of this argument in the De vulgari eloquentia and the Commedia, this chapter concludes by discussing several later authors who gave Dante the status as the new Homer in their attempts to vindicate new cultural initiatives, including Vico, Shelley, Emerson, Joyce, Walcott, Rodó, Vargas Llosa, and Ngũgĩ.

The Painting (Composition)

This chapter scrutinizes the challenges editors confronted in their typographical composition of Dante’s poem with two beginnings. Should the first beginning be followed by the rest of the poem and then the second beginning or both beginnings and then remaining verses? The various solutions proposed in the early printed editions, nineteenth-century translations, and early modern manuscripts, show the complexity of Dante’s own poetic strategy in this poem on the anniversary of Beatrice’s death, which aims to defeat time and overcome Beatrice’s death by adding more time. Exploring the persistence of this issue in the most recent editions, the chapter considers the poem in light of Dante’s decision to represent himself in the prose as painting an angel. Connecting this remark to Dante’s reflections on angels and representation in the De vulgari eloquentia and the Commedia, this chapter examines Dante’s thinking about the materiality of texts and the relationship between word and image in the context of a larger tradition that stretches from Augustine and Petrarch to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

The Crisis (Musical Staves)

This chapter begins with the musical stages that accompany Dante’s ballata in an early twentieth-century English translation. Although the music is a modern fabrication, it calls attention to the distinctive form of the ballata which Dante considers defective in the De vulgari eloquentia because it requires the kind of musical accompaniment these staves provide. This chapter examines how this formal defect also encodes a thematic problem of relying on Beatrice’s greeting. This chapter shows how Dante deals with this crisis through the praise style expressed in the self-sufficient (not defective) form of the canzone Donne ch’avete intelletto. While the canzone’s significance has been widely recognized, this chapter shows how Dante’s expression of this new idea of love by plotting these different poetic forms draws on the two books he read after Beatrice’s death, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and Cicero’s De amicitia. The final section discusses how several later readers transformed and even erased Dante’s innovative idea of love.