From Revelation to Dilation in Dante's Studio (original) (raw)

Abstract

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This essay explores Dante's concept of allegory through the thematic framework of his artistic 'studio' as a metaphor for his creative diligence and transformation as a writer. It examines the progression of Dante's literary form from mixed prose and poetry to the epic unannotated format of the Commedia, paralleling his intellectual development and the significance of allegory in his works. Through the lens of his studio, the paper illuminates how Dante engages with allegory as both a literary form and an epistemic tool, reflecting on the historical and cultural milieu of his time.

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References (78)

  1. The De vulgari eloquentia, for example, shows Dante's intellectual interest in the question of language, but also documents his travels around the peninsula and recording the sounds that would later give the Commedia its unique polylingual texture.
  2. My argument on the studio is not concerned with the hypothesis that the Vita nova's explicit (chapter 42 in modern editions) was a later addition: I am interested not in possible chronologies for Dante's actual studio, but with the studio as a theme running through his works themselves. See Luigi Pietrobono, "Il rifacimento della Vita Nuova e le due fasi del pensiero dantesco," in Saggi danteschi (Turin: Società editrice internazionale, 1954), 25-98, and Toby Levers, "The Image of Authorship in the Final Chapter of the Vita Nuova," Italian Studies 57 (2002): 5-19
  3. In Dante's "Epistle to a Florentine Friend" (XII) he refers to his unremitting studio (5) during the previous 15 years of exile. The verb studeo of course means "to dedicate oneself."
  4. The term comes from Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion; Studies in Logology (Berke- ley: University of California Press, 1970), and means "words about words" or the "study of words" where logos is understood to replace the prefix of "theology." Burke's approach will have a strong presence in this essay, though I use "logology" here in a more general sense: a given culture's stance on the relation between words and things (influenced by Michel Foucault, The Order of Things [New York: Pantheon, 1971]).
  5. The pun's irony usually being the ubiquity of the word "gloss" in the later Middle Ages, such that the word had taken on a dual meaning that still exists in English usage today: to "eluci- date" (its traditional meaning) or to obfuscate by means of a deliberately confusing "explanation" (to "gloss over"). In the Canterbury Tales see the Wife of Bath's tale (v. 26, 119, 509), the Squire's tale (v. 166), the Monk's tale (v. 2140), the Man of Law's tale (v. 11800), and the Summoner's tale (v.1792-4, 1920). In making these puns, Chaucer echoes the Roman de la rose, (e.g. verses 2071-4, 6543, 6929-31, 7170-86, 15149-54).
  6. Consider the variations on the term "literal" in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: duplex sensus litteralis, litteralis moralis, litteralis historicus, litteralis allegoricus. This tendency toward hyphenation shows a strong shift in a word that, for Augustine, simply meant basic or plain mean- ing. The most important consequence is that the term litteralis became strongly linked to "intent." See Alastair Minnis, A. Brian Scott, and David Wallace, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100-c. 1375: The Commentary-tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 66, 205-6; Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1964), 93-8.
  7. From the opere minori to the famous evocations of veiled meaning in the Commedia: Inferno 9.58-63; Inferno 16.124; Purgatorio 15.117
  8. As many great dantisti have shown, for example, in addressing the controversial issue of Dante's "truth claims." See Bruno Nardi, Dante e la cultura medievale: nuovi saggi di filosofia dantesca (Bari: Laterza, 1949), 336-416;
  9. Robert Hollander, "Dante Theologus-Poeta," Dante Studies, 94 (1976): 91-136; Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
  10. Namely his interest in linguistic mutability and the rising European vernaculars, and his perceptive appreciation of the "author figure" that was becoming a fixture of his episteme. See Alison Cornish, Vernacular Translation in Dante's Italy (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Albert Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
  11. 5.1, 1.7.5; Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 81, 98, 123-30; Elena Lombardi, The Syntax of Desire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 139. 11. On this word in the Convivio, see Tristan Kay, "Dido, Aeneas, and the Evolution of Dante's Poetics," Dante Studies 129 (2011), 135-60.
  12. See Charles Singleton, "In Exitu Israel de Aegypto," in Dante Studies 78 (1960): 1-24;
  13. Gianfranco Contini, "Dante come personaggio-poeta della Commedia," in Un'idea di Dante: 01-DAS16 Levers (1-25).indd 19 10/26/16 12:12 PM Saggi danteschi (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1976), 33-62. On the bearing of allegory on the picture of history (the "essence of history as interpretation") see Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 239-47.
  14. As the framework that makes possible the ultimate union of "the pilgrim who exists but does not know, and the poet who knows but does not exist," as John Freccero puts it, in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 120. 14. His attentiveness to the recurring events and figurae in human history. See Erich Auer- bach, "Figura," in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (Minne- apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11-76
  15. See Zygmunt Baranski, "Il Convivio e la poesia: Problemi di definizione," Contesti della "Commedia": Lectura Dantis Fridericiana 2002-03, eds. Francesco Tateo, and Daniele Maria Pegorari (Bari: Palomar, 2004), 9-63. 16. First casting himself as scribe, copyist, and compiler (VN 1).
  16. Dividing his commentary into various registers: auto-accessus, formal division of the poems' parts, occasional digression on points of religious (24), artistic (25), philosophical and astrological (29) relevance (at times even glossing his own glosses [28]). See Alistair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 94-103;
  17. Thomas C. Stillinger, The Song of Troilus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 1-22 and 73-117;
  18. Steven Botterill, " 'Però che la divisione non si fa se non per aprire la sentenzia de la cosa divisa': The Vita Nova as commentary," in La gloriosa donna de la mente, ed. Vincent Moleta (Florence: Olschki, 1994), 61-76.
  19. See Pio Rajna, "Lo schema della Vita Nuova," Biblioteca delle scuole italiane 2 (1890): 161-4;
  20. Stillinger, The Song of Troilus, 54; Olivia Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
  21. See Maria Corti, "Il modello analogico nel pensiero medievale e dantesco," in Dante e le forme dell'allegoresi, ed. M. Picone (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1987), 11-21.
  22. See Lombardi, 140.
  23. Categorizing them demographically: men, women, the virtuous (19.14), the villainous (19.14-20), the variously interpreted "princely" (30), the foreign (40). 22. VN 2.4-6.
  24. For the "sottili" see 24.5, and 29.4. For the "semplici" see 3.15. See Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez, Time and the Crystal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 53-70.
  25. I.e. with the first dream the meaning remains obscure to him, whereas later on he has previous dreams as points of reference and understands meaning more quickly and decisively, characterized by a progressive paring down of his divisioni marked especially in chapter 30 where he moves the glosses from after to before the poems, making the poetry look "widowed" to match Dante's own "widowed" state (harkening back to the widowed lover of the Song of Songs; see also Conv. 2.2.2). This "widowing" is a precursor to Dante's eventual abandonment of the prosimetrum form, where he will compel his readers to "look inside" themselves.
  26. I.e. the dreams of chapters 3 and 23, and his emotional disturbances upon the death of Beatrice's friend (8.1-2, and "Audite quanto Amor") and that of her father (22.1-2).
  27. On the traditions of integumental uncovering and the most popular allegory of the Middle Ages, see Alastair Minnis, Lifting the Veil: Sexual/textual Nakedness in the Roman de la rose (London: King's College London, Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 1995).
  28. See Dante's discussion at Conv. 4.27.4 of maturation as the life stage where one can be most of help in "illuminating" others. See also Dante's sonnet "Io me credea del tutto" where he announces a new poetic "path." 28. Certainly his literary fama would have included also the lyrics he'd circulated inde- pendently, but it is the Vita nova that he is discussing in Convivio 1, the infamia of the donna gentile allegory doubled with Dante's political infamia. Also important here is the association between 01-DAS16 Levers (1-25).indd 20 10/26/16 12:12 PM
  29. See Michelangelo Picone, ed., L'enciclopedismo medievale (Ravenna: Longo, 1994);
  30. Mary Franklin-Brown, Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012);
  31. Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
  32. See Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982).
  33. See the records of Galileo's trial where the vocabulary of the "literal" and figurative is at the center of the debate, even if by then entirely jargonized, used as an intensifier for both sides' authority: Richard Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible (Notre Dame, London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 5-27, 57-8, 64-9.
  34. See Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, esp. 118-159;
  35. Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 67-129, and 162. 45. As stated by Aquinas (". . . the literal, from which alone can any argument be drawn" [Summa theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 10 ad and Dante (Conv. 2.1.8). The earlier ad litteram is the "literal" of Augustine's age, while sensus litteralis is that of Aquinas, now strongly connected to intentio and finally becoming jargonized to the extent that it loses its specificity, like a euphemism losing its effectiveness because it has become too familiar. See Singleton, Essay on the Vita nova, 55-6. On Aquinas and the "historical method, see M.-D. Chenu, Toward Understanding Saint Thomas, trans.
  36. A.-M. Landry and D. Hughes (Chicago: Regnery, 1964), 139-49.
  37. See Minnis et al., Medieval Literary Theory, 1-72, 197.
  38. See Gutas, 28-60, and 142, discussing the Baghdad translation movement and Arabic scholarship's equivalent to Augustine's distinction between reading for "letter" or "spirit." 48. See Cornish, Vernacular Translation in Dante's Italy: Illiterate Literature, 128-9. See Gutas, 155. 49. Much like the study of "hybridizing" by historians in the last few decades. See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). An example of some- thing like this approach, in scholarship on the spread of literacy in the European Middle Ages, is found in Franz Bäuml's "Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy," Speculum 55 (1980): 237-65.
  39. Not, that is, the tautology Carruthers takes it to be (The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 235). I do not hesitate to say this because I think the point ultimately supports the thesis of Carruthers' indispensable book.
  40. I.e., the precision possible in that point of connection, a kind of logological analogue to the perspectivism exemplified by Alberti's De pictura. 52. Likewise Bonaventure: "No one can easily reach this standard of exposition unless he is thoroughly familiar with the text and commits the text and its literal sense to memory," (Breviloquium, Prologue, sect. 6). By the ages of Nicholas of Lyra, William Tyndale, and Martin Luther, the word "literal" will be an extremely common refrain (see Minnis et al., Medieval Literary Theory, 206).
  41. As in the Roman de la rose's theme of "knowing all": looking into a speculum (the mirror that Amant sees in the garden) or into an encyclopedic text (like the Rose itself ), and the eth- ical implication that knowing "all" includes knowing both good and evil: "Il fait bon de tout savoir" (15218, quoting Romans 15 and presaging the later querelle of Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson). See Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 204-7.
  42. See Erich Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 61-2: "In Beatrice the oriental Christian motif of incarnate divine perfection, the parousia of the Idea, took a turn which has profoundly influenced all European literature." 55. Suggested especially when Dante says he is not writing down all that he remembers but is selecting (". . . e se non tutte, almeno la loro sentenzia" [VN 1]). On "written memory" see Burke, 25-56.
  43. I.e. in VN 2 and 3, and 7.2 where Dante says that Beatrice caused him to write even those poems not openly about her. See Burke, 95-6 on Aristotle and the ignorance of the future significance of events when they occur.
  44. -DAS16 Levers (1-25).indd 22 10/26/16 12:12 PM hermeneutics, as evidenced by Boethius and Martianus Capella. See Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 55.
  45. See Conf. 3.4.7, on the importance of Augustine's reading of Cicero's Hortensius. See Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions de saint Augustin (Paris: Boccard, 1950), 93-132.
  46. Plato: In Twelve Volumes, ed. and trans. W. R. M. Lamb (London: W. Heinemann, 1967), 299-301. 60. On the Trinity, trans. Arthur West Haddan (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887). See Lombardi, 27-8, regarding De trinitade and De magistro 11.38, and Burke, 55. 61. Confessions of Saint Augustine, trans. E. B. Pusey (New York: Dutton, 1950), 138-9.
  47. Though Manichaeanism did in fact have scriptural influences (Stock, Augustine the Reader, 44-7). 65. Conf. 4.15.28.
  48. "But having then read those books of the Platonists, and thence been taught to search for incorporeal truth, I saw Thy invisible things . . . assured 'That Thou wert, and wert infinite . . .' " Conf. 7.20.26 (Pusey, 142).
  49. As Brian Stock calls it (The Implications of Literacy, 62).
  50. And by extension the idea of "permanence" in general can take on associations with textual permanence. It is in this sense that I take the late medieval popularity of the term litteralis to be a statement on permanence, a moment when a metaphor (meaning itself as "letter-like") becomes so pervasive that its metaphoricity is forgotten. See Copeland, 61.
  51. Relative permanence, of course, but even symbolic permanence has effects on one's ontological outlook. As Bottéro puts it: "First there is organized speech . . . simultaneously the expression and the prolonging of thought . . . the most solid of social ties . . . But this com- munication through spoken language is limited to those who are standing right next to us . . . Writing enables speech to transcend space and time: once speech in all its details has been fixed and materialized as it was originally intended by its author . . ." (Ancestor of the West, 19-20). See also Whorf, 153.
  52. Whorf describes it as producing a picture of time as a series of individual moments passing by as if on a "ribbon or scroll" (153). Or as Taylor calls it, the "punctual self " (171).
  53. Questions about sexual morality, astrology, metaphysics, engagement in society, Trin- itarian belief, etc.
  54. Pusey, 110-11. See Burke, 52-3, and 100 on allness/negation as the basic model for the foils in the Confessions. 75. Pusey, 78-9.
  55. See Paul Saenger, Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, CA: Stan- ford University Press, 1997). See also M. B. Parkes, "Reading, Copying and Interpreting," in Cavallo et al. eds., A History of Reading in the West, 90-119.
  56. Pusey, 97-8. The juxtaposition between Ambrose and Faustus-with regard to their respectively "subtle" and "simple" insights-is made explicit at 5.14.24.
  57. See 6.7.12, where Alypius's belief that Augustine's lecture is directed at him is a positive misunderstanding, foreshadowing the former's imitation of Augustine's garden sors (Augustine as exemplum).
  58. I.e. the fixity of the word on the page allows him to recognize the voice of his own inner enunciation, and that voice's familiarity becomes, in Augustine, the feeling of familiarity 01-DAS16 Levers (1-25).indd 23 10/26/16 12:12 PM with God. See Sergio Cristaldi's La "Vita Nova" e la restituzione del narrare (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1994), which discusses Paul Zumthor's "vicarious I" (e.g. 165-169), and Raffaele Pinto's discussion of Zumthor in Dante e le origini della cultura letteraria moderna (Paris: Honore Champion, 1994), 7-10.
  59. An accrued meaning that, in terms of the larger history of literacy and literate thought, is the next stage after the loss of the "author's" physical presence. See Paul Zumthor, La lettre et la voix: de la "littérature" médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1987), e.g. 179, 231. 82. Conf. 8.11.26.
  60. 8.12.29-30, where the shutting of the book signifies a cutting off of the interpretative process. 84. See Simone Marchesi, Dante and Augustine: Linguistics, Poetics, Hermeneutics (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2011), 107-53.
  61. "Dilate" being an eminently Augustinian word: see Conf. 1.11.17 and 13.26.40: (echoing Psalm 118:32). See also examples in Cicero, Brutus 90, 309, and De republica 6, 20; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 2.3.8, 8.4.14; Pliny, Historia naturalis 35.1.1. See Burke, 58, on "opening." 86. See Stock, Augustine the Reader, 61-3, and Saenger, 1-17, on the changing neurophysio- logical processes of "reference reading." 87. Recall that for Augustine ad litteram means "surface meaning," whereas his spiritus is closer to what will later become the sensus litteralis (intent).
  62. I.e., his warning against "slavery to the letter," his fondness for Paul's dictum that the "letter kills" (DDC 3.5.9, 3.22.32; Conf. 6.4.6).
  63. In the Tusculan Disputations: see Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 15-16.
  64. See Paola Nasti, Favole d'amore e "saver profondo": la tradizione salomonica in Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 2007);
  65. "La memoria del Canticum e la Vita Nuova: una nota preliminare," The Italianist 18 (1998): 14-27; Paul Priest, "Dante and the Song of Songs," Studi Danteschi 49 (1972): 79-113;
  66. Lombardi, 156, on language-as-desire in Paradiso.
  67. María Rosa Menocal, Writing in Dante's Cult of Truth: From Borges to Boccaccio (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 11-50.
  68. See Singleton, Essay on the Vita Nuova, 87.
  69. Proverbs taught the reader to acceptably "enjoy the things of the world," and thus dealt with "ethics"; Ecclesiastes taught of the temporality and fragility of the things of the world so that readers might place their hope in God rather than in physical things, thus dealing with "physics"; the Song of Songs taught the reader to not only renounce the world, but also to look inside one's self for salvation (i.e., to introspect rather than to look for salvation in anything exterior).
  70. Christologically, the absence of the lover is taken as the deprivation of Christ from earth at his crucifixion, an absence that leads to humankind's salvation. This association with the three branches of learning is present in the vast majority of the commentaries-notably Gregory the Great, Richard of St. Victor (see Lino Pertile, La puttana e il gigante: Dal "Cantico dei Cantici" al Paradiso Terrestre di Dante [Ravenna: Longo, 1998], 28-9), Isidore, Origen, and Jerome (see Mary Dove, ed., The Glossa Ordinaria on the Song of Songs [Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press, 2004], 2-5). See Conv. 2.14.20.
  71. First in an illness when he has hallucinations of Beatrice's death and his own (VN 23), then when she dies (28). See Singleton, Essay on the Vita Nuova, 25.
  72. I.e. the aspirations that led to his studio, and ultimately to the Commedia. After returning to Beatrice (the origin of his dedication to the art of poetry) he returns to a pre-birth state, a re-entry where the "mandala" of Paradiso 31.1-the "celestial rose"-transforms the Roman de la rose's culminating sexual innuendo into an allegory of Dante's own birth.
  73. See Lombardi, 138, Copeland, 57, and Baranski, "Sole nuovo, luce nuova": Saggi sul rinnovamento culturale in Dante (Turin: Scriptorium, 1996), 41-77.
  74. -DAS16 Levers (1-25).indd 24 10/26/16 12:12 PM
  75. See Conv. 1.11.11-15, and Cornish, Vernacular Translation in Dante's Italy: Illiterate Literature, 156. 101. See Conv. 1.13.4, on how the vernacular "caused" Dante's own birth.
  76. De memoria et reminiscentia 450a-b, in Aristotle: Vol. I (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 691. See Conv. 4.23.8-13.
  77. See Barolini, "True and False See-ers in Inferno XX." Lectura Dantis 4 (1989): 42-54;
  78. Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 327-9.