Dante's "Vita Nova": A Collaborative Reading

By Zygmunt G. Baranski and Heather Webb

This original volume proposes a novel way of reading Dante’s Vita nova, exemplified in a rich diversity of scholarly approaches to the text.

This groundbreaking volume represents the fruit of a two-year-long series of international seminars aimed at developing a fresh way of reading Dante’s Vita nova. By analyzing each of its forty-two chapters individually, focus is concentrated on the Vita nova in its textual and historical context rather than on its relationship to the Divine Comedy. This decoupling has freed the contributors to draw attention to various important literary features of the text, including its rich and complex polysemy, as well as its structural fluidity. The volume likewise offers insights into Dante’s social environment, his relationships with other poets, and Dante’s evolving vision of his poetry’s scope. Using a variety of critical methodologies and hermeneutical approaches, this volume offers scholars an opportunity to reread the Vita nova in a renewed context and from a diversity of literary, cultural, and ideological perspectives.

Contributors: Zygmunt G. Barański, Heather Webb, Claire E. Honess, Brian F. Richardson, Ruth Chester, Federica Pich, Matthew Treherne, Catherine Keen, Jennifer Rushworth, Daragh O’Connell, Sophie V. Fuller, Giulia Gaimari, Emily Kate Price, Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, Francesca Southerden, Rebecca Bowen, Nicolò Crisafi, Lachlan Hughes, Franco Costantini, David Bowe, Tristan Kay, Filippo Gianferrari, Simon Gilson, Rebekah Locke, Luca Lombardo, Peter Dent, George Ferzoco, Paola Nasti, Marco Grimaldi, David G. Lummus, Helena Phillips-Robins, Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė, Alessia Carrai, Ryan Pepin, Valentina Mele, Katherine Powlesland, Federica Coluzzi, K. P. Clarke, Nicolò Maldina, Theodore J. Cachey Jr., Chiara Sbordoni, Lorenzo Dell’Oso, and Anne C. Leone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780268207380

Book preview

Cover: Dante’s “Vita nova”: A Collaborative Reading, published by University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana. Cover image is detail of “A Compositional Sketch of Dante, Beatrice and Love.” by Rossetti placed on a green background.

Dante’s Vita nova

THE WILLIAM AND KA THERINE DE VERS SERIES IN DANTE AND MEDIE VALITALIAN LITERA TURE

Zygmunt G. Barański, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., and Christian Moevs, editors

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Manuscript Poetics: Materiality and Textuality in Medieval Italian Literature

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VOLUME 21

Dante’s Multitudes: History, Philosophy, Method

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Dante’s Other Works: Assessments and Interpretations

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Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante’s Commedia

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• Translated, with introduction and notes, by Santa Casciani and Christopher Kleinhenz

DANTE’S

VITA NOVA

A Collaborative Reading

Edited by

ZYGMUNT G. BARAŃSKI

and

HEATHER WEBB

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2023 by the University of Notre Dame

Published by the University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023942033

ISBN: 978-0-268-20739-7 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20740-3 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20743-4 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20738-0 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

ABOUT THE WILLIAM AND KATHERINE DEVERS SERIES IN DANTE AND MEDIEVAL ITALIAN LITERATURE

The William and Katherine Devers Program in Dante Studies at the University of Notre Dame supports rare book acquisitions in the university’s John A. Zahm Dante collections, funds a visiting professorship in Dante studies, and supports electronic and print publication of scholarly research in the field. In collaboration with the Medieval Institute at the university, the Devers program initiated a series dedicated to the publication of the most significant current scholarship in the field of Dante studies. In 2011 the scope of the series was expanded to encompass thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian literature.

In keeping with the spirit that inspired the creation of the Devers program, the series takes Dante and medieval Italian literature as focal points that draw together the many disciplines and lines of inquiry that constitute a cultural tradition without fixed boundaries. Accordingly, the series hopes to illuminate this cultural tradition within contemporary critical debates in the humanities by reflecting both the highest quality of scholarly achievement and the greatest diversity of critical perspectives.

The series publishes works from a wide variety of disciplinary viewpoints and in diverse scholarly genres, including critical studies, commentaries, editions, reception studies, translations, and conference proceedings of exceptional importance. The series enjoys the support of an international advisory board composed of distinguished scholars and is published regularly by the University of Notre Dame Press. The Dolphin and Anchor device that appears on publications of the Devers series was used by the great humanist, grammarian, editor, and typographer Aldus Manutius (1449–1515), in whose 1502 edition of Dante (second issue) and all subsequent editions it appeared. The device illustrates the ancient proverb Festina lente, Hurry up slowly.

Zygmunt G. Barański, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., and Christian Moevs, editors

ADVISORY BOARD

Albert Russell Ascoli, Berkeley

Teodolinda Barolini, Columbia

Piero Boitani, Rome

Patrick Boyde, Cambridge

Alison Cornish, New York University

Christopher Kleinhenz, Wisconsin

Giuseppe Ledda, Bologna

Simone Marchesi, Princeton

Kristina M. Olson, George Mason

Lino Pertile, Harvard

John A. Scott, Western Australia

Heather Webb, Cambridge

CONTENTS

Preface, by Zygmunt G. Barański and Heather Webb

Vita nova I–IV [1–2.5]: Things Never Said about Any Woman, by Claire E. Honess

Vita nova I [1.1], by Brian Richardson

Vita nova II [1.2–1.11], by Ruth Chester

Vita nova III [1.12–2.2], by Federica Pich

Vita nova IV [2.3–2.5], by Matthew Treherne

Vita nova V–XII [2.6–5.24]: A Lover’s Trials, by Catherine Keen

Vita nova V and VI [2.6–2.11], by Catherine Keen

Vita nova VII [2.12–2.18], by Jennifer Rushworth

Vita nova VIII [3], by Daragh O’Connell

Vita nova IX [4], by Sophie V. Fuller

Vita nova X and XI [5.1–5.7], by Giulia Gaimari

Vita nova XII [5.8–5.24], by Emily Kate Price

Vita nova XIII–XVIII [6–10.11]: Not Just a Passing Phase, by Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden

Vita nova XIII [6], by Rebecca Bowen

Vita nova XIV [7], by Nicolò Crisafi

Vita nova XV [8], by Lachlan Hughes

Vita nova XVI [9], by Franco Costantini

Vita nova XVII and XVIII [10.1–10.11], by David Bowe

Vita nova XIX–XXIV [10.12–15.11]: A New and More Noble Theme, by Tristan Kay

Vita nova XIX [10.12–10.33], by Filippo Gianferrari

Vita nova XX [11], by Simon Gilson

Vita nova XXI [12], by Rebekah Locke

Vita nova XXII [13], by Luca Lombardo

Vita nova XXIII [14], by Peter Dent

Vita nova XXIV [15], by George Ferzoco

Vita nova XXV–XXVII [16–18]: Literature as Truth, by Paola Nasti

Vita nova XXV [16], by Rebecca Bowen

Vita nova XXVI [17], by Marco Grimaldi

Vita nova XXVII [18], by David G. Lummus

Vita nova XXVIII–XXXIV [19–23]: The Poetics of a New Affective Community, by Heather Webb

Vita nova XXVIII [19.1–19.3], by Helena Phillips-Robins

Vita nova XXIX [19.4–19.7], by Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė

Vita nova XXX [19.8–19.10], by Alessia Carrai

Vita nova XXXI [20], by Ryan Pepin

Vita nova XXXII [21], by Valentina Mele

Vita nova XXXIII [22], by Katherine Powlesland

Vita nova XXXIV [23], by Katherine Powlesland

Vita nova XXXV–XXXIX [24–28]: The Donna Gentile Episode, by Simon Gilson

Vita nova XXXV [24], by Federica Coluzzi

Vita nova XXXVI and XXXVII [25–26], by K. P. Clarke

Vita nova XXXVIII and XXXIX [27–28], by Nicolò Maldina

Vita nova XL–XLII [29–31]: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by Theodore J. Cachey, Jr.

Vita nova XL [29], by Chiara Sbordoni

Vita nova XLI [30], by Lorenzo Dell’Oso

Vita nova XLII [31], by Anne C. Leone

Notes

Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

PREFACE

Zygmunt G. Barański and Heather Webb

This volume arises from many years of sustained conversation and dialogue between researchers at all points of their careers, across the United Kingdom and beyond. The productive potential of such collaboration had already become clear from the experience of the "Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy, hosted in Cambridge from 2012 to 2016 and organized by George Corbett and Heather Webb. Over four years of lectures, recorded and archived online and now collected in three volumes, the Vertical Readings" proposed a new model of Dante commentary and sparked vigorous and spirited debate. It was, in fact, at the last session of the series that we pondered how to continue to harness this energy as a group. In conversation with colleagues, including Kenneth Clarke, Tristan Kay, and Catherine Keen, we felt that the next text that demanded a new form of commentary was the Vita nova.¹

The Vita nova, composed in Florence in the early to mid-1290s, has often been assessed and interpreted within relatively narrow parameters. As Dante’s youthful work, it has been read as the quintessential stilnovist text, a work that focuses exclusively on love and love poetry from within a closed, elite circle. The poet’s closing statements on his aspirations to speak of Beatrice in a new way have further served to encourage readers to consider the prosimetrum as a preamble to the Commedia.² Just as the Vertical Readings proposed looking at the Commedia from a different perspective—commenting three same-numbered cantos together with an open mind to what might emerge—we decided to read the Vita nova from a novel viewpoint, to see if we might not find fresh ways to do better justice to the multifaceted complexities of the libello, the little book.

We wondered what might emerge if we systematically decoupled the Vita nova from the Commedia and read it in its own context, with careful attention to its situatedness in the landscape of the Florence of Dante’s youth. We wondered, further, what might emerge from a slow reading, isolating small fragments of the text and exploring the contours of those textual moments in depth for what they might reveal as regards Dante’s relationships with other poets, but also his social environment, his evolving vision of the scope of his poetry, and the development of his modes of exegesis, to give just a few examples. What if, we asked, we were to read the Vita nova the way that we are used to reading the Commedia in the great lectura Dantis tradition—just a small bit of the text at a time? So many sections of the Vita nova are considered to be merely placeholders. Some portions of the text that have at times been designated as chapters are only a few lines long. Could even those fragments prove productive under the lens of close scrutiny? The readers of this volume will come to their own conclusions, but we and our collaborators have found an immense richness in the experience of detailed, small-scale, and careful engagement with the Vita nova.

The project could never have come into existence without the generosity, trust, and shared enthusiasm of our collaborators. We settled on the idea of an itinerant series of seminars, in which each research center would take responsibility for hosting a meeting on a section of the Vita nova, inviting speakers, and putting forward an approach or approaches to their portion of the text. The research centers involved were chosen on the principle that most of us could travel there and back by train for a day. In addition to this, our trusted partners at Notre Dame London and Notre Dame Rome hosted the first and last sessions of the series, with Notre Dame Indiana connected by video for each session. We committed to attending all of the seminars where possible, so that our conversation could properly develop over the course of our readings.

The project, which spanned two years, formally began with a meeting at the London Global Gateway of the University of Notre Dame. The meeting served to frame our logistical and methodological approach to examining Dante’s Vita nova. After this first encounter, we began our roving reading, gathering first at the University of Leeds before moving on to University College London and the Universities of Oxford, Bristol, Reading, Cambridge, and Warwick, and finally concluding our journey at the University of Notre Dame’s Global Gateway in Rome. Even in the context of these peripatetic events, there was a foretaste of the virtual modes to come. Throughout the events, the majority of which were held in the United Kingdom, colleagues at Notre Dame and at the Rome Global Gateway, as well as other remote participants, joined us via video link, participating virtually in every meeting across great distances and time differences. The final event in Rome was not only an opportunity to bridge some of those distances; it was also a physical manifestation of our intent, as a group, to bring a collaboration between institutions in the anglophone world more explicitly into conversation with Italian scholars and scholarship. As will be clear from our bibliography, lively dialogue and deep engagement with the work of Italian colleagues was at the heart of our project from the very beginning. Despite being concentrated in anglophone countries, the project was never intended to be insular. Our commitment to international dialogue is reflected in this volume, which includes contributors from different parts of Europe, as well as from the United Kingdom and the United States.

Each center maintained its own identity throughout the project, and this was consolidated during the editorial process as each center collected and edited its contributions prior to the overall editing of the volume. The organization of the volume closely reflects the nature of the original meetings, with an overview prefacing the analyses of the individual chapters examined by a particular institution. In each case, those who authored the overviews coordinated and first edited the contributions making up their sections. The editors and section curators are Claire E. Honess, Catherine Keen, Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, Francesca Southerden, Tristan Kay, Paola Nasti, Heather Webb, Simon Gilson, and Theodore J. Cachey Jr. Special thanks are due to David Bowe, who took on the task of coordinating the meetings, taking responsibility for the online materials relating to the meetings, and shouldering much of the work of eliciting contributions for the volume. His enthusiasm and energy fueled many stages of this project. All of our contributors were collaborators in the project, attending, participating, and often presenting at the original events. We are proud of the number of early career researchers who figure as contributors in the pages that follow, including PhD students and postdoctoral researchers.

In order to begin, it was necessary to wade into the fraught question of how to divide the text of the Vita nova. Our decision to follow the traditional organization into forty-two chapters canonized by Michele Barbi, which has recently been reaffirmed by Donato Pirovano in his excellent annotated edition, should not be taken as an expression of scholarly support for this particular division of the text over other schematizations (throughout citations are given both to Barbi’s and Gorni’s editions; at the same time, since we had based ourselves on Barbi’s numbering, it seemed appropriate to use his 1932 edition as our textual point of reference).³ Our choice was entirely pragmatic: we wanted to include as many contributors as possible in the project. And pragmatism, thanks to Claire Honess’s clarity of vision and practical sensibilities, determined how chapters were organized into broader sections and assigned to different institutions. Thus we did not prioritize any existing ideas regarding the narrative, formal, and ideological structure of the libello. Each research center was asked only to consider how many chapters it could feasibly address, drawing not just on its own members but also on colleagues from other universities both in the United Kingdom and beyond, and on scholars from other disciplines. Initially, the aim was to assign one chapter per colleague; however, in a few instances, colleagues developed arguments that, of necessity, spanned two chapters. Once the order in which institutions would present had been confirmed, chapters were then distributed (it proved remarkably easy to share the chapters among the various centers). Thus we began with the University of Leeds reading chapters I–IV (1–2.5 in Guglielmo Gorni’s edition). In general, it was felt that the arbitrary nature in which blocks of chapters were assigned allowed for considerable exegetical freedom and flexibility since contributors did not feel inhibited by existing critical orthodoxies. Our impression is that this approach has helped to highlight the Vita nova’s remarkably rich and complex polysemy, as well as its structural fluidity.

The overviews for each section briefly summarize the central narrative events of their multichapter segment of the Vita nova. These introductory essays also seek to delineate the existing critical panorama, or the principal points of debate, on that portion of the text. The overviews thus free the short individual chapter essays of the burden of extensive bibliographical review so that they may pursue fresh interpretive directions.

Although each reading presents the personal views of its author, threads of communal discussions at the seminars and in other settings may also be discerned, as might be expected from a project as commitedly collaborative as this one. At the same time, we should like to stress that, despite the emphasis on collaboration, there has been no attempt to homogenize contributions either within a particular research center or across the volume. Thus a plurality of critical methodologies and exegetical perspectives has been employed, although one might note that many contributors have merged historicist with hermeneutic approaches. Such plurality means that readers can expect competing opinions to be aired and defended across the volume. The decision to encourage such multiplicities of readings has led to interesting results: for instance, there would seem to be rather more pivotal moments in the text than scholarship has hitherto acknowledged. Collaboration is for naught if it cannot accommodate and respect differing possibilities.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Our project began when we were regularly able to meet in person; it was then brought to completion as we moved in and out of lockdown restrictions. Working in pandemic conditions has created numerous challenges, although people were able to support each other, as we have become used to doing, thanks to remote forms of communication. We are thus extremely grateful for the continuing commitment and enthusiasm of all our collaborators. The volume offers lasting testimony to their hard work, scholarly seriousness, and exemplary collegiality.

Our collaboration would not have been possible without the support and work of Vittorio Montemaggi (Kings College London), who organized the opening meeting at the University of Notre Dame Global Gateway in London; of Zyg Barański, Ted Cachey, and David Lummus, who arranged the final meeting at the Rome Global Gateway, which was funded by the Center for Italian Studies and the William and Katherine Devers Program in Dante Studies at the University of Notre Dame; and, of course, of the institutional leads (in chronological order of the events in the series): Claire Honess and Matthew Treherne at the University of Leeds; Catherine Keen at University College London; Manuele Gragnolati (Sorbonne), Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden at the University of Oxford; Tristan Kay at the University of Bristol; Paola Nasti (Northwestern) at the University of Reading; Heather Webb at the University of Cambridge; and Simon Gilson (Oxford) at the University of Warwick. We are grateful for funding and support from all the host institutions.

Vita nova I–IV [1–2.5]

Things Never Said about Any Woman

CLAIRE E. HONESS

Io spero di dicer di lei quello che mai non fue detto d’alcuna (XLII.3 [31.3]) [I hope to say things about her that have never been said about any woman]. These words from the final chapter of Dante’s Vita nova, often read proleptically (with, perhaps, just a touch of wish fulfillment) as a reference to the Commedia, might also stand as a sort of summative gloss on the prosimetrum as a whole, and, in particular, its first four chapters. Just as the end of the Paradiso anticipates the retelling of the protagonist’s whole journey up to this climactic moment (Par. 31.43–45), so at the end of the Vita nova Dante’s vision of Beatrice in heaven (which, like the pilgrim’s final moment of communion with God in the Commedia, remains undescribed) is both the climax of and the pretext for the book that it concludes. Indeed, as the following chapters of the present volume will show, the Vita nova is, from its very beginning, aware of, and keen to highlight to its readers, its startling novelty in both form and content—a poetic novelty that is rooted in the nature of the work’s subject, Beatrice, who is uno miracolo (XXIX.3 [19.6]) [a miracle]. Whatever Dante may have intended by his concluding promise to write about Beatrice in ever more innovative ways, it is clear that this resolution has already been fulfilled, at least in part, by the Vita nova itself, which deliberately sets out to shed new light on the writing of love poetry and to ask important moral and theological questions about the love that inspires it.

With this conclusion in mind, we should beware of taking at face value the apparently specific, subjective statement of the work’s literary objectives with which the Vita nova opens:

In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria dinnanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova. Sotto la quale rubrica io trovo scritte le parole le quali è mio intendimento d’assemplare in questo libello; e se non tutte, almeno la loro sentenzia. (1 [1.1])

————

[In the book of my memory—the part of it before which not much is legible—there is the heading Incipit vita nova. Under this heading I find the words which I intend to copy down in this little book; if not all of them, at least their essential meaning.]

Here, the reference to the author’s memory as the source of the text which is to follow—indeed, as Brian Richardson will demonstrate in detail in his contribution to this volume, as the source text from which the words contained in the Vita nova are copied—immediately identifies the story told in the libello as a personal one. Memories cannot be read, after all, by a third party, but only by the individual to whom they belong; and, even when she or he chooses to share them with others, it is always the memories’ owner who retains overall editorial control of what is, or is not, shared (just as Dante admits that he does not intend to copy down all the words that he finds in the book of his memory). The text is presented, then, as a personal story, shared by an author-protagonist who really experienced the events and emotions he describes: an autobiographical or even confessional text.¹ And yet the events that the author-protagonist rereads in the book of his memory and copies down in the libello do not concern him alone but have a significance that extends far beyond the events of his own life: indeed, it is precisely because the events described have this broader significance—because they have some deeper meaning or sentenzia—that they are considered to be worthy of sharing.

As we shall see, the deeper meaning that Dante extracts from the memories that he reads, edits, and writes down is multifaceted and wide-ranging, so that any attempt to pin down what the libello is about by limiting it to just one area of significance seems doomed to fail: it is enough to think of Barbara Reynolds’s description of the Vita nova as a treatise written by a poet, for poets, on the art of poetry, a definition that unsatisfactorily reduces the poetic, religious, personal, and psychological depth of this work to the stuff of a mere academic essay.² In contrast, as its first four chapters already clearly signal, the Vita nova is a text that is both personal and universal: it is a human story that also sheds light on the broader story of God’s relationship with humankind; it is a collection of poems that also offers a theoretical exposition of the composition and analysis of poetry; it is an account of an entirely exceptional experience of love, but also an attempt to understand the physical and psychological impact of love on human beings more generally; and it is a work that carefully situates itself within a literary tradition while simultaneously breaking new ground in its form, language, and content.

Adding to these difficulties of definition and focus, moreover, it is almost axiomatic to describe the Vita nova as a work almost entirely devoid of context, cut off from time and place, unrealistic, oneiric, ethereal—this despite the fact that, as we have seen, the focus on memory in the text’s very first words necessarily anchors it in the life of a particular individual. The reader of the Vita nova is insulated from spatial and historical specificity that would enable her to connect the text to a particular time and place,³ and the libello is seen as inward-looking, closed in terms of both its subject matter and its audience.⁴ Concerned only with the love story of its poetprotagonist and with the poetry that the love story inspires, it is seen as being characterized by an assenza di esperienze extrapoetiche o sociali [absence of nonpoetic or social experiences],⁵ as lacking any extraneous detail, character description, or scene setting. As evidence of the abstract and socially detached nature of the text, commentators often cite the absence of proper names in the text. The poet-protagonist remains unnamed, as do the women to whom he addresses some of his compositions (the ladies who share his intelletto d’amore, XIX.4 [10.15] [understanding of love]) and the other vernacular poets with whom he engages; in chapter III, for example, these are referred to en masse as li fedeli d’Amore (III.9 [1.10]) [Love’s faithful], while the poet’s primary interlocutor, Cavalcanti, is indicated as primo de li miei amici (III.14 [2.1]) [my best friend].⁶ Even in the case of the poet’s beloved, it is, in fact, entirely unclear whether the name, Beatrice, by which she is known da molti … li quali non sapeano che si chiamare (II.1 [1.2]) [by many without even knowing that was her name] is, in fact, intended to be read as a proper name at all—let alone as a reference to the specific historical Beatrice Portinari—or merely as a senhal, indicating her role, in the text and in the author’s life, as a bearer of blessing. Even the city in which the action of the text takes place—hard as it is not to imagine it as late thirteenth-century Florence—is never actually named but is only referred to as la cittade [the city] or la sopradetta cittade [the aforementioned city],⁷ giving the text a universal quality that means the libello is not firmly anchored in time or space. And yet, despite the abstraction achieved by the avoidance of proper names, the Vita nova does seem to have been conceived as a broadly social text, on a number of levels, which are already apparent in the work’s first four chapters, and which will be examined in more detail in the contributions that follow.

In the first place, the fact that the Vita nova is written in the vernacular clearly helps to situate it in place and time (since variations in vernacular languages, as the De vulgari eloquentia explains,⁸ are both geographical and diachronic). The city may not be named, in other words, but the language in which it is described unavoidably places it in Tuscany, and probably even locates it precisely in Florence, since omnia vulgaria in sese variantur, ut puta in Tuscia Senenses et Aretini …, nec non in eadem civitate aliqualem variationem perpendimus (Dve 1.10.7) [all these vernaculars also vary in themselves, so that the Tuscan of Siena is different from that of Arezzo …, and, moreover, we can detect some variation even within a single city]. As will be the case in the encounter with Farinata in hell, Dante’s language gives him away,⁹ probably from the libello’s very first sentences; his reticence over the specificity of the book’s setting is only apparent. And the decision to write in the vernacular also suggests that Dante has in mind a particular audience (or, as we shall see, a particular series of audiences): one specifically associated with the central Italian city-states, where Latin was associated primarily with bureaucratic and legal writing, and where the use of the vernacular was not a mere frivolous literary game, as it might have been in the courts of Provence or Sicily, but a necessity, a marker not only of identity but also of active engagement with the life of the city.¹⁰ Indeed, it may not be fanciful to see in the audience of the Vita nova an anticipation of that of the Convivio: culturally aware and politically engaged, though too taken up with cura familiare e civile (Conv. 1.1.4) [domestic and civic responsibilities] for serious academic study.

It is clear that the decision to write in the vernacular belies the sense that this is an inward-looking, closed, perhaps even self-obsessed text. On the contrary, Dante’s choice of language—and specifically of a language easily identified as Florentine—presupposes a specific set of engaged interlocutors, with potentially different approaches to the text and different understandings of its sentenzia. Indeed, it is clear from the text’s first four chapters that these imagined interlocutors and their interests are many and varied. The libello cannot be read as a theoretical treatise addressing only poets (as Reynolds suggests), any more than it can be dismissed as nothing more than cosette per rime (V.4 [2.9]) [little rhymes], addressed, somewhat patronizingly, to those women for whom it is malagevole d’intendere li versi latini (XXV.6 [16.6]) [difficult to follow Latin verses], for all that Dante would later point to this group as the original and primary audience of poetry in the vernacular.

Already, then, these chapters introduce us to the molti (II.1 [1.2]) [many people] who recognize Beatrice as a blessing to her city. These are the citizens of Florence, taken as a whole, from whom the text’s other audiences are drawn: they are the same citizens who will later find themselves miraculously ennobled by the mere sight of this miraculous woman,¹¹ and who will be left bereft, almost widowed,¹² by her passing. We might imagine these citizens as the recipients of the more public poems in the collection: those on the death of Beatrice’s father (XXII [13]), for example, and that inspired by the visit of the two men of high social rank in the city (XXXIV [23]), as well as those on Beatrice’s death and those in which her effects on all who see her are outlined. Within this broader collective, we also glimpse for the first time here the group of gentili donne (III.1 [1.12]) [gracious women] who will be Beatrice’s constant companions in the text. These are the women who surround Beatrice at the wedding when she mocks the hapless poet (XIV.4 [7.4]) and who care for Dante when he is ill (XXIII.12 [14.12]); they are also, and most significantly, the women to whom he will address the turningpoint poem, Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore (XIX [10]) [Women who understand the truth of love]. A parallel male group—identified as the poet’s friends—appears in chapter IV [2.3–2.5]. Here they express concern at his physical deterioration and peculiar behavior; later they will prompt him to write various poems, such as Amor e il cor gentil (XX [11]) [Love and the open heart], Venite a intender li sospiri miei (XXXII [21]) [Come and take notice of my every sigh], and Quantunque volte, lasso! (XXXIII [22]) [Whenever I, alas!]. Finally, from within or partially within this circle of friends, these chapters introduce the group of love poets—li fedeli d’Amore (III.9 [1.20]) [Love’s faithful]—and among them quelli cui io chiamo primo de li miei amici (III.14 [2.1]) [somebody whom I consider my best friend], easily identified from the reference to the poem whose title is reported here as Guido Cavalcanti. This latter is also identified as the addressee of Io mio senti’ svegliar dentro a lo core (XXIV [15]) [I felt awakening in my heart one day], while the group of love poets are the recipients of Piangete amanti (VIII [3]) [Cry, lovers].

The opening chapters of the Vita nova, then, set up the libello as a text that is only apparently personal, inward-looking, and private. In a similar way, the themes that these chapters start to address already point to the way in which the text as a whole will seek to reach beyond the individual story of one man and one woman to engage with deep questions about life and death, the creation and purpose of art, and love, both human and divine.

One of the primary themes of these early pages, highlighted immediately in the opening words of its first, very brief, chapter, is that of writing. Dante is always a self-conscious author, one keen to control and manage how his works should be read through careful metaliterary analysis and explicit direction of his readers.¹³ Here, as Richardson’s chapter will explore in more detail, he sets up what will become one of the main preoccupations of the text through a precise attention to the use of technical vocabulary about writing: from the source text or exemplar, the libro de la … memoria [book of memory], with its rubrics and paragraphs, to the libello selectively copied from it in order to clarify its meaning or sentenzia. From the beginning, then, Dante assumes that his book’s audience—or at least one of the audience groups identified above—will have an understanding of, and an interest in, these technicalities, in the same way that he will later imagine their queries and objections in relation to his personification of Love: Potrebbe già l’uomo opporre contra me e dicere (XII.17 [5.24]) [It is true that someone might object, saying], and Potrebbe qui dubitare persona degna di dichiararle onne dubitazione (XXV.1 [16.1]) [Here, a person worthy of having every doubt clarified might be doubtful].¹⁴

This imagined interest in writing takes on a specific flavor when it comes to the fedeli d’Amore, experts in the field (famosi trovatori in quello tempo, III.9 [1.20] [well-known poets of that time]), who are invited to interpret Dante’s sonnet A ciascun alma presa [To all besotted souls] and to explain the meaning of the vision described there. Here Dante sets up poetry itself not as merely expository but—potentially, at least—as dialogic: his poem elicits many replies, with many suggested meanings, and allows him to establish what will become a long-lasting and influential poetic and personal relationship with the poet who would become his closest friend (E questo fue quasi lo principio de l’amistà tra lui e me, III.14 [2.1] [This was, so to speak, the beginning of our friendship]). But at the same time, this episode also illustrates powerfully the need for a text such as the Vita nova, which is not just a collection of poems but also an attempt to convey their sentenzia in a more accessible and straightforward form. For none of these famous poets is able to grasp the verace giudicio (III.15 [2.2]) [correct interpretation] of the poet’s dream; and if this correct interpretation is now manifestissimo a li più semplici (III.15 [2.2]) [clear to even the most simple-minded], this can only be because of the careful explanatory prose provided by the Vita nova itself, written with the benefit of hindsight and increased spiritual awareness, the acquisition of which constitutes one of the book’s main themes. If the quasi-technical terms—that is to say, the terms used idiosyncratically by Dante himself to refer to the structures and techniques of his own writing—that will later come to be applied to them are not yet used explicitly here, chapter III of the Vita nova nonetheless demonstrates for the first time the importance and function both of the narrative prose that provides the poems’ backstory (later referred to as their ragione) and of that which breaks them down into their constituent parts in order to clarify how they should be read (the divisione that, Dante will later clarify, is intended to aprire la sentenzia de la cosa divisa (XIV.13 [7.13]) [open up the meaning of the thing divided]. The very first poem included in the Vita nova demonstrates clearly what its author would later turn into a statement of poetic intent: that is, that poetry is, by nature, a complex medium and that the writers of poetry owe it to their readers to provide the necessary interpretive tools to guide them toward a verace giudicio as to the sentenzia of what they have read: Grande vergogna sarebbe a colui che rimasse cose sotto vesta di figura o di colore rettorico, e poscia, domandato, non sapesse denudare le sue parole da cotale vesta, in guise che avessero verace intendimento (XXV.10 [16.10]) [It would be shameful for one who wrote poetry dressed up with figures or rhetorical color not to know how to strip his words of such dress, upon being asked to do so, showing their true sense].

It is surely no coincidence that the verace intendimento that Dante claims, in chapter XXV [16], all poets should be able to point to in their verse should pick up precisely the verace giudicio that all readers of A ciascun alma presa so singularly fail to grasp. As Federica Pich will show in her analysis of chapter III below, it is important to recognize that the inability of readers to analyze the dream correctly at the time of the composition of A ciascun alma presa is not so much a sign of the inadequate reading skills of the fedeli d’Amore as a pointer to the inadequacy of Dante himself as a poet at this early stage of his development. His original call for interpretations of the dream-vision is a genuine one, not one designed to set up his contemporaries to fail in order to reveal his own hermeneutic superiority. He too, like his primo amico, whose response to the poem ignores all hints of fear or pain to provide an entirely positive reading of this dream of Love’s domination,¹⁵ misunderstands this dream in an entirely romantic vein, to the extent that there is nothing in the sonnet itself that might point to any other possible reading.¹⁶ This suggests that Dante himself initially misinterprets his own vision and only later comes to recognize the real (but ultimately transformative) pain—not just the sadness of waking from a lovely dream, as Cavalcanti suggests—at the death of Beatrice to which it seems to point.¹⁷ Neither the narrative ragione nor the somewhat superficial divisione—which merely divides the sonnet into the initial address to the reader and the puzzle to be answered—makes this explicit, of course, and the vision retains its darkly mysterious quality. However, the careful reader—and Dante always demands care from his readers—cannot miss the reference to the ineffabile cortesia [ineffable benevolence and grace] of Beatrice, la quale è oggi meritata nel grande secolo (III.1 [1.12]) [which now is rewarded in eternal life]—a reference that prefigures the text’s closing words, in which the poetprotagonist dreams of being reunited with "quella benedetta Beatrice, la quale gloriosamente mira ne la faccia di colui qui est per omnia secula benedictus" (XLII.3 [31.3]) [that blessed Beatrice, who gazes in glory into the face of him qui est per omnia secula benedictus ].

But if the dream-vision’s subject is dead, then not only the vision itself but also all that follows it needs to be read differently; it needs, that is, to be read with an eye on that same grande secolo [eternal life] which is the goal of all the book’s Christian readers. If the young Dante fails to grasp the vision’s full import, it is because his understanding of love is, at this stage in his development, an excessively narrow one. It is, as Ruth Chester discusses more fully in her chapter below, an understanding that focuses on the physical impact of love on the lover, and specifically on the ways in which the proper functioning of the lover’s body is negatively affected by the sight of the beloved, leaving him di sì fraile e debole condizione (IV.1 [2.3]) [so frail and weak] that his friends become concerned for his well-being. Chapter II of the Vita nova describes falling in love in terms of an invasion, as the spirits that control the lover’s body—his heart, his mind, his eyes, and his digestive system—are, in turn, overtaken by the power of love, which exerts over him tanta sicurtade e tanta signoria … che [gli] convenia fare tutti li suoi piaceri compiutamente (II.7 [1.8]) [such confidence and power that there was no choice but to do whatever he wanted]. Here Dante is setting up the complete loss of control of his physical and mental faculties that will later bring him almost to the point of death,¹⁸ and is illustrating the insidious nature of purely human love, which masquerades as something noble and reasonable,¹⁹ only to reveal itself later as anything but. This almost forensic desire to apprehend and describe what love is and how it works is another theme that will be threaded throughout Dante’s text, as it moves from this early physiological understanding, through the discovery of joy in purely altruistic love with the stile della loda (praise style), to the relapse into pain and confusion with the episode of the lady at the window, and finally to the sublimation of human love into the spiritualized love of Beatrice in heaven with which the libello ends.²⁰ Again, we see how the work’s opening chapters serve to prepare the reader for what is to come: in this case, announcing that writing about love cannot be dismissed as nothing more than parlare fabuloso (II.10 [1.11]) [telling a tall tale], but rather that it is something to be considered sotto maggiori paragrafi (II.10 [1.11]) [under larger paragraphs], a term that, as Brian Richardson suggests, implies both the importance of the content that is to follow and the significance of the way in which it is to be presented.

In these early chapters, however, and as is appropriate for this stage in the development of both the poet and the protagonist, the religious significance that would later come to be attached to the figure of Beatrice and presented as the only correct approach to human love is not yet made explicit. Rather, we find here mere hints of Christian meaning, whose sense will emerge clearly only on a second or subsequent reading. If, as I have suggested, the Vita nova, like the Commedia, has a circular structure, its end pointing back to its beginning, then it may be that only having glimpsed the Beatrice who contemplates, in eternity, the face of the one who is "per omnia secula benedictus might we return to read these early chapters with greater insight. If the suggestion that Beatrice non parea figliuola di uomo mortale, ma di deo (II.8 [1.9]) [did not seem the daughter of a mortal man, but rather of a god] looks, at first reading, like rhetorical hyperbole, the later explanation that Beatrice is uno miracolo, la cui radice … è solamente la mirabile Trinitade" (XXIX.3 [19.3]) [a miracle, whose root … is none other than the miraculous Trinity] implies, rather, that the poet’s first impression was intended to be taken at face value. Likewise, as we have seen, her name—Beatrice—is no mere senhal: she literally blesses her lover, whose salute—his spiritual, moral, and physical well-being—depends on hersalute, her greeting.²¹ Already, too, these early chapters point not only to classical and contemporary poets as sources of inspiration for the libello’s author,²² but also to the Bible, which Barański identifies as "the Vita nova’s primary source.²³ The biblical echoes are particularly strong in chapter III’s closing reference to the meaning of the dream-vision, which is now manifestissimo a li più semplici (III.14 [2.1]) [clear to even the most simpleminded]; this recalls, as Matthew Treherne also points out in his chapter below, the initial mystification and later comprehension of Christ’s disciples concerning his triumphal entry to Jerusalem in John’s Gospel,²⁴ as well as St. Paul’s assertion that quae stulta sunt mundi elegit Deus, ut confundat sapientes (1 Corinthians 1.27) [the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the wise] and Jesus’s own repeated assertions that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs not to the wise but to the parvuli" [little ones].²⁵

Even the book’s designation as the story of its protagonist’s "vita nova" (I [1.1]) cannot but recall that novum testamentum that tells the story of God’s intervention in human history through the sending of that verace luce (XXIV.4 [15.4]) [true Light], which Beatrice herself will figure in the protagonist’s vision in chapter XXIV, and who comes, precisely, ut vitam habeant, et abundantius habeant (John 10.10) [that they may have life, and that they may have it abundantly].²⁶ Dante’s new life will ultimately be—even if he fails to recognize this until much later—a new life in Christ, for which the new beginning marked by his first sight of his beatrice [the one who blesses him] prepares and equips him; and the words "incipit vita nova," as Alberto Casadei has shown,²⁷ have a long history of being used in reference to precisely this sort of Christian conversion, and, in particular, to the new life that begins with baptism and ends, as the Vita nova ends, in the light of the vision of God, "qui est per omnia secula benedictus."

In this short introduction, I have attempted to show how the opening chapters of the Vita nova set up many of its key themes, as well as starting to define what kind of a text this is, its relationship with its immediate and broader social and cultural context, and its intended purpose and function. Above all, I have suggested that the libello’s conclusions—poetic, personal, and religious—are anticipated from its very beginning, revealing it to be anything but a simple boy-meets-girl story, but rather a tightly structured and highly novel text that, like the Commedia, begins in the streets of Florence but ends in the mind of God.²⁸ In the chapters that follow, my colleagues will explore each of these areas in more detail, outlining the importance of these opening chapters both in their own right and for the ways in which they anticipate the richness and depth of this text as a whole.

Vita nova I [1.1]

BRIAN RICHARDSON

To preface the narrative of the Vita nova, Dante makes a sustained use of the technical terminology of the manuscript book that is audacious for its combination of the metaphorical and the literal. He tells us that he is about to copy out a booklet whose source is an early section—with its own heading—of the book of his memory, although he will not transcribe it word for word: "In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria dinanzi alla quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova. Sotto la quale rubrica io trovo scritte le parole le quali è mio intendimento d’assemplare in questo libello; e se non tutte, almeno la loro sentenzia" (I [1.1]) [In the book of my memory—the part of it before which not much is legible—there is the heading Incipit vita nova. Under this heading I find the words which I intend to copy down in this little book; if not all of them, at least their essential meaning]. After sketching an outline of his first encounters with Beatrice in the second chapter, Dante ends it by saying that he will omit much of the more youthful material in his source text and concentrate on the contents that the text itself marks as most significant: Trapassando molte cose le quali si potrebbero trarre dello essemplo onde nascono queste, verrò a quelle parole le quali sono scritte ne la mia memoria sotto maggiori paragrafi (II.10 [1.11]) [Passing over many things that could be copied from the same source, I come to words written in my memory under larger paragraphs]. What are the implications of Dante’s bibliographical terminology, and how does he use it to set out the nature of his tasks as author?

Libro, Libello, Incipit, Rubrica

The metaphor of the book of memory is given exceptional prominence by Dante, but it was not new. From the classical period to the Middle Ages, there is a close association between the concept of perceptions recorded in locations of the memory and the wax tablet or the page on which something is recorded with signs. As Mary Carruthers observes in her great study of memory that takes its title from the Vita nova, Dante was newly articulating a very old observation. She cites as an example the observation of Cicero in the De partitione oratoria (7.26) that the structure of memory, like a wax tablet, employs places and in these gathers together images like letters.¹ Dante is recalling his own earlier use of the image of the book of the mind in his canzoneE’ m’incresce di me, which was probably linked to his love for Beatrice but excluded from the Vita nova:

Lo giorno che costei nel mondo venne,

secondo che si trova

nel libro de la mente che vien meno

. . . . . . . . . . . .

e se ’l libro non erra

(Rime 20 [LXVII], lines 57–59, 66)

————

[The day when she came into the world, as is written in the book of my failing mind … and if the book does not err]

In this poem, Dante’s memory fails or faints because of the effect of Beatrice. At the outset of the Vita nova, in contrast, Dante seems entirely confident in his power of recall, just as he is later in Inferno 2.6, when he writes of la mente che non erra [my unerring memory]. Carruthers notes the precision with which Dante conceives the layout of the libro: he sees the work in visual form.²

Dante establishes a contrast between the remembered libro and the physical book that he is about to create, using libello to refer to the latter. This diminutive form is used three times later in the Vita nova (XII.17 [5.24], XXV.9 [16.9], and XXVIII.2 [19.2]), and three times in the Convivio (1.5.10, 2.2.2, 2.8.9), where it refers respectively to the De vulgari eloquentia, the Vita nova, and Cicero’s De senectute. Dante avoids the option of the diminutive libretto, a term used by Brunetto Latini twice to describe his Tesoretto.³ The Latin libellus was often used by classical authors to refer selfdeprecatingly to a single work of theirs, for instance by Ovid in the first line of the Remedia amoris, which Dante instead respectfully calls a libro in the Vita nova when he quotes the second line of the poem (XXV.9 [16.9]). Libellus and libello could also refer to a subdivision of a work, as in Dante’s reference in the Paradiso to the dodici libelli [twelve books] of Peter of Spain’s Summulae logicales (12.134–35). In the Vita nova, Dante appears to use libello in the more specialized sense of a short unit that could form part of a larger libro but is textually complete, independent, and detachable. Such a libello could consist of one or more gatherings of parchment or paper.⁴ Several libelli could be grouped together to create a larger composite manuscript that might then be bound. Dante refers to the practices of binding and detaching gatherings (legare, squadernare) in Paradiso 33.85–87.⁵

One of the contexts in which the libello, as an object, was used in the Middle Ages was the creation of liturgical booklets that could be used for a single occasion; they might contain, for instance, offices for a feast day, a funeral mass, or a sacrament such as baptism or extreme unction. But this practice declined after the eleventh century.⁶ Another and more enduring context was hagiographical: a booklet containing a life of a saint, or a collection of lives of one saint, which could form part of a composite collection of saints’ lives.⁷ It is also worth noting that, at the start of these texts, whether or not they were transcribed in libelli, the term incipit was regularly followed by vita. As in all types of manuscript, section headings would often be written in red ink, creating a rubrica. An example (not Italian, but consultable online) is found in the third part of the Stuttgart Passionale (Württembergische Landesbibliothek, MS Bibl. fol. 58), dating from around 1130–35, in which the life of St. Alexis begins on folio 12r: Incipit Vita sancti Alexii confessoris [Here begins the life of St. Alexis, confessor].⁸ Other examples come from Luzern, Zentralund Hochschulbibliothek, MS P 33 4°, dating from around 1200, at the openings of the lives of St. Ulrich (Incipit vita sancti Odalrici [Here begins the life of St. Ulrich], fol. 1r) and of St. Gall (Incipit vita beati Galli confessoris [Here begins the life of the blessed Gall, confessor], fol. 32v).⁹ The association between hagiographical manuscripts and the cluster of terms used in the Vita nova has significance for Dante’s work, in view of his portrayal of the blessed nature of Beatrice.

Scrivere, assemplare, essemplo

Another subgroup of terms concerns the processes of locating a source text and then copying from it. Dante finds words written metaphorically in his book of memory, as he tells us in chapter I (Io trovo scritte le parole [I find written the words]) and again at the end of chapter II [1.11] (quelle parole le quali sono scritte [those words which are written]). His use of the past participle leaves open the possibility that the inspiration of the words was, at least in part, divine.¹⁰ Taking this book as his essemplo or exemplar, he undertakes the task of assemplare, transcribing its words in order to make a material booklet with them. As commentators have noted, Dante is paying homage to Cavalcanti’s canzoneIo non pensava che lo cor giammai [I did not think my heart could ever be] in the congedo of which the poet writes that he has transcribed his poem from a longer set of libri: Canzon, tu sai che de’ libri d’Amore / io t’asemplai quando madonna vidi [Song, you know that when I saw my lady I copied you from the books of Love].¹¹ Dante echoes the verb, and also the opening phrase of the Vita nova, in the Commedia, when he writes of the hoarfrost copying the image of snow with a pen that soon grows blunt:

In quella parte del giovanetto anno

. . . . . . . . . . . .

quando la brina in su la terra assempra

l’imagine di sua sorella bianca,

ma poco dura a la sua penna tempra.

(Inf. 24.1, 4–6)

————

[In that season of the youthful year when the hoarfrost copies out on the land the image of its snowy sister, although her nib does not stay sharp for long.]

Dante also tells us that, in creating the libello, he will act as an editor, trapassando molte cose (II.10 [1.11]) [passing over many things]. He is, after all, moving from private to public,¹² from what is written only in his mind to a text that is about to be circulated. (He signals another case of omission when he refers to his conversation with Virgil in the Inferno: altro parlando / che la mia comedìa cantar non cura, 21.1–2 [speaking of other things, of which my comedy does not care to sing]).¹³ Pamela Robinson has noted the eclectic attitude shown by scribes in the process of putting texts together for personal use: Whatever he copied …, a scribe collecting for himself felt free to modify the text in the light of his own requirements and experience.¹⁴

Sentenzia, paragrafi

Dante’s opening words identify another authorial function: he will give the sentenzia of some of the words written in the libro, that is, the interpretation and explanation of their meaning.¹⁵ The term recurs with this exegetic implication in the Vita nova—A questo sonetto fue risposto da molti e di diverse sentenzie (III.14 [2.1]) [Many people responded to this sonnet and gave various interpretations of it]; La divisione non si fa se non per aprire la sentenzia de la cosa divisa (XIV.13 [7.13]) [Division is only for opening up the meaning of the thing divided]; Non m’intrametto di narrare la sentenzia de le parti (XXII.17 [13.16]) [I will not add anything to