Performing Salvation in Dante's Commedia

Performing Salvation in Dante’s Commedia
Albert Russell Ascoli
Dante Studies, Volume 135, 2017, pp. 74-106 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/das.2017.0002
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/686853
Access provided by University of California @ Berkeley (14 May 2018 19:25 GMT)
Performing Salvation in
Dante’s Commedia
Albert Russell Ascoli
T he second canto of Purgatorio has, over the years, received con-

siderable scholarly attention in the ongoing quest to define
Dante’s conception and practice of poetic authorship and sig-
nification. In a dominant strand of North American criticism the canto
has, from this perspective, been treated as perhaps the most important in
the entire poem. This privilege is all the clearer when canto 2 is paired,
as the poem urges, with Dante’s response in canto 24 to Bonagiunta da
Lucca’s inquiries about whether he is the author of a “dolce stil nuovo.”
After revisiting the reasons for according the canto such importance,
and reaffirming its status in general terms, this essay will suggest that
a key aspect of the canto’s intra- and inter-textual dynamic has been
significantly undervalued.1 I refer to the question of “performance,”
broadly understood as the point of intersection between authorship
and readership, as between Dante-poet and his narrative projection as
Dante-personaggio and pilgrim.2 I will argue that when considered from
this angle, canto 2, together with 24, effects a radical, deliberate recan-
tation of the definition of poetic authorship in De Vulgari Eloquentia,
book 2, chapter 8, a text whose pivotal place in Dante’s self-construction
as poet has rarely been given its due, and whose importance for this
canto has been entirely ignored. In conclusion, I will argue that for the
Dante of the Commedia the dramatization of the performance of poetic
song ultimately reveals a process of “performative” becoming in which
poet-“singer” enacts and embodies the substance of his composition.
In the process, I expect to shed some new light on the perennially
Vol. 135:74–106 © 2017 Dante Society of America

Performing Salvation in Dante’s Commedia Ascoli
problematic relationship between theology and poetry, truth and fiction,

in the Commedia.3
I begin with a brief, selective description of the canto and its imme-
diately preceding context. In the first canto, as we know, Dante-pilgrim
undergoes a figurative rebirth under the severe gaze of Cato Uticensis,4
immediately following the exordial declaration of Dante-poet that he is
ready to enter into a new poetic mode (“ma qui la morta poesì resurga /
o sante Muse” [Purgatorio 2.7–8]).5 Canto 2 concludes the interactions
with Cato, and sees the pilgrim begin the first part of this second stage
of his journey, through the so-called ante-Purgatorio, where four forms
of “negligenza” [negligence, from nec-eleggere: “not to choose”], must
be expiated before purgation proper begins. As we will see, canto 2 also
ostentatiously offers some possibilities for understanding what more
precisely is meant by the image of poetry reborn under the auspices of
“Holy Muses.”
The second canto is articulated around the arrival of a boatload of
redeemed souls who have come to the “otherworld” by the normal
route (as against Dante’s passage through the center of the earth)—a
sea-voyage from the mouth of the Tiber river conducted by an angelic
“galeotto,” that is, sailor or helmsman.6 The exceptionalness of Dante’s
own journey is thus put in relief, especially in the inauguration of a
recurrent contrast between his living, embodied presence and the shad-
owy existence of the dead souls.7 At the same time, his ongoing dialogue
with this new category of soul begins on a highly personal note as he
discovers that one of the newly arrived is an old and dear friend, the
minstrel Casella. What really makes the canto at once so extraordinary
and yet so central to scholarly understandings of the Commedia’s poetics,
however, is the performance of two very different songs, both of which
have a separate existence external to and independent of the world of
the poem, and each of which is evoked by quoting its incipit or first line.
The first, cited at line 46, is the singing of the psalm “In exitu Israel
de Aegypto” (Vulgate 113; 114–115 in modern Bibles) by the newly
arriving souls:
‘In exitu Israel de Aegypto’

cantavan tutti insieme ad una voce
con quanto di quel salmo è poscia scripto. (2.46–48)
75
Dante Studies 135, 2017
The singing of a psalm is very much in keeping with the prayerful,

liturgical character of the second realm, which is redolent with citations,
paraphrases, translations and dramatizations of Scripture.8 It focuses the
consistent imagery of risky sea-voyage (Inf. 1 and 26) as metaphor of
spiritual error and deliverance, constitutes a narrative alternative in bono
to Charon’s (and Phylegias’s) transportation of the damned (Inf. 3 and
8), and provides a key focal point for the poem-long thematics of exile
and repatriation.9
The second performance is the singing by Casella, at Dante’s request,
of the pilgrim’s own canzone, “Amor che nella mente mi ragiona,”
one of those interpreted in the prosimetrum philosophical treatise,
the Convivio, written after Dante went into exile but before he began
composing the Commedia:
E io: ‘Se nuova legge non ti toglie

memoria o uso a l’amoroso canto
che mi solea quetar tutte mie doglie,
di ciò ti piaccia consolare alquanto
l’anima mia, che, con la sua persona
venendo qui, è affannata tanto!’.
‘Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona’
cominciò elli allor sì dolcemente,
che la dolcezza ancor dentro mi suona.
Lo mio maestro e io e quella gente
ch’eran con lui parevan sì contenti,
come a nessun toccasse altro la mente.
(2.106–117)
The pairing of these two songs—one sacred, one “profane”—may

be understood as mediating the development of “Dante-pilgrim” into
“Dante-poet” over the course of the poem.10 Before turning to my
own reading of the relationship between the two (and of both with the
second of Dante’s explicit self-citations, in Purgatorio 24), let me briefly
rehearse the most influential prior account, that of Charles Singleton
and Robert Hollander, according to which Purgatorio 2 marks a defini-
tive turn to a theological, quasi-Biblical “allegory of theologians” from
the “allegory of poets” expounded in prior works, most notably the
Convivio itself. In 1959, Singleton published his seminal essay, “In exitu
Israel de Aegypto,” which made the powerful and accurate claim that
Dante-pilgrim’s journey as “everyman” is structured to a significant
76
extent as a rehearsal of the typological understanding of the Jews’ exile

in and Exodus out of Egypt as figure of the individual soul’s turning
away from sin in this life while moving toward salvation in the next.11
By implication, Dante’s whole poem constituted, analogically, a rep-
etition of Exodus and particularly of its poetic rehearsal by David in
Psalm 113. For Hollander this analogy became the basis for substanti-
ating Singleton’s claim that Dante was imitating God’s way of writing
in the Commedia, in the process coining the term “theologus-poeta” to
characterize the author’s stance.12
Singleton’s and Hollander’s arguments were, and are, apparently
bolstered by two passages in other works presumed to be by Dante, one
earlier, one later, in which “In exitu” is used specifically to illustrate
the fourfold model of exegesis employed by medieval theologians in
interpreting the Bible in (uncertain) relation to Dante’s own poetry. In
Convivio, the model is being specifically and idiosyncratically adapted
to the purposes of an interpretive strategy distinct from that employed
by “teologi.”13 There, “In exitu” is used to characterize only the third
of three allegorical senses, the anagogical or eschatological (the other
two being the allegorical proper or Christological-ecclesiological and
the tropological or ethical), and no attempt is made to show how this
model might be applied to the canzoni being expounded in the prose
“pane” of the treatise (2.1.6–7).14 Then in the accessus or prefatory
section of the so-called “Epistle to Cangrande” the fourfold model
is exemplified in toto with reference to “In exitu” in such a way as to
illustrate the polysemous nature of the poem’s allegory and, according
to Hollander at least, serve as a guide to reading the “sacro poema” as
if it were Holy Writ:15
Nam si ad litteram solam inspiciamus, significatur nobis exitus filiorum Israel de

Egipto, tempore Moysis; si ad allegoriam, nobis significatur nostra redemptio facta
per Christum; si ad moralem sensum, significatur nobis conversio anime de luctu
et miseria peccati ad statum gratie; si ad anagogicum, significatur exitus anime
sancte ab huius corruptionis servitute ad eterne glorie libertatem.16 (Epistle, par. 7)
(If we consider the letter alone, the thing signified to us is the going out of the
children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses; if the allegory, our redemp-
tion through Christ is signified, if in the moral sense, the conversion of the soul
from the sorrow and misery of sin to a state of grace is signified; if anagogical, the
passage of the sanctified soul from the bondage of the corruption of this world to
the liberty of everlasting glory is signified).
77
Coming as it does, chronologically, after Convivio, but before the

Epistle, the use of the Psalm in Purgatorio 2 has often been seen as a
major step forward in Dante’s use of the Biblical text as a model for his
own writing, and has been interpreted far more often in relation to the
standardized exposition of the four-senses model in the Epistle than to
the anomalous illustration of anagogy in Convivio 2.1. In fact, as we are
about to see, the singing of the Psalm by the souls in Purgatorio 2 does
implicate, as it literalizes, all three of the polysemous meanings attribut-
ed in the exegetical tradition and in the Epistle to the Exodus of the Jews:
Christ’s sacrifice (allegory proper), which enables a conversion from sin
to grace (tropology), resulting in the “passage of the sanctified soul from
the bondage of the corruption of this world to the liberty of everlasting
glory” (anagogy), precisely the “liberty” that is identified in Purgatorio
1.71–72 as the fundamental motive of Dante’s journey.
The related claim that the singing of “In exitu” is specifically a figure
of Dante-poet’s writing in the Commedia is favored by the fact that the
Biblical text is indeed the transcription of a song composed by the Bible’s
most poetic human author, David (with whom Dante is compared sever-
al times, especially in the Paradiso),17 and that, as will be discussed below,
the language of “singing” in both Latin and Italian (“cantio”; “canto”;
“canzone”) is Dante’s preferred metaphor for both poetic composition
and its “performance,” sung or otherwise. Also suggestive is the fact
that it is performed under the auspices of a heavenly “galeotto” (Purg.
2.27) with evident recall of the damnable “galeotto”—both book and
author—that Francesca blames for her lamentable fate and that of Paolo
(Inf. 5.137), and which is so often taken to be an example in malo of what
Dante’s own writing may have risked doing to its readers in the past
and what the present work is striving to remedy.18 Most important, and
here we come back to our point of departure, is the fact that the canto
concludes with the performance of another song, this one Dante’s own
canzone of love for a “donna gentile,” glossed in the third book of the
Convivio as a hymn to its author’s love of wisdom (Filosofia): “Amor che
nella mente mi ragiona.”19
That the two songs are meant to be compared, and then contrasted, is
obvious. Both are, to belabor the point, musical performances of verbal
constructs. The first, however, is a collective performance of a Biblical
text, the second is a solitary performance of a poetic text.20 The first
is of dual authorship, written by God through his human amanuensis
78
or scriba Dei, David; the second is written by a human author, Dante

himself. The first, literally recalling the Exodus of the Jews in search
of the Promised Land, accompanies, as it typologically figures, a spir-
itual journey, marking a dynamic movement from our world to the
next, and from sin to salvation. The second, as Cato harshly reminds
the group, leads to a deplorable stasis, and to an initial exemplification
of the problem of “negligenza” whose purgation takes place in cantos
3–8 (2.118–123). One celebrates God’s justice and grace; the other,
either love for an extraordinary “donna gentile” (if taken at the letter)
or human reason (if understood in the light of Dante’s allegorization in
Convivio, book 3). The opposition thus delineated, it seems no wonder
that the Singleton-Hollander line—in conjunction with the strong
interpretation of “The Epistle to Cangrande,” paragraph 7—has claimed
that the re-born poetry of Purgatorio and indeed of the “poema sacro” as
a whole, is modeled on the former performance rather than the latter.
Moreover, the performance of “Amor che nella mente” has not only
been seen as contrapuntal with respect to “In exitu,” but has also, and
perhaps even more often, been taken to constitute a specific palinodic
“recantation” of the poetics of an earlier Dante, thus reinforcing the
assertion that the Commedia has adopted a new, theological, quasi-Bib-
lical perspective and mode of writing. Two widely influential essays
from the mid-1970’s, by John Freccero and Robert Hollander, explored
the function of Dante’s explicit auto-citationality in the Commedia, pro-
viding a model for the many “palinodic” readings of the poem which
followed.21 In this account, the insertion into Purgatorio 2 of “Amor che
nella mente” recalls and supersedes either the philosophical interpreta-
tion given to it in Convivio or its literal celebration of his (ennobling?)
love for a “donna gentile” or both. The alternative is a faith-based mode
of knowledge, in which both “Amor” and “ragiona” potentially take
on new meanings. On this view, the personified god of Love from Vita
Nova and the Love of Lady Philosophy yield to the Johannine “God is
Love”; while “ragiona,” which initially indicated the rational speech of
the human intellect now refers to an inspired language infused from
on high.22
Finally, from this perspective, if the singing of “Amor che nella
mente” contrasts immediately with “In exitu” and suggests a temporary
relapse into an earlier moment in Dante’s moral-spiritual and poetic
evolution (“l’amoroso canto / che mi solea quetar tutte mie doglie”),
79
it also prepares the way for the second great auto-citation of the can-
ticle,23 this one explicitly attributed to Dante and explicitly positive,
namely Bonagiunta da Lucca’s recall of “Donne che avete intelletto
d’amore”—the pivotal canzone of the even earlier Vita Nova—in canto
24 of Purgatorio, line 51. This in turn opens the way to Dante’s newly
overt positioning of himself as a “Scriba Dei,” copying out the dictates
of Love as the Holy Spirit moves him (the passage is quoted at the end
of this essay).24 Canto 24 would, in other words, constitute proof that
Dante is now openly asserting the comparability of his writing, perhaps
in “Donne ch’avete,”25 but also, more importantly and certainly, in the
Commedia itself, to a Biblical text like “In exitu,” and his own role to
that of a Biblical author like David. Put schematically, to the thesis/
antithesis of the songs of canto 2, canto 24 might be seen as operating
a transcending synthesis, an issue to which I will return at the end of
this essay.26
I now turn to a critique of this critical complex and thence to my
supplement/alternative to it. In the broadest terms, the interpretation
just outlined—the Singleton-Hollander interpretation, let us call it—
and in fact most interpretations with which I am familiar, are concerned
with two interrelated questions. First is the authorship of the two songs:
God (and David) on the one hand, Dante on the other. Second is their
meaning, their “content”: the multiple senses of theological allegory
associated with In exitu; the amorous and/or philosophical implications
of “Amor che nella mente.” But in the context of the canto, author-
ship and the meanings determined by authorial intention are not what
is foregrounded. Rather, in both cases the explicit stress falls on the
performance of the song, and on the meanings produced in its reception
by an audience.27 As is commonly observed, in the first case the song
is performed chorally in its entirety (“tutti insieme ad una voce / con
quanto di quel canto è poscia scripto”) by the souls whose presumed,
multiple, audience—since they are—as we soon discover—unaware
of Dante’s presence—is themselves, God’s angelic minister, and God
Himself. In the second, the song is performed by a single individual at
the request of another,28 and rather than experience the song as a whole
and its content, all of the hearers become rapt in a “sweetness” that
removes thought of anything else, including the fact that the journey
to a promised land about which they were so recently singing is not yet
complete. Dante-pilgrim’s primary role in both cases is that of audience,
80
though of course the fact that he was the original author of “Amor che
ne la mente” and that he initiated Casella’s performance of it is of no
little consequence.
To amplify the implications of this last point: the criticism, which
more often than not assumes or argues that the episode represents the
active reinterpretation and recantation of the work of a younger Dante
by an older one (see again notes 21–22), has never fully come to grips
with the fact that Dante-poeta (poet of the Commedia, that is) stages a
scene in which his younger self—also, obviously, a poet—becomes the
passive audience of a poem which he himself wrote when he was younger
still.29 And yet, if to the intrinsic peculiarity of this configuration we add
the earlier Dante’s obsessive staging of himself as reader of his own work
(in the self-commentaries of Vita Nova and Convivio; and, in a different
way, in the use of his own poems as evidence in De Vulgari Eloquentia),
together with the apparent departure from that structural model in the
Commedia,30 Dante’s doubled role as writer and reader of the canzone
sung by Casella must appear as extraordinarily fraught, and in need of
carefully nuanced explication.
In order to make sense of both the performative nature of the scene
and its complex intervention in the author/reader dialectic, I now direct
attention to the revisitation in the episode of another Dantean pre-text,
one which has rarely been taken into due account in Dante criticism
generally, and, as concerns this episode in particular, is cited almost
exclusively to clarify questions concerning the oral and musical perfor-
mance of a written canzone (see again note 27). That pre-text is book
2 of De Vulgari and, more specifically, that part of it, chapter 8, where
Dante sets out to define the poetic form which alone is worthy of the
noblest, “illustrious” vernacular, the cantio, which we usually translate
as canzone, but could as easily be rendered as canto, or song, or, given
the emphasis on performativity, as “a singing.” As we will see shortly,
this passage is also the immediate precursor to the passage, later in the
same chapter, where the author of the treatise first explicitly identifies
himself as the exemplar of the poet who writes such poems:
Est enim cantio, secundum verum nominis significatum, ipse canendi actus vel
passio, sicut lectio passio vel actus legendi. . . . [C]antio dupliciter accipi potest:
uno modo secundum quod fabricatur ab autore suo, et sic est actio—et secundum
istum modum Virgilius primo Eneidorum dicit Arma virumque cano -; alio modo
secundum quod fabricata profertur vel ab autore vel ab alio quicunque sit, sive
81
cum soni modulatione proferatur, sive non: et sic est passio. Nam tunc agitur;
modo vero agere videtur in alium, et sic tunc alicuius actio, modo quoque passio
alicuius videtur. Et quia prius agitur ipsa quam agat, magis, immo prorsus deno-
minari videtur ab eo quod agitur, et est actio alicuius, quam ab eo quod agit in
alios. Signum autem huius est quod nunquam dicimus ‘Hec est cantio Petri’ eo
quod ipsam proferat, sed eo quod fabricaverit illam (2.8.3–4).31
(A cantio, according to the true meaning of the word, is an act of singing, in an
active or a passive sense, just as lectio means an act of reading, in an active or a
passive sense. . . . . [C]antio has a double meaning: one usage refers to something
created by [its] author [and in this sense it is an action]—and this is the sense
in which Virgil uses the word in the first book of the Aeneid, when he writes
‘arma virumque cano’; the other refers to the occasion on which this creation is
performed, either by the author or by someone else, whoever it may be, with or
without a musical accompaniment—and in this sense it is passive. For on such
occasions the cantio itself acts upon someone or something, whereas in the former
case it is acted upon; and so in one case it appears as an action carried out by
someone, in the other as an action perceived by someone. And because it is acted
upon before it acts in its turn, the argument seems plausible, indeed convincing,
that it takes its name from the fact that it is acted upon, and is somebody’s action,
rather from the fact that it acts upon others. The proof of this is the fact that we
never say ‘that’s Peter’s song’ when referring to something Peter has performed,
but only to something he has written.)
The prima facie relevance of this passage to my re-reading of

Dante-p ersonaggio’s re-hearing of Casella’s re-cantation of Dante-p oeta’s
canzone, “Amor che nella mente mi ragiona,” should be evident.32 How-
ever, before exploring the passage in more detail, let me take yet another
necessary detour by describing its immediate context within De Vulgari,
which will further reinforce and clarify its pertinence to the issues at
hand.
Chapter 8, in fact, lies at the heart of a technical discussion of the
vernacular poetic form suitable to the noblest, tragic style, and to the
three exalted subjects (2.2.7: salus; amor; virtus [well-being; love; vir-
tue]) which are to be represented in it. That form, the cantio or canzone,
is, Dante says, to be written in the “vulgare illustre,” the illustrious
vernacular, as defined in the first book of the treatise. Chapter 8 is
immediately preceded by a chapter dedicated to the vocabulary suitable
to the noblest subjects treated in the noblest poetic form, and before
that by a long chapter illustrating the kind of constructio, or syntactical
construction, appropriate to those subjects and that form. Of particular
82
note in the latter case is that this chapter, the sixth of book 2, begins
with a thematically charged list of examples of prose “constructions,”
culminating with an example of the most beautiful and exalted kind,
the only kind suitable to the “cantio,” which just happens to recall an
experience of exile from Florence caused by the invasion of Charles of
Valois, very much like that of Dante himself (2.6.5).33
More directly to the present point, Chapter 6 then continues with
a list of vernacular poetic examples of this type of construction, which
leads from the troubadours (Girhault, Folquet and Arnaut), through one
representative of the Sicilians (Guido da Colonna) to the “dolce stil”
poets—Guinizelli, Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, and Cino’s unnamed
friend, Dante:
Hoc solum illustres cantiones inveniuntur contexte, ut

Gerardus: Si per mon Sobretots non fos;
Folquetus de Marsilia: Tan m’abellis l’amoros pensamen;
Arnaldus Danielis: Sols sui che sai lo sobraffan che’m sorz;
Namericus de Belnui: Nuls hom non pot complir addreciamen;
Namericus de Peculiano: Si com l’arbres che per sobrecarcar;
Rex Navarre: Ire d’amor que en mon cor repaire;
Iudex de Messana: Anchor che l’aigua per lo foco lassi;
Guido Guinizelli: Tegno de folle empresa a lo ver dire;
Guido Cavalcanti: Poi che di doglia cor conven ch’io porti;
Cynus de Pistorio: Avegna che io aggia più per tempo;
amicus eius: Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona.
Nec mireris, lector, de tot reductis autoribus ad memoriam: non enim hanc
quam supremam vocamus constructionem nisi per huiusmodi exempla possumus
indicare. Et fortassis utilissimum foret ad illam habituandam regulatos vidisse
poetas, Virgilium videlicet, Ovidium Metamorfoseos, Statium atque Lucanum
. . . Subsistant igitur ignorantie sectatores Guictonem Aretinum et quosdam alios
extollentes . . . (4.6.6–8)
(Illustrious canzoni are composed using this type of construction alone, as in this
one by
Girault: Si per mon Sobretots non fos.
Folquet de Marselha: Tan m’abellis l’amoros pensamen.
Arnaut Daniel: Sols sui che sai lo sobraffan chem sorz.
Amerigo di Belenoi: Nuls hom non pot complir addrechamen.
Amerigo di Peguhlan: Si com l’arbres che per sobrecarcar.
The King of Navarre: Ire d’amor que en mon cor repaire.
The Judge of Messana: Anchor che l’aigua per lo foco lassi.
Guido GuinizeIli: Tegno de folle ’mpresa a lo ver dire.
83
Guido Cavalcanti: Poi che de doglia cor conven ch’io porti.

Cino da Pistoia: Avegna che io aggia più per tempo.
and his friend: Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona.
Nor should you be surprised, reader, if so many authorities are recalled to your
memory here; for I could not make clear what I mean by the supreme degree of
construction other than by providing examples of this kind. And perhaps it would
be more useful, in order to make the practice of such constructions habitual, to
read the poets who respect the rules, namely Virgil, Ovid in the Metamorphoses,
Statius, and Lucan . . . So let the devotees of ignorance cease to cry up Guittone
d’Arezzo and others like him . . .)
This list, by far the longest string of examples in the treatise (11—the
runners-up—both in book 2, chapter 5—have 7 each), culminates with
the one and only reference in De Vulgari to “Amor che nella mente mi
ragiona,” which thus becomes, at least temporarily, the ne plus ultra of
vernacular writing.34 The exemplary list, a literary history in miniature
of romance vernacular poetry, is followed by, with the implication that
it is the reason for, a highly unusual reference to the vernacular writers
as “autores,” one of the very rare instances in Dante’s oeuvre where he
seems willing to use that word of himself and other modern poets.35 The
chapter concludes with a reference to parallel examples, which might
have been adduced, from classical poets and prose-writers, beginning
with Virgil, who are ostentatiously not identified as autores.36 In other
words, the chapter not only celebrates the achievement of vernacular
poets, but also tacitly challenges the strict hierarchy first laid out in
Vita Nova, in the chapter formerly known as 25, between the classical
poete and the vernacular “dicitori.” The final slam at claims of Guittone
d’Arezzo and his followers to have initiated an illustrious vernacular
literature serves, as it were, to attribute to them and them alone the
presumed inferiority of modern versifiers, a polemic famously continued
in cantos 24 and 26 of Purgatorio.37
We are, in short, presented with one of the high water-marks, to
that date, of Dante’s project of appropriating the classical designation
of auctor for the vernacular in general and for his own work in partic-
ular—and “Amor che nella mente,” again, serves as the poster-child
for the success of that appropriation, at least at the level of constructio.
On this evidence alone one might argue that the auto-citation in
Purgatorio 2 is designed to recall an earlier and superseded moment in
Dante’s quest for poetic auctoritas—perhaps aimed at highlighting the
84
oft-noted shift from the tragic cantio to the comic style and terza rima
in the Commedia.
The possible relevance of this chapter to the auto-citationality of
Purgatorio is reinforced, but also somewhat complicated, if we note that
the very next poetic example presented in the treatise, coming late in
chapter 8 (after the passage cited above), is the first of two references
to “Donne che avete intelletto d’amore,” that is, to the very poem, so
central to the Vita Nova, which will then constitute the second and
last auto-citation of the canticle.38 That the order of reference already
implies a hierarchy of value between the two poems, even a supersession
of one by the other, in De Vulgari, as it later does in Purgatorio, might be
inferred from the fact that, as I have argued elsewhere, a radical shift in
self-presentation takes place between the two examples.39 Throughout
the treatise to that point a clear separation had been made between the
third-person singular “friend of Cino” (a phrase repeated five times),
who is the prime example of the illustrious vernacular and the poetry
written in it, and the first-person plural “nos” who writes the treatise
and deploys those examples. In other words, from the outset, the Latin
author of the treatise had coyly refused to identify himself with the
privileged author of poetry in the language that is the subject of the
treatise, creating a doubled “Dante” analogous to the more overt split
between poetic and prosaic Dantes in Vita Nova and in Convivio (see
again note 30).
Now, soon after Dante has referred to vernacular poets with the pres-
tigious designation of autores and immediately following his definition
of the cantio as the handiwork of an active auctor, that clear separation
suddenly vanishes, as the “nos” of the treatise openly identifies him-
self as the author of “Donne ch’avete” even as he offers the definitive
description of the cantio:
Dicimus ergo quod cantio, in quantum per superexcellentiam dicitur, ut et nos

querimus, est equalium stantiarum sine responsorio ad unam sententiam tragica
coniugatio, ut nos ostendimus cum dicimus: ‘Donne che avete intelletto d’amore.’
(2.8.8)
(We say that the cantio [or canzone], in so far as it is so-called for its pre-eminence,
which is what we too are seeking, is a connected series of equal stanzas in the
tragic style, without a refrain, and focused on a single theme, as we showed when
we wrote “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore.”)
85
This shift is emphasized by the use in a single period of four verbs in the
first person plural and by the repetition of “dicimus,” once used of the
treatise’s author and once of Dante-poet. It clearly anticipates the move
from a Dante divided into poet and commentator upon that poet, as in
the earlier prosimetrum works, to the “I” who is openly identified as
both poet and character in the Commedia, a text that dispenses altogether
with the extrinsic apparatus of the treatise or commentary.40 And, as
such, this textual event also opens the way to the sort of retrospective
reflection on the phenomenon of authorial self-reading which we find,
mirabile dictu, in Purgatorio, canto 2.
As just noted, between the citation of “Amor che nella mente” and
that of “Donne ch’avete” falls the definition of the cantio as an “act of
singing, in an active or a passive sense,” active singing referring to the
song’s creation by a poetic author, passive singing referring to its sub-
sequent performance by the author or someone else “with or without
a musical accompaniment” (2.8.3). Dante then goes on to specify that
a cantio, though it requires the harmonization of words, is called such
even in the absence of a performer or of music, while, on the other
hand, a piece of music by itself may not be called a cantio. And it seems
to me no coincidence that this focus on the cantio as the verbal product
of an active author’s making (“fabricatur ab autore suo”), which we
have seen was prepared by the preceding reference to the vernacular
poets as “autores,” opens the way to the prose “nos” identifying himself
explicitly at chapter’s end with the person who wrote “Donne che avete
intelletto d’amore.”41
It should now be absolutely clear why it is that I have turned to De
Vulgari 2.8 as a key inter-text for the Casella episode. Casella fits pre-
cisely the description of the performer of the “passive” cantio, while his
friend Dante was the “active author” of the poem being performed.42
What is most curious, as I have already begun to suggest, and what
requires additional consideration, is that within the economy of the
canto, Dante appears not as active author, but as passive audience, the
“someone” upon whom the song itself acts. Dante-personaggio, in other
words, has here become the audience/“reader” of his own poem—and,
as Cato’s outrage suggests, either the song was not a very good one to
begin with, or there is something wrong with this mode of experiencing
it, or both.
86
For Hollander and Freccero, as for most other readers, the culprit is
decidedly the content of the canzone. For Hollander it is a demonically
seductive “siren song”—anticipating Dante’s second dream in canto 19
of Purgatorio—which threatens to interrupt the pilgrim’s mission just as
it seems to have taken a quantum leap forward.43 For Freccero, perhaps
more persuasively, the song stands for an earlier moment of the author’s
intellectual development, the moment in which the love of rational wis-
dom, the sentiment allegorically expressed in “Amor che nella mente”
according to Convivio, book 3, took the place of Christian faith, “the
evidence of things unseen.” Thus the canzone specifically rebukes the
concupiscent love of Francesca, but is itself now rebuked in favor of a
higher Love.44 Both, in any case, take Dante-personaggio’s passive reaction
to the poem as an oblique figure of the intentions of an earlier version of
Dante-author in his active making of it, as reinterpreted, and re-canted,
by the definitive Dante-poeta who is now writing the Commedia. And
neither they nor anyone else, to my knowledge, has tried to account in
any detail for the peculiar spectacle of an author staging an experience of
his own creation as a passive descent into a pleasurable, thoughtless, stasis.
Needless to say, I will now consider this last-mentioned phenomenon
in some detail both by explicating its debts to the formulation of the
active and passive modalities of the canzone in De Vulgari, and by noting
how that formulation has been significantly recast, palinodically as it
were, in Purgatorio 2 specifically and in the Commedia more generally.
In De Vulgari 2.8 the cantio is primarily discussed in terms of its making
and, secondarily, its performance. At first blush, it would seem that the
experience of the reader/hearer is either ignored entirely or mentioned
ambiguously in passing as a passive experience of being acted upon,
without further elaboration. But that is not quite true: as we have seen,
the prose “nos” of the treatise begins his discussion of the meaning of
cantio, which will come to mean “the action of an author,” by comparing
it to the meaning of lectio:
A cantio, according to the true meaning of the word, is an act of singing, in an

active or a passive sense, just as lectio means an act of reading, in an active or a
passive sense [sicut lectio passio vel actus legendi] (2.8.1)
I begin with an inference that the choice of the example of lectio is not
a casual one, since “singing” as Dante then defines it, especially in the
87
passive sense of the secondary performer of a work, implies the subse-

quent experience of the made object by an audience or reading public.45
This inference seems all the more probable given Dante’s insistence that
musical performance is not an intrinsic and essential feature of the cantio,
with the implication that it might as well be read as heard, notwithstand-
ing the apparent association between “song” and orality.46 He does not,
however, go on to specify further what either an active or a passive lectio
might be, or even what the word literally means.
The question of what lectio and cantio have to do with one another is
further complicated, if we consider more closely both the grammatical
tradition upon which Dante is drawing for his distinctions between
“active” and “passive” senses and the way in which he has forcefully
reconfigured, by resemanticizing, that tradition, as well as, perhaps,
contaminating it with reference to meanings assigned to the word lectio
in another available context, that of Scholastic philosophical and theo-
logical education. In grammatical handbooks, lectio is simply used as an
example to illustrate the inherent fungibility of the genitive case, which
may refer either to the person performing an action on an object or to
the object on which the action is performed: in the active form, e.g.,
“lectio Petri,” “Peter’s reading,” the stress falls upon the agent of read-
ing, the person who reads; in the passive form, e.g., “lectio libri,” “the
reading of a book” the stress falls upon what is being read, the object
of the action. As Mengaldo has shown, however, Dante immediately
wrenches the traditional active/passive opposition to his own very dif-
ferent purposes.47 Where traditionally the active sense of cantio in the
genitive form would be “Virgil’s singing [of the Aeneid],” and the pas-
sive “the singing of the Aeneid [by Virgil],” Dante instead distinguishes
between the authorial composition of the song and the later performances
of that song by the author or someone else. He further muddies the
waters as he explains that in the passive sense “the cantio itself acts upon
someone or something,” a formulation that might suggest the impact
of the song on an audience (or, again, reader, since it does not literally
have to be sung to be a “song”), though what is apparently meant is that
the song “acts upon” the person who is performing it in the somewhat
abstract sense that it supplies the material to be performed.
If one then returns to apply the active/passive formulation of cantio as
Dante has elaborated it to lectio, we find ourselves in a bit of a quandary,
for more than one reason. First of all, the traditional “active” reading
88
of lectio, “Peter’s reading of a book” [more often than not written by

someone else], actually corresponds to the passive meaning Dante gives
to cantio, the later performance of a song by someone [usually someone
other than its author]. What then would lectio in a passive sense be?
Logically it would mean the effect of such a performance upon some-
one else, that is, an audience. And at this point one might be further
tempted to think of the ways in which lectio figures into the late medi-
eval discourse concerning the transmission of knowledge, where we
find another distinction which could be mapped onto the active and
passive senses, namely the distinction between the lectio or prelectio of
the teacher-commentator and the lectio of the student who experiences
that teaching either as an auditor or a reader. Moreover, this distinction
is typically accompanied by the further observation that the ambiguity
of lectio is double, in the sense that it can refer either to the oral teach-
er-student relationship or to the silent reading of a book; in other words,
it anticipates the way in which Dante stretches the sense of cantio from
sung/heard to written/read.48
Why speculate about the possible active and passive senses of lectio
when Dante himself does not do so in this passage? Because, I would
argue, the re-cantation of De Vulgari in Purgatorio seemingly invites us to
do so. In the first instance it re-proposes the active/passive song distinc-
tion by juxtaposing the original auctor or faber of the song, Dante, with
a performer of that song. In the second instance, however, it inverts the
active/passive relationship by showing the performance of a song by one
person acting upon other people, surprisingly and significantly includ-
ing the original author of that song. In this sense Casella’s performance
much more closely resembles the hypothetical “active” definition of
lectio, while the reception of that performance by Dante and the crowd
of shades gives content to the “passive” form of lectio as construed on
analogy with the bi-partitite definition of cantio in De Vulgari. At the
very least, reading De Vulgari 2.8 together with “Casella’s Song” focuses
our attention on the fact that where authorship was the focal experience
of the treatise, performance, the repetition and re-experiencing of a text,
is the key to Purgatorio 2, all the more so because of the earlier singing
of “In exitu” by the souls in transit. Moreover, the singing of “Amor
che nella mente” dramatizes a conceptual ambiguity that we have seen
was implicit in De Vulgari, inasmuch as Casella is at once passive (he
merely repeats a cantio someone else wrote) and active, inasmuch as his
89
performance, his lectio of the cantio one might say, has a profound effect
on its audience. As we are about to see, that ambiguity can be heuris-
tically mapped onto what seems to be Dante’s new-found concern for
the relationship between two contrasting but also intricated notions of
linguistic “performance”—(passive) performance as staged repetition
of a text before an audience and (active) performance as enactment and
embodiment of that text.
From this perspective, the failure of “Amor che nella mente” is deter-
mined not by its original “content,” which although it does provide,
from its first line forward, for the active engagement of the mind in
philosophical reasoning, also insists that reason is ultimately subordinate
to and in aid of Christian faith.49 If anything, the reception of Casella’s
singing of Dante’s song suggests the inadequacy of the pedagogical
model advanced in the Convivio, which depends upon the “presence” of
the author-turned-commentator to explicate the meaning of his verses,
to furnish a lectio of them as it were, rather than allowing for dynamic
readerly exegesis.50 That failure is rendered all the more acute by the
recognition that, as we have repeatedly observed, the poem’s active author
has been reduced to the status of the most passive of auditors/readers,
one who allows himself to be caught up in an experience of perfor-
mance without attempting to understand the significance of what he is
hearing, a significance for which he himself was originally responsible.
At this point, we face a series of difficult questions. If the perfor-
mance of “Amor che nella mente” dramatizes the threat presented by
a passive lectio of a song, what is the alternative: what would an active
reading look like? And if at the same time the song implicitly casts a
long shadow over the positive figure of the “active author,” why does it
do so and what is the remedy? In other words, what is wrong with the
concept of creative authorship presented in De Vulgari book 2 and, in
another sense, in Convivio? And what is the alternative embodied in the
“reborn poetry” of Purgatorio? What differentiates “Dante-poeta” in the
Commedia from his earlier avatars?
A partial answer comes if we recognize that, from the palinodic
perspective of the Commedia, De Vulgari and Convivio are fundamentally
works addressed by Dante to himself, to the end of elaborating a concept
of authorship, and of an illustrious language and attendant poetics with
which he will then be identified. This is a claim that I have argued at
length elsewhere and will not rehearse here. I do note, however, two
90
basic points that underpin it: the one rooted in interpretation, the other
in the historical facts as they have come down to us. The first is that
both works break off at precisely the point when they have covered the
topics necessary to support Dante’s philosophical and technical-poetic
ambitions, respectively, and before they enter into projected areas that
might be of more general pedagogical benefit, but of less immediate
relevance to Dante himself. Second is the fact, increasingly noted of
late, that neither work appears to have had any significant circulation
among readers while Dante was alive.51
By contrast, the Commedia—parts of which had already begun to
circulate during the poet’s lifetime—for all that it places “Dante”-per-
sonaggio at the center of its representations, is deeply concerned with the
(moral; spiritual) effects it will have upon its readers. This is expressed,
notably, in several explicit addresses to the reader suggesting interpre-
tive possibilities and warning of interpretive dangers—in other words,
encouraging “him” to an “active” generation or regeneration of textual
significance.52 And it is also, as most notably in Inferno 5 and in the
Statius episode, dramatized in terms of failed and successful readings,
which also implicate Dante himself as “reader” (or perhaps “witness”
is a better word).
In other words, to return to the episode at hand, the experience of
Dante-personaggio and the newly arrived souls of “Amor che nella men-
te” leaves aside the question of what the author of the poem originally
intended it to mean and directs attention instead to a readerly reception
which is passive rather than active, which dwells on the captivating
sweetness of form rather than truly probing what the ethical-spiritual
meaning of the poem might be, thus distracting them—if only momen-
tarily—from continuing their purgatorial journey and fulfilling their
anagogical destiny, the one they earlier claimed for themselves in singing
In exitu Israel de Aegypto. At the same time, when Dante turns an earlier
version of himself—one who was an active, auto-exegetical reader of
his own poetry—into a passive experiencer of that same poetry, he is in
some sense acknowledging, perhaps even poking fun at, the inevitable
failure of those obsessive attempts to control the meaning of his work,
not only in his original making thereof but in the ways that they will
be subsequently experienced. What in Convivio appeared as a positive
self-reflexivity might here, instead, seem to have been a narcissistic
self-absorption, tending toward moral-spiritual stasis.53
91
Not, of course, that we should forget that the Casella episode and
everything else in the Commedia are products of perhaps the most con-
trolling authorial consciousness to be found in the Western tradition.
But, and this is crucial, that Dante, the Dante-poeta of the Commedia,
actually is at some pains to qualify or even to eliminate the figure of
the autonomous author-maker of De Vulgari, generator of authoritative
models and possessed of extraordinary freedom in his role as writer. In
the remaining pages, I will suggest that alternative, performative models
of both readership and authorship can be deduced by looking again at
the two songs which bracket “Amor che nella mente”—the immediate-
ly preceding In exitu Israel (readership) and the much later, but clearly
symmetrical “Donne che avete” (authorship).
In the case of the psalm, there are two complementary ways in
which the model of De Vulgari—its radical distinction between human
authors and performers, on the one hand, and between authors and
readers, on the other—is clearly inadequate. First of all, like all of the
Bible, the song has two authors—God and his human amanuensis,
David—a relationship in which the active, human, auctor of De Vul-
gari is turned into a passive performer (except, of course, insofar as he
imposes linguistic and poetic form on the materials he is to transmit).
That fact, however, remains in the background, though perhaps the
phrase “poscia scripto” serves as a hint that it should be taken into
account, since it does refer to writing, though more immediately to the
copied words on a page than to the original, divinely-inspired, act of
writing. Central, on the other hand, and as we noted near the outset,
is the choral performance of the psalm by the souls in transit. In the
terms of De Vulgari these would be the negligible “passive authors” of
the song. But, in the first instance, they are also the audience (along
with God and his angelic minister) of what is being sung, what it is
acting upon. More importantly still, as they chant, they are, in fact,
describing themselves: singing of exodus out of spiritual captivity to
the liberation of a promised land, even as they travel to that promised
land because of an arcane convergence between their own merits while
they lived and God’s prevenient Grace. They are enacting, embodying,
the tropological and anagogical senses of the psalm as traditionally
interpreted (as we have seen in the Epistle to Cangrande, par. 7)—they are
the meaning of what they sing. Performing the text they are inscribed
typologically within it, as part of God’s cosmic poem. To put it yet
92
another way, as the souls “perform” the song, they transform “perfor-
mance” in the traditional sense of a recital for the benefit of others by
themselves performing the action they describe.54
In the larger context of canto 2, the juxtaposition of the simulta-
neously “active” and “passive” singing of the “In exitu Israel” by the
souls further reinforces the subsequent failure of those same souls, plus
Dante, passively absorbed in a piece of secular poetry. Based on this
canto alone, then, the “performance of salvation” seems to be restricted
to Biblical texts and the liturgical repetitions of them, and to leave little
if any space for a poem, like the Commedia itself, composed by a human
author alone. Nevertheless, in turning to Purgatorio 24, and Dante’s sec-
ond self-citation, “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore,” in the company
of Forese Donati and at the behest of the poet Bonagiunta da Lucca,
we find that Dante has seemingly overcome the binary opposition of
the Bible to human poetry, presenting us with a version of himself as
author that carefully adapts the problematics of authorial and readerly
performance to another of his own poems.55
That we are encouraged to view the relationship between the two
cantos in this light is obvious: the mere fact that the canticle contains
two self-citations, one on the threshold of Purgatory, one as Dante-
personaggio is nearing the end of this part of his journey, is sufficient to
suggest this. The imperative to take them together is further marked
by the fact that the two citations come during the only two episodes
in Purgatorio where Dante encounters personal friends—Casella and
Forese—both of whom are linked to him, among other things, through
poetry (in the case of Forese I refer, obviously, to their “tenzone,” which
I take to be authentic). As their incipits by themselves reveal, of course,
the cited poems are linked by the problem of how Love can be known
and understood, and then expressed poetically. Critics have long stressed
the thematic and prosodic connections between the two cited poems,
including shared rhyme schemes, that suggest that they may have been
written in dialogue with one another to begin with.56 And, as we have
seen above, it is clear that as early as the De Vulgari Dante had paired the
two, in the same order, with, apparently, the same hierarchical ranking
of lower to higher (which however reverses the order of composition).
And it has been pointed out, most forcefully by Martinez, that, in
fact, “Donne che avete,” like its “sister” canzone, is also preceded and
thematically paired with the singing of a psalm, in this case “Labia
93
mea domine” (Psalm 50) which is chanted by the purging souls at the
entrance to the girone of gluttony.57
Especially worth noting from the perspective of the author-reader
dialectic foregrounded in this essay is the way that the positive language
that Dante-poeta uses to describe Bonagiunta’s reception of his account
of the composition of the poem, especially the phrasing, “il dolce stil
nuovo ch’io odo” (24.57), recalls phrasing in “Amor che nella mente”
that points to the poet’s failure to represent the truth of his amorous
experience:
Lo suo parlar [of Love] sì dolcemente sona,

che l’anima che l’ascolta e che lo sente
dice: “Oh me lassa! ch’io non son possente
di dir quel ch’io odo de la donna mia.”
E certo e’ mi convien lasciare in pria
s’io vo’ trattar di quel ch’io odo di lei,
ciò che lo mio intelletto non comprende
e di quel che s’intende
gran parte, perché dirlo non savrei (Conv. 3. canzone, ll. 5–13)
This reprise with a difference in one sense shifts attention away from
the author and onto his “reader”/audience (Bonagiunta), but that reader
in turn quickly recasts the expressive failure of that earlier Dante into
the expressive triumph of this one. Bonagiunta, a fellow poet,58 but also
an enthusiastic if still apparently uncomprehending reader of Dante’s
“Donne ch’avete,” returns us to an authorial model quite similar to
that advanced in De Vulgari 2.8 and debunked in the Casella episode.
Specifically, Bonagiunta hails the poeta-personaggio as “colui che fore /
trasse le nove rime, cominciando/ ‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’,”
although we should also note that the process indicated as “drew forth,”
which might possibly suggest mediation rather than creation, is less cer-
tainly “active” than the “fabbricare” of De Vulgari. Of course, Bonagi-
unta’s captatio then elicits from the pilgrim a very famous description of
the manner in which he composes poetry, which clearly modifies his
interlocutor’s formulation:
E io a lui: “I’ mi son un che, quando

Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo
ch’e’ ditta dentro vo significando.” (Purg. 2.52–54)
94
Dante here clearly casts himself not as an “active author,” but, like the
human authors of the Bible, as a scribe or notary who copies out the
words dictated to him by Love. It is hard not to suppose that he is in
fact assimilating this inspiring Love to the Holy Spirit, the person of
the Trinity that both designates the Love of the Father for the Son and
mediates between the Godhood and humankind as “The Counselor.”59
Upon hearing this, Bonagiunta immediately acknowledges the sense
in which Dante has re-defined his role as “performer” of a script dictated
from on high:
“O frate, issa vegg’ io,” diss’ elli, “il nodo

che ’l Notaro e Guittone e me ritenne
di qua dal dolce stil novo ch’i’ odo!
Io veggio ben come le vostre penne
di retro al dittator sen vanno strette,
che de le nostre certo non avvenne;
e qual più a gradire oltre si mette,
non vede più da l’uno a l’altro stilo.” (24.49–62)
Whether or not this poetics actually constitutes a pre-statement of the

mode that Dante-poet will adopt once his journey is complete and he
has begun to write it down in the form of the Commedia, or is instead
just a claim that (at least some of ) the poetry he has written in the past
has functioned in this way,60 there can be no doubt that it more closely
resembles the model of dual authorship represented in canto 2 by “In
exitu” than it does the human-author-centered model presented in De
Vulgari 2.8 and seemingly debunked in the treatment of “Amor che
nella mente.”
To insist upon the point: where in the earlier episode the performance
of a poem authored by Dante is juxtaposed, to its disadvantage, with
the performance of a Biblical text, here another poem written out or
“drawn forth” by Dante is described positively, by both Bonagiunta and
Dante himself, in a way that many have taken to constitute an assimi-
lation to double authorship of the Bible, with Dante playing the role of
a David, or Scriba Dei,61 apparently collapsing or at least bridging the
opposition of poetry and theology as it is articulated in canto 2. In the
terms of De Vulgari foregrounded in the present essay, Dante here casts
himself in the double role of “passive author” and “active reader,” that
95
is, as performer who in providing the linguistic-prosodic form of the work

carries out, performs, the will of God.
Of course, in another sense, by shifting attention back onto the
composition of the poetic work, Dante has it both ways, giving himself
(“I’ mi son un”) a special privilege as writer, if not as auctor.62 At the
same time, Bonagiunta’s apparent extension of the “dolce stil” to an
unspecified plurality of writers (“vostre penne”) and his reference to a
“qual” who looks further into the matter also might suggest that Dan-
te’s experience in following behind the “dittator” is not his alone and
may be repeatable in future. For that matter, for all its emphasis on first
person singularity, the indefinite “one” with which Dante’s “I’ mi son
un” closes, does open itself to the possibility that he is “uno” within a
potential plural group, not “the one and only.”
There is one last matter to deal with. The really striking feature of the
choral recitation of “In exitu” in Purgatorio 2 is the double sense in which
the souls “perform” it: repeating it, but also enacting and embodying
it. This element at first appears to be absent from the exchange with
Bonagiunta, but, on second thought, perhaps it is there after all, if one
looks carefully at a key Dantean phrase that is usually taken exclusively
to describe his process of writing: “quel che ei ditta dentro, vo signifi-
cando.” In light of my reading of the singing of In exitu, and building
on an argument first made by Warren Ginsberg, a fruitful ambiguity
appears in the final words of the phrase: “Vo significando” can mean,
“I go on producing signs,” i.e., writing poetry, but it can also mean,
that “I, Dante, in and of myself signify”: both as passive performer and
active reader of the poem, I myself am a signifier of God’s discourse.63
As the embarked souls of Purgatorio 2 not only sing a psalm but also enact
and fulfill its meaning, he both expresses and embodies the meanings
of divine love.64 And in this ambiguity, one might add, is revealed the
essential intersection of the two Dantes of the Commedia: poeta and per-
sonaggio: he has, within the confines of his fiction, realized the perfect
coincidence of writing and interpretation, the written self is its own
exegesis.
Does this then amount to subscribing to the Singleton-Hollander
claim that Dante is deliberately casting himself in the role of human
author of Scripture?65 Here I think the answer is a qualified “no.” While
it is certainly true that the singing of a Biblical text furnishes a model
for the process Dante then describes, it is telling that he exemplifies it
96
not with the Commedia itself, the “poema sacro,” but with an earlier,
though certainly spiritually charged, canzone, “Donne che avete.” Just
as it is crucial that those who sing “In exitu” are not thereby equated
with David. Or that those who in singing the offices of the liturgy (as
we have seen, so frequently evoked throughout Purgatorio) are “perform-
ing salvation” in a way that Christ’s death and resurrection have made
available to anyone who enters into it with a willing heart. From this
perspective, rather than as author of a new book of the Bible, Dante casts
himself as an especially self-conscious signifier in God’s other book, the
poem of creation itself.66
University of California at Berkeley
NOTES
1. Like all of the cantos of the Commedia, Purgatorio 2 has repeatedly been the subject of
“Lecturae” a genre which produces decidedly mixed results. I will refer only to instances of
this genre that bear most directly on this interpretation of the canto. A recent, representative
example of the genre is Donato Pirovano, “Lettura del secondo canto del Purgatorio,” Rivista di
Letteratura Italiana 33, 2 (2014), 9–24.
2. For a recent essay that also understands “performance” and “performativity” in a larger
sense as key to understanding the dynamics of canto 2, albeit without reference to De Vulgari
Eloquentia 2.8, see Paolo De Ventura, ‘Dante e Casella: Allusione e performanza’, Dante: Rivista
Internazionale di Studi su Dante Alighieri, 9 (2012), 43–56 (see also nn. 27 and 54 below).
3. See especially Charles S. Singleton, Dante Studies 1: Elements of Structure (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1954), and “The Irreducible Dove,” Comparative Literature 9 (1957):
129–135; as well as Robert Hollander, Allegory in Dante’s “Commedia” (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1969), and “Dante as Theologus-Poeta,” in idem, Studies in Dante (Ravenna:
Longo, 1980), 39–89, first published 1976. See also the major responses to/qualifications of the
Singleton-Hollander position in John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), as well as, “Allegory and Autobiography,” in
Rachel Jacoff, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Dante, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), 161–180; Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1979) and Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993); Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Prince
ton University Press, 1992); Peter Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination
(Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). A neo-theological critical movement including
both British and North American scholars has recently emerged, represented by the essays
included in Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne, eds., Dante’s ‘Commedia’: Theology as
Poetry (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), and in Claire E. Honess and
Matthew Treherne, eds., Reviewing Dante’s Theology, 2 vols. (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang,
2013). That is of course not to say that theological issues have not been raised by Italian critics,
including, notably, Nicolò Mineo, Anna Maria Chiavacci-Leonardi, Sergio Cristaldi, Giuseppe
Ledda and others, although Purgatorio 2 has been featured less prominently in that context (one
important exception is Lucia Battaglia-Ricci, Dante e la tradizione letteraria medievale. Una proposta
per la Commedia” (Pisa: Giardini, 1983)). For a previous gloss on the relationship of poetry and
97
theology, which anticipates some aspects of the present argument, see Albert Russell Ascoli,
“Poetry and Theology,” in Reviewing Dante’s Theology, Vol. 2, eds. Honess and Treherne, 3–42.
4. On Cato, see Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert, ch. 1.
5. These and following quotations of the Commedia follow Dante Alighieri, La Commedia
secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi (Turin: Einaudi, 1975).
6. The symbolic force of the transit and of the canto as a whole in the economy of the Com-
media is, as is well known, reinforced by corrective echoes of two of the primary “meta-poetic”
episodes of Inferno: that of Francesca and Paolo (discussed below) and that of Ulysses’ disastrous
journey to within sight of Mt. Purgatory.
7. An important thread in criticism of the canto focuses on the contrast between the solidity
of the pilgrim’s body, which casts a shadow, and the immateriality of the purging souls, which
don’t, and in particular on the failed embrace between Dante and Casella. See the recent dis-
cussion by Manuele Gragnolati, Experiencing the Afterlife (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2005), 148–149, which places the episode in relation to the problematics of corporeal
representation in Purgatorio more generally.
8. On the pervasive references to and use of the liturgy in the Commedia generally and Pur-
gatorio in particular, see the rich series of essays by Ronald L. Martinez, “The Poetics of Advent
Liturgies: Vita Nuova and Purgatorio,” in Theodore Cachey, Margherita Mesirca, and Michelan-
gelo Picone, eds. Studi in onore di Robert Hollander. Atti del quarto Seminario dantesco internazionale
(Florence: Cesati, 2004), 271–304; “The Places and Times of Liturgy from Dante to Petrarch,”
in Theodore Cachey and Zygmunt Barański, eds., Dante and Petrarch (Notre Dame IN: Univer-
sity of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 320–370; “ ‘L’amoroso canto’: Liturgy and Vernacular Lyric in
Dante’s Purgatorio,” Dante Studies 127 (2009), 93–127; and “Dante and the Poem of the Liturgy:
Consequences of Liturgy for Dante’s Writing,” in Honess and Treherne, eds., Reviewing Dante’s
Theology, 89–155. See also Erminia Ardissino, Tempo liturgico e tempo storico nella ‘Commedia’ (Città
del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2009); Matthew Treherne “Liturgical Personhood:
Creation, Penitence and Praise in the Commedia,” in Montemaggi and Treherne, eds., Theol-
ogy as Poetry, 131–160. For the specifically liturgical character of the singing of “In exitu,” see
Dunstan J. Tucker, “ ‘In exitu Israel de Aegypto’: The Divine Comedy in the Light of the Easter
Liturgy,” American Benedictine Review 11 (1960), 43–61; Albert E. Wingell, “Dante, Augustine,
and Astronomy,” Quaderni d’Italianistica 2 (1981), 123–142; Amilcare Iannucci, “Casella’s Song
and the Tuning of the Soul,” Thought 65 (1990), 27–46, esp. 36–37; and Martinez, “ ‘L’amoroso
canto’,” 96–101, and “The Poem of the Liturgy,” 93–94 and 149–150. For a recent re-elaboration,
see Helena Phillips-Robins, “ ‘Cantavano tutti insieme ad una voce’: Singing and Community
in the Commedia,” Italian Studies 71.1 (2016), 4–20.
9. In addition to highlighting its relationship to the fourfold allegorical scheme of Biblical
exegesis (see below), the criticism has taken the psalm as a focal point for understanding the
metaphorics of exile as a structuring motif in the Commedia and throughout Dante’s works from
Convivio forward. Especially influential on my perspective is the work of Giuseppe Mazzotta,
beginning with Dante, Poet of the Desert. See also Guy Raffa, “Dante’s Poetics of Exile,” Annali
d’Italianistica 20 (2002), 73–97, and the essays contained in Se mai continga . . . : Exile, Politics and
Theology, eds. Claire E. Honess and Matthew Treherne (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2013). See
also the recent critique of the scholarly tendency to conflate spiritual exodus and biographical
exile by Elisa Brilli, Firenze e il profeta: Dante fra teologia e politica (Rome: Carocci, 2012), 328–335.
10. Gian Roberto Sarolli, Prolegomena alla ‘Divina Commedia’ (Florence: Olschki, 1971), esp.
52–55; Robert Hollander, “Purgatorio II: Cato’s Rebuke and Dante’s ‘Scoglio,’ ” in idem, Studies
in Dante, 91–105, first published 1975, esp. 91–92, 102–104. Kevin Marti, “Dante’s Baptism
and the Theology of the Body in Purgatorio 1–2,” Traditio 45 (1989–90): 167–190, esp. 180–188,
makes an extended textual comparison of the two songs in the light of Christian iconography
that tends to strongly reinforce the readings of Sarolli and Hollander. A more recent comparison,
which is closer to the perspective of the present essay, is De Ventura, “Dante and Casella.” See
also note 20 below.
98
11. Charles S. Singleton, “In exitu Israel de Aegypto,” Annual Report of the Dante Society, 78
(1960): 1–24; see also Tucker, “ ‘In exitu.” For succinct statements of the crucial role of the Exo-
dus typology in the allegory of the Commedia, see Battaglia-Ricci, Dante e la tradizione, 74–76,
103–107; Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments, 44–45; Ronald L. Martinez and Robert M. Durling,
“Introduction,” in Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, 3–15, esp. 12–15. See also Peter Armour, “The
Theme of Exodus in the First Two Cantos of the Purgatorio,” in David Nolan, ed., Dante Soundings
(Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1981), 59–99.
12. Robert Hollander, “Dante as Theologus-Poeta.”
13. On Convivio 2.1, see my “Tradurre l’allegoria: Convivio 2.1,” in a special triple issue of
Critica del Testo entitled “Dante Oggi,” ed. Piero Boitani and Roberto Antonelli, Fall 2011, vol.
3, 153–175.
14. For this text, I have consulted primarily Dante Alighieri, Convivio, in Dante Alighieri,
Opere minori, vol. 1, part 2, ed. Cesare Vasoli and Domenico De Robertis (Milan and Naples:
Ricciardi, 1988); citations of Convivio and of the canzone “Amor che nella mente” are taken
from that edition.
15. The authenticity of the Epistle has, of course, frequently been contested, in part to counter
strong theological claims for the modus significandi of the Commedia, and has been just as stren-
uously defended. While I tend to agree that the Epistle is by Dante (without embracing many
of the uses made of it in reading the Commedia), my citation of the passage here is solely aimed
at illustrating the Singletonian and Hollanderian positions and highlighting the significance of
the citation of “In exitu” in Purgatorio 2, rather than at claiming special status for the Epistle. For
a succinct review of the current state of the authenticity question, along with references to my
own past discussions of it, see Ascoli, “Poetry and Theology,” 16n20; see also Zygmunt Barański,
“The Epistle to Cangrande,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Volume 2. The Middle
Ages, eds. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
583–589. Recently Alberto Casadei has strongly reasserted the forgery thesis, for instance in
Dante oltre la ‘Commedia’ (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2013).
16. Cited from Dante Alighieri, Epistole, ed. Arsenio Frugoni and Giorgio Brugnoli, in Dante
Alighieri, Opere minori, vol. 2, ed. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo et alii, Milan and Naples: Ricciardi,
1979. The translation is that of David Wallace in Alastair Minnis and A. B. Scott, with David
Wallace, ed. Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c.1375: The Commentary Tradition
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 459–60.
17. For Dante’s use of David as poet figure in the Commedia, see Barolini, Dante’s Poets: Tex-
tuality and Truth in the ‘Commedia’ (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 275–279;
Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments, 82–84; Albert Russell Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern
Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. 380, 386, 397; Theresa Federici,
“Dante’s Davidic Journey: From Sinner to God’s Scribe,” in Montemaggi and Treherne, eds.,
Theology as Poetry, 180–207. See also Thomas C. Stillinger on David as model for the author of
the poems in Vita Nova, The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medieval Book (Philadelphia PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), esp. 40–41.
18. See in particular the discussions of meta-poetic connections between Purg. 2 and Inf. 5 in
John Freccero, “Casella’s Song (Purg. II.112),” in idem, Dante, The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel
Jacoff (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 186–94, this essay first published 1973,
192, and Barolini, Dante’s Poets, 33–35. See also the remarkable exploration of the performative
aspects of Francesca’s (and Paolo’s) reading in Elena Lombardi, The Wings of the Doves (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012), ch. 6, as well as her “Francesca lettrice di romanzi e il
‘punto’ di Inferno V,” L’Alighieri n.s. 43 (2014), 19–40.
19. Scholars have debated whether in citing “Amor che nella mente” Dante means for us to
see it in terms (a) of its placement and allegorizing interpretation within Convivio, bk. 3 or (b) its
independent circulation. That querelle is further complicated by disagreements over whether the
canzone on its own (a) is actually compatible with the gloss that the “donna gentile” celebrated
in the poem is Lady Philosophy or (b) it concerns an amorous attachment (like that to another
99
“donna gentile” described in Vita Nova). Finally, assuming that the “donna gentile” is a human
beloved and not a personification, there is debate over whether (a) the love described is a redemp-
tive one, like that for the Beatrice of the Vita Nova, compatible with love of the Christian God,
or (b) it is tinged with eroticism. All of these questions, obviously, have a bearing on whether
and how one embraces or rejects the palinodic interpretation of the Casella episode (on which
see notes 21 and 22 below). While recognizing the validity of these debates, and having my own
views about them, I will largely bracket them for purposes of this essay, since (a) what concerns
me primarily is the negative valence of the poem’s performance in canto 2 in contrast to that of
“In exitu”; (b) the context of the meeting with Casella clearly does evoke a key prior moment in
Dante’s experience as a poet (whatever one may think that moment to have been); and (c) those
debates are centered around contrasting understandings of the “meaning” of the poem as intend-
ed by the author, while I focus on its reception, as “performed,” by an audience. As will become
clear, however, I do believe that Dante is deploying a palinodic strategy in the canto, though
in a way different from those that other exponents of such a reading have claimed. For a useful
overview of the evolving place of “Amor che nella mente” in Dante’s oeuvre as a whole, as well
as its intertextual relationship to other of Dante’s works (including “Donne ch’avete”) and to
the works of other poets (Cino, Guittone, Guinizelli, Cavalcanti, and so on), see Paolo Borsa,
“ ‘Amor che nella mente mi ragiona’ tra stilnovo, Convivio, e Purgatorio,” in Johannes Bartuschat
and Andrea Aldo Robiglio eds., Il ‘Convivio’ di Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 2015), pp. 53–82.
20. For a helpful reflection on this contrast, with which, however, I am not entirely in
agreement, for reasons that will become clear shortly, see Phillips-Robins, “ ‘Cantavano ad una
voce,’ ” 12n27. See also Federico Schneider, “Ancora su ‘Dante musicus’: Musica e dramma nella
Commedia,” Studi medievali e moderni, 14.2 (2010), 5–24 (esp. 13–19), and, especially, De Ventura,
“Dante e Casella.”
21. For the by-now widely diffused interpretation of the singing of “Amor che nella mente”
as a theological palinode, a veritable recantation, of the philosophical interpretation of the poem
in Conv., bk. 3, see Freccero, “Casella’s Song”; Robert Hollander, “Cato’s Rebuke,” as well as
his “Purgatorio II: The New Song and the Old,” Lectura Dantis 6 (1990): 28–45, and “Dante’s
Deployment of Convivio in the Comedy,” Electronic Bulletin of the Dante Society of America [EBDSA]
(http://www.princeton.edu/~dante/ebdsa/), October 7, 1996. See also Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of
the Desert, 52–53 et passim; Guglielmo Gorni, “La ‘nuova legge’ del Purgatorio,” in idem, Lettera,
nome, numero. L’ordine delle cose in Dante (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990 [this essay first published
1982]), 199–217; Barolini, Dante’s Poets, esp. 31–40; Franco Fido, “Dall’ante-purgatorio al para-
diso terrestre: il tempo ritrovato di Dante,” Letture classensi 18 (1989): 65–78, esp. 72; Iannucci,
“Casella’s Song,”; Michelangelo Picone, “Canto II,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Purgatorio, eds.
Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone (Florence: Franco Cesati, 2001), 29–42, esp. 39–40;
and many others since. The readings of the correction of a (tendentially heretical) philosophical
stance in Convivio by a turn to theology in the Commedia derive in turn from the work of Bruno
Nardi, for example, Dal “Convivio” alla “Commedia,” Fasc. 35–9 in the series Studi Storici (Rome:
Istituto Storico Italiano, 1960). For a general consideration of the palinode as Dantean rhetorical
strategy, see Ascoli, Dante and the Making, esp. ch. 6. It is significant that “Amor che nella mente”
presents itself as palinodic with respect to a “sorella,” that is, an earlier canzone, “Voi che savete
ragionar d’Amore” (ll.73–74, where the humble lady of “Amor che nella mente,” is represented
as “fera e disdegnosa.” Dante claims that the earlier work represents how the lady appeared to the
lover, while the current poem portrays her true essence.
22. The palinodic reading has, of course, not gone uncontested. As against the successive
(philosophy, then theology) model of palinode, Kenelm Foster, The Two Dantes and Other Studies,
(London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1977), long ago argued that Dante wrote in these two
different yet compatible modes of thought throughout his career. Building on Foster, John A.
Scott, in “Dante and Philosophy,” Annali d’Italianistica 8 (1990) 258–77, and “The Unfinished
Convivio as a Pathway to the Commedia,” Dante Studies 113 (1995) 31–56, argues specifically that
there is no conflict between the two texts for Dante, in Purgatorio II or elsewhere. Lino Pertile,
“Dante’s Comedy Beyond the Stil Nuovo,” Lectura Dantis 13 (1993) 47–77, esp. 59–60, and “Lettera
100
aperta a Robert Hollander sui rapporti tra Commedia e Convivio,” Electronic Bulletin of the Dante
Society of America [EBDSA] (http://www.princeton.edu/~dante/ebdsa/), October 8, 1996, argues
that because the events of the poem take place prior to Dante’s exile and a fortiori to the writing
of Convivio, Dante cannot be referring to the later work. For Pertile’s alternative (but still pal-
inodic) interpretation of the episode, see La punta del disio: semantica del desiderio nella ‘Commedia’
(Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005), 59–84 (this chapter first published 1995). Other critics of the palinodic
interpretation include: Martinez, “ ‘L’amoroso canto’, ” esp. 96–97; Paolo Borsa, “Amor che nella
mente,” 80–81; Pirovano, “Lettura,” 22. To be clear, my assertions that the singing of “Amor
che nella mente” can be characterized as “palinodic” do not presume that Dante assumed that
his readers would recognize the transformative reference to earlier works (although I have yet
to run across anyone who doesn’t think we are meant to recognize that the poem is by Dante,
despite the absence of a direct statement to that effect, as there will be in Purg. 24); rather, I am
describing a developmental process within Dante’s thought and writing that can be most clearly
understood by showing how he, deliberately, returns to issues raised in earlier works and marks
his conceptual and artistic distance from them.
23. E.g., Hollander, “Cato’s Rebuke,” 352–353; Barolini, Dante’s Poets, esp. 37–40.
24. Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert, 202–210; Ronald L. Martinez, “The Pilgrim’s Answer
to Bonagiunta and the Poetics of the Spirit,” Stanford Italian Review 4 (1983), 37–63. Their
argument is significantly reinforced by Monarchia 3.4.11: “Nam quanquam scribe divini eloquii
multi sint, unicus tamen dictator est Deus, qui beneplacitum suum nobis per multorum calamos
explicare dignatus est” (cited from Dante Alighieri, Monarchia, ed. Prue Shaw, Vol. 5 in Le opere
di Dante Alighieri, Edizione Nazionale a cura della Società dantesca italiana (Firenze: Le Lettere,
2009)). For a substantially different view, see Lino Pertile, La punta del disio, ch. 3.
25. It is usual to cite the following passage from Vita Nova, as an anticipation of Purg.
24.52–54: “la mia lingua parlò quasi come per se stessa mossa, e disse ‘Donne ch’avete intelletto
d’amore’ ” (19.2; cited from Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, ed. Domenico De Robertis, in idem,
Opere minori, vol. 1, pt. 1, eds. Domenico De Robertis and Gianfranco Contini (Milan and
Naples: Ricciardi, 1984)). Although the issue of why “Donne ch’avete” is cited at this junc-
ture and why it is paired with “Amor che nella mente” in both De Vulgari and the Commedia is
pertinent to the questions raised here, I will address it only in passing, given the complexities
involved (cf. note 19 above).
26. The two poetic performances are often brought into relation with one another in the crit-
icism, notably, from the perspective of this essay, in Barolini, Dante’s Poets, 31–57, and Martinez,
“ ‘L’amoroso canto’,” 96–105. Nonetheless, there is remarkably little critical discussion of what
happens when one tries to understand the dynamic movement in Dante’s self-representation as
poet from the earlier episode to the later (as there is, in fact, far less study than desirable of the
unfolding development of the poem by a scholarship largely caught up in the analysis of single
cruxes and cantos). An important exception is Pertile, La punta del disio, chs. 3–4, though our
interpretations differ.
27. To the extent that the performance has been at issue in the criticism it has been largely
in relation to the separate debate, concerning “Amor che ne la mente” alone, over whether
Dante’s poetry was primarily written to be read or whether it continued to participate in a
tradition of oral performance, including musical accompaniment, associated with the Occitan
troubadour tradition. On staging of oral and musical performance in the episode, see Mario
Marti, Il canto II del ‘Purgatorio’, in the series Lectura Dantis Scaligera (Florence: Le Monnier,
1963); John Ahern, “Singing the Book: Orality in the Reception of Dante’s Comedy,” in Dante:
Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Amilcare Iannucci (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997,
this essay first published 1981), 214–239, esp. 224–226. See also the forthcoming essay of Olivia
Holmes, “Virgil and Sordello’s Embrace in Dante’s Commedia: Latin Poet Meets Vernacular
Rhymester,” Mediaevalia 36–37 (2015–2016), 79–117. While it is clear that Dante alludes to
this tradition in the Casella episode, it is equally clear from De Vulgari Eloquentia, 2.8 (of which
more below) that he thinks of music as a non-essential addition to poetry. Justin Steinberg,
Accounting for Dante Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy (Notre Dame IN: University
101
of Notre Dame Press, 2007) clarifies that even as Dante distances himself from the oral tradi-
tion he “understood [that] the written reception of texts is just another form of contextualized
performance” (123). Other critics, including Iannucci, “Casella’s Song,” and, more recently,
both Francesco Ciabattoni, Dante’s Journey to Polyphony (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2010), 98–109, passim, and Schneider, “Ancora su Dante musicus,” have focused on the rele-
vance of the episode to understanding Dante’s conception of musicality in a broader sense. For
a rare and significant exception, which draws upon the theories of linguistic performativity
in Austin and Searle, and which brings together “Amor che nella mente” with “In exitu,” see
again De Ventura, “Dante e Casella.”
28. In his Dante’s Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion (New York: Palgrave McMil-
lan, 2006), 79–85, Gregory Stone makes the appealing argument that the canto represents a cri-
tique of individualism in favor of subordination to a collectivity. The subsequent re-affirmation
of the authorial “I” in the exchange with Bonagiunta (see note 62 below) makes this claim less
plausible than it initially seems.
29. One critic who takes more note than others of Dante-personaggio-poeta’s subject-position
in the scene, to different ends than mine, is Franco Masciandaro, The Stranger as Friend: The Poetics
of Friendship in Homer, Dante and Boccaccio (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2013), 63–65.
30. On the evolution of Dante’s self-commentary, see Ascoli, Dante and the Making, esp. ch.
4, and bibliography. See also Zygmunt Barański, Dante e i segni: Saggi per una storia intellettuale
di Dante Alighieri (Naples: Liguori, 2000), esp. 7–39, and “Dante Alighieri: Experimentation
and (Self-)Exegesis,” in Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson, ed., The Cambridge History of Literary
Criticism; Vol. 2: The Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 561–82.
31. Cited from Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, in idem,
Opere minori, vol. 2, eds. Mengaldo et alii. The translation is from Dante Alighieri, Dante: De
Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. and trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996). Though the first book of De Vulgari gets ample critical attention, the second, highly tech-
nical book is less studied, and, when it is, the focus is almost always on the first four chapters,
including the exposition concerning the three topics worthy of treatment in the “vulgare illustre”
(2.2.6–9, 2.4.8), the definition of poetry as “fictio rethorica musicaque poita” (2.4.2), and the
discussion of the three styles, especially the distinction between tragedy and comedy (2.4.5–6).
On 2.8, however, see also Steinberg, Accounting for Dante, 122.
32. I have anticipated some aspects of this discussion of the pertinence of the De Vulgari 2.8
to the Casella episode in prior publications: Ascoli, Dante and the Making, 127–128 and n. 97, 188
and n. 34; “Reading Dante’s Readings: What? When? Where? How?”, in Dante and Heterodoxy.
The Temptation of Radical Thought in the 13th Century (New York, 8–9 March 2012), ed. Maria Luisa
Ardizzone (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014), 126–144, esp. 140–144;
“Poetry and Theology,” in Reviewing Dante’s Theology, ed. Honess and Treherne, 32–39. Iannucci,
“Casella’s Song,” p. 42, advances the idea that Purg. 2 recants both Convivio and De Vulgari, but
only with reference to the explicit citation of “Amor che nella mente” (given below) in 2.6, not
the discussion of the cantio in 2.8.
33. See Dante and the Making, pp. 167–168.
34. On the construction of a literary history in 2.6, see Barolini, Dante’s Poets, esp. 91–94, as
well as Joseph Luzzi, “Literary History and Individuality in De Vulgari Eloquentia,” Dante Studies
116 (1998), 161–188, esp. pp. 171–172. For De Vulgari’s relationship to the Duecento-Trecento
practice of constructing a tradition through the anthologizing of vernacular poetry, notably in
Vat. Lat. 3793, see Roberto Antonelli, “Struttura materiale e disegno storiografico del canzoniere
vaticano,” in Lino Leonardi, ed., I canzonieri della lirica italiana delle origini. Vol. 4. Studi critici
(Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galuzzo, 2001), pp. 3–23; and Steinberg, Accounting for Dante,
ch. 3. Neither specifically analyzes the lists in chapters 5 and 6 of book 2.
35. See Ascoli, Dante and the Making, pp. 169–170 n. 55. See also Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo,
Linguistica e retorica di Dante (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1978), p. 36.
36. Cf. Michelangelo Picone, “Dante and the Classics,” in Dante: Contemporary Perspectives,
ed. Amilcare Iannucci (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 51–73, esp. 58–59.
102
37. On Dante’s treatment of Guittone in the De Vulgari and then in the Commedia, see, for
instance, Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 95–110, as well as Roberto Antonelli, ‘Subsistant igitur igno-
rantie sectatores’, in Michelangelo Picone ed., Guittone d’Arezzo nel settimo centenario della morte: Atti
del convegno internazionale di Arezzo, 22–24 aprile 1994 (Cesati: Florence, 1995), 337–50. For the
negative judgment of Guittone in the treatise, see also 1.13.1.
38. The second reference comes in 2.12.3, where it is paired with Cavalcanti’s great doctrinal
canzone, “Donna me prega.” While no comparative evaluation is specifically made, it is difficult
not to see the use of “Donne che avete” here as a sequel to the amicizia / agon of the Vita Nova
and a prelude to the allusive struggle with Guido in the Commedia (most conspicuously in Inferno
10 and Purgatorio 11).
39. Ascoli, Dante and the Making, 137, 161–162, 222–223.
40. Ascoli, Dante and the Making, 218–226.
41. Thereafter examples of Dante’s own work remain in the foreground. In addition to the
two canzoni already mentioned he also cites: “Al poco giorno” twice (2.10.2 and 13.2); “Trag-
gemi de la mente” (2.11.5); “Amor, che movi” (2.11.7); “Donna pietosa” (2.11.8); “Poscia che
Amor” (2.12.8); and “Amor, tu vedi ben” (2.13.13). In all he cites himself 10 times from chapter
8 onward, while citing other poets only 7 times: Guido Cavalcanti, “Donna me prega,” twice
(2.12.3 and 8: both times followed immediately by a Dantean example); Namericus de Belnui,
“Nuls hom” (2.12.3; as also in 2.6.6); three Bolognese poets: Guido Guinizelli, “Di fermo sof-
ferir,” Guido di Ghisleri, “Donna lo fermo core,” and Fabruzzo, “Lo meo lontano gire” (all at
2.12.6); Arnaut Daniel, “Se’m fos Amor de ioi donar” (2.13.2). Cino da Pistoia, cited seven times
before 2.6, has disappeared entirely.
42. Ahern, “Singing the Book,” 222–224, notes the relevance of De Vulgari 2.8 to the problem
of the author-reader dialectic and hints at a parallel with the Casella episode but does not develop
this insight further. See also Holmes, “Virgil and Sordello’s Embrace,” 103–105.
43. Hollander, “Cato’s Rebuke,” 348: “Casella’s song is a Siren’s song”; see also Iannucci,
“Casella’s Song,” 38–39. Incidentally, since it is Dante’s gaze that, in the dream reported in Pur-
gatorio 19 and alluded to in Hollander’s opening assertion, turns the “femina balba” into a Siren,
there too, one could argue, the fault lies not in the author/performer but in the beholder/listener.
44. Freccero, “Casella’s Song.” In a potent synthesis of Hollander’s and Freccero’s positions,
Barolini, Dante’s Poets, 34–36, sees Casella as interpreting “Amor che nella mente” as “mere”
love-poem with erotic overtones while the reader [and Dante-pilgrim?] are aware of its allegor-
ical meaning. For a useful rehearsal of the thread in Italian criticism, beginning with Giovanni
Pascoli, that has seen a special connection between Inf. 5 and Purg. 2, see Pirovano, “Lettura,”
23–24.
45. As far as I can tell, however, no other reader of this text has noted the thematic pertinence
of the word lectio. It may be significant that of the five times Dante-trattattista evokes his lector,
four come in the second half of book II (2.6.7; 2.7.3; 2.10.5; 2.12.11), twice juxtaposed with the
“auctoritas” of the newly ennobled vernacular poet. The final instance intimates that the treatise
has had the goal of turning its readers into such authors: “Satis hinc, lector, elicere sufficienter
potes qualiter tibi carminum habituanda sit stantia habitudinemque circa carmina considerandam
videre.” In other words, in addition to anticipating the “addresses to the reader” of the Commedia
(see note 52 below), Dante is both stressing the opposition auctor/lector and showing the way for the
latter to become the former. By contrast, the word lectio is a hapax in the De Vulgari.
46. On this point see, inter alii, Ahern, “Singing the Book”; Steinberg, Accounting for Dante,
122–123 and Holmes, “Virgil and Sordello’s Embrace,” 103–105 and n. 70.
47. Mengaldo, note to 2.8.3, in Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. Pier Vincenzo
Mengaldo, in idem, Opere minori, vol. 2, eds. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo et alii, (Milan and Naples:
Ricciardi, 1979), 200. Elaborations of Mengaldo’s point are to be found in, among others, the
annotations of Mirko Tavoni in Dante Alighieri, De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. Mirko Tavoni, in
Dante Alighieri, Opere. Rime, Vita Nova, De Vulgari Eloquenti, ed. Claudio Giunta, Guglielmo
Gorni, and Mirko Tavoni (Milan: Mondadori, 2011), 1471–1474; and those of Enrico Fenzi, in
Dante Alighieri, Le opere. Vol. 3. De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. Enrico Fenzi, with Luciano Formisano
103
and Francesco Montuori (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2012), 200–201. Mengaldo’s examples from
the grammatical tradition are taken from the 19th century collection of Charles Thurot, ed.,
Notices et extraits de divers manuscrits latins pour servir à l’histoire des doctrines grammaticales au moyen
âge (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1868).
48. The distinction can be found in John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, ed. J. B. Hall and K. S. B.
Keats-Rohan, in Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis, vol. 98 (Turnhout: Brepols,
1991), 1.24.6–11, who also notes the ambiguity between “lectio” as lesson delivered orally and
“lectio” as reading proper undertaken privately: “[Quia] legendi uerbum aequiuocum est, tam
ad docentis et discentis exercitium quam ad occupationem per se scrutantis scripturas, alterum,
id est quod inter doctorem et discepulum communicator, ut uerbo utamur Quintiliani dicatur
prelectio.” More commonly, however, the expedient of using “prelectio” to resolve the ambigu-
ity is abandoned, and “lectio” is used of all three cases, as in Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon. De
Studio Legendi. A Critical Text, ed. Br. Charles Henry Buttimer (Washington DC: The Catholic
University Press, 1939), 3.7: “lectio est, cum ex his quae scripta sunt, regulis et praeceptis infor-
mamur. trimodum est lectionis genus: docentis, discentis, vel per se inspicientis. dicimus enim
‘lego librum illi,’ et ‘lego librum ab illo,’ et ‘lego librum.’ in lectione maxime consideranda sunt
ordo et modus.” I’m grateful to Jeffrey Turco for pointing out the relevance of these passages
to my concerns.
49. For instance, lines 51–53 and 71–72 suggest the active role of the beloved “lady” in
promoting Christian faith, while lines 1–18 (quoted in part below) suggest the inability of the
human intellect and human speech to understand and express her nature.
50. Stanley W. Levers, “From Revelation to Dilation in Dante’s Convivio,” Dante Studies 134
(2016), 1–25, makes a strong case that in Convivio Dante already anticipates ceding a more active,
pedagogically fruitful, role to his readers in their interpretation of his texts.
51. On the absence of evidence that the Convivio circulated during Dante’s lifetime, see Per-
tile, “Lettera aperta,” as well as Gianfranco Fioravanti, “Il Convivio e il suo pubblico,” Le forme e
la storia n.s. 7 (2014), 13–21, esp. 13. On the DVE, see the still-valid summary of Pier Vincenzo
Mengaldo, “Introduzione al De vulgari eloquentia,” in Linguistica e retorica, 23–25.
52. It is usual to cite the classic essays on this topic: Erich Auerbach, “Dante’s Addresses to
the Reader,” Romance Philology 7 (1954) 268–78; Leo Spitzer, “The Addresses to the Reader
in the Commedia,” in idem, Romanische Literaturstudien, 1936–56 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1959,
this essay first published 1955), 574–595. A loaded but nonetheless cogent example is at Paradiso
10.22–25: “Or ti riman, lettor, sovra ’l tuo banco, / dietro pensando a ciò che si preliba, /
s’esser vuoi lieto assai prima che stanco. / Messo t’ho innanzi: omai per te ti ciba.” Recent
criticism has frequently thematized the Commedia’s encouragement of readerly interpretation,
not necessarily in terms of the addresses specifically. See, for instance, Susan Noakes, Timely
Reading: Between Exegesis and Interpretation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); William
Franke, Dante’s Interpretive Journey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Stone, Dan-
te’s Pluralism. Perhaps most pertinent to the present discussion is Simone Marchesi, “ ‘Intentio
auctoris’ tra Purgatorio XXII e Convivio,” in Lucia Battaglia-Ricci, ed., Leggere Dante (Ravenna:
Longo, 2003), 57–72. Such work reflects Dante’s explicit claims but does not, perhaps, fully
acknowledge his enduring will to control the meaning of his text. See Ascoli, Dante and the
Making, esp. chs. 4 and 7 for a discussion of the complexities of Dante’s relation to the problem
of authorial intentionality from the Vita Nova forward.
53. Compare Levitan, “Dante as Listener: Cato’s Rebuke and Virgil’s Self Reproach,” Dante
Studies 103 (1985), 37–55, 47–48, “for a poet like Dante . . . physical self-image and physically
depicted actions as temptations are as nothing compared to the attractions of one’s own text and
thought.” Levitan’s remarks are in the service of an argument quite different from mine.
54. This is not quite the same as John Austin’s “perlocutionary” speech act (renamed “perfor-
mative” by John Searle), since in that case the speech itself causes an event (“I do” spoken twice
in the right circumstances, results in a marriage), whereas here the speech coincides with, refers
to, but does not cause, the spiritual “exodus” of the souls. See again note 2 above.
104
55. On the occasion when I first presented a draft of this work, Teodolinda Barolini urged
me to emphasize how, from this perspective, Dante resists the temptations of rigid conceptual
binaries (Bible/poetry; active/passive; and so on). Like Barolini, indeed like most of us raised
in the shadow of deconstruction, I am happy to do so. I note, however, that there are pitfalls in
the traditional alternatives to binarism, which in fact are dominant in Western thought, as well.
Whether in the thesis/antithesis/synthesis structure of Hegelian thought (which remains the
underlying structure of most literary criticism even today) or the Trinitarian mystery of three
in one and one in three (Dante’s own solution), the way out of binarism may represent another
master-narrative in need of critique.
56. Vincenzo Pernicone, “Amor che nella mente mi ragiona,” in Enciclopedia Dantesca, 6 vols.,
dir. Umberto Bosco (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Dantesca, 1970–1978), vol. 1, 217–219;
Barolini, Dante’s Poets, 37–40.
57. Martinez, “L’amoroso canto,” 101–105. Others who discuss the use of “Labia mea
domine,” though without reference to “In exitu,” are Warren Ginsberg, Dante’s Aesthetics of
Being (Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 83; Christian Moevs, The Metaphysics
of Dante ‘Comedy’ (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 88–89; Treherne,
“Liturgical Personhood,” esp. 139–149. For a general discussion of Dante’s use of the Psalms both
in direct quotation and in allusive reference, see Sergio Cristaldi, Verso l’empireo. Stazioni lungo il
verticale dantesco (Catania: Gruppo Editoriale Bonnano, 2013), 139–186.
58. On the significance of Dante’s choice of Bonagiunta see, for instance, Maria Picchio
Simonelli, “Bonagiunta Orbicciani e la problematica dello stil nuovo,” Dante Studies 86 (1968),
65–83.
59. In fact, as has been noted, the phrasing also recalls a topos of love poetry more generally,
as in this line from “Amor che nella mente”: “la donna di cui dir Amor mi face” (22).
60. Given that, as the present essay itself demonstrates, our understanding of Dante’s poetics
evolves over the course of the poem, in an internal structure of assertion/contradiction/revi-
sion resembling the palinode, it is not possible to dismiss out of hand those critics, like Pertile,
who claim that Dante’s words refer only to the poetry his textual avatar had written before the
Commedia (see note 21 above). No doubt, on the other hand, that the language of inspiration
and divine-human co-authorship (see note 24 above) is proleptic of such later passages, that
more clearly refer to the “poema sacro,” as Paradiso 10.27 (“quella materia ond’io sono fatto
scriba”) and 25.1–2 (“’l poema sacro / al quale ha posto mano e Cielo e terra”). I happily leave
this question, too, suspended.
61. As I have argued elsewhere (Ascoli, “Poetry and Theology,” esp. 6–8), a model of dual
authorship is not exclusive to the Bible, and in fact is used to acknowledge the debt that any
(Christian) author has to God’s grace and inspiration for whatever good thing he may do or
write. On the other hand, in this context it’s clear that one of the models Dante uses for dual
authorship, “In exitu,” is, in fact, a Biblical text.
62. On the intensely personalized, individualized nature of Dante’s self-description here, to
the point of virtual “self-naming,” see Martinez, “The Pilgrim’s Answer,” 44–45, 50–51; see
also Ginsberg, Dante’s Aesthetics, esp. 79–80.
63. See Ginsberg, Dante’s Aesthetics, 81, 89–93, see esp. 90: “Dante is not a sign but an incar-
nation of love,” though I do not think that “vo” governing a gerund should be taken to express
literal movement. On the external body as signifier of the soul in the Commedia more generally,
see Freccero, Poetics of Conversion, esp. chs. 5 and 13.
64. As I have argued elsewhere, in this way canto 24 can be seen as the explicitation of the
array of relationships between human poets and the works they compose in Purgatorio cantos
21–22: where Virgil’s poetry signifies the salvation in Christ though its author does not (Maz-
zotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert, 221–224), while Statius himself embodies salvation (by means
of reading Virgil’s poetry), but does not signify his Christianity in his poems (Barolini, Dante’s
Poets, 258–270, as well as Joan Ferrante, The Political Vision of the ‘Divine Comedy’ [Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1984], 237–239). The implication that Dante does both is then
realized in the passage from canto 24 under consideration (Robert M. Durling, “Virgil and
105
the Fourth Eclogue,” additional note in Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, 622; Ascoli, Dante and the
Making, 319–322).
65. For a different but suggestive delineation of the unresolved tensions between the poetic
and the prophetic in the Commedia, itself a development of and response to Andreas Kablitz’s
argument that Dante claims to write a “third Testament,” see Gerhard Regn, “Double Author-
ship: Poetic and Prophetic Authorship in Dante’s Paradiso, MLN 122 (2007), 167–185. For Kablitz,
see his “Poetik der Erlösung. Dantes Commedia als Verwandlung und Neubegründung mittelal-
terlicher Allegorese,” in Glenn Most, ed., Commentaries-Kommentare (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 1999), 353–379. See also Moevs, Metaphysics, 175–180.
66. This would make the phrase evocative, in a special meta-poetic key, of what Freccero,
following A.C. Charity, calls “applied typology” (“Allegory and Autobiography,” 168; Char-
ity, Events and Their Afterlife [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966], 35), that is, the
manifestation of salvation history in and through the example of Dante’s own life.
106

Performing Salvation in Dante's Commedia

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Performing Salvation in Dante's Commedia

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Performing Salvation in Dante’s Commedia

Albert Russell Ascoli

Dante Studies, Volume 135, 2017, pp. 74-106 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

T he second canto of Purgatorio has, over the years, received con-

Vol. 135:74–106 © 2017 Dante Society of America

problematic relationship between theology and poetry, truth and fiction,

‘In exitu Israel de Aegypto’

The singing of a psalm is very much in keeping with the prayerful,

E io: ‘Se nuova legge non ti toglie

The pairing of these two songs—one sacred, one “profane”—may

extent as a rehearsal of the typological understanding of the Jews’ exile

Nam si ad litteram solam inspiciamus, significatur nobis exitus filiorum Israel de

Coming as it does, chronologically, after Convivio, but before the

or scriba Dei, David; the second is written by a human author, Dante

The prima facie relevance of this passage to my re-reading of

Hoc solum illustres cantiones inveniuntur contexte, ut

Guido Cavalcanti: Poi che de doglia cor conven ch’io porti.

Dicimus ergo quod cantio, in quantum per superexcellentiam dicitur, ut et nos

A cantio, according to the true meaning of the word, is an act of singing, in an

passive sense of the secondary performer of a work, implies the subse-

of lectio, “Peter’s reading of a book” [more often than not written by

Lo suo parlar [of Love] sì dolcemente sona,

E io a lui: “I’ mi son un che, quando

“O frate, issa vegg’ io,” diss’ elli, “il nodo

Whether or not this poetics actually constitutes a pre-statement of the

is, as performer who in providing the linguistic-prosodic form of the work

University of California at Berkeley

You might also like