Music and Grammar Models of Dantean Inquiry from the De Vulgari Eloquentia to Inf. 3

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Published: Jan 13, 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14434/tc.v15i2.35542
Keywords:
Dante, Music, Grammar
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Section
For Dante Alighieri (1265–1321): Dante and Music
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Paolo Scartoni
Rutgers University

Abstract

Dante’s original and insightful linguistics and poetics have prompted important conversations among scholars, in terms of their anthropological, theological, and philosophical implications. In this article, I reconsider Dante’s understanding of language and poetics from the perspective of grammar and music. I bring together the scholarship from these two disciplines to analyze Dante’s theoretical and poetical works, and I argue that grammar and music offered Dante two distinct ways to think about language. I trace the relationship between the two disciplines in the De Vulgari Eloquentia first, and in the first cantos of the Comedy (Inf. 1–3), in the second part of this article. Ultimately, I show that a deeper understanding of Dante’s grammatical and musical models of linguistic inquiry can shed new light on our comprehension not only of his poetics but also of his ethical and political project.

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Author Biography

Paolo Scartoni, Rutgers University

Paolo Scartoni is a PhD student at Rutgers University. His research focuses on the relationship between musica speculativa and grammatica in Dante’s linguistics and poetics. He collaborates as an encoder at Petrarchive, the digital edition of Petrarch’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, and he participated in the Deiphira Project, the digital edition of a witness of Alberti’s Deiphira (Harvard University's Houghton Library, MS Typ. 422). He is co-editor of a new DH project, tentatively entitled Divine Networks: An Interactive Visualization of Dante’s Comedy, which maps the network of internal cross-references between the cantos of Dante’s Comedy. L’ascesa a Dio. Tipologie della preghiera nella Commedia di Dante, Paolo’s translation of Alessandro Vettori’s latest monograph on Dante, came out in March 2022. Prior to attending Rutgers, he earned an M.M. from the Conservatory of Perugia (Italy), where he graduated in Historical Piano defending a thesis on the role of literature in Robert Schumann’s piano music.

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