Visual Theory

This chapter provides an overview and assessment of Dante’s use of medieval visual theories in his writings. It first surveys his use of the medieval Aristotelian tradition of visual theory in the Convivio, and discusses his reliance on other models of vision in the Vita nova and Rime, including those found both in medical writings and in the works of other poets. The chapter then discusses how, in the Commedia, Dante incorporates a variety of other late medieval discourses about vision into his narrative. Dante does this—it is argued—in carefully structured and stratified ways that often reveal his characteristic syncretism. The poet continues to use neo-Aristotelian theory but also draws upon a rich body of material on seeing found in medieval theology, contemplation, and Biblical exegesis. Particular attention is paid to how these multiple traditions inform the presentation of Dante-character’s own visual experiences throughout the poem.

Religion

This chapter explores the way in which Dante forges an original form of religiosity in his work by embracing Franciscan and apocalyptic ideas. It focuses on three aspects: the prophetic spirit that animates Dante’s critique of the Church and his call for spiritual renewal; his emphasis on the transformative power of prayer and its role in the poet’s construction of his spiritual authority; and the celebration of the female role in salvation through the figures of Lady Poverty and Beatrice. Franciscan thought on Poverty, from Joachim of Flora to radicals such as Ubertino da Casale and Peter John Olivi, informs Dante’s theological (but also political and spiritual) reflections on religion. Moreover, Dante’s personal exile becomes a metaphor for Christian peregrinations on earth, a figura of homo viator’s pilgrimage toward the final destination in the afterlife.

The Master Narrative and its Paradoxes

The chapter explores alternatives to the uplifting linear narrative of progress that underpins Dante’s Commedia and can be regarded as its ‘master narrative’. It investigates three counter-narratives that stand in tension with, and often subvert, its teleological trajectory. These are enacted by (i) the poem’s representations of an uncertain, open-ended future; (ii) the alternative endings voiced by various characters who imagine how their lives might have turned out differently; and (iii) the paradoxes that resist the poem’s linear temporality and offer important illustrations of a more unresolved Commedia that does not always seek ‘total coherence’. The chapter concludes that alongside established notions of Dante’s plurilingualism and pluristylism, it is fruitful to think of the Commedia in terms of its narrative pluralism. Exploring counter-narratives balances a popular image of Dante as a carefully controlling author with that of a writer open to a more liberal and reciprocal relationship with his readers.

The Lyric Mode

Dante is before all other things a lyric poet and this chapter explores his commitment to lyric from his earliest compositions to the Commedia. For Dante, lyric is the natural mode for expressing desire and is particularly marked by pleasure. Indeed ‘modo’ is the word he uses in both Vita Nova and Commedia to represent the indissoluble bond between love and speech that animates the desiring subject and leads to the production of poetry. This chapter traces the significance of this word in the Occitan and early Italian love lyric, especially in its associations with measure (misura) and desire’s tendency to transgress it. It considers how the lyric mode is employed to convey the intensity of the love experience and the porous nature of the desiring body, especially in Dante’s relationship to Beatrice and as expressed in flexible and expansive forms of textuality that resist closure.

The Manuscript Tradition, or on Editing Dante

The editions of Dante’s works represent as many responses as there are questions raised by their peculiar manuscript tradition. This chapter discusses the methodological procedures of the main editorial enterprises related to Dante’s vernacular works and the results achieved by these enterprises. It also addresses the tradition of the Latin works. It discusses the geographical dissemination of manuscripts and the value of local traditions insofar as they help us find a way out of the complicated tradition of the Commedia and of the Rime. The chapter also investigates the ways in which the tradition bears marks of authorship, focusing on such problems as the debated existence in manuscripts of a ‘song book’ planned by Dante himself or on the possible authorial chapter division of the Vita Nova. Dante’s philology is always an ‘author-oriented’ philology showing at its best to what extent philology and hermeneutics can reinforce one another.

Conversion, Palinody, Traces

Taking three terms which represent different ways of relating to experience, time, and narration, this chapter proposes attention to what remains, in the form traces, against the pressure of conversion which requires, instead, a complete break with the past. Traces are here understood as vestiges or footprints, with literal and metaphorical implications inspired by Sigmund Freud’s reading of Gradiva’s footsteps in his essay on Jensen’s novel, and followed back to Beatrice’s footsteps in Vita Nova and Inferno. Just as Freud understands Pompeii as a symbol of a force which is at once destructive and preservative—in other words, repression—, so this chapter shows that palinody in Dante is a mechanism that conserves as well as hides. The resultant understanding of Dante’s works is volcanic as well as non-linear.

Modernist Dante

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.

The Materiality of the Text and Manuscript Culture

This article investigates the significance of the manuscripts of Virgil and other classical poets that Dante might have read. Calling attention to the presence of musical notation (neumes) in copies that share the particular Virgilian readings Dante quotes, this essay explores the resonance of one of those passages (Aeneas’ dream of Hector) in Dante’s poem. It shows how Dante uses this Virgilian episode to craft his encounter with Manfred where he considers the relationship of body and soul that constitutes one of the major differences between classical and Christian thought, as Augustine frequently noted. Just as Christian anthropology maintains that the body constitutes an essential element of the human person, this essay argues that the materiality of the texts Dante read constitutes a crucial source for understanding how Dante interpreted these texts.

Exile

This chapter examines the way the poet represents his exile. It is composed of three parts: the first considers the way Dante handles his exile in relation to authorship, and reveals how he constructs his authority from his position as an exile in the Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia, and his Epistles. The second analyses exile as a major element of the autobiographical dimension of the Commedia. It shows that the necessity to grasp the moral lesson of the exile constitutes the very heart of the poem. The third part explores the relationship between exile and pilgrimage, the latter being, from the Vita Nuova onwards, a symbol of the human condition, and demonstrates how Dante interprets his experience both as an exile and as a wanderer in the other world in the light of pilgrimage.

Early Italian Lyric

In order to examine the relationship between Dante and the early Italian lyric, this chapter focuses on two key moments of Dante’s rewriting of his own story as lyric poet: first in the Vita nuova, which traces the relationship to fellow poet Guido Cavalcanti, and second in the encounters with Bonagiunta da Lucca and Guido Guinizzelli in Purgatorio XXIV and XXVI, which redefine the roles of the major poets of the past generation. These passages are less ambiguous than has often appeared: they doubtless intend to promote Dante’s poetic choices and literary authority, but they also testify to objective developments in the history of vernacular love poetry.