Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy (review)

It is clear from the first pages that Justin Steinberg's book is innovative and groundbreaking. Returning the rightful importance to the cultural circumstances and social context surrounding some of Dante's most important declarations of poetics, this critical analysis provides new and convincing answers to highly-debated issues. It effectively accounts for Dante's repeated attempts at directing his readership, not only using well-known self-referential speech acts, but especially through careful manipulation of the instruments and techniques of book production and circulation.

Focusing on the transcriptions of vernacular lyric poetry in the Memoriali Bolognesi, chapter 1 successfully demonstrates that the selection of lyrics presented in these manuscripts and the codification of different formats for their transmission are part of an active and conscious cultural policy. The choice of lyrics offers clear evidence of the Bolognese notaries' support for an emerging cultural ideology, inextricably linking their transcriptions to their social and historical context. For Steinberg, the occurrence of Dante's writings in the Memoriali has therefore a specific cultural sign, especially evident when contrasted with his general exclusion from contemporary lyric anthologies. Examining in detail the notaries' changing practices and techniques, Steinberg also reveals the lyrics' function in the manuscripts as both textual and cultural artifacts, thus demolishing the established view that assigned them the purely practical and legal purpose of filling blank spaces on the page. In chapter 2, Dante's discussion in the Vita nova of the circulation and interpretation of the crucial "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore" is examined in relationship to the specific issues raised by the material dissemination of the canzone. Steinberg concentrates in particular on its occurrence in Vat. Lat. 3793, where the transcription of "Donne ch'avete" is followed by a somewhat trivializing and simplifying response in the form of the anonymous canzone, "Ben aggia l'amoroso et dolce chore." In an attempt to reclaim the philosophical complexity of his composition and preserve the original message of his canzone, Dante was forced, Steinberg argues, to unequivocally define the hermeneutical framework of "Donne ch'avete" and to establish its innovative poetic focus on authenticity and interiority. It was, in fact, his acute insight into issues of reception and readership that drove him to constantly and publicly revise his positions in response to unwarranted interpretation of his work.

However, the inauthentic, ritualized, and conventional poetic dialogue constructed by the anonymous amico in "Ben aggia" better responded to the taste and ideological discourse originating the collection in Vat. Lat. 3793, as becomes even clearer in chapter 3. Here, a close inspection of the notions informing the literary history offered by Dante in his De vulgari eloquentia lead Steinberg to reframe the treatise as a conscious reaction to cultural operations like the Vatican collection and to the municipal poetics epitomized there. Dante codified a new linguistic space to reject this cultural system, Steinberg convincingly argues, so that an illustrious vernacular could exist beyond geographical specificity and escape the boundaries of local politics. In this conceptual dimension, the exiled author could create a permanent locus for his writings, where his creation remained immune from the uncertainty that conditions every contextualized communicative act. But Dante, Steinberg justly insists, always remained keenly aware of the importance of space, time, and material circumstances for the reception of his texts, thus withstanding a consuming intellectual conflict between coming to terms with his ineludible historicity and fulfilling his pressing desire to transcend space and time. Such concerns and aspirations were uncommon in mercantile Florence, where poetry remained a public and standardized display of class and gender. As the codicological features of Vat. Lat. 3793 examined in chapter 4 openly reveal, the production and collection of literary texts constituted a social practice integral to the collective cultural interaction of the ruling class. The poet-banker Monte Andrea perfectly embodied...