Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture (review)

Barolini's usual critical acumen and hermeneutic ability show in this collection spanning nearly twenty years of critical militancy. The unifying thread that runs through the essays, forming a constellation of critical appendages to her Dante's Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy (Princeton UP, 1984), and The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton UP, 1992), is the author's unremitting commitment to studying the ways in which Dante constructs an authorial voice that had such an impact on subsequent authors. For the sake of brevity, I will summarize only some of the sixteen essays included in the book, preferring those in the last section, which presents the most original material with respect to the previously published articles. The reader can, however, find an on-line preview (which conveniently includes the index, for reference) on http://books.google.it/.

The book, collecting Barolini's essays from 1989 to 2005, is divided into four sections. Section 1, "A Philology of Desire," explores the ideology of love and desire in Dante's early lyric production and the Inferno, setting it against the backdrop of Italian lyric tradition and theological debate. One of the main points Barolini makes is that Dante in Doglia mi reca links eros and avarice, responding to and superseding Guittone's Ora parrà.

Section 2, "Christian and Pagan Intertexts," analyzes the Comedy's claims of truth and authority, grounded in the Christian visionary tradition and pagan authors such as Ovid and Vergil. Barolini reassesses the meaning of Dante's otherworldly kingdoms as historicized ideas, aiming at "reinstating Dante into the visionary tradition rather than isolating him on a high-culture peak of literary and poetic greatness."

In section 3, "Ordering the Macrotext: Time and Narrative," Barolini addresses the Vita nuova's narrative and anti-narrative structures and the editorial history of Dante's Rime. The chapter on Dante's Rime includes a useful synopsis of the poems' order in the editions by Barbi, Contini, Foster & Boyde and De Robertis. This section also includes a chapter on the construction of the lyric sequence in Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and one on the recovery of the essential human qualities of intellect and compassion—qualities which society lost in the plague—by the brigata of Boccaccio's Decameron.

The last section, "Gender," discusses the complexity and historical import of Dante's female figures such as Francesca da Rimini and Beatrice. Barolini argues that the didactic productions intended for women's use composed by Guittone, Dante, and Boccaccio (but not by Petrarch, whom Barolini does not include in this number), mark a distinctive progress from the preceding courtly ideology. "Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi: Toward a Sexual Politics of the Decameron" brings to light the implicit relation between words and deeds and the gendered underpinnings of such a dialectic, while "Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender" presents Dante as the only historical source of his time to have recorded the life and death of Guido da Polenta's ill-fated daughter. The poet thus made the figure of this young lady the protagonist of a gendered story in which agency is "doubly constituted, both along the moral axis [. . .] and along a gendered-historicized axis." In "Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d'Arezzo (With a brief Excursus on Cecco D'Ascoli)" the author illustrates the ambivalent attitudes of early Italian lyric poetry in the treatment of love and desire. Poets such as Guittone, Cecco and Dante himself seem to follow the standard ideology of courtly love, while here and there displaying moral stances that sharply contradict the courtly rules. Dante is the author who eventually is very much at odds with the code of the established system in his courtly poetry: while the traditional courtly lyric lady does not act or speak, Dante, from his canzone Doglia mi reca on, makes women the protagonists of moral agency, exhorting "women to display the virtue that they theoretically lack against the men who...