Dante in Love - Hardcover

A. N. Wilson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1848879490 ISBN 13: 9781848879492

Publisher: Atlantic Books, 2012

Synopsis

For Yeats, Dante Alighieri was 'the chief imagination of Christendom'; for Eliot he was of supreme importance, both as a poet and philosopher; Coleridge championed his introduction to an English readership. Tennyson based his poem 'Ulysses' on lines from the Inferno and Byron chastised an 'Ungrateful Florence' for exiling him. The Comedy resonates across five hundred years of our literary canon. In Dante in Love, A N Wilson presents a glittering study of an artist and his world, arguing that without an understanding of medieval Florence, it is impossible to comprehend the meaning of Dante's great poem. He explains how the Italian States were at that time locked into violent feuds, mirrored in the ferocious competition between the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy. He explores Dante's preoccupations with classical mythology, numerology and the great Christian philosophers which inform every line of the Comedy. Dante in Love also lays bare the enigma of the man who never wrote about the mother of his children, yet immortalized the mysterious Beatrice, whom he barely knew.With a biographer's eye for detail and a novelist's comprehension of the creative process, A N Wilson paints a masterful portrait of Dante Alighieri and unlocks one of the seminal works of literature for a new generation of readers.

About this title

About the Author

A. N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is a prolific and awarding-winning biographer and celebrated novelist. His most recent novel, Winnie and Wolf, was longlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize. He lives in North London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Dante In Love
IWHY THIS BOOK HAS BEEN WRITTENDANTE IS THE GREATEST POET OF THE MIDDLE AGES. IT COULD BE argued that he was the greatest of all European poets, of any time or place. Yet, for many, perhaps nearly all (non-Italian), readers, he also remains unread. Most literate people are aware of only a few facts about him and nearly all of these are wrong, such as that he was romantically involved with a girl called Beatrice. Dante, a married man with children, did have love affairs, some of them messy, and about some of them, he wrote. Beatrice was not in this sense one of the women in his life. She was something different.There are other readers who have begun to read Dante's book the Vita Nuova under the impression that it would have been all about Beatrice, and then they have given up because it was about something else - Dante himself, chiefly. Sometimes they have tried to read his Comedy, which was named by Boccaccio (1313 - 75) the 'divine' Comedy, and they have abandoned the attempt. The intelligent general reader of the twenty-first century - that is to say, you - might or might not have a knowledge ofclassical mythology and Roman history. Dante expects you to remember who Briareus was, and who Cato, and how Arachne was transformed into a spider, and what was the fate of the Sabine women. On top of this, he expects you to share his knowledge of, and obsession with, contemporary Italian history and politics. Some translations and modern editions of his poem endeavour to 'help' you here by elaborate explanations of the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, which soon have your head spinning. And on top of all that, there is the whole confusing business of medieval philosophy and theology - what Thomas Aquinas owed to Averroes, or the significance of St Bernard of Clairvaux.No wonder that so many readers abandon their reading of Dante's three-part Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso) long before they get to Purgatory. No wonder that so many who manage to read as far as the Purgatorio find that very little of it has remained in their heads. Such readers are prepared to take on trust that Dante is a great poet, but they leave him as one of the great unreads. And in so doing, they leave unsavoured one of the supreme aesthetic, imaginative, emotional and intellectual experiences on offer. They are like people who have never attended a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni, or of King Lear, never heard a Beethoven symphony, never visited Paris. Quite definitely, they are missing out.If you belong to this category of Dante-reader, or non-reader, then this book is specifically designed for you. And before we go any further, it had better be admitted that, as your travel guide in unfamiliar terrain, I know that my work will be difficult. The greatest of all European poems cannot be understood unless you familiarize yourself with the Europe out of which it came. So we must set off on a journey together to the Middle Ages, which were a strange land.Dante was the most observant, and articulate, of writers. He was profoundly absorbed in himself, but he was also involved with the centralpolitical and social issues of his time. Indeed, it was his involvement with politics which led to his being expelled from his native city, Florence, and spending the last two decades of his life in bitter exile. If he had been a successful Florentine politician, he would never have written the Comedy. He would be remembered as a poet - no doubt about that. His Canzoni and Ballate and Sonnets would ensure that his name had lasted. But his true greatness was to sum up in one narrative poem, not only his own autobiography, but the lives of his contemporaries, and the tremendous change which had taken place in Europe in his lifetime.Dante lived from 1265 to 1321. Nation states, and independent city states, were emerging. Hindsight sees that. At the time, the institutions of papal monarchy versus the Holy Roman Emperor fought out their dinosaur battles, thinking to use the smaller units of nation state or city state. History would make nation states stronger than either the Holy Roman Empire or the papal monarchy. (The Papacy as a religious institution, which was all that Dante wanted it to be, clearly survives to this day but with no obvious hope of universal jurisdiction over all Christendom, let alone over all humankind.)Dante's age was a time of great economic change, above all to the money supply of Europe, with Florence, the fountain of florins, being a supremely important place, as were the other Italian towns which pioneered that medieval invention, the Bank. Symptomatic of the era of change during which Dante lived was the rate of technological advance of the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. Technological advance always brings with it great social and intellectual change. And if Dante did not live through anything so momentous as the Industrial Revolution, he nonetheless saw a Europe which would have been unimaginable to his great-grandparents, a Europe in which Arabic learning and Greek philosophy were available to Latin-speaking intellectuals for the first time for hundreds of years.But before we begin the story, you might like to ask what my qualifications are for telling it? And let me admit at once that I am no Dante scholar. To be a Dante scholar is a full-time, lifelong occupation. Such rare beings need to possess a knowledge of medieval theology, astronomy, linguistics, poetics, mathematics and history of which I possess only an amateur's smattering. I first began to read Dante when I made a teenage visit to Florence. I became hooked on the Inferno, but it was some years before I went beyond it and read the rest of the Comedy. I think there was a simple reason for this. I did not realize how comparatively easy it is to master the historical and biographical background to the poem. I did not realize that Dante was an impoverished aristocrat living in a burgeoning city republic; the more you know about medieval Florence, of course, the better equipped you will be when you open the Comedy. But, to start with, all you really need to know is that this young man - his family identity pretty shadowy if not actually disguised in the early books of the Comedy - has two ambitions. One is to be a great poet, and in this ambition he has been encouraged by two people - Brunetto Latini (c.1220 - 94), the most famous Florentine intellectual of the generation before Dante's own, a (probably) homosexual older friend who was in some senses Dante's teacher; and the better-born, better-placed, brilliantly innovative older poet Guido Cavalcanti (c.1250/55 - 1300).The only other thing which you need to master before you begin is that Dante had political ambitions. He had been married by arrangement, as was the custom of those days, into one of the grandest families of Florence, the Donati. He writes not one word about his wife, Gemma, though it is possible that, as I have come to suspect, he uses her as an unnamed figure in his allegories. Her cousins were his boyhood friends. One, Forese Donati, was a good friend of Dante's and exchanged ribald sexy jokes with him during their teens and early manhood. The other, Corso Donati, one of the most brutal of the big Florentine magnates, was,together with the Pope at the time, Boniface VIII, responsible for Dante's fall from political grace and his exile from Florence, a catastrophe which ruined him financially and broke his heart.At first I read Dante only in English, then in the little blue Temple Classics editions which had the Italian on one side of the page with English on the other. Still a very good way to read him, in my opinion. Dante's Italian, clear, concise and sharp, is comparatively easy to master. But in this book I have decided to quote him in translation, using a variety of the excellent modern English translations available. After school, I went to the British Institute in Florence where Luisa Rappaccini's lively language classes gave me a basic grounding in Italian, and Ian Greenlees's lectures began to open my eyes to the extraordinary story of Italian medieval literature and culture.Yet, as a young man, I still thought that the historical and biographical background of the poem was too complicated to be mastered before I read the Comedy. Therefore, when any contemporary references occurred in the Comedy, I did not exactly 'skip' but I did not bother to see what was happening. I was racing on to the 'famous' scenes - such as the everlasting sorrow of the doomed adulterers, Paolo and Francesca, or the everlasting intellectual curiosity of Ulysses. Those who read the Comedy in this way definitely derive something from the experience - it would seem as if there were many Victorians who enjoyed such an approach. But the book remains for such a reader a set of 'lovely' scenes interrupted by passages which are only semi-comprehensible.What I needed as a young man when I first read the Comedy was a book which did not take for granted any knowledge of Dante's background. I needed a guide to thirteenth-century Florence. I needed someone who had read the principal Latin texts in Dante's own library - Virgil, of course, Lucan, Boethius. I needed someone who had at least a basic grasp of medieval philosophy, and who was prepared to tell me whowas Pope, who was King of France, and, when there were battles or political quarrels, what the fuss was about. And then again, I wanted this author to tell me how Dante's life and work did, and did not, relate to his contemporaries. He lived in a period which, loosely, contained the early Franciscans, St Thomas Aquinas, King Philip IV (the Fair) of France, Pope Boniface VIII. The Sicilian Vespers happened during his manhood - I needed to be reminded what they were. And then I needed to be told something of his poet-contemporaries in Italy. And oh yes, I sh...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1848879490
• ISBN 13: 9781848879492
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 386