These two volumes propose an essential recognition of questions regarding Dante and Dantean criticism: they promote an overall vision of the life and works of the poet and of his relationship with both medieval and contemporary culture. The contributions included in these volumes, along with other materials, were presented at the international convention in Rome that celebrated the 750th anniversary of Dante’s birth (1265–2015). The commemoration began in May 2015 at Palazzo Madama, seat of the Senate of the republic, inaugurated by the president of the Senate, Pietro Grasso. The first volume opens with several moments from the day, accompanied by an exhibition of artistic testimonies and editorial initiatives prepared in Palazzo Madama’s Garibaldi Room. The pages “Exhibit for Dante” recall the documents that were on display: archaic illuminated manuscripts, illustrated commentary on the Divine Comedy, and a new artistic interpretation of the cantos of the Inferno in the thirty-six etchings by Domenico Ferrari.
At the beginning of the first volume, greetings from the Senate president underline the wide-ranging initiatives dedicated to the figure of the poet, followed by those of the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, with a message from Pope Francis, who characterizes Dante as the “poet of hope” (16). The centrality of the poet in the Italian institutional context is evidenced in the gratitude of both Dario Franceschini, minister of cultural heritage and activities and tourism, as well as Enrico Malato, eminent Dante scholar and president of the Centro Pio Rajna. Dante’s cultural significance and constant presence in the Italian tradition are also reflected in the testimonies of contemporary artists: the volume includes Dante’s “Ballata, i’ voi che tu ritrovi amore,” sung by soprano Rosa Feola with original music performed by Nicola Piovani, as well as Paradiso, canto 32, recited by Roberto Benigni.
The cultural and academic solemnity of the celebrations emerges in the essays by eminent Dante scholars—Roberto Antonelli, Corrado Bologna, Francesco Bruni, Andrea Mazzucchi, Maria Luisa Meneghetti, and Stefano Zamponi—who participated in Rome at a specialized forum at the Centro Pio Rajna headquarters at Villa Altieri. These contributions illustrate the Dantean publications accomplished by the Centro in light of the centennial years 2015–21: namely, the New Annotated Edition of Dante’s Works, the Census of Dantean Commentary and the National Edition of Commentary, the illustrated commentary of the Divine Comedy with facsimiles of illuminated codices and other Dantean documents, the initiative of One Hundred Cantos for One Hundred Years, a selection of the last cycles of Dantean lectures at the Casa di Dante in Rome, the Journal of Dantean Studies, and the presentation of the etchings of Dante’s Inferno, curated by Ettore Lombardo.
The contributions by Italian and international scholars offer the most recent results of Dantean research, divided into six thematic areas, with a foreword by Luciano Canfora on Dante and the passion of knowledge. Teresa De Robertis later details the initial objectives of updating the edition of the Dantean diplomatic codex by Renato Piattoli (1940), including the criteria that guided the selection of the documentary material, its distribution, and the publication processes of the texts included in the new edition, CDD (currently still in draft form). Bartuschat and Milano tackle the subject of Dantean biographies, which Bartuschat defines as “treatises of poetry and a form of literary historiography” (173), in light of the documents and the motives for studying the documentary context.
The second section, dedicated to Dante’s intellectual formation, explores the poet’s Florentine years, again through documentary material and biographies. Brunetti concentrates on Dante’s study of the classics and on the grammatical and rhetorical education that he received in Florence, alongside that of the notary arts. Antonelli addresses the difficult theme of vernacular poetic interpretations on the basis of what was collected in the last annotated editions of the Vita nova and Rime, preexile. Though Dante read and cited many authors, he tended to obscure his references as “he historically and explicitly functionalizes every presence in a rationally and coherently constructed personal profile” (271). Fumagalli reflects on the Dantean way of reading the Bible—the most central and pervasive work for the Divine Comedy—in which Dante approaches the sacred text “as a model and not as a text to annotate” (288). Boethius’s Consolatio, the Nicomachean Ethics, and the Greek fathers’ theological sources stand out among Dante’s readings prior to his exile as traced by Gentili, while Tabarroni explores Dante’s cultural proximity to the study of medicine and art in Bologna.
“The Production and Tradition of the Works” investigates several lines of inquiry: the centrality of Dante’s relationship with Cavalcanti, as emerges from the edition of the Vita nova and the Rime edited by Donato Pirovano and Marco Grimaldi (Rea); the public of readers and the circulation of the Convivio on the basis of codicological and paleographic aspects gathered in the study of the manuscripts by Ceccherini, who proposes a new chronology of four manuscripts produced in the fourteenth century, and specifies the mercantile profile of several copyists involved in the work’s fifteenth-century transcription; the diversity of attitudes among contemporary editors toward Dante’s Latin works, in particular the De vulgari eloquentia (Gianola); and, above all, the Rime among the works of dubious attribution (Stoppelli). Bertelli and Zaccarello concentrate on the Comedy: on manuscript production and graphic evolution of its copies, respectively, and on the perspectives of the forthcoming critical edition, including possible editorial solutions that would consider an edition of the Boccaccian form of the poem, as well as the Dante del Cento codices and the early print tradition.
“The Languages of Dante” assembles contributions on several topics: on the vernacular, or “modern way with words,” according to Dante’s expression (Frosini); on the linguistic and stylistic variety of his Latin writings according to their genre (Rizzo); on the metric schemes and rhyme, functional to rhythmic intensification (Afribo); and on several musical points in the third canticle and their philosophical exegesis (Rostagno). Fiorentini, Pasut, Corrado, and Bologna examine aspects of the reception and interpretation of his works, as well as the elaboration of the foundational myth of Dantean exegesis; the critical fortune of the illuminated codices of the Comedy; the typology of commentary for individual cantos known as “lectura Dantis”; and the presence of Dante in twentieth-century literature, in particular in the Discourse on Dante by Mandel’štam. The penultimate section looks toward “the heredity of Dante,” with the message from Cardinal Ravasi; Banella’s investigation of an important example of the Dantean canon in the fifteenth century, the MS B 2 1267 of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence; and the questions of methodology and new documents for a Dantean biography in “Indizio e Regnicoli.” The final section covers the Dantean heritage in dialectal translations of the Comedy (Marzo), the moral exegesis of the sixteenth-century Florentine Academies (Pavarini), the literary genre of Dante’s epitaphs (Piacentini), and the aspects that distinguish and unite, beyond the specific content of Christian doctrine, between the Dantean corpus and the theological program of the Scrovegni Chapel.
