Dante: A Brief History

"I think this work stands out as the strongest short introduction for probably three reasons. The first is that it’s lively and accessible without oversimplifying major issues concerning Dante’s politics, religion, poetics and sexuality. It’s also based on his own long study of Dante which resulted in one of the best critical accounts – his 1999 book Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination . And thirdly it derives from a long experience of teaching the subject. For instance, chapter three begins with the wonderful sentence: ‘There comes a time in every Dante class where someone blows the whistle on Beatrice.’ [Dante’s inamorata and guide.] Then it goes into a dramatisation of conversations between students about Dante’s relationship with Beatrice. That is some indication of its accessibility. It’s something that has fascinated people for a long while: was it a real relationship? Hawkins, when he’s talking about the Dante classes, mentions questions like ‘how far did it go between them?’ and ‘Is he just in love with her because she’s dead?’ There was some debate in the 19th century about the historical Beatrice – is she merely a symbolic figure, symbolising theology, or was she a real person? How far is one justified in developing a kind of biography of this relationship? What does the Commedia have to do with real love and sex? One way in which he contextualises Dante is to focus initially on his life and another way of historicising the subject is through an important concluding chapter which he calls ‘Dante’s Afterlife’ – dealing with the presence of Dante from the Middle Ages onwards and indeed into modern and contemporary culture. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The legacy is partly one of debate about whether he should have written in the vernacular as opposed to the prestige language of Latin – that’s a question that was already developing in Dante’s own time and Boccaccio was rather divided over it. He was very impressed by Dante as the vernacular writer and he began, within about ten to fifteen years of Dante’s death, to imitate him, using Dantean language in his early verse romances. Now Petrarch, the third of the three crowns of Florence as they were called – Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch – was much more chary of Dante. Petrarch was of course a vernacular writer but he also had a strong sense of resisting Dante as an influence, and the fear of being dominated by him was something Petrarch actually mentioned in a letter to Boccaccio. “There was some debate about the historical Beatrice – is she a symbolic figure, symbolising theology, or was she a real person?” That fear is itself a strong indication of the power of Dante’s presence in Italian culture of that period – because he had already, by that time, in the second half of the 14th century, become a bestseller. Within twenty years of his death there were at least eight commentaries being written on the Commedia , and we still have, from the late 15th century, the end of the manuscript tradition, around 800 manuscripts which contain part of the Commedia . The fact that there are so many suggests that there must have been many, many more in circulation which have not survived. By medieval standards, this denotes a phenomenal success. He does indicate the prominence of Inferno as what most people associate with Dante. I think he recognises, like anyone who deals with the reception of Dante, that Inferno has this kind of priority for readers. In a sense that was the case from the Middle Ages onwards. For instance, the first mention of Dante by an English writer, Chaucer , identifies him as an expert on hell. He saw him as a major, and somewhat daunting, precedent for writing in the vernacular. Chaucer is, of course, writing out of a culture in England which is at least trilingual – English, Anglo-Norman and Latin all had some status – and Chaucer, writing in English, is very conscious of going into areas which had not been explored before by the vernacular. And so he saw Dante as a precedent for making big claims on behalf of writing poetry in the vernacular; he saw Dante as someone who one might want to follow in certain ways but slightly subvert in others. Some of Chaucer’s allusions to Dante are of an ironic kind, particularly in the first work in which he refers to Dante, a poem called ‘The House of Fame,’ in which he journeys into another world – his view of Dante there is slightly sideways on. He takes a sceptical view about making big pronouncements about the hereafter and about damnation."