Tristan Kay’s monograph addresses erotic love in Dante’s works from his early lyrics to his masterwork, the Commedia. It argues that Dante rejected the “dualism” of prior lyric poets such as Guittone d’Arezzo, whose ethical verse “severs vernacular poetry from love and renders earthly love and lust indistinguishable” (127). Instead, the Florentine poet generally adopted an “integrative” stance, validating amorous desire and the poetry that described it as a conduit to religious truth. The book is structured in two parts, one each for its main concerns of eros and the vernacular lyric. Kay first sets out the problem: Dante seeks to achieve for love literature “a form of cultural authority ordinarily reserved for a small number of biblical, theological, and classical texts” (37). He then identifies the solution in the figure of Beatrice in the Commedia: “The locus where ordinarily conflicting loves no longer clash but coincide” (90). Part 2 retreads the same argument in greater detail, examining Dante’s “negotiations” with three poetic precursors: Guittone d’Arezzo, Arnaut Daniel, and Folco of Marseille. Each is seen to exhibit a distinct but dualistic approach to the relationship between lyric poetry and eros, in counterpoint to Dante’s integrationist poetics.

Kay believes Dante’s commitment to integrating eros and spirituality wavered in the years between composing the Vita nova and beginning the Inferno (ca. 1295–1307). He defines this middle period as Dante’s most dualistic and thus most ideologically indebted to Guittone, despite the unwavering disdain for the Aretine found throughout Dante’s work. The abandonment of the ambitious prose work Convivio in favor of the Commedia therefore represents a “departure from a dualistic model of conversion … [toward] a radically reimagined lyric poem, defined by lyric desire as well as epic narration” (246).

The book claims to constitute a “reappraisal of two strongly interrelated aspects of Dante’s work” (247)—namely, eros and the vernacular lyric tradition. Still, those familiar with the rich tradition of Dante scholarship on these perennial topics, generously cited and discussed throughout the book, will find the intellectual biography just outlined broadly familiar. The book’s innovative contributions come in the close readings. The sections of chapter 2 on Purgatorio and Paradiso give a novel accounting of the affective importance of Beatrice that refuses to strip away her fundamental character of lyric beloved. Part 2’s incorporation of material on Dante’s lyric predecessors then allows for a felicitous, albeit not totally unprecedented, reading of the heaven of Venus as an interrogation of the transcendent possibilities of erotic love and the vernacular lyric.

Useful passages of analysis notwithstanding, the treatment of the overarching issues of eros and the lyric is disappointingly narrow. There is little engagement with current research topics in allied disciplines: the history of emotions, vernacular theology, and medieval literary theory. Chapter 4, for example, reduces the intricate debates between romance poets over the ethical implications of obscurity to a rebuttal of fellow Dante scholars’ application of the term trobar clus. All too often, the book draws its accounts of the cultural context from secondary literature on Dante where a direct appraisal of the primary sources seems essential. The titular concept of “Dante’s lyric redemption” itself rests on a debatable axiom: “scholastic theologians such as Thomas Aquinas regarded marriage as inferior to celibacy and sex as potentially lustful even in wedlock” (17). This minimizes the rich tradition of Christian sources—Saint Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite, Bernard of Clairvaux—that described spiritual desire in explicitly erotic terms and gives, moreover, a partial account of Scholastic doctrine on marital love (cf. Peter Lombard, Sentences, 4.dist.31).

The fundamental contrast between dualism and integration appears ironically dualistic itself given this absence of nuance. There is little or no consideration of the vernacular precursors whose work is more open to the coexistence of eros and spirituality: Jaufré Rudel, Giacomo da Lentini, Brunetto Latini, or Guido Guinizzelli. And there is no mention of religious poetry, although its treatment of figures like the Virgin Mary or Saint Francis in courtly and indeed erotic terms is especially pertinent to the notion of “lyric redemption.” Even Dante’s works other than the Commedia become mere stepping stones to the poem: the Convivio—a prose work whose connections to the love lyric are unprecedented—is simplistically charged with the “devaluation of eros and [the] suppression of lyric discourse” (238). The conclusion that “only Dante has [achieved redemption] through his amatory verse” (246) therefore smacks of confirmation bias. Specialists will find readings here to interest them, but the broader project joins a tradition of studies on Dante that have celebrated finding the unique, romanticized poetic “I” whose existence was a premise of their inquiry.