The Wings of the Doves: Love and Desire in Dante and Medieval Culture by Elena Lombardi (review)

This insightful monograph has an ambitious aim: to investigate diverse ways in which medieval conceptions of love and desire inform Dante’s poetry, while demonstrating the complexities of a single canto from Dante’s Commedia, Inferno V, and opening its far-reaching implications for further interpretation. The volume builds on and develops some of the themes addressed in Elena Lombardi’s previous work, including The Syntax of Desire: Language and Love in Augustine, the Modistae, Dante (2007); several articles on desire, lust, and Inferno V; and a volume she co-edited with Manuele Gragnolati, Tristan Kay, and Francesca South-erden, Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages (2012), as is evident from the volume’s expert treatment of these related issues.

The book’s elegant structure is evident in the poetic simplicity of its chapter titles: “Hell,” “Lust,” “Desire,” “Love,” “The Kiss,” and “Reading.” Inferno V, itself informed by (in Lombardi’s words) “multiple contexts: classical, lyrical, romance, theological, political, confessional,” may be seen as a structural model for Lombardi’s method of interpretation, which seeks to allow these contexts to interact with and “challenge each other.” In a sense, the very tensions inherent in the dynamics of desire as she presents them – “the subtlety, ambiguities, and constitutional ambivalence of desire” – might be seen to provide a model for her method of criticism, which seems to seek to preserve subtle tensions and ambiguities of meaning in the culture and poetry she investigates.

In a succinct and engaging introduction, Lombardi describes the methodology of the book, which balances delicately close readings and philology. On the one hand, Lombardi treats Inferno V as, in her words, a “window onto a larger theme in medieval culture: the spiritual and erotic versions of love and desire.” Indeed, the volume is dense with primary sources, Lombardi’s analysis of which highlights the richness and complexities of the issues of love and desire in the cultural context in which Dante wrote. Yet, on the other hand, she does not reduce Inferno V to an instrument for understanding a cultural context; rather, she uses the cultural context in which Dante was writing to interpret Inferno V and to show how the implications of Inferno V reach beyond itself. The measured balance between the methods and aims of Lombardi’s analysis demonstrates the sensitivity with which she approaches the topic of her work.

Delicacy and sensitivity also define Lombardi’s analysis of the canto itself. Inferno V contains one of the more famous passages of Dante’s Commedia, perhaps even of Dante’s work as a whole: the portrayal of the doomed lovers Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, punished for eternity in hell for their adulterous passion. There has been ample scholarship on Inferno V and on many of its implications, including those relating to the issues of desire and love; Lombardi skilfully acknowledges previous scholarship while developing her own original and well-founded insights.

The volume emphasizes the cultural gap between modern or contemporary understandings of love or desire and medieval ones. For instance, love in a medieval context, in Lombardi’s words, “covered a much wider ground than it does today, accounting for almost any relation in nature and the human being, spanning from sexual desire to friendship, to political harmony, and to religion.” The way in which the book emphasizes the tensions between and coexistence of the spiritual and sexual implications of desire and love in Dante’s poetry is one of its great strengths. As Lombardi says, Beatrice “simultaneously de-eroticizes earthly love and eroticizes God.”

Another great strength of the book is the way in which its careful characterization of the tensions between the spiritual/divine and the erotic opens up a much needed perspective from which to investigate the figure of Francesca in light of other women in the Commedia – from the Virgin Mary to “la femmina balba,” and from...