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The Prose Works of Dante Alighieri: Vol. 1, The Italian Works and Vol. 2, The Latin Works, preface and introduction by Joe Carlson, Roman Roads Press, 2025
At the end of his Vita nuova (New Life, 1293-1294), a largely autobiographical work of prosimetrum mixing prose and poetry that recounts Dante’s first encounter with his longtime muse Beatrice, her death, and Dante’s grief following her death, Dante concludes:
After this sonnet (Beyond the sphere that widest orbit hath), a wonderful vision appeared to me, in which I saw things which made me resolve to speak no more of this blessed one (Beatrice), until I could more worthily treat of her…I hope to say of her what was never said of any woman (Chapter XLII)
In his next work, the Convivio (Banquet), one often referred to as Dante’s “philosophical treatise” but which is in reality a multifaceted medieval work encompassing too many generic labels to recount here, Dante refers both to the work he is writing (Convivio) and the work he had finished approximately ten years earlier (Vita nuova):
And if in the present work (which is entitled, and which I wish to be, the Banquet) the handling be more virile than in the New Life, I do not intend thereby to throw a slight in any respect upon the latter, but rather to strengthen that by this, seeing that it conforms to reason that that [Vita nuova] should be fervid and impassioned, this [Banquet] temperate and virile” (I, i, 16).
Given Dante’s own, slightly palinodic attitude towards his previous work and the indication, in the Vita nuova, of the possibility of a subsequent work worthy of his muse Beatrice, is it any wonder that scholars and readers alike of Dante have, in the words of one Dante scholar, treated Dante’s so-called “minor works” (his Latin and vernacular works, along with those poems written in vernacular not as part of the Comedy) as mere “dialectical steps on the way to the Comedy”? (As careful as the editor of the volumes reviewed here is, he, too, is not immune to the temptation to understand Dante’s pre-Comedy prose works as appetizers to the main dish of epic poetry. In the “Introduction” to Volume Two [Dante’s Latin works], he observes that “the best way to understand these works [Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia] and their relation to the Comedy is as the development of Dante himself rather than the development of a particular idea” p. 4).
There have just appeared two new volumes of Dante’s prose works in English translation, the first containing his vernacular Italian works, the second his Latin prose works. These volumes aim to remedy such a teleological hermeneutic of Dante’s works by bringing them all together for what appears to be the first time in history to an English-reading audience.1 Each volume contains a preface by Joe Carlson, and there are brief introductions preceding each individual work. What do we gain by reading Dante’s prose works? First, the reader understands the complexities of Late Medieval Italy and in particular the degree to which Dante was not always a “proto-humanist” but a medieval man in full, responsive to and a driver of the political and cultural Zeitgeist regnant in Florence. From the Vita nuova emerge the preoccupations of pre-exilic Dante: his youthful, fleeting–I mean really fleeting–encounter with Beatrice; his desire to be welcomed into Florence’s republic of letters by his “primo amico” (first friend), fellow-Florentine and fellow-poet Guido Cavalcanti, as well as to be accepted by the Bolognese poet-philosopher-jurist Guido Guinizzelli, whose canzone-manifesto Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore (Within the gentle heart abideth Love: “Neither before the gentle heart was Love, / Nor Love ere gentle heart by Nature made”) Dante endorses in Chapter XX with his own sonnet Amore e ’l gentil cor sono una cosa: “Love is but one thing with the gentle heart, / As in the saying of the sage we find; / Thus one from other cannot be apart, / More than the reason from the reasoning mind”); and, finally, the overwhelming grief that arrives with Beatrice’s death, whereby Dante compares himself to the “widowed” city of Jerusalem in the Book of Lamentations: “Quomodo sedet sola civitas” (“How lonely the city stands”).
The loneliness of the Vita nuova post-Beatrice contrasts with Dante’s Convivio, written after his exile from Florence, which puts the democratization of knowledge front and center from the first sentence, for Dante opens the treatise by quoting “the Philosopher,” i.e., Aristotle, and his dictum from the Metaphysics that “all men by nature desire to know.” Later on in Book One, Dante enjoins those “kept in human hunger” to “seat [themselves] at the same table with others impeded in like manner” (I, i, 13). The Dante of the Banquet is manifestly not the Dante of the “fervid” and “impassioned” Vita nuova, but neither is he wholly the poet in the thralls of Lady Philosophy. Rather, he is the great synthesizer; he aims to unite Aristotle and Scripture, to discourse on ethics and metaphysics, and to explore the true nature of nobility. Unlike the Vita nuova, Dante does not see the Banquet to completion, perhaps an unexpressed acknowledgment of the necessity for something more capable of affecting moral and ethical transformation than this prose work can offer?
Volume Two of The Prose Works of Dante Alighieri contains his often-lesser-known prose works in Latin. These include his unfinished treatise De vulgari eloquentia (On the Eloquence of the Vernacular); his treatise on government De monarchia (On Monarchy); his 13 mostly-undisputed surviving letters; and the Questio de aqua et terra (The Question of Water and Earth). Like Volume One, Volume Two features a helpful explainer on the circumstances that led to the Latin works of “Dante in exile,” the first of which, De vulgari eloquentia, features significant overlap with the near-contemporaneous Convivio. As Carlson points out, “to rectify [society’s] ignorance, he will offer deep draughts of the sweetest honey wine (hydromel), whereas the Convivio offers the ‘bread of angels’” (p. 4) Dante’s deployment of this mellifluous metaphor exemplifies its debt to the classical satirical tradition, for Horace in his Sermones (1.1) and Lucretius in the De rerum natura both utilized similar metaphors. One other aspect links the Dve to the Convivio, and that is the innumerable descriptions of its genre and style. Just in the last decades the Dve has been called, among other things, an appendix to the Convivio (Mengaldo 1968), a semiotic workshop (De Benedictis 2009), a proto-Freudian text (Cestaro 2003), and others, not to mention it is also a text that without a doubt considers the origins of language and the theological implications of the Book of Genesis: who spoke first, to whom and what was said (Gorni 1981). Indeed, in the De vulgari eloquentia, written–though, like the Convivio, never completed–between 1303 and 1305, Dante first explores the unity inherent in pre-Babelic language. He concludes that the first speaker was Adam; that he first spoke to God; and that he and his descendants spoke Hebrew. This linguistic state persisted until Man’s perfidy: “In this form of speech Adam spoke; in this form of speech all his descendants spoke until the building of the Tower of Babel, which is by interpretation the tower of confusion); and this form of speech was inherited by the sons of Heber, who after him were called Hebrews” (DVE, I, vi, 5). He observes further that Man’s presumptuousness caused its folly. In a nod to the satirical character of the treatise, Dante deems man incurable:
For incorrigible man, persuaded by the giant, presumed in his heart to surpass by his own skill not only nature but even the very power that works in nature, who is God; and began to build a tower in Sennear, which was afterwards called Babel, that is, Confusion, by which he hoped to ascend to heaven, proposing in his ignorance not to equal but to surpass his creator. (DVE, I, vii, 4)
Dante’s merciless reproach of the builders identifies them with diversity and division that he knew as an exile: “misera miserum venire maluisti ad equum (“and thou, wretched one, didst choose to come to a rather wretched steed!” [DVE, I, vii, 2]). Diversification of labor propelled their undertaking. Linguistic diversity then manifests as (inversely proportional) punishment: “multis diversificati loquelis” (DVE I, vii, 6): “And the human race was accordingly then divided into as many different languages as there were different branches of the work; and the higher the branch of work the men were engaged in, the ruder and more barbarous was the language they afterwards spoke” (DVE, I, vii, 7). As Elena Lombardi has noted,
[a]ccording to Dante, language determines the national identity of people and not vice versa…In the episode of Babel, the birth of different languages is presented as a form of contrapasso, the harsher the punishment the higher the hierarchy of operation belonging to each group…After Babel, humankind is therefore left with: (1) a completely isolated, rarefied language of grace; (2) an unruly natural language fragmented into the various vernaculars and dispersed in space and time; and, as a fully human antidote to this dispersion, (3) an artificial language, gramatica.”2
In the second half of Book One, Dante explores the need for a unified Italian language capable of “uniting” the disparate Italian vernaculars that are a legacy of the tower. In Book Two, Dante begins to outline a poetics of Italian poetry, but ends the work mid-sentence.
There can be a case made that Dante’s discussion of language in the Dve camouflages his near-constant political desire for imperial unification, which will be the object of his only completed Latin work, the De monarchia, reproduced here in Aurelia Henry Reinhardt’s 1904 translation. Readers will find in On Monarchy kernels of the political thought expressed by Dante in the Convivio, the De vulgari eloquentia, and even the Comedy. For example, in Book I, Chapter V, Dante again follows Aristotle in arguing for a hierarchy of ever-enlarged spheres pointed towards the attainment of happiness: the individual (Book I, v, 4); the household (Book I, v, 5); the village (Book I, v, 6); the city (Book I, vi, 7); and the kingdom (Book I, v, 8). The ultimate conclusion of Dante’s political philosophy in On Monarchy finds that the “Roman Prince” and the “Roman Pontiff” should occupy their proper spheres of competence, temporal and spiritual, respectively, but that ultimately the Roman Prince, Caesar, must honor Peter “as a first-born son honors his father” (Book Three, xvi, 18).
Finally, it is fitting that Dante’s thirteen preserved Latin Epistolae and the Questio de aqua et terra close out the two volumes, for the typical reader of Dante likely knows these the least, which is a shame because, as Carlson writes in the introduction, “the epistles show the man, and not just the poet or author” (161). The Dante who writes the Latin Epistles is profoundly wounded by his status as persona non grata in Florence, so much so that he calls himself “exul inmeritus”, an undeserved exile. On innumerable occasions in the Comedy shades identify Dante-character by his Florentine speech and address him as “Tuscan.” In Inf. 10, Farinata degli Uberti, the leader of the rival Ghibelline faction, memorably flatters Dante the Guelph by singling him out as a compatriot: “Your way of speaking makes it clear / that you are native to that noble city” (vv. 25-26). Even posthumous literary glory, though, would not have been enough to soften the pain of the unrequited oikophilia–the “love of place”–that Dante endured in exile, would not have blunted the sorrow that he felt upon the loss of his Florentine citizenship, no matter that it was a “città partita” (‘divided city’; Inf. 6.61). After all, in Par. 8, Charles Martel asks of Dante, “Would it be worse for man on earth if he were not a social being?” (vv. 115-116) “Yes,” an all-too-knowing Dante replied without hesitation, “and here I ask no proof.” None was needed. Dante had all the first-hand experience of civic loss that he desired. In this, as in so many other things, Dante conjoins the particular–his own journey, that of Dante-character–and the universal–the implication that his journey, our journey, is that of the Everyman. From the perspective of the reader of the Comedy, the most interesting letter is Epistle XIII, the so-called “Letter to Cangrande.” Even if this reviewer might argue with Carlson’s assertion that “most scholarship today has come around to the conviction that it is, indeed, authentic,” he finds no reason not to agree with Carlson’s quoting John A. Scott, who wrote that “what the letter has to say about Dante’s poem is true to its author’s ideas and purpose so that, even if Dante did not write the epistle, ‘it is fortunate that another did so in his name.’”
Joe Carlson and Roman Roads Press have done an invaluable service for English-language readers of Dante by making his vernacular and Latin prose works available to be read together. It is my “fervid” hope that their objective be fruitful–that readers rise above “browsing round on grass and acorns in the pasture of brutes” (Convivio, I, i, 8)–and that English-speaking readership explore more in-depth the production of Dante before the Comedy in an effort to read his non-epic works on their own terms.
Anthony Nussmeier serves as Chair of Modern Languages, Director of Italian, and Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Dallas, where he teaches courses ranging from first-year Italian language to fourth-year senior seminars on Dante. He has published widely, in English and Italian, on Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and thirteenth-century poets such as Guido Guinizzelli and Guittone d'Arezzo. Outside of the University of Dallas, he has served as an Advisory Board Member for 100 Days of Dante, Contributing Editor (Dante Studies) for the journal The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, Co-Editor and Book-Review Editor (Medieval, English) for the journal Annali d’Italianistica, and on the National Screening Committee for Fulbright English Teaching Assistantships in Italy. He is also the co-founder of the annual DFW Italian Festival.
The Prose Works of Dante Alighieri: Vol. 1, The Italian Works and Vol. 2, The Latin Works, preface and introductions by Joe Carlson, Roman Roads Press, 2025. The two volumes use existing English translations of Dante’s Vita nuova, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia, De monarchia, Epistolae, and Questio de aqua et terra.
Elena Lombardi, The Syntax of Desire. Language and Love in Augustine, the Modestae, Dante, University of Toronto Press, 2007, p. 135.