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| ISBN-13: | 9780859898454 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Exeter Press |
| Publication date: | 10/30/2009 |
| Edition description: | Revised |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d) |
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A New Life of Dante
By Stephen Bemrose
University of Exeter Press
Copyright © 2009 Stephen BemroseAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85989-936-9
CHAPTER 1
A Florentine Childhood (1265–1283)
Dante Alighieri was born in medieval Florence into a family of the minor nobility who, like many of their kind, were of Guelph allegiance. As an opening sentence this may seem harmless enough, but it leaves much unsaid and may not mean a great deal to the non-specialist reader. So perhaps we should begin again.
Thirteenth-century Italy, of which the city-republic of Florence was a part, was utterly different from the modern unified nation-state which has existed for the past century and a quarter. It was also very different from, say, the High Renaissance (early sixteenth-century) Italy of Machiavelli or Raphael, dominated by five large political entities (whose government was generally of an aristocratic kind) and vulnerable to foreign military intervention on an unprecedented scale. Again, medieval Italy shows marked differences from medieval France or England or Germany. Three particular points may be stressed here. First, commercial life was of paramount importance in thirteenth-century Italy. Second, the peninsula, most markedly in its central and northern areas (and particularly Tuscany and Lombardy), was highly urbanized. Third, there was a flourishing lay culture; the long-standing notion that in the Middle Ages all learning was firmly in the hands of the Church, such that society consisted of a literate clergy and an illiterate laity, is quite false when applied to Dante's Italy. Indeed it is often wide of the mark north of the Alps. These three distinctive features of medieval Italy are closely interrelated. But the prominence of the towns is in many respects the key to the character of Dante's Italy. Population statistics are crude, but not without significance. Suffice it to say here that in 1300, the year in which the action of Dante's Divine Comedy is set, there were at least twenty-six towns of over 10,000 inhabitants in the Italian peninsula. The kingdom of France and the duchy of Burgundy between them had at this time fewer than twenty such towns, and the various German states less than ten. In England there were just two (London and Bristol).1 Commercial and financial activity flourished in central and northern Italy as nowhere else in Europe, except Paris, London and Cologne, and this had led to rapid population growth in the century and a half up to 1300. The expanding city walls of many an Italian town during the period bear striking witness to this process.
Historians often refer to the thirteenth century as the great age of the Italian communes. Many, though by no means all, of the central and northern towns were republics, certain categories of whose citizens were able to play a direct part in civic and political life. The origin of the communes is often obscure, but in general it is true to say they arose in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in conditions of turmoil consequent upon the collapse of the old Italian kingdom (a shaky structure dating back to the time of the Lombards). In the course of the thirteenth century the political, social and cultural life of the communes developed rapidly, and certain characteristic institutions of government and administration emerged. These include the offices of podestà (roughly equivalent to 'chief magistrate') and capitano del popolo (a representative of middle-class interests), and in the case of Florence and other cities the small group of officials known as priori (priors). Moreover in certain cities—Florence is a prime example again—the major guilds of traders and professional people exercised a great deal of political power.
A brief word should be said at this point about the aristocracy, the class into which Dante was born. A reader familiar only with feudal England after the Norman conquest might well be misled by the sentence with which this chapter began. The Italian nobility of Dante's time did not necessarily live in fortified manors or castles. It was quite normal for them to reside much of the time in the towns, though they frequently owned property in the contado, the countryside surrounding their city. Nor did they necessarily live on the proceeds of their estates. Indeed, they were frequently involved in trade, if only as investors. The three classes of grandi or magnati (the nobility); borghesia or popolo grasso (the middle classes); and the popolo minuto (the common people) are not to be thought of as watertight compartments. The close relations between the grandi and the leading merchants led to marriages which crossed what was often only a thin dividing line. Upward social mobility was an increasing phenomenon. But Dante's own family was by no means rich, and had probably undergone something of a socio-economic decline in the thirteenth century. Certainly both his father and grandfather had at one time acted as moneylenders (though this is not something the poet is keen to tell us about). Apart from their house in Florence, the family seem to have possessed no property other than two farms at nearby Camerata and Pagnolle, together with a couple of smallholdings. In fact Dante's father, Alighiero II di Bellincione, was no powerful baron but a businessman and small landowner who operated in Florence and in and around the neighbouring commune of Prato. He was never active in politics and when his party, the Florentine Guelphs, were defeated by their Ghibelline enemies in 1260 he was not considered worth exiling. Thus although many prominent Guelphs and their families were unable to return to their native city until after the Ghibellines were themselves defeated in 1266, Dante's family were in Florence throughout the 1260s and it was there, in May 1265, that the poet was born.
Documents pertaining to the Alighieri family at this time are not exactly plentiful, but what there are have been exhaustively collected and studied by a number of eminent Italian scholars during the course of the twentieth century. The most authoritative recent judgements are those of Petrocchi. On the basis of such documentation as exists, Dante's father Alighiero II (born about 1220) was married twice. His first wife Bella (possibly of the Abati family) bore him Dante and later a daughter, whose name is not known. Bella died quite soon, perhaps when Dante was as young as five and certainly when he was no more than eight. Alighiero was soon remarried, to Lapa Cialuffi, who bore him a son and daughter, Francesco and Gaetana (or 'Tana'). So Dante had a sister and two half-siblings. Very little is known about his childhood, and inevitably all sorts of legends and conjectures have arisen. Might the eight-year-old have witnessed the grand ceremonies of June 1273, when Pope Gregory X and the French prince, Charles d'Anjou (brother of the late St Louis), met in Florence in an attempt to pacify the still fractious Guelphs and Ghibellines? There is no means of knowing. The first date commonly reckoned to be of significance in Dante's life is 1274, the year when the nine-year-old boy is supposed first to have met Beatrice, the beloved inspiration of much of his youthful verse, and later to become, in the Divine Comedy, his guide through the heavens. But this date is attested only in Dante's collection of poetry with prose commentaries called the Vita Nuova, which will be discussed in the next chapter. The first independent document concerning the young Dante is the legal instrument (instrumentum dotis) dated 9 January 1277, by which he was betrothed to Gemma Donati, of a Florentine family rather more prominent than the Alighieri. Such childhood betrothals were not at all uncommon in aristocratic or mercantile families. The marriage in due course took place, most probably in 1285. However, not once is Dante's wife mentioned in his writings (unlike Beatrice).
Certainly Gemma cannot help us to understand Dante's work, but a knowledge of his education can. Although we have some information about Dante's studies after 1290 (see Chapter 3), we unfortunately know nothing for sure about what he learnt as a child. Although Florence was not at this time a university city, education was widely diffused and basic literacy high. Referring to a somewhat later period (the early fourteenth century), the contemporary Florentine chronicler Villani estimated that between 8,000 and 10,000 children received elementary education, with 1,000–1,200 attending 'abacus schools' (these provided numeracy skills for commerce) and some 550–600 going on to a further training in logic, as well as Latin. In fact, as much as half the male population of Florence may have received some kind of schooling. Elementary education was in the hands of the numerous doctores puerorum, private individuals who taught not only reading and writing but also Latin grammar. We can only presume that Dante's first studies were of this kind. Perhaps it should be explained that neither in his childhood nor at any later stage did Dante learn Greek. Knowledge of Greek in the medieval West was uncommon, and the full-scale revival of Greek studies had to wait until the fifteenth century. Although Dante did attend certain ecclesiastical centres of learning later on, he was taught in his childhood and adolescence by laymen. But apart from formal instruction in Latin grammar, Dante would have learnt a great deal about lay culture, not least vernacular poetry and prose, in a more informal manner. Florence was characterized at this time by a lively interest in the relatively recent tradition of Italian verse, which for practical purposes dates only from the 1220s. Moreover, the Florence of Dante's youth was an international trading centre whose merchants, with their many business trips abroad, brought home with them the fruits of their contact with other languages and cultures. Of special importance here are the contacts with France, both northern and southern. These matters will be the concern of the earlier part of the chapter which now follows.
CHAPTER 2Beatrice and the Vita Nuova (1283–1295)
(i) Early Influences: The Medieval Lyric; Brunetto Latini; the Roman Poets
Dante's earliest writing, indeed his entire literary output up until his exile at the age of thirty-six, consisted of lyric poems in Italian (together with vernacular prose commentaries on some of them). His first poem can probably be dated to the year 1283, and for the rest of the 1280s his output was substantial. Some thirty-one of these poems he later assembled in an anthology interspersed with prose. This was the Vita Nuova, the extraordinary account of his love for Beatrice Portinari, composed probably in 1293–95. Before considering this work, and the poems that preceded it, a very brief sketch of Italian poetry prior to Dante may be helpful.
Italian emerged as a literary language markedly later than, say, Anglo-Saxon, Old French or Provençal. It was not until the 1220s that the first lyric verse was written. Most of this was the product of the so-called Scuola Siciliana, or Sicilian School, a group of love poets resident at or associated with the court established at Palermo in 1220 by the half-German, half-Norman Emperor Frederick II. These poets owed a great deal to the flourishing tradition of troubadour poetry written in southern France from about 1100 until late in the thirteenth century. Not only did the Sicilians adapt many of the well-known Provençal themes, such as the lover as servant or vassal of his (typically distant and unreciprocating) lady, but they also modelled much of their vocabulary on the quasi-technical terminology of the troubadours. Compared to the vast corpus of Provençal verse (over 600 manuscripts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have survived), the Sicilians produced little—though it seems they invented the sonnet. But then their Scuola was short-lived. After the Emperor's death in 1250 there was a period of political upheaval, although the court was continued under his sons Conrad IV and Manfred. The chief focus of poetic activity in Italy now moved north: the literary history of the mid-century is dominated by the so-called Siculo-Tuscan, or simply Tuscan, School. Here the cities of Arezzo and Lucca (not quite at this stage Florence) are the most important. The central figure is Guittone d'Arezzo, whose large and varied corpus of poetry was not confined to amorous themes and exercised a powerful influence in the 1260s and 1270s. Indeed, it influenced Dante's earliest poems in the 1280s, notwithstanding his later strictures against Guittone. A number of other poets from central Italy are generally referred to as the Guittoniani, among them Bonagiunta da Lucca. We encounter his spirit in the Divine Comedy (Purg. XXIV, 49–63), talking to Dante about his and Dante's own poetry, to the manifest advantage of the latter! Contemporary with Bonagiunta was Guido Guinizelli of Bologna. Although happily acknowledging his poetic debt to Guittone, he displays a number of stylistic and thematic features, and here chiefly his emphasis on the ennobling power of love. These were early on identified, notably by Dante himself, as looking forward. What they looked forward to was the next major stage in Italian literature: the emergence of the Dolce Stil Novo (or 'Sweet New Style')—the phrase is Dante's own.
The Stil Novo poets were a small group of young Tuscans, including some Florentine aristocrats, most of whom were known to one another personally. They strove to achieve a certain purity of diction, rigorously eliminating from their verse all Gallicisms, Proven^alisms and Latinisms, and most of them, though not all, shared common views as to the nature of love. An awareness that they were doing, or trying to do, something novel is evident, but it may be going too far to describe this loose, informal group of Stilnovists as a literary movement. Dante himself belonged to the group in the 1280s; its chief exponent, however, was Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's senior by some ten years. Dante's close friendship with Guido dates from around 1283. He referred to him as 'il primo amico' ('my best friend'), and it is to him that the Vita Nuova was dedicated. Cavalcanti was not only an outstanding poet but also very interested in philosophical matters, though he wrote no philosophical works as such. It is generally supposed that he exerted a strong formative influence upon the young Dante.
An equally important, though very different, influence was exercised by an older Florentine, Brunetto Latini (born about 1220). Readers of the Divine Comedy will remember that Dante meets Brunetto almost halfway through Hell, among the spirits of those who in their earthly lives had (apparently) been guilty of sodomy (Inf. XV, 22–124). However, I am not here concerned with the difficult questions raised by that literary encounter, but with Brunetto's important role in the Florentine culture of his time. He was a bourgeois, and by profession a notary, a member of that flourishing breed which in thirteenth-century Italy catered for the increasingly complex legal and administrative demands of the communes. He was also a 'rhetorician', skilled in the vital diplomatic art of writing official letters, in accordance with certain elaborate conventions, or formal rules of expression. Some grounding in rhetoric, the art of effective verbal expression, was a standard component of medieval education at this time. By 1253 Brunetto held a position of considerable importance: he was Secretary and Letter-writer to the governing council of Florence. He might have continued in this administrative role, had not his life been dramatically changed, as Dante's was to be, by political events.
After the 1260 Ghibelline military victory at Montaperti, Brunetto, who at the time of the battle was on his way back from a mission in Spain, decided to take refuge in France. Here he remained for over five years, in various locations from Montpellier to Paris. Although he found notarial employment, this period of exile is famous as the occasion for Brunetto's most extensive work, an encyclopaedia, written in French: the Livres dou Tresor. This was not intended for scholars, but for literate merchants and others who wanted relatively easy access to some notions of rhetoric, ethics, politics, history, natural science and so forth. The book's contents are not original and derive from well-known authorities; Brunetto was above all a communicator and teacher.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A New Life of Dante by Stephen Bemrose. Copyright © 2009 Stephen Bemrose. Excerpted by permission of University of Exeter Press.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceA List of Dante’s Works, and the Editions Used in this Book
Abbreviations
A Guide to Further Reading in English
Guelph and Ghibelline, a Prefatory Note
1 A Florentine Childhood (1265-1283)
2 Beatrice and the Vita Nuova ( 1283-1295)
3 The Consolation of Philosophy (1290-1296)
4 Guilds and Government: Dante the Politician (1295-1300)
5 Boniface VIII and the Black Coup (1300-1302)
6 Early Exile (1302-1304)
7 A One-Man Party (1304-1308)
8 The Sacred Poem: A Survey of the Divine Comedy (1308-1321)
9 Henry VII and Dante’s Imperial Dream (1308-1313)
10 The Gentleman of Verona (1312-1318)
11 Ravenna (1381-1321)
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index