There is an intriguing contrast between the stability of Dante’s image in the modern world--his very physiognomy has a settled and immediately recognizable form--and the paucity of documents that attest to his activity and whereabouts during the fifty-six years of his life. Unlike in the cases of Boccaccio and Petrarch, not a single manuscript survives in Dante’s own hand, and significant periods of his life, both in the commune of Florence and in exile, are unrecorded in the archives. A familiar idea of the shape of the poet’s life and its constituent chapters has emerged and solidified over the centuries. Nonetheless, many accounts of his biography that rest upon such an idea have tended to elide evidence and pseudo-evidence: on the one hand, the extremely sporadic record of Dante’s life in the archives; on the other, the complex forms of self-representation that we find across his surviving works. To the latter we might add legendary or apocryphal elements in Dante’s early commentaries and biographies that have too readily been accepted as facts.
Elisa Brilli and Giuliano Milani’s stimulating book, published in Italian and French prior to this accomplished English translation by Mary Maschio and Eva Plesnik, offers an account of Dante’s life that pointedly separates the documented Dante from the poet’s “lifelong elaboration of many different narratives about himself” (11). The authors, one a historian and the other a literary scholar, note that biographers of the poet over the centuries have usually taken a “combinatory” approach, mixing and matching the archival traces with the literary self-representations to create a seamless and consistent whole. Brilli and Milani contend that any such seamlessness is illusory. They vow not to “succumb to the power of Dante’s life writing” but to treat his narratives “as objects of study” rather than “biographical sources” (262). Thus, instead of seeking a single cohesive account, they offer an “alternating dialogue” (11) which segregates the archival evidence from the poet’s “life-writing.” The scholars each bring their own expertise and methodology to bear upon the question. Milani, Professor of Medieval History at the Université Gustave Eiffel in Paris, takes the reader through the archival record, carefully presenting to us what is (and what is not) known about each phase of Dante’s life and its wider context. Brilli, Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto, interrogates Dante’s forms of self-representation from the same period. In so doing, the authors seek to uncover, “through comparison rather than combination, the common questions, resonances, and profound links that animate these different facets of Dante’s life” (11). The result, they tell us, is “a rather experimental book,” one that does not “offer a reconstruction that fills in every hole [or] promise to recreate ‘the real Dante,’” but instead presents a “problematic restoration, one in which the lacunae are treated as data points on a par with the other textual and contextual evidence” (12).
Reflecting its “alternating” and “dialogic” approach, the book is structurally eccentric. Yet its formal idiosyncrasy is intended to illuminate the unavoidable tensions and seams that should characterize any attempted reconstruction of “Dante’s life.” Following a brief preface setting out the book’s scope, a prologue (“Lineages”) traces the fortunes of the Alighieri family in a specific sestiere of Florence in the context of the commune’s social and political dynamics, from the mid-eleventh century until Dante’s birth in 1265. Hereafter, the book is divided into four main sections. These reflect “broad chronological tranches” (262) that are loosely based on the “four ages of man” that Dante describes in his Convivio (IV, xxiii) but are adapted to Dante’s own lifespan: (1) adolescence; (2) youth in Florence; (3) youth in exile; and (4) old age. Each “tranche” begins with an “Interlude,” wherein a significant archival document and a notable passage from Dante’s works are read side by side, setting the scene for the life stage in question and establishing some of the key matters at stake. Thereafter, the section is divided into two chapters: the first describes the surviving archival traces of Dante’s life and situates them in their wider historical context, while the second explores the forms of “life writing” that we find in the same period. An epilogue (“Legacies”) draws together some key findings and conclusions.
The chapters dedicated to the poet’s “adolescence” in Florence (c. 1265-1295) use the limited archival evidence to situate Dante and his family within the commune’s complex social and political networks, before examining his first steps into the poetic arena. Dante’s early life coincided with a “writing revolution” (39) in Florence: from increased record and account keeping to a nascent vernacular poetic tradition and the transcription and translation of ever more text types. Nonetheless, the archival traces of Dante himself in this politically turbulent period are meagre, with only three public documents surviving from the first thirty years of his life: a debt obligation record, a dowry contract, and a record of a civil case where Dante served as a witness. Brilli and Milani contend that this scarcity “is in itself a source of information” and attests to his “shadowy” status outside of the major factions and professions; the poet, they write, “seemed to rub shoulders with all these groups without fully belonging to any of them” (40). Dante’s Florentine milieu is carefully reconstructed: from the forms his early education may have taken and the ways in which his literacy in Latin would likely have been developed, to the wider social, political, and cultural dynamics of the city. What makes Dante highly unusual is that, while the documentary record offers only fleeting traces of his “adolescence,” these same early years witness an intense commitment to poetry, particularly if we accept the Dantean authorship of the Fiore. The authors summarize: “[Dante’s] lyrical overabundance contrasts with the documentary silence of his early years and, together, these two elements start to bring into focus a clearer picture: Dante had no profession, but he wrote poetry every day with a diligence that is all the more surprising because he gained no recompense as a courtier, jongleur or minstrel” (65). Dante’s lack of a stable profession and neat factional allegiance are recurring themes in Brilli and Milani’s biography. The authors present a protean Dante, defined above all by his social, political, and intellectual versatility. Following this first historical chapter, the account of Dante’s first literary steps is rewarding and insightful. While his early poetry operates within the parameters of the existing Romance lyric, and provides few biographical traces, his command of different lyric genres is quickly demonstrated, and his innovations are subtle but significant. The chapter especially highlights his uncommon use of personifications; his interest in visionary experience and the afterlife; his engagement with Scripture; his manipulation and integration of existing vocabularies and traditions; and--in contrast with his contemporary Guido Cavalcanti’s “irreducibly individual” (77) lyrics--an emerging commitment to poetry as communal experience.
Part II (“Youth in Florence”) takes us from 1295, and Dante first participation in Florentine politics, to his banishment from the city in 1302. We begin with a transcription of Dante’s contribution to a session of the Florentine general council in 1295, where Dante spoke in favor of moderating laws that had targeted the so-called magnati. This record appears alongside the opening lines of his contemporaneous Vita nova, where the work is presented as the transcription of Dante’s own “book of memory”: a peculiar and highly original instance of medieval life writing. This is the most consistently documented period of Dante’s life: twenty-three of the forty-two surviving records containing his name are from 1290s and concern his political activity, though even this period contains significant lacunae. The evidence points to a rapid ascent through the Guelf city’s political structures on the part of a capable, trusted, and politically moderate figure, culminating in his term as prior in the summer of 1300 and his ambassadorial visit to Pope Boniface VIII in October 1301. The extent of Dante’s access to the studia at Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, and his means of acquiring new forms of knowledge in this period, are treated in a detailed but circumspect manner. The accompanying literary chapter focuses on the Vita nova,as a work concerned with carving out a public reputation for its author. The chapter might be read in isolation as an insightful essay on the libello, dissected in terms of its ideas on love, its reflections on poetry, and particularly its public functions. The work is discussed cautiously in relation to modern categories of autobiography and life writing, before the harsher literary experiences of the “rime petrose” and the tenzone with Forese are analyzed as alternative and contrasting modes of self-representation.
The first years of Dante’s exile (c. 1302-1307) are traced in Part III (“Youth in Exile”). In the “Interlude,” the words of a judge declaring Dante’s banishment are read alongside Dante’s celebrated canzone on exile, “Tre donne,” which offers a stylized “new self-portrait” in which exile becomes “a fundamental part of his authorial identity” (143). The poem, the authors contend, represents “an attempt to create a new ideal community, an alternative to the historical community that banished him, and one in which the poet could recover his full rights as a citizen” (143). A central claim in this part of the book is that the first period of Dante’s exile has too often been read through the prism of his poetry. The Commedia’spronouncements concerning Dante’s stark isolation and his sudden rupture from his White Guelf allies in exile, in particular, have been afforded too much biographical credence. The surviving archival traces from 1302 are again few, as Dante existed outside of the “documentary system” (144) of the commune. Dante’s possible movements, between the community of exiled White Guelfs and the Malaspina court in northern Tuscany, are traced cautiously, such that a “fluid and variable” (154) picture emerges. Dante’s literary works from the same period, meanwhile, are read “not as a faithful witness to the events of his life, but as an incomparable record of his survival strategy” (165). His dramatization of his life in exile is shown to be highly stylized; indeed, his very choice of the epithet “exul,” rather than the official “banditus”, reflects the author’s search for “a form of nobility in the stigma of expulsion” (166). “Tre donne,” for instance, while a defining work of exile, has prompted “a dizzying kaleidoscope of hypotheses” (170) and is fraught with peril if treated as a biographical document. The authors emphasize the danger of attempting to “deduce a micro-chronology or even a biography from an inherently polysemous text” (170). The De vulgari eloquentia and Convivio, meanwhile, while drawing suggestively on the theme and experience of exile, do so with their own specific aims, models, and structures in mind, constructing in each case a particular form of authorial persona rather than providing a reliable account of historical events.
Part IV (“Old Age”) concerns Dante’s later years (c. 1307-1321), associated with his composition of theCommedia,in which his pro-imperial political vision crystallizes but his activities and precise whereabouts again often prove highly elusive. Those records that survive concern his continuing absence from Florence, rather than his presence elsewhere (not a single official record survives, for example, of Dante’s stay at the cosmopolitan court of Cangrande in Verona). The “civil death recorded in the archives,” however, contrasts with the “vivid and varied” (195) figure that emerges from Dante’s political epistles from the same period. The authors carefully present the political and intellectual conditions in which his mature advocacy for universal empire emerges, as well as evidence of the Commedia’s earliest reception. We witness an ever more intellectually agile Dante in these years, from his treatment of political philosophy in the Monarchia to natural philosophy in the Quaestio de aqua et terra and Latin pastoral poetry in his exchange of eclogues with Giovanni del Virgilio, not to mention the extraordinary riches of the Commedia.The final core chapter first probes in a sophisticated fashion the thorny relationship between the “poema sacro” and history. The poem, they argue (with reference to Erwin Panofsky), has traditionally been regarded as a timeless “monument” served by minor historical “documents” that explain its context. Increasingly, however, scholars have approached the poem as “a pamphlet written in a dynamic relationship with its historical context” (229). Hereafter, the focus turns to the Commedia’s forms ofself-representation and its peculiar and shifting poetic “I.” The authors describe a gradual transition “from an epic Christian poem with a didactic and exemplary value centered on a conversion narrative to its redefinition [...] as a providential work justified by the self-portrait of a recognized apostle” (250). Dante’s letters from the same period occupy an intriguing intermediate space, serving as important documents for the reconstruction of the poet’s biography while also witnessing elaborate new forms of self-representation, informed especially by Scripture.
The epilogue offers some stimulating reflections on Dante’s biographical history, beginning with a passage from Boccaccio’s influential Trattatello. The biography is shown to “set up expectations for biographies of Dante that, in a way, continue to this day” (260). Boccaccio erases some of the poet’s eccentricities and is “animated by a need to normalize his profile” (260). In seeking a “smooth” narrative, biographies have often attached outsized importance to assertions in Dante’s literary works while glossing over significant ambiguities and lacunae in the documentary evidence. It would have been interesting, whether here or in the rather fleeting preface, to hear more about other recent biographies of Dante (such as those by Marco Santagata, Giorgio Inglese, and Alessandro Barbero) and their own respective responses to the same challenges. The epilogue sees Brilli and Milani again emphasize Dante’s “lack of professional status and [...] of a firmly established social position” (262) as an especially important dimension of his personal history and literary activity alike. On the one hand, it accounts for Dante’s elusiveness in the archives, especially during his years of exile. On the other, it meant that he “could permit himself to study so many different types of learning, to combine them and to draw often surprising conclusions from them” (263). It was often from this very combining of different literary and intellectual traditions that Dante’s extraordinary originality emerged, such that “a largely autodidact Florentine of middling birth was able to permanently revolutionize not only literary history but, more generally, the representation of the individual and the role that authors’ lives played in Western culture” (266).
This is a distinctive, authoritative, and meticulously researched contribution to the study of Dante’s biography and his enduring interest in “life writing” and self-representation. While allowances are made for lay readers, with all quoted material appearing in English translation and direct engagement with secondary literature largely confined to the voluminous endnotes, it is a highly detailed and sometimes dense account, especially in elaborating upon what are often intricate political developments, that will appeal chiefly to specialists. Above all, this is an important corrective to those accounts that are tempted to elide some of the gaps and complexities in Dante’s biography in seeking a seamless and satisfactory whole, and to those that implicitly treat the many intriguing modes of self-representation we find across his literary corpus as biographical sources. In truth, the “Life” of such an unevenly documented medieval poet, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, is a series of competing and partial reconstructions that present tensions and contradictions as well as symmetries and resonances. The biographer must reckon with the presence and absence of historical documents, the wider known context, the centuries-old biographical tradition, forms of apocrypha, and the poet’s shifting forms of “life writing.” In separating the historical evidence from Dante’s textual self-fashioning, while bringing the two into cautious but stimulating forms of dialogue, Brilli and Milani’s “problematic restoration” at once destabilizes and enriches our understanding of a medieval poet’s life.