Dante and the Church: Literary and Historical Essays (review)

This collection of stimulating essays situates Dante within the dramatic ecclesial context of his time. Originally delivered as lectures at University College Dublin in 2001–02 as part of the annual Dante series (the principal forum for Dante research in Ireland), four historians and three Italianists offer erudite investigations of the Florentine poet’s complex and often contentious love affair with the Church. As stated in the preface, it should be noted that “the meaning of the word ‘Church’ has been left somewhat elastic”(p. 5). Such elasticity, however, does not signal diffusion. Although the essays do focus on, for example, individual churchmen, religious movements, as well as the historical institution of the Church and its significance for the political, literary, cultural, and philosophical discourse of Dante’s day, the resounding effect of their diversity is symphonic.

The volume opens with the insightful historical essay by Gary Dickson (University of Edinburgh), “Dante, Boniface VIII and the Jubilee.” The author poses the intriguing question, “Whose Jubilee was it, Boniface’s or Dante’s?”(p. 13). Even though Pope Boniface VIII officially inaugurated the first ecclesial Holy Year in history on February 22, 1300, Dante, whose poetic pilgrimage in the Commedia begins on March 25, 1300, never explicitly identifies the Jubilee with the Pope: such references are deliberately “de-Bonifaced” (p. 22). Why? Not merely because Dante famously loathed this pontiff for his abuses of papal power but also because Boniface himself, in recognition of widespread popular belief in the availability of indulgences at the start of the new century, retroactively set the official beginning of the Holy Year on Christmas Day, 1299. Thus, there was no need for Dante to associate Boniface with the anno santo, for Dante’s Jubilee had already begun three months previously (Purg. 2.97–99) in a “Boniface-free zone” (p. 22).

“Dante and the Franciscans” by George Holmes (Oxford) lucidly explores Dante’s relationship with the conflicting currents of Franciscan intellectual and spiritual life and masterfully places it in historical perspective. By reading Paradiso as a series of palinodic essays, the author provides an astute rationale for the anomalous presence of the Siger of Brabant, the Averroist philosopher, and Joachim of Fiore, the radical prophet and abbot, in the Circle of the Sun (Par. 10–13). Siger stands for Dante’s youthful association with the group that produced the Fiore (the long sequence of sonnets based on the Roman de la rose), whose villain Falsembiante (Hypocrisy) is a mendicant convicted for the death of Siger. Joachim represents the pessimistic apocalypticism (that Dante may have gleaned by way of the Franciscan Spiritual, Ubertino of Casale) of Purgatorio 31–33. The panegyrics to Francis and Dominic thus atone for this pair of earlier indiscretions. The figures of Siger and Joachim, however, remain in heaven as symbols of Dante’s spiritual biography that he did not wish to abandon. Holmes concludes by distinguishing three stages in Dante’s tumultuous intellectual itinerarium vis-à-vis the Franciscan Order: “the young man jeering at the Franciscans, the religious enthusiast embracing their extreme wing, and the mature admirer of their aspirations” (p. 38).

The fascinating study by Alexander Murray (Oxford), “Purgatory and the Spatial Imagination,” examines the coincidence between Dante’s poetic representation of Purgatory and the revolutionary advances in the way people conceived space in the late-thirteenth century. He begins by investigating the evolution of spatial consciousness in the realms of language, political administration, philosophy, and “man-made spatial analogues”—maps, portulan charts, astrolabes, and new painting techniques (rules of perspective). The author then traces Dante’s awareness of such technical innovations and argues for the poet’s firsthand knowledge of portulan charts, astrolabes, and other navigational and astronomical instruments. For example, Ulysses cannot have been an eyewitness to all to which he refers at Inf. 26, 103–05 (Africa, Spain, Sardinia, Majorca) and 110–11 (Ceuta, Seville...