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c h a p t e r 1 4 Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender W hile we are accustomed to Dante’s appropriations and revisions of history, the case of Francesca da Rimini (Inf. 5.73–142) is rather different from the norm, since in her case no trace remains of the historical record that the poet could have appropriated. There is no completely independent documentation of Francesca’s story; we are indebted for what we know to Dante and to his commentators. A fourteenth-century chronicler of Rimini, Marco Battagli, alludes in passing to the event, but his history was written in 1352, thus postdating by three decades Dante’s death in 1321.1 Two factors come into play when we assess Battagli’s chronicle as an independent verification of Francesca’s story: on the one hand, he is an indisputable authority regarding Rimini and the Malatesta;2 on the other, he knew Dante’s poem.3 Therefore, Battagli’s passing and indirect reference (to which we shall return in due course) serves at best as plausibly independent confirmation of an occurrence about which the contemporary historical record is silent. That silence is broken by Dante.4 By reintegrating history—including the silence of history—into our reading of canto 5, we restore a context in which to remember that in the case of Francesca da Rimini, Dante is the historian of record: in effect he saved Francesca from oblivion, giving her a voice and a name. Technically, we know that Dante is the transmitter of the little that we know about Francesca da Rimini. Francesco Torraca, whose 1902 essay on Inferno 5 has not been surpassed in historical richness, clearly states as much (‘‘Del fatto, nessuna cronaca contemporanea, nessun documento ci ha conservato memoria; primo, e solo narratore contemporaneo, Dante’’),5 and the point is repeated in the Enciclopedia Dantesca’s article on Francesca (‘‘Il racconto dantesco resta l’unica testimonianza antica intorno al dramma di adulterio e di morte Dante and Francesca da Rimini 305 consumato alla corte malatestiana, ignorato dalle cronache e dai documenti locali coevi o posteriori’’).6 Similarly, when we begin to wonder about the historicity of Francesca, we discover the existence of a specialized bibliography on the historical Francesca of great erudition. But it rarely intersects with the much larger literary bibliography on Inferno 5, and its findings—including the fundamental fact that there is no historical record of the events narrated in the canto—are rarely factored into literary readings. Torraca’s clarity about the silence of the historical record has not informed subsequent readings of the canto. This essay attempts to recuperate the significance of the fact that Dante is the historian of record with respect to Francesca da Rimini and to integrate the implications of this understanding, as well as the implications of a historicized Francesca, into our critical response to Inferno 5. My subtitle outlines the parameters of my reading: realpolitik , because Dante viewed Francesca’s life as politically determined, her death the result of the pragmatic matrimonial politics that governed dynastic alliances;7 romance, because Dante injected romance into Francesca’s essentially political story, as a way of highlighting the tension between her role as pawn of the state and her desire for personal fulfillment (romance is the genre, in fact, that makes possible the focus on personal desire); gender, because the choice of romance as the modality for this particular narrative, a narrative founded on dynastic marriage, is a choice that necessarily brings us to gender. Ultimately , I hope to throw light on the ways in which Francesca’s story, as told by Dante, is a gendered story, one in which unusual value is placed on the personhood of the dynastic wife.8 The key fact of Francesca da Rimini’s life is a dynastic-political fact: Francesca was born into a family that aspired to dominion over Ravenna (and achieved it, in 1275); she married into a family that aspired to dominion over Rimini (they, too, succeeded, twenty years later, in 1295). She thus served a dynastic function, as a link between the two most powerful rising dynasties of Romagna. She was the daughter of Guido Minore da Polenta (so called to distinguish him from his cousin Guido Riccio; he is also referred to as Guido il Vecchio da Polenta), lord of Ravenna. Circa 1275 she married Giovanni (called Gianciotto, ‘‘crippled John’’) Malatesta, the second son of Malatesta da...

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