Divining The Undivine ComedyReflections and RecollectionsZygmunt G. Barański

On the penultimate day of May 2024, Teo and I did something that we had never done before. We met in the historic shadow of Windsor Castle — ah Teo, the redoubtable Anglophile — , enjoyed an excellent meal, and, over several hours, never once mentioned matters even vaguely academic. We were, if truth be told, in the company of Susanna, her sister, and Maggie, my partner. However, I don’t believe that we were simply being considerate to our family members. We were behaving in a manner that is not common in the academy. We had gone out as friends and not as colleagues. And let’s be honest, when was the last time, dear reader, that you spent time with a fellow academic without talking shop…? We had done so without artifice or calculation: our friendship of over thirty years had eclipsed our professional identities and concerns.Beginning of page[p. 224]

Anyone present at our first meeting in October 1989 would never have imagined that Teo and I would become good friends. All I’m prepared to say about that evening in and around NYU’s Casa Italiana is that both of us, in our different ways, can be a bit prickly. Yet, like the proverbial two negatives ‘mysteriously’ making a positive, the prickles lost their barbs. Irritation ceased. Scholarly respect is a great balm. And when did friendship begin to complement academic regard? To be honest, I’m not sure. I can be certain, however, that by 1992, the year of The Undivine Comedy’s publication, we were friends. My copy of the book affirms it: ‘For Zyg — interlocutor and friend, with best wishes, Teo’ is inscribed in black ink and slightly sloping script on the first page.

I was deeply impressed by Teo’s new book.22Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), hereafter UDC. Subsequent references given in parentheses in the main text. Its boldness and originality, as well as its difficulty — difficulty as a virtue, of course, and not as a vitium —, were striking. This was sustained, serious scholarship. I immediately felt impelled to recognize publicly the importance of The Undivine Comedy, not least because I had started to hear murmurings — murmur, the pernicious whispering sin undermining medieval religious communities — murmurings, I repeat, about the book, which seemed to me seriously to misunderstand and to misrepresent it (on this, more anon). Speculum generously allowed me to write an extended review of Teo’s monograph, which appeared in 1994.33Zygmunt G. Barański, review of Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy (1992), Speculum, 69 (1994), pp. 1106–09. This was followed a year later by an article in Italian Studies that attempted to assess the significance of The Undivine Comedy and of Giuseppe Mazzotta’s Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge, which had appeared a year after Teo’s book. My review considered the works both in themselves and in light of their relationship to Singleton’s scholarship, and more generally to the sway that Singleton still held over North American dantismo in the early 1990s.44Zygmunt G. Barański, ‘Dante, America, and the Limits of “Allegory”’, Italian Studies, 50 (1995), pp. 139–53.

What was it, over thirty years ago, that had struck me about The Undivine Comedy? First and foremost, that it was so unexpected. ‘Unexpected’Beginning of page[p. 225] is possibly the wrong term, since Teo had trailed (and trialled) some of her ideas in a series of provocatively innovative articles, of which ‘Re-presenting What God Presented: The Arachnean Art of the Terrace of Pride’, published in 1987, had swiftly become canonical.55Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Re-presenting What God Presented: The Arachnean Art of the Terrace of Pride’, Dante Studies, 105 (1987), pp. 43–62. Yet, reflecting further, ‘unexpected’ is the correct term. Although The Undivine Comedy is distinguished by its rigorous and rich engagement with the tradition of dantismo (and not exclusively in its notes, as several reviewers reductively observed), its methodological perspective, its tone, its concerns were vibrantly and excitingly outside the mainstream of international Dante scholarship of the early nineties. A limpidly honest voice willing — if on occasion a bit bluntly — to take to task how we had been and were continuing to read Dante. To put it a bit more concretely, Teo’s book constituted a striking departure from and a challenging corrective to both North American Singletonian ‘allegorizing’ Dantism and the stylistic ‘philologizing’ approaches of Italian dantologia. As someone who, for a number of years, had also been working on questions that were not part of the established primary interests of the majority of Dantists — first the poet’s relationship to medieval literary theory, criticism, and exegesis and, by 1992, the impact on Dante of symbolic, hermeneutic, and divinely inspired revealed traditions with their roots in Scripture and Neoplatonism, and more generally what has since become known as ‘Dante’s intellectual formation’ —, I could not but be captivated by someone who was so obviously following her own scholarly interests and enthusiasms rather than timidly adhering to matters and approaches imposed externally by the academy and by the sanctioned norms of our subject. The inherent and continuing conservatism of dantismo has long been a bugbear of mine, although it is only fair to acknowledge that such conservatism has its institutional and professional causes and reasons. At the same time, I remain convinced, as does Teo — Zoom is a fantastic bridge for effortlessly spanning oceans, and I write these reflections with her voice in my head —, that an effective way of countering actual or perceived ‘crises in the humanities’ is to develop strong, independent Beginning of page[p. 226] intellectual voices rather than acquiesce and compromise to current fads and orthodoxies.

As I read The Undivine Comedy back then, I became increasingly persuaded that, despite some quite notable differences of temperament and manner, as well as of academic preference, I was communing with a kindred spirit. Teo had in fact intuited this before I had, as her dedication makes clear: ‘friend and interlocutor’ — thank you, Teo. Indeed, as I shall discuss, there were interesting points of convergence between our research projects which, at first sight, might seem very different: the neo-formalist close reader and the cultural historian and Continian neo-filologo. And yet, the signs of confluence had always been there. As I write, I am remembering a long conversation that we had one afternoon in Teo’s NYU office soon after she had been appointed to her post at Columbia. We were both more than affably surprised to discover that among the Dantists who had had the greatest impact on our thinking were many of the same names. Moreover, these were not necessarily the names most frequently cited or whose influence was readily discernible in the writings of our peers. By the 1990s, how many Dantists in the English-speaking world had made significant recourse to Gianfranco Contini’s ground-breaking, genuinely transformative essays on the poet? Indeed, and the same I would say holds true today, how many had actually read him?66Nevertheless, for almost fifty years, Contini’s essays have been conveniently collected in the Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi: Gianfranco Contini, Un’idea di Dante (Turin: Einaudi, 1976). I continue to think that there is something ‘Continian’ about the prose style of The Undivine Comedy: the lexical and syntactic density, the knowing allusiveness, the at times startling logical connections, and the accumulation of references to different parts of the poem within a single paragraph, within a single argumentative thread. What I’m referring to is, of course, that productive ‘difficulty’ which I mentioned earlier. And then there was Pat Boyde. Not the co-editor of Dante’s lyric poetry, and most certainly not the author of the comfortably elegant but tepidly flat 1981 Dante Philomythes and Philosopher, but the Pat Boyde who, in Dante’s Style in his Lyric Poetry (1971), had originally and suggestively fused medieval rhetoric and twentieth-century stylistics to offer Beginning of page[p. 227] a description and analysis of the character and development of Dante’s style in his rime. It is not hard to appreciate how Pat’s work could have had a bearing on Teo’s engagement with the Commedia’s form and on my interest in its poetics. Despite their arch-establishment status — the Scuola Normale and Cambridge — both Contini and Boyde were ‘outsiders’ in terms of the substance of their Dante scholarship. And that fact, too, is likely to have had an effect on the ways in which Teo and I had decided to pursue our research interests.

What I have conveyed in the preceding two paragraphs is largely written from the perspective of my seventy-three-year-old self. Nonetheless, my fundamental point of departure — The Undivine Comedy’s ‘unexpectedness’ — will always belong to my forty-year-old self. How did I articulate that sense of intellectual and professional surprise, or better, what aspects of the book had captured my attention? Furthermore, reflecting now on The Undivine Comedy and on Teo’s scholarship more generally in light of what I wrote about both soon after the book’s appearance, what did I miss about their significance with respect to the dantismo of the early 1990s?

‘It is difficult to think of any other book that tells us as much and in such detail about the poet’s manipulative formal genius and the ideological and emotional implications of his mimetic strategies’.77Barański, Speculum review, p. 1108. There is little doubt in my mind that this sentence pithily encapsulates what, at least for me, was crucial and determining about The Undivine Comedy. Indeed, I still hold to that view. The same claim regarding its exceptionality, and not simply in general terms, can still be made today. Given the forthright yet apposite manner in which, in The Undivine Comedy, Teo, as we all know, deals with the shortcomings of Singleton’s essentially content-based approach to matters relating to the Commedia’s truth claims, matters which, as she vigorously determines, are also inescapably formal, it would be annoyingly redundant to rehearse them here. Her formalist challenge to Singleton’s sway over what had become an accepted and recognizably ‘American’ allegorical approach to Dante was not just unexpected, given Singleton’s persistent and forceful canonicity (in institutional terms too), but it also offered a liberating analytical framework for The Undivine Comedy, as well Beginning of page[p. 228] as compelling evidence that American Dantism was anything but a critical monolith. Things could never be the same again, — and they most certainly have not been — in the wake of The Undivine Comedy’s publication. The spell had been broken. It had become much more difficult, to quote Steven Botterill — always an acute reviewer of our field —, for a scholar to rely on ‘the identification of allegorical meaning in the Commedia, when elevated into a principle, […] to legitimate the creation of the critic’s own narrative alongside — or rather beyond — that of the Commedia itself’.88Steven Botterill, ‘Dante Studies and the Study of Dante’, in Dante and Modern American Criticism, ed. by Dino Cervigni, Annali d’Italianistica, 8 (1990), pp. 88–102 (p. 98). Teo’s rallying call could not have been more different: our responsibility as critics lies within the poem, within its textual weave.

Yet, for all its punchy originality, The Undivine Comedy, as I noted at the very start of my Speculum review, has some of its roots in Teo’s previous monograph, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the ‘Comedy’,99Teodolinda Barolini, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the ‘Comedy’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), hereafter DP. Subsequent references given in parentheses in the main text. the implications of whose precisely indicative subtitle, and not just for her second book, have been rather too frequently and unjustifiably ‘elided’ — in more than one instance literally, by not citing it. The tendency has been to draw on Dante’s Poets as a sort of ‘manual’ on the poet’s attitude and recourse to several of his key auctores — Scriptural, classical, vernacular —, and, as a result, it has been consulted in a piecemeal fashion. At the same time, given the ties between Teo’s two books, it is important to acknowledge that, in Dante’s Poets, there is no explicit challenge to Singleton, although, equally, his presence and influence are significantly curtailed, especially when compared to the work of many American Dantists of the time. He is one among a large body of scholars, normally cited, like others, with respect for a critically useful observation. Only once is his contribution emphasized and distinguished:

Without denying that Dante subscribes wholeheartedly to the notion that his poem is the instrument of a divine message, I would suggest that as a poetic strategy granting the poet absolute freedom and authority, the fiction of the Comedy is Beginning of page[p. 229] unparalleled. If, in Singleton’s formula, the fiction of the Comedy is that it is no fiction, then it follows that the strategy of the Comedy is that there is no strategy. (DP, p. 90)

I find the quotation striking and highly revelatory when considered in respect of the radical ways in which Teo deconstructs and reformulates Singleton’s famous dictum in The Undivine Comedy. Rereading what she wrote in 1984 alongside what she would write in 1992 offers a telling insight into how boldly and independently her thinking developed over a relatively short period of time. In the article I published in Italian Studies, I highlighted both the nature and the consequences of her reaction to and rejection of Singleton. What I have only understood quite recently — inevitably there is something ‘schizophrenic’ about this presentation as I ‘jump’, a beloved Barolinian image, between two moments of my academic life now over thirty years apart — is that in its own quiet, understated manner, Dante’s Poets likewise represents a noteworthy departure from Singleton and Singletonianism.

Especially since the late 1980s, North American Dante scholarship has become closely associated with the study of the ways in which, in his oeuvre, Dante adapted and revised his literary sources in order to highlight the literary and ideological novitas of his writings. This trend, of course, marks the principal means by which American Dantism slowly freed itself from the yoke of Singleton’s deafness to poetry. This shift, in fact, is especially striking when it is remembered that, in the 1950s and 1960s, but also in the 1970s, American Italianists specializing in Dante showed little interest in the poet’s debts to other writers. This situation may be striking, but it is hardly surprising. Singleton had defined, and hence delimited, American dantismo in terms of Scriptural allegory and medieval religious culture and theology. The fact that Dante was a consummate poet who would have been interested in other poets qua poets, and hence, to put it medievally, in the lictera of their poetry, is not contemplated in Singleton’s understanding of the Commedia. Consequently, he left little to no space for the more strictly literary qualities of Dante’s oeuvre, never mind, let’s say, for secular pagan Latin poetry. Thus, in his first two books, Singleton never refers to a classical author. In Journey to Beatrice, Virgil and Ovid do put in an appearance: Virgil as a key character in the Commedia’s symbolic unfolding — ‘Virgil is that natural light, being, in allegory, such a light Beginning of page[p. 230] as was given to the “philosophers” before Christ’;1010Charles S. Singleton, Journey to Beatrice, 2nd edn (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 263. Ovid as the poet of the ‘golden age’ to which Matelda alludes. Singleton has no interest in either poet outside the schema of his allegorical reading. When he mentions their texts — the opening of book 1 of the Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Eclogue 4 — they are subordinated to his ideas about ‘justice, original justice, and how that was lost’.1111Ibid., p. 196. It should come as no surprise that Singleton’s ‘allegorized’ Virgil should be in close concord with the Virgil of the allegorists: ‘those scholiasts who came to be such great authorities for the interpreting of Virgil’s works’;1212Ibid., p. 195. Singleton is of course correct to highlight the significance of the commentary tradition; however, he does this in a largely anachronistic and self-serving manner. I have long been disquieted by Singleton’s standing as a scholar and his impact on Dante studies, especially given his scholarly narrow-mindedness and his notorious reluctance to recognize his critical debts. I attempt to assess both Singleton and his legacy in Zygmunt G. Barański, ‘Reflecting on Dante in America: 1949–1990’, in Dante and Modern American Criticism, ed. by Cervigni, pp. 56–86; Barański, ‘Dante, America’. while, in Ovid’s case, Singleton embroils the ancient poet in an idiosyncratic and philologically untenable ‘allegorical’ elucidation, while shifting responsibility for such an interpretation onto Dante: ‘when Dante compares his experience to that of Glaucus who became “consort in the sea with the other gods,” he has more than human souls in mind. The “gods” must be the angels, first of all, even though these do not appear here’.1313Singleton, Journey to Beatrice, pp. 28–29 (my italics). Nothing could be further from Teo’s careful, philologically and textually based reconstruction and analysis of Dante’s attitudes to other poets.

Things had to change. And change they did: first, as a result of Robert Hollander’s work in the late 1960s on the Commedia’s debts to the Aeneid and on the importance of the ‘literal sense’ for any discussion of medieval allegory; then, and more substantially, with the appearance of Dante’s Poets. Teo, I believe, while establishing her own critical voice, also showed others how to begin to find theirs, even though it is sad to observe that, for a number of years, rather too many did not acknowledge what they owed her. Most pointedly, Teo definitively demonstrated that, to work on Dante, one did not need to have Singleton at one’s side. As its title suggests, the breadth of Dante’s Poets is noteworthy and unusual. Ancient epic poetry, the vernacular Beginning of page[p. 231] lyric, and David, ‘il cantor de lo Spirito Santo’ (Par. 20.38), are assessed in themselves but also in relation to each other so as to reveal Dante’s self-construction as an inspired Christian poet, the main concern of her book, and, subsequently, a central pillar of The Undivine Comedy. As I suggested earlier, Teo’s second monograph grows out of the same soil as Dante’s Poets, as is also evident from her assessment of how Dante draws on the writers of antiquity to ‘raise fundamental questions […] regarding textuality in general: questions of belief and disbelief, falsity and truth’ (DP, p. 212), and from her acute appreciation of the Commedia’s idiosyncratic and revolutionary textuality: ‘The comedìa is […] a genre that is devoted to the truth, rather than to the parola ornata, it may exploit any register — high or low — but depends entirely on none, since it must always be free to adopt the stylistic register that most accurately reflects the truth of the situation at hand’ (DP, p. 280).

As one ponders, so the mind wanders…. I was supposed to be concentrating on what I had found noteworthy about The Undivine Comedy when I first read it. Instead, I have allowed present-day reflections to distract and ensnare me. My far-too-active historicist biases have pushed aside soberly stated intentions of purpose, preferring to sound trends in American Dante scholarship. If this had been a conventional academic article (never mind a student’s piece of writing), I would now have to rethink, redraft, reorganize. However, for me, one of the pleasures of contributing to our volume is the possibility and freedom to think and write in a relaxed, ‘spontaneous’, loosely structured, dialogic manner — an extension of nearly forty years of conversations with Teo, which, in recent years, have become more frequent and engaged. I know she’s going to read me, and so I want her to hear my voice, to imagine that we’re chatting.

Enough! Time to get back to 1994–95. The promise of the subtitle to Dante’s Poets had achieved full intellectual and critical flourishing. As I wrote then (and I don’t think I can say it better now),1414Barański, Speculum review, p. 1107. the nub of Teo’s achievement, as I indicated above in passing, was to have established that ‘[t]he issue of the poem’s “realism” (and “its concomitant surrealism” [UDC, p. 60]) constitutes — as it still does today — one Beginning of page[p. 232] of its great interpretative dilemmas […], a question that affects the poem’s every fibre, since “the stylistic correlative to the comedìa’s truth claims” is “its manifoldness” [UDC, p. 76]’. This is a genuinely key insight — an insight that, more importantly, is given concrete textual endorsement on every page of The Undivine Comedy. As I read, I began to think almost immediately how Teo’s stress on stylistic manifoldness might usefully converge with my research of the time on the Commedia’s plurilingual comicità, its radically disruptive poetics, especially as we were both endeavouring to account for the poem’s uniqueness with respect to its formal inventiveness and its energetic striving for verisimilitude. We were asking the same central question albeit from different yet inter-related perspectives, our abutting aims, even if we didn’t appreciate it then, ‘to analyze the textual metaphysics that makes the Commedia’s truth claims credible, and to show how the illusion is constructed, forged, made — by a man who is precisely, after all, “only” a fabbro, a maker […] a poet’ (UDC, p. 20).

What I also found energizing and stimulating was the breadth of The Undivine Comedy’s vision. It was anything but common to read a boldly overarching investigation of the entire Commedia. Fragmentation, unsurprisingly, has always bedevilled the study of the ‘sacrato poema’ (‘sacred poem’; Par. 23.62).1515I cite the Commedia from Dante Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. by Giorgio Petrocchi, 2nd edn, 4 vols (Florence: Le Lettere, 1994). English translations are from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. by Allen Mandelbaum, 3 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980–82). Yet, I must admit, it was Teo’s consideration of one part of the Commedia that most appealed to me. What really struck a chord was her rigorous demonstration of the jaw-dropping reductiveness of deeming Dante’s portrayal of Paradise as ‘cloyingly serene’ (UDC, p. 167) — both Teo and I see the advantage of a no-nonsense adverb —, of deeming the Paradiso a canticle that was disinterested in drama and narrative. Indeed, ‘[r]ather than content himself with merely saying that heaven is eternal, he [Dante] actively confronts the narrative implications of its timelessness, demonstrating the difference between asserting eternity and representing timelessness in his disparate treatments of hell and heaven’; and he does this by problematizing those indefatigable narrative stalwarts: ‘space and time’ (UDC, p. 170). Paradiso, for too long pushed into the background by Beginning of page[p. 233] Inferno’s representational vehemence and Purgatorio’s chiaroscuro nostalgia and biographism, was being returned to the fore of our scholarly attention, as, concurrently, was also being done by Giuseppe Mazzotta and by Lino Pertile.1616Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Lino Pertile, La punta del disio: semantica del desiderio nella ‘Commedia’ (Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005), which collects essays mostly written in the 1980s and 1990s. My own serious engagement with the Paradiso only begins after the intellectual jolt that I received from The Undivine Comedy. The three chapters on the third canticle that cannot but bring to mind, mutatis mutandis, Dante’s poetic achievements in the third part of his poem, reveal Teo at the height of her critical and analytical powers. By privileging her discussion of the Paradiso, am I not in danger of reasserting that hermeneutic fragmentation I have just bemoaned? Possibly. I would prefer, however, to think that, dealing with a book that explicates well and at length the role of paradox in the Commedia, I’m simply finding myself caught in the trap of paradox that is an inherent feature of every text and of every act of reading.

Inextricably entwined with questions of form, narrative, and truth is Teo’s insistence that Dante’s and the Commedia’s religious claims be taken seriously and approached with respect. Put so starkly, it might not unreasonably be assumed that, on this issue at least, she was following Singleton’s lead. And indeed she was — at least to a point. Through his work on the impact of Scriptural exegesis on the Vita nova and the Commedia, Singleton, especially in contrast to critical trends in Italy, had restored Dante’s standing as a religious writer. Yet, as we know, by focusing almost exclusively on the Commedia’s theological and moral content, Singleton had swept away its poetry. The legacy he left Teo was twofold. On the one hand, and in clear opposition to Singleton’s emphases, it spurred her commitment, as we have seen, to the Commedia’s poetic fabric. On the other, and positively, Singleton’s standpoint highlighted the critical need to acknowledge and assess the poem’s religious ambitions. However, instead of imprisoning herself, like so many other contemporary American Dantists, within an ‘allegorical’ cage, Teo turned her attention to other modes of medieval religious writing and, more importantly, she gauged their literary, and not simply their ideological significance for Dante. Poetry Beginning of page[p. 234] and religious belief could comfortably co-exist. Thus, her emphasis on ‘visionary’ literature and experience, whether in their aulic authoritative expressions — the ‘enraptured’ Paul of the Second Letter to the Corinthians, St John the recipient of apocalyptic visiones, Augustine’s and Aquinas’s exegesis of both events — or in their hugely successful ‘popular’ variant of adventurous and graphic accounts of the afterlife, was vital not only for her main argument but also for Dante scholarship more generally. At any rate, it should have been invigorating for Dante scholarship, but, alas, things didn’t quite work out in that way, as I shall soon elucidate. In the last twenty or so years, Dante’s predominant, wide-ranging, and deep-seated connections to Christian religious culture broadly understood have developed into a major and multifaceted area of research.1717See Giuseppe Ledda, ‘Cultura religiosa: ricordi autobiografici di un lettore novecentesco di studi su Dante’, in Now Feed Yourself: Anglo-American and Italian Scholarship on Dante, ed. by Zygmunt G. Barański, Theodore J. Cachey Jr., and Anna Pegoretti (Oxford: Legenda, 2024), pp. 201–27; Paola Nasti, ‘Ri-teologizzare Dante? Percorsi e prospettive per Dante e la cultura del suo tempo’, Letture Classensi, 50 (2022), pp. 63–121, and Nasti, ‘Religion and the Religious in Dante Studies’, in Now Feed Yourself, ed. by Barański, Cachey, and Pegoretti, pp. 167–200. Yet, Teo’s contributions to the field are rarely properly acknowledged or understood. However, I’m getting ahead of myself. More of that meandering reflection….

I’m pleased to note — and I hope that I don’t sound too smug in saying this — that I did appreciate the significance of The Undivine Comedy’s religious turn. By the early to mid-90s, I was deep at work on the essays that, in 2000, would converge in Dante e i segni, which is often credited with opening a space — especially in Italy and in the United Kingdom — for the study of the poet’s religious culture. As I grappled, largely in academic isolation, with the implications of Dante’s fascination with divinely inspired forms of knowledge, to learn that Teo was taking his visionary and prophetic contentions not just seriously but also as the basis of her re-evaluation of the Commedia was invigorating and reassuring. Yet, although Teo is among the scholars I cite most frequently in Dante e i segni, I rarely do so with reference to the sacred. The ways in which we were approaching the matter of Dante’s religious prerogatives were quite distinct. While I hope that, in examining the role of the vestigia Dei in the poet, I was able to keep matters of textuality and truth to the fore, never ‘disengaging form from Beginning of page[p. 235] content’ (UDC, p. 17, slightly adapted), my emphases were much more culturally historical than Teo’s emphases. Indeed, in my review of The Undivine Comedy, I did observe that

what does remain a bit in the shade is the extent to which the problem of the dichotomous relationship between truth and language — ‘the gap that exists between what he [Dante] says and what he has actually wrought’ [UDC, p. 19] — had, for centuries, been central to the symbolic-exegetical character of Christian epistemology. To put it simply, despite the supreme literary originality of the Commedia, the questions it raises remain deeply rooted in its own time.1818Barański, Speculum review, p. 1108.

The comment is valid, but it was a tad unfair. Teo’s primary interest was, as I have said before, the text and much less the context out of which the Commedia emerged.

We all know why The Undivine Comedy’s contribution to our estimation of Dante as a religious poet has not just remained substantially unrecognized but has, in fact, also been drastically, unfairly, and grotesquely distorted. That title and that subtitle. Even as insightful and appreciative a reader of The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante as Steven Botterill ends his review of ‘this almost wholly admirable book’ with a long paragraph that begins ‘“Almost”, because there remains the question of that ill-chosen title’.1919Steven Botterill, review of Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy (1992), Italica, 71 (1994), pp. 404–05 (p. 405).

I remember soon after The Undivine Comedy had appeared, either in an email or in person (this I don’t remember), ‘accusing’ Teo of having ‘plagiarized’ her title: it was one of my silly remarks that often fall flat. Teo demanded an explanation. Nie-Boska komedia — The Un-Divine Comedy — is the title of one of the great works of Polish nineteenth-century literature; indeed, despite its recourse to antisemitic tropes, ‘a masterpiece not only of Polish but also of world literature’,2020Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 244. The play has been regularly translated into English, most recently in Zygmunt Krasiński, The Undivine Comedy, trans. by Charles S. Kraszewski (Lehman, PA: Libella Veritatis, 1999). which, like many other works of that most Dantean of centuries, is profoundly indebted to the poet and the Commedia. The Beginning of page[p. 236] play’s author, Zygmunt Krasiński, was twenty — Dante, I like to imagine, would have felt a twinge of irritated envy — when, in 1833, he wrote the prose drama. Krasiński appears to have chosen the title to stress that the setting and action of his play are firmly in the here-and-now, thereby highlighting the stark contrast between the divine order of Dante’s afterlife and the decidedly non-divine world that he was describing. For most of the work’s four parts, the tenor is bleakly pessimistic: the degeneracy of the nobility, the failure of art, the grim violence of the class struggle, everywhere the pall of death, suicide, disease. And yet, (in)famously, the Nie-Boska komedia ends with the revolutionary leader Pankracy, after routing the forces of reaction, having a vision of a burning cross and of Christ. His last words just before he dies are ‘Galilaee vicisti!’ (‘Galilean, you have won!’). The Nie-Boska komedia is astonishingly and unexpectedly transformed into the Boska komedia.

Something not entirely dissimilar might be said to occur with Teo’s title. The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante leads one to expect a study — far from the first — whose aim is to challenge or even elide the Commedia’s religious character. And this, alas, is still how rather too many today deem its remit to be. Moreover, especially in Italy, this unfortunate misconception has been bolstered by the shudderingly unacceptable — at least as far as I am concerned — La ‘Commedia’ senza Dio. Dante e la creazione di una realtà virtuale that ‘disfigures’ the title page of the Italian translation of Teo’s book.2121Teodolinda Barolini, La ‘Commedia’ senza Dio. Dante e la creazione di una realtà virtuale, trans. by Roberta Antognini (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2003). Teo and I have often talked about her title and the unintended and unexpected effects it has engendered. It is for her to go into detail as to how the titles were finally arrived at. All I feel able to say is that, originally, Teo was considering a title along the lines of the soberly precise Dante and Narrative. We have jokingly mused that a book with such a title placed next to my blandly descriptive Dante e i segni would have made of them fine companion pieces, which, in many ways, they most certainly are.

Teo lucidly explains the exact meaning of her neologism ‘detheologizing’; and her explanation bears repeating, especially given the years of misapprehension:Beginning of page[p. 237]

Detheologizing is not antitheological; it is not a call to abandon theology or to excise theological concerns from Dante criticism. Rather, detheologizing is a way of reading that attempts to break out of the hermeneutic guidelines that result in theologized readings whose outcomes have been overdetermined by the author. Detheologizing, in other words, signifies releasing our reading of the Commedia from the author’s grip, finding a way out of Dante’s hall of mirrors. (UDC, p. 17)

In the remainder of her book, as we know, Teo undertakes the task of ‘detheologizing’ the lictera of the Commedia, which she accomplishes with acumen, rigour, and commitment, revealing in detail the workings of Dante’s formal strategies and their repercussions both on the poem and on its readership. She demonstrates the ever-changing ways in which Dante’s poetry accommodates his religious beliefs and ends — what she terms his ‘theology’ —, and the myriad combinations into which his religious beliefs and ends shape his poetry. The Undivine Comedy leaves no doubt that Dante is both a poet and a man of faith (I’m loathe to use the tag poeta-theologus or theologus-poeta given our increasing understanding of their problematic status, as, for the same reason, I am reluctant to employ ‘theology’ and ‘theologian’ — by the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, all these terms were contested and semantically fluid and unstable). To put it simply, Teo fulfils brilliantly the task she had set herself. Yet, and I can sense the frustration of all of us who have read The Undivine Comedy ‘tutta quanta’ (Inf. 20.114), it is also regrettably the case that her book has been deemed to argue in favour of the very opposite of what it actually and successfully proves. One of the problems with neologisms is that their makers cannot control their reception, especially when one of their constituent elements already has a deep-seated value in a linguistic culture. This is the case with the prefix de- in English which, with its origins in the Latin preposition ‘de’ — ‘from’, ‘away from’, ‘out of’ —, has connotations implying ‘moving away/from’, ‘reversing’, ‘removing’. On glancing at the title of Teo’s book, it must have seemed ‘obvious’ to some that they had ‘divined’ its ‘anti-theological’ message and thus did not need to investigate further. This is sad. Even more, it is an indictment of a serious lapse in professional judgment and integrity that, as academics, especially academics responsible for reading reliably, we should do everything to avoid. Yet, I cannot but wonder,Beginning of page[p. 238] alongside my dear much-missed friend Steven Botterill, how things might have gone if, instead of ‘detheologizing’, Teo had alighted upon ‘retheologizing’….2222Botterill, review of The Undivine Comedy, p. 405.

The moment has come to bring these recollections and reflections to a close. There is no question that The Undivine Comedy has stood the test of scholarly time; and I hope that what I have penned begins to give some idea as to why this is so. And there is more. Particularly effective, especially in recent years, has been the influence of Teo’s suggestions regarding the intricacies of the Commedia’s narrative structure. I must admit that, back in the mid-1990s, I didn’t quite realize how significant this aspect of her book actually is. In my review, I refer to it but twice, and then rather blandly and only in the concluding paragraph. The first time I highlight how ‘her various arguments are […] brought back to the central concepts of realism, narrative, and truth’ (I’ll get to my second reference imminently).2323Barański, Speculum review, p. 1109. I am now well aware of the consequence of Teo’s ‘narratological’ promptings, including those in Dante’s Poets, not least because they were of value to two of my former doctoral students. Both were interested in Dante’s characterization techniques, specifically the formal and structural implications of the varietas of the poet’s characters, what Teo synthesized as the ‘greater textual resonance’ and seductiveness of some of these.2424I am thinking of Laurence E. Hooper — who, like Steven Botterill, left us much, much too soon —, ‘Characterization’, in The Cambridge Companion to Dante’s ‘Commedia’, ed. by Zygmunt G. Barański and Simon Gilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 43–60; and of Katie Sparrow, ‘Dante’s Dantes: Self-Characterization in the Vita nova and Commedia’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Notre Dame, 2023) <https://doi.org/10.7274/1j92g735d7f> [accessed 18 April 2025].

‘She — naturally Teo — offers unambiguous evidence of the coherence and unity of the Commedia’s organization by demonstrating that similar formal and narrative structures, and thus similar ideological concerns, underpin the poem as a whole’2525Barański, Speculum review, p. 1109. — this is of course my second allusion to narrative. I believe I was trying to bolster my first reference. However, while the point I made was not invalid — the continuity of interests and strategies across the Commedia — the manner in which I phrased it was potentially misleading. To speak Beginning of page[p. 239] of ‘coherence and unity’ casts into shadow what, for me today, is most important about Teo’s proposals regarding the poem’s narrative make up: the fact that ‘Dante holds the aporias and contradictions of a prophetically inspired poem […] within the rigorous embrace of paradox’, and that this is especially so with respect to the ‘contradictions inherent in the project of representing paradise’ (UDC, pp. 13, 174). Unlike Teo, most Dantists tend to be blind to the Commedia’s structural complexity. Consequently, they do not feel the need to engage with the implications of its formal organization. The very strong impression that emerges from the critical tradition is that, in general, Dante scholars consider the structure of the Commedia to be a non-question, since, for all intents and purposes, it has been definitively resolved.2626It is telling that the author of the most substantial book written in recent years on the poem’s moral structure should have prefaced his excellent study by writing defensively: ‘Even to myself, writing a book about the structure of the Divine Comedy seems a very old-fashioned, if not positively reactionary, thing to do. There was a time when books were written on this subject, for the most part in the early years of the [twentieth] century. Nowadays, if the subject is treated at all, it is as a brief note to those few places in the Commedia where the structure of the cantica is discussed explicitly. As a separate subject, the poem’s structure seems to have been exhausted, or discredited’: Marc Cogan, The Design in the Wax: The Structure of the ‘Divine Comedy’ and its Meaning (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), p. xix. As far as they are concerned, at the macrostructural level, the Commedia is unproblematically dominated by notions of progress, success, fulfilment, orderliness, and perfection, notions that appear to be justified and regularly reaffirmed by the providential character both of the journey and of the writing. It thus goes without saying that, from this perspective, the Commedia is an elegant and harmonious text of concise and ineluctable homogeneity, in which each element functions effortlessly and faultlessly both in itself and in relation to all the other elements that constitute it. Time and again, mechanistically and monotonously, mention is made of a single and inviolate structure that succeeds in tidily circumscribing the development, the logic, the narratio, and the form of the poem. Among readers of the Commedia, the conviction has spread that, in the poem, and in particular in the Paradiso, where — ‘sì com’ io dovea’ (‘as I ought’) — the viator inexorably moves towards God, the ‘fine di tutt’ i disii’ (‘the end of all desires’; Par. 33.46–47), everything holds and everything fits: ‘l’opera Beginning of page[p. 240] più saldamente unitaria d’ogni tempo’ (‘the most solidly unified work of all time’);2727Aldo Vallone, Strutture e modulazioni nella ‘Divina Commedia’ (Florence: Olschki, 1990), p. 172. ‘il […] rapporto [di ogni passo] con il discorso generale sviluppato nel poema, la sua connessione con la fitta e complessa rete di messaggi che, intrecciandosi nelle sue varie parti, fanno dell’opera un mirabile monolite, un “Sistema” compatto in cui ogni particolare è in collegamento con il tutto e funzionale ad esso’ (‘the […] relationship [of each passage] with the general discourse developed in the poem, its connection with the dense and complex network of messages which, intertwining in its various parts, make the work an incredible monolith, a compact “System” in which every detail is connected to the whole and functional to it’);2828Enrico Malato, ‘Avvertenza del curatore’, in Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, ed. by Enrico Malato, 3 vols (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2021– ), i: Inferno (2021), pp. xix–xxix (p. xx). ‘Tutta l’invenzione del poema si fonda sull’armonioso ordine che regge l’universo e lo fa simile a Dio ([Par.] 1.103–05): dalla sua struttura primaria […] alle secondarie, e sempre ragionate, suddivisioni, tutto l’aldilà dantesco resiste come invenzione — quasi un blocco di diamante — per la qualità dotata di ordine, vale a dire di intelligibilità’ (‘The whole invention of the poem is based on the harmonious order that governs the universe and makes it similar to God ([Par.] 1.103–05): from its primary structure […] to the secondary, and always well-thought-out, subdivisions, the whole of Dante’s afterlife endures as an invention — almost a block of diamond — thanks to the quality endowed with order, that is to say with intelligibility’).2929Dante Alighieri, Commedia, ed. with commentary by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, 3 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1991–97), iii: Paradiso (1997), p. 875.

From this perspective, throughout the many ‘anni’ (‘years’) that made Dante ‘macro’ (‘thin’) because of his dedication to the ‘poema sacro’ (Par. 25.1–3), he never deviated from handling and arranging his poetic material with the same measured and harmonizing dedication. As in the ‘volume’ that ‘lega’ ‘ciò che per l’universo si squaderna’ (‘binds’ ‘what, in the universe, seems separate, scattered’; Par. 33.86–87) — creation constitutes the ultimate and most authoritative model of the Commedia —, each part comfortably finds its place in the totality Beginning of page[p. 241] of the whole and in relation to all the other parts: ‘The poem, in fine, declares everywhere, with its terza rima, that it is an analogue to God’s “poem”, to God’s book of the created universe. And even as all things in that universe reveal among themselves an order, so the parts of Dante’s poem in its symmetries’.3030Charles S. Singleton, Dante’s ‘Commedia’: Elements of Structure (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 58. Immediately after, Singleton refers to ‘the unfolding of its [the Commedia’s] form as the fulfillment of a necessary pattern’ (p. 59; my italics). In short, the poem and the poet are perfect. Yet, with Singleton once more firmly in her sights, Teo impressively demonstrates, documenti testuali alla mano, that, despite its seeming ‘diamantine’ flawlessness, it is far from the case that, in the Commedia, and especially in the Paradiso, everything holds and everything fits.3131I borrow the image from Lino Pertile, ‘Dimenticare Beatrice’, in La punta del disio, pp. 235–46 (p. 245): ‘La mia impressione è che qualcosa non quadri del tutto in quest’ultimo tratto della storia [namely the Empyrean]’. We have again allowed ourselves to become confused and mesmerized by Dante’s ‘hall of mirrors’ (UDC, p. 17), and have passively allowed the poet to lead us out of the maze. Instead, we should have recognized that ‘[e]ven the contradictions fundamental to this poem and its poetic authority are confronted analytically, through the syllogistic method’ (UDC, pp. 230–31) in Paradiso 24; that in Paradiso 30.28–30 ‘Dante is constrained to demote his earlier failure in canto 23, which now turns out not to have existed, in order to claim priority for this, his newest failure’ (UDC, p. 241); and that ‘the difference God made cannot be in vain […]. At the same time, this is an attitude with which Dante will struggle throughout the Paradiso, since it also accounts for the specter of disunity in the realm of unity’ (UDC, p. 182), an insight which Teo has recently reiterated a bit more forcefully: ‘il Paradiso delinea il conflitto che Dante prova nel cercare di venire a patti col fatto che nel regno dell’unità ci sia ineguaglianza’ (‘Paradiso outlines the conflict that Dante feels in trying to come to terms with the fact that in the realm of unity there is inequality’).3232Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Il Limbo di Dante e l’equità di accesso: non-Cristiani, bambini, e i criteri di inclusione ed esclusione, da If 4 a Pd 32’, Italianistica, 50 (2021), pp. 49–64 (p. 61).

This should have been ‘all about’ Teo. Yet, other American friends have on occasion sneaked in. And that feels right. On the one hand, I Beginning of page[p. 242] have wanted to stress that Teo’s achievements as a scholar and specifically in The Undivine Comedy can best be gauged by considering them in relation to the wider context of (American) Dante studies. On the other, as I wrote, I found myself thinking about the fifteen or so years that I have spent in North America since my first visit in the Spring of 1985. Teo is not only very much part of my nearly forty-year American ‘journey’, but she has also helped shape it, as is also true of the many other ‘wonderful Americans’ that I have had the privilege to meet. To put it slightly differently, I don’t imagine that I would have written this piece, and certainly not in the form it has taken, if I hadn’t become something of an ‘American’ myself. ‘Cause I love the American culture, its music, books and poetry | And the wonderful Americans that I’ve met on my journey’.3333Beans on Toast, ‘The Great American Novel’. Thanks to everyone, and with a special thanks to Teo.3434I should also like to thank Ed Barański, Ted Cachey, Simon Gilson, and Lino Pertile for their comments on an earlier version of this tribute. Much as I enjoyed writing it, it’s a genre with which I’m unfamiliar. I was very much in need of your advice.