From Revelation to Dilation in Dante’s Studio

In this essay I will examine Dante’s approach to allegory through the lens of his studio, the recurring conceit of his diligence and maturation as a craftsman. Studio here does not mean his academic study or the tutelage of reading works of earlier literature, though it includes these things. Studio rather means his self-application—Dante’s effort to become capable of creating the artworks that he envisions. His early works both describe and constitute this studio, a record of his attempts and his working concerns.¹ At the end of the Vita nova he refers to his literary training with the present tense of the verb studiare (“io studio quanto posso”), which mirrors the eternal present shared by Beatrice and God (“qui est per omnia secula benedictus”).² The Vita nova’s preceding chapters had depicted his studio in the early years of his literary career, but the final chapter’s declaration means that this apprenticeship had itself changed him, itself generated a vision that he knows can only be achieved through more effort and improvement.³ Though his studio has many facets, it repeatedly focuses on the place of allegory in Dante’s craft, and when he moves from the Vita nova to the Convivio, his pressing concern will be allegory. In this essay’s approach, therefore, allegory will in its own right become a lens through which we will look back on Dante’s studio. This approach will have inroads to several aspects of Dante’s episteme, his intellectual, cultural and “logological” milieu.⁴ We might think of these aspects as corresponding to Dante’s past, present, and future.

In Dante’s past is the centuries-long process through which his craft—writing—had spread throughout the world, played an ever more important role in civilizations, and become a feature of epistemes. What will interest us here are the sorts of latent book analogies that become meaningful in lettered contexts: mind/book, reality/book, totality/book. Representing this past will be Augustine of Hippo, in whose Confessions the absence or presence of reading practices—the fact that he converts from a non-lettered religion (Manicheanism) into a lettered one (neoplatonic Christianity)—is a decisive frame for the theological and philosophical dilemmas that impel his conversion.

Dante’s present tense is represented by the biggest change that his literary practice undergoes over the course of his studio: his abandonment of the mixed prose/poetry format, taking up the epic, unannotated format of the Commedia. Just as Augustine’s transition into lettered thought affected his sense of self—his sense of interiority, time, and authenticity—Dante’s change from prosimetrum to poetry is a performative transition from a literary goal of revelation, the covering and uncovering (through self-glossing) of exact sentenze, to a goal of “dilation”: a poetics of making things in reader’s minds.

This transition would have been especially intelligible and meaningful to readers in Dante’s epoch, a time of great interest in the idea of allegory, a time of sensitivity to allegory’s attendant vocabulary. Puns on words like “veil” and “gloss” were common in works of literature,⁵ and the very meaning of the term “literal” was altered by the sheer force of the word’s own popularity, a popularity that eventually rendered the word’s very definition difficult to pin down.⁶ We might think of this period—the late Middle Ages in Europe and the Mediterranean—as representing a certain saturation milestone for those same book/reality analogies that had been building up over previous centuries. A moment, that is, when these analogies had become familiar enough to achieve a certain invisibility. Dante’s present tense was the age of the summae, an age when the analogy between encyclopedic texts and the totality of the cosmos was especially resonant. Among those medieval authors who made themes and motifs of their epoch’s “saturation milestone” and its elements (allegory; encyclopedism; resonance of the book/person analogy), Dante was the foremost: he draws on these elements not only in the forms of his works (his early prosimetrum format...