Good history requires responsible speculation. Marco Santagata’s most recent book on Dante hints that it will engage in some speculation in its very title, Dante. Il romanzo della sua vita, literally “Dante: The Novel of His Life” (Dante: The Story of His Life, as Richard Dixon’s new translation has it). The book reconstructs Dante’s activity chronologically while also dividing it geographically into two parts: half a life climbing the social and political ladder of medieval Florentine society and half a life spent in itinerant uncertainty after being banished from his hometown.

Domenico Peteerlini, Dante in Exile, 1860, Oil on canvas, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Florence.

Chronicling the life of a man who was born more than 700 years ago and not to a noble family leaves us with scarce documentation and thus requires a great deal of guesswork. The extent of Santagata’s bibliography and explanatory notes—which take up more than a quarter of the text—can give the reader some reassurance that speculation, when it does occur, announces itself promptly and is justified by the secondary literature. Without these moments of creativity, one might be tempted to read the book as merely a long synthesis and reordering of the seemingly endless historical scholarship on Dante.

Dante’s elaborate self-fashioning as a prophet makes the labor of the biographer a difficult one.

An Anglophone readership may be less forgiving of the book’s occasional if necessary dryness given our much lesser appetite for Dante relative to an Italian audience, though Santagata’s writing is clean, simple, and occasionally even humorous. This biography will be most useful and enjoyable to those who already have a familiarity with the Comedy and want a more nuanced view of its place in Italian history. It is likely that only specialists will find some of the more precise historical speculations of much interest (at which points Dante cohabited with his wife Gemma, to what extent he interacted with the Florentine philosopher and statesman Brunetto Latini, whether he was in communication with Henry VII of Luxembourg’s attorneys while writing the Monarchia, etc.), but some of the more imaginative claims are sure to capture the casual reader (for example, that the fainting spells described in Dante’s early work of prosimetrum, the Vita Nuova, provide evidence for a medical diagnosis of epilepsy).

The necessity of such speculations comes both from the typical challenges of historical work and from Dante’s own efforts to mythologize himself. The poet’s elaborate self-fashioning as a prophet through the careful manipulation of his personal history makes the labor of the biographer a difficult one. To make the prophet Dante, the person Dante is reduced and subsumed by his own literary creation. In some ways this is what all good autobiographical writing does; it merges lived experience with an idea, a generation, or a historical moment and thereby elevates the author while also reducing him to the status of an avatar. In the first pages of the book, Santagata describes how Dante spent nearly his entire life crafting this narrative. He was baptized Durante, but the poet never used that name. Medieval thinking held that the proper reading of a name (interpretatio nominis) would reveal the fate of a person. Dante’s name, though simply a contraction of Durante, suggests a false etymology from the Italian (third person singular of dare, “to give”), as if to indicate that Dante’s work will be a prophetic gift. At some point in his middle age, the poet was present in the Florentine baptistery when a child fell into one of the terracotta amphorae filled with holy water. Dante broke the containers, which may have been considered a sacrilege. It is Dante’s particular gift that he was able to read into this occurrence a prophetic sign: his smashing of the amphorae recreates a scene from the life of the prophet Jeremiah, who breaks an amphora to proclaim that Jerusalem will be destroyed. By reading his life as a refiguration of Jeremiah, who—like Dante—railed against his contemporaries (in Jeremiah’s case, idolatrous Jews), the poet turns his life into art.

There is some deflating irony in the project of understanding Dante as a man and not as part of his own fiction. Santagata’s work is to reverse carefully the poetic alchemy that makes a prophet of a man, hopefully without detracting from our enjoyment of the poem. Scholars have long made a sometimes murky distinction between Dante poeta (Dante the poet, who authors the work) and Dante pellegrino (Dante the pilgrim, protagonist of the Comedy). Santagata is interested in how one Dante forms the other. Far more important, though, is the way in which Santagata creates a new version of Dante through which we can read, a Dante politicus. Behind Dante the fictional character there is Dante the poet, but behind Dante the poet there is also Dante the politician, whose allegiances and needs shift over time while he writes. Dante wrote the Comedy over a long period of time, and occasionally circulated parts of the poem well before it was completed. As a result, the Comedy sometimes expresses ideas and attitudes that would change over the course of the poet’s life. Only by coming to know Dante the politican and historical figure can we understand, to give just one example, how the appearance of Henry VII on the political scene explains what Santagata describes as “an almost complete volte-face” between the inconsistent rhetorics of empire contained in the Inferno and those in Purgatorio. Santagata sums his project up nicely somewhere near the middle of the book:

The author’s biographical journey, his shifts in position, his contradictions, are all recorded in the book, which takes the form of a prophetical reading of human history and, at the same time, an autobiography. But it is a most unusual autobiography since it records the actions and thoughts of the protagonist, destined to be a man with the exceptional gift of prophecy.

Behind Dante the poet there is also Dante the politician.

Much—and much of the most beautiful—Dante criticism takes either a vaguely New Critical approach, viewing the poem as a single aesthetic object, or a vaguely historicist approach that nonetheless considers the poem as an indivisible literary monument. Santagata shows a different way of reading Dante, focusing on how his thoughts are historically contingent, resulting in a poem that sometimes contradicts itself just as Dante did when his philosophical insights changed or his political allegiances shifted. Santagata’s book is a catalogue of contingencies, which will both introduce the reader to the political situation of the Italian peninsula in Dante’s time and show how that context assists us in reading the poem.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 35 Number 1, on page 124
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https://newcriterion.com/issues/2016/9/dante-politicus

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