Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies

Not only literary students, but also well-known scholars share the idea that the reconstruction of a text is a routine job which leaves little room for creativity. After some 40 years during which I have edited or prepared the edition of works of Machiavelli (Discorso intorno alla nostra lingua), Pietro Aretino (Cortegiana) and Torquato Tasso (Aminta), and 17 years devoted to the textual transmission and the text of Dante’s Commedia, I think that, except for the first phases of the job, textual editing requires almost constant critical thought and interpretation. I shall present a little series of examples, mostly from Dante’s Commedia, with cases ranging from decisions in the realm of accidentals to rather complicated choices among competing substantial readings and to the risky enterprise of emendation against all the witnesses of the work. While these examples can give an idea of the novelty of some solutions of my forthcoming edition (the introduction and Inferno will appear in the summer of 2021), in my view, they seem to confirm the opinion of the great classical philologist Giorgio Pasquali, for whom textual criticism isn’t mechanical; it is methodical.

As one of the outstanding authors of medieval literature, Dante Alighieri has enjoyed seven centuries of close scholarly attention. ¹ The immense success of his Comedy has prompted some modern Dante scholars to assume that such success came easily during his life, even though the Comedy was fully issued only after the poet’s death. Similar claims for rapid success are also made for the Vita nuova and some of Dante’s lyric poetry. However, although much ancient source material has been lost, the surviving evidence does not support the view that success came to Dante during his life. Close scrutiny of the manuscript sources suggests a quite different scenario: Dante as an author had to survive in a dynamic and ruthlessly competitive environment (which, by analogy with the theory of natural selection, may have helped to elicit his finest achievements). His goal was to persuade the highly educated and affluent Florentine upper class to abandon its attachment to the prevailing lyrical school, represented by the authoritative and apparently indomitable Guittone d’Arezzo and his followers. Only then would Dante and the new poets (the Stilnovisti) stand a chance of seeing their work collected in the prestigious and expensive canzonieri. Probably, on the evidence of the surviving collections and other manuscripts (Escorialense, Laur. Martelli 12, etc), Dante did not fully achieve his goal — a situation which changed, dramatically, only after the Comedy was published.

Il saggio studia le perifrasi (stranamente poco considerate dalla critica) che nella Commedia vengono impiegate per indicare Dio. Si sa che sul nome di Dio Dante interviene ben due volte, legandolo alla questione della prima parola umana, ma nel poema c’è anche una ricca varietà di perifrasi usate per indicare la divinità. Da un regesto di queste figure retoriche si ricavano le caratteristiche che Dante assegna al divino con qualche originalità. La trattazione discute anzitutto i fondamenti biblici e teologici delle opzioni poetiche di Dante, confrontando in particolare le perifrasi su Dio con il De divinis nominibus dello Pseudo-Dionigi. Si rileva però anche l’originalità di Dante per le qualità divine che fa emergere attraverso la creazione poetica.

Dante deals specifically with the theme of humility only in the canto of the superbs (Purgatory, X–XII). Still, the topic permeates the entire poem, from the moment Vergil invites Dante to follow him. Obedience is the predominant form that humility takes in Inferno. In Purgatory, it determines the choral forms of the language (prayer and singing), but it manifests itself most spectacularly in the Earthly Paradise procession, which takes the shape of a Cross, the highest symbol of humility in Christ and of Christianity. In Paradise, it is present in some key episodes (that of Cato, of St. Francis, and Dante’s theological exam). Yet, it is continuously signified in the language of image-symbols’ configuration that the blessed souls take in each heaven. Finally, it is humility that allows the Pilgrim to see God with his physical senses, which provide the lowest and most concrete form of knowledge, and yet the most sublime one.

The hybrid nature of the human–plant suicidal souls explored through the character of Pier delle Vigne in Inferno XIII exhibits unique characteristics in the Comedy’s first cantica. For centuries the Wood of the Suicides has demanded the attention of readers and scholars alike and yet the interplay and structure of their coexisting identities remain subject to lively debate. As an analytical tool, Dante’s encounter with Pier delle Vigne is compared to the wave–particle duality of light, a peculiar phenomenon of quantum physics. Indeed just as the suicides are at once true human and true plant, light behaves simultaneously as wave and particle depending on the experiment performed. The two complementary descriptions of light are mirrored in the duality of Pier delle Vigne, allowing a schematic restating of the canto emphasizing the multisensory interaction between Dante and the sinner. The hybrid nature of the damned soul thus becomes an expression of the contrasting judgments of Dante–theologian and Dante–poet on this character. Furthermore, the analogy shows how the anonymous suicide from Florence introduced at the end of the canto embodies the ambivalent perspective of Dante on the city of Florence itself.

This contribution aims to identify the notions of “tatto” and “tocco” as main agents for soul health and as vectors of spiritual transcendence in Dante’s thought and in particular in the Divine Comedy. In his path from Hell to Paradise, the pilgrim transforms his physical ability “to touch” and “to be touched” in a form of spiritual sensoriality. In this way, the sensitive phenomenons participate to the intellectual processes, pleasure becomes salvation, and the perception of sweetness allows access to the intangible and ineffable realities of Paradise. We will analyze the functions of tactile feeling and experience in their pathological, pharmacological and finally spiritual aspects. First we show how touch feeling, for Christian thought, corresponds to a general modality through which Grace enters into the intellect and through which the intellect perceives the divine phenomena. In this case, pleasure is synonymous with communication with God and is no more related to a condemnable voluptuousness. From the symptomatic touch of physical suffering of Hell to the ineffable sweetness of Paradise, passing through the acquisition of a new spiritual touch in Purgatory, Dante develops this idea through many similarities. Poetic writing becomes itself the instrument through which the soul could taste the divine “stille” in order to turn back to the “stelle”.

The phrase “Dante the pilgrim” has become commonplace within scholarship on the Commedia as a way to refer to the character within the text who travels the Christian afterlife, as distinct from “Dante the poet,” the voice which narrates the poem. Yet, despite such prevalence, the validity of the term “pilgrim” goes rather unquestioned by scholars. This study aims to challenge the label through Dante’s own definition of a peregrino in the Vita nuova as “chiunque è fuori de la sua patria” (XL.6), a definition that shows a more nuanced understanding of the term than modern scholarship acknowledges. Instead, by tracing out the legacy of the term “Dante the pilgrim” as emerging from late 19th-century criticism such as Francesco de Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana, this article will show that the typical understanding of pilgrim ignores a central dimension of Dante’s own definition: a sense of physical displacement. For Dante, pilgrimage becomes constitutive of the virtual world in the poem, drawing off of material practices of travel to inform the physical experiences of the protagonist. This literal level, signified by an embodied protagonist in similar ways as pilgrims to holy sites interacted with those places, is fundamental for interpreting the larger theological truths Dante conveys, even in minute details such as kicking rocks in Inferno 12.

This paper ¹ re-examines the relationship between Dante’s Commedia and the Baptistery of San Giovanni from an art historical perspective. Drawing on –– and then departing from –– earlier work by Dante scholars who described figurative echoes between the Commedia and the Baptistery’s mosaic program, this article reconceptualizes the relationship between the two as not only figurative, but also liturgical. Using the texts of two extant medieval Florentine libri ordinales to reconstruct the liturgy of Holy Saturday, I document the ways in which the decorative mosaic imagery of the Baptistery is reflected in and reinforced by the multisensory performance of the baptismal rite. I argue further that Dante ekphrastically reimagines this rite in cantos 1–2 and 29–33 of Purgatorio. By exploring Dante’s liturgical imagination vis-à-vis the multivalent space of the Baptistery, this paper articulates and illuminates the profound interconnections that can exist between medieval art, architecture, liturgy, and poetry.

A central question facing the reader of the Paradiso terrestre (Pg 28–33) concerns the selfhood of the protagonist, the character Dante. While the state of Dante’s soul was critical to the poem’s beginning in the dark wood, and remained implicit through the intervening cantos, it is only in the Paradiso terrestre that it becomes the poem’s central focus. This question is explored in cognitive and theological terms in a sequential reading of the six cantos that elucidates the learning process occurring in the character before and after his confession in Pg 31: in his encounter with Matelda, his sensory and perceptual experience of the procession, his dialogues with Beatrice, and his witnessing of her divine beauty as the analogia entis reflecting the beauty of God. The analysis acknowledges the changes in Dante’s style in this interval, which serves as a fulcrum of the entire Commedia, a spatio-temporal threshold in which the transition of one soul, from confession to redemption to instruction on the divine word, is linked to the destiny of humankind and the prospect of universal salvation. Throughout this process of becoming, the character’s cognitive limitations are exposed, not simply as flaws but as signs of his intrinsic humanity.

Much recent commentary on Dante’s Commedia focuses on Dante’s truth claims in the poem. Indeed, Teodolinda Barolini has proposed that “the fundamental question for all readers of Dante’s poem” is “How are we to respond to the poet’s insistence that he is telling us the truth?” I propose that the poem itself gives us guidance as to the seriousness of its claims to literal truth. It does so by actively deconstructing its own meaning at critical junctures. I look at several such moments of deconstruction, but I argue that the first few cantos of the Paradiso in particular provide a reflection on the difference between reality and fiction. Early in the Paradiso, Dante draws attention to the metaphoric nature of his poem and reminds his reader, through his character’s own actions, that metaphor is not reality. In this way, Dante implies that we should not take the narrative particulars of his poem too literally but should treat metaphor as metaphor rather than as mimesis.

Starting from the early 14th century, Piccarda Donati and the story of her abduction from the Clarissan convent of Monticelli were subjected to a creative process of reconfiguration and retelling that “made” Piccarda into a virgin martyr and a champion of the Clarissan order. By reading early modern Clarissan and Franciscan historiography against the grain of Paradiso 3–4 and the information preserved in early commentaries of the Commedia, I demonstrate that this process was likely initiated and favored by the Poor Clares of Monticelli, who appropriated and subverted the devotional potential offered by Piccarda’s story as told by Dante in Paradiso 3 and incorporated Piccarda within the canon of the early saints of female Franciscanism.

Paradiso 23 is intensely lyrical. Everything in it is part of a coherent construct both readable in relation to itself alone and also as part of a larger set of themes, images, and narrative strategies. Even by the standards of the Paradiso, it takes place in an atmosphere of exalted rarification and intense dependence on metaphor. Until the final lines there is no hint of earthly troubles, nor are we given the cosmological or theological discourses we have come to expect. The canto is replete with tropes of phonic repetition (alliteration and assonance), with Latinisms, and exclamations—all of which serve to magnify its intensity and stylistic elegance, even while conveying, for most readers, an effect of simplicity. Instead of the customary dialogue between Dante and the souls that he encounters, this canto is given over to spectacle; the only dialogue is between Dante and Beatrice.

Dantists have largely interpreted Paradiso 24 as a dryly intellectual canto that positively engages with medieval scholastic culture. Consequently the poet’s treatment of faith is seen as both ideologically unproblematic and as an essentially private declaration. The present article argues that such claims are questionable. In actual fact, Paradiso 24 is highly critical of the academic world, while its treatment of faith, although orthodox, is personal, idiosyncratic, and controversial. In addition, the manner in which Dante presents faith has significant political and social implications especially in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Finally, the canto in general and its assessment of faith in particular serve to legitimate Dante’s status as a scriba Dei, an imperative that destabilizes the coherence of the diegesis.

The extraordinary claims that Dante makes in cantos 24–26 of Paradiso with regard to both his theoretical knowledge and his actual ‘possession’ of the three theological virtues – Faith, Hope and Charity – do not seem to be entirely consistent with the story of a character who, only a few days earlier, was struggling in the dark forest and about to succumb to intellectual bewilderment and moral straying. Why else was that character so close to spiritual death if not because he lacked those virtues which he now claims to know so profoundly and hold in supreme measure? This paper argues first, that Dante here transcends any distinction that may operate elsewhere in the poem between Dante as character, narrator and author; second, that his claims make sense in the context of his circumstances at the time when he composed cantos 24–26 of Paradiso, i.e. on or just before 1320, twenty years after the fictional date of his journey to the Otherworld; and third, that he is likely to have made such claims in order to preempt any attack on himself, his poem and his mission as theologian, prophet and reformer of the Church.

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.

This article documents the responses of incarcerated men to Dante’s story of Ugolino in canto 33 of Inferno. Reading Dante’s poem in prison theater workshops the men are inspired to write about the ways in which their own children, like Ugolino’s, have suffered because of the incarceration of their father. Interweaving fragments of Dante’s text into their stories the incarcerated readers generate narratives that explore the multiple meanings of starvation. While Ugolino’s children die starving for food, the children of incarcerated fathers are starving for love, family, and community. Like the majority of men in American prisons the participants in these Dante theater workshops are people of color and their writing highlights the impact of mass incarceration on black and brown communities in America at the same time that it demonstrates the continuing relevance of Dante’s poem to readers confronting issues related to justice and its absence in the twenty-first century.

American artist and architect Paul Laffoley (1935–2015) had a life-long fascination with Dante. Not only did he refer to Dante and the Commedia throughout his writings and paintings, but he created a large-scale triptych illustrating the poem, as well as sketched out plans for a full-immersion Dante study center on a planetoid orbiting the Sun, complete with a to-scale replica of the medieval Earth, Mount Purgatory, the material heavens, and the Empyrean through which a “Dante Candidate” could re-enact the Pilgrim’s journey. Laffoley’s work is often placed by art critics within the visionary tradition and Laffoley himself embraced that label, even as he deconstructed the term in his writing. Among the many visionary artists, poets, and philosophers Laffoley studied, Dante was central. He was, for Laffoley, a model seeker of knowledge, a seer beyond the illusions of everyday life. The essay that follows offers a brief biography of Laffoley and his works; an overview of his two main Dante projects (The Divine Comedy triptych [1972–1975] and The Dantesphere [1978]); and initial considerations on how Dante’s works and thought fit into Laffoley’s larger epistemological project.

This article outlines how Dante’s philosophy and theology turn on issues that are being debated in broader philosophical, theological, and theoretical milieus today. It emphasizes, in particular, how the new horizon opened by certain postmodern—and more specifically post-secular—turns in philosophy shifts the light falling on the interface between the concepts of transcendence and immanence. As a result, Dante’s attempt, in the twilight of the Middle Ages, to renegotiate the relations between the two shows up as acutely relevant and potentially groundbreaking for current philosophical and theological inquiry. The areas of inquiry traversed include realized eschatology as theorized by Agamben; Foucault’s archeological model of knowledge; Patristic and medieval hexameral exegesis; the tension between hermeneutics and deconstruction; political theology; the theological turn in phenomenology; secularism and humanities as crypto-theological forms of thought. All are examined as prefigured in embryo by Dante’s comprehensive, poetic approach to knowing.

Il contributo porta avanti l’analisi della repetitio alla lex si ut proponitis del dodicesimo libro del Codice del giurista Bartolo da Sassoferrato dedicata alla dignitas e alla nobilitas. Si dimostra, con elementi interni al testo, che Bartolo conosceva la canzone Le dolci rime d’amore ch’io solea, che commenta minuziosamente nel suo approfondimento giuridico (repetitio), ma che non conosceva il Convivio. Giunto a discutere la seconda delle opiniones in materia di nobiltà che Dante espone nella canzone Le dolci rime, Bartolo interpreta erroneamente il verso che recita “e altri fue di più lieve savere / che tal detto rivolse / e l’ultima particula ne tolse” dimostrando di non conoscere l’auto-commento che Dante fa della canzone medesima nel quarto libro del Convivio. Il volgarizzamento procurato da Lapo da Castiglionchio nella seconda metà del Trecento, fedelissimo al dettato latino della repetitio ci fornisce una controprova di questa posizione critica.

The rise and revival of Dante since his introduction into China over a century ago has been a complex process, marked by two highpoints: the first in the 1920s and 30 s, with early interest in Dante’s significance as an historical figure and translation of his works into Chinese; and the second, a reprise of his work in the post-Mao reform period from the 1990s on, with the advent of serious translation projects and literary analysis from a Chinese perspective. This article examines the translation, research, and teaching of Dante and his works in China during two periods, 1880–1978 and 1979–2020, and provides a window into how Dante has been read and understood in China since the introduction of his oeuvre.