The readers of Elizabeth Coggeshall’s excellent new book, On Amistà, join a skillful scholar in the difficult yet rewarding task of recovering some of the conflicting models of friendship in Dante Alighieri’s corpus. It is not that we moderns have lost the original message of terms such as amico or amica which were clear to Dante and his contemporaries--although we are certainly somewhat misled by our own notions and practices of friendship--but that premodern friendship simultaneously encompassed a broader array of meanings and practices, moving between ideal love and beneficial or political relationship.
The book focuses on the period before “secular humanism,” and introduces Dante as an important predecessor for early humanist thinking on friendship, demonstrating that “Dante’s generation discussed friendship as a much more fraught relationship than has previously been considered” (4). The author offers to rewrite the intellectual history of friendship in its Italian context from a sociological perspective, arguing that “[t]he language of friendship offered writers like Dante a set of terms adaptable to particular strategic ends in the specific milieux of literary networks” (6). Beyond literary circles, poets were looking for the protection and support of signori in different urban centers, and the key to their affection was friendship. Nevertheless, Coggeshall suggests we should avoid thinking about friendship primarily as a private intimacy and instead look at amical practices such as exchanging letters or gifts and their public functions. If Alan Bray in his groundbreaking work The Friend (University of Chicago Press, 2003) studied humanist secretaries and their application of classical friendship to self-fashioning themselves as loyal servants, Coggeshall explores the earlier medieval literati and their academic networks and activitiesin the literary “piazza” or the patron’s court (although without much attention to their spatial dimensions as they are treated as sociological “fields”).
The introduction chapter summarizes the main differences between the classical models of friendship and their later Christian commentaries. Aristotle had a more expansive approach to friendship, as he was willing to apply the “term philia equally to transactional and pleasurable friendships, or friendships between unequals in rank, age, or gender, as to the kind of friendship defined by Cicero as ‘vera amicitia’” (13). Whether friendship is an exclusive and rare relationship or one which can unite many people of different nature, was not a mere theoretical contemplation during Dante’s period: the more inclusive approach meant that friendship could bring city-states together (a notion that appears in the Nicomachean Ethics) and was therefore a potential remedy for the notorious social frictions of Italian urban politics at the time.
Chapter One comes to answer the riddle of Dante’s primo amico, Guido Cavalcanti, as the poet names his friend in the Vita nova. Scholars perceived this declaration of loyal friendship as insincere, but instead of turning to biographical explanations, Coggeshall explains that Dante’s friendship here is of the “antisocial” kind. Rather than integrating poets into the literary community, as seen in earlier tenzoni correspondence poems, Dante emphasizes friendship as an exclusive bond that aims to separate two friends from their wider social and artistic circles. And while other poets used friendship to expand their socio-poetic interactions--even with rivals or newcomers to the literary piazza--Dante chooses a smaller scale and prefers the isolation of two or three friends and a “withdrawal from the piazza” (48). His movement from the open piazza to the privacy of his heart and home finally leads him, as the author convincingly argues, to limit the scope of friendship and its outreach, even in the case of his intimate “first friend.”
Dante’s dramatic exile from Florence in 1302 inspired him to reconsider the role of friendship, especially in the intellectual context of the university. Coggeshall suggests a “Ciceronian turn” in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia that leads him back to civic friendship. Chapter Two depicts Dante’s new interest in disinterested friendship, one necessary for mutual cooperation in promoting the Italian vernacular. Language, in its turn, opens the possibility for two individuals to befriend one another. Nevertheless, by referring to himself as a friend when mentioning his collaborator Cino da Pistoia (“Cynus Pistoriensis et amicus eius”), Dante was still able, even while channeling disinterested friendship, to promote his own interests. Association with Cino, more well-connected than Dante through the Bolognese network, was a valuable strategy for Dante’s self-promotion, and the poet seems to capture in his work the two often competing meanings of friendship, as both a practically useful relationship and a sublime intellectual bond.
Chapter Three turns to the court and examines the concept of patronage through the lens of the Epistle to Cangrande addressed to the Veronese lord whom Dante considers a friend and to whom he dedicates his Paradiso as a token of gratitude for his support (though the authenticity of the text is unclear). In this text, Dante engages with the longstanding debate about whether true friendship can exist within the bounds of inequality or hierarchy. For instance: how could a relationship be genuinely reciprocal, when a client cannot match the patron's gifts? Dante equalizes the patron and client by emphasizing their shared refined tastes and by highlighting their symbolic capital (in the spirit of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice). Furthermore, Dante challenges the notion of patronage as domination by boldly presenting the dedication of his poem to his patron as an equal gift. “With its gratuitous gift, the Epistle releases the client from the bonds of patronage, thus elevating him within the field of sociability and making possible his authentic friendship, as equal, with the lord” (108). As in previous chapters, the author here resists the temptation to portray a one-dimensional approach to friendship, and instead introduces a Dante quite ambivalent about friendship, “a poet who delights in unresolved paradoxes, tensions, dilemmas, and doubts” (144).
The final chapter turns to the Commedia, where the term amico is surprisingly rare. In the Inferno, since “the sinners in hell refuse the mirroring of the self in the other that friendship proffers” (119)--the reason for which the damned are excluded from God’s friendship. Later in the Purgatorio, friendship is replaced with alternative terms such as fratellanza, amor, and carità, to direct the penitents to unite as a community of the virtuous. The author argues that the language of amistà was pushed aside perhaps due to its individual or competitive baggage, although other chapters show Dante’s artistry in negotiating the different meanings of friendship. It is possible that here we encounter the limits of the amical discourse. In any case, this trend continues in the Paradiso, where friendship leads to mutual love and conformity with God (later authors will take this hierarchy even further, seeing friendship as a threat to loving God).
On Amistà is an inspiring study that successfully integrates classical philosophical works on friendship and sociological thinking with Dante’s corpus and its rich scholarship. It makes a powerful argument about the poet’s sophisticated strategies in navigating the ever-perplexing world of medieval friendship. Sensitive to each text’s historical and social context, Coggeshall’s readings of Dante are nuanced and insightful, and will undoubtedly inspire further studies on the amical practices of Dante's contemporaries, in the Italian peninsula and beyond. Joining recent works on premodern friendship, such as Donald Gilbert-Santamaría’s The Poetics of Friendship in Early Modern Spain: A Study in Literary Form (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), the book demonstrates the centrality of questions of intimacy, affection, and alternative kinship to key texts of medieval and early modern culture. In fact, On Amistà challenges the somewhat accepted periodization that only the early modern era broke free from schematic models of “true” friendship, by showing how Dante continued to swear allegiance to the classical ideals of amity while at the same time adjusting such amical notions to the changing social world of his time. Under Dante’s masterly treatment, friendship could go a long way.