Detheologize to Historicize Nassime Chida

Francesco Torraca’s early twentieth-century scholarship on Dante was notable for its historical detail. Torraca identified specific historical events and associated them with Dante’s verse, locating many of Dante’s manipulations of history by bringing divergences between Dante’s account and the historical record to the reader’s attention. In this vein, not as an example of a divergence but as a clarification of the historical record, Torraca pointed out that Dante is the only source for the story of Francesca.11Francesco Torraca, Il Canto v dell’ ‘Inferno’ (Rome: Nuova Antologia, 1902).

For almost a century following Torraca’s work, Dante scholars avoided using history to interpret the Commedia.22Elisa Brilli wrote of a hesitance among Dante scholars to use historical research following the foundational work carried out in the previous century. Nevertheless, she drew attention to some notable exceptions in her essay Elisa Brilli, ‘Dante e la storia: gli studi storici nelle Letture Classensi (12 dicembre 2020)’, in Cinquant’anni di letture classensi: lingua, storia e modernità di Dante, ed. by Giuseppe Ledda, special issue of Letture Classensi, 49 (2021), pp. 69–88, including philological work on Dante’s religious context, his relationship with and representation of Florence, and the 1979 edition of his letters edited in part by the medieval historian Arsenio Frugoni. During this period, the areas of Dante Studies where history would be used was in the time-honoured tradition of writing biographies of Dante, as well as in the philological work of collecting, editing, interpreting and distributing the extant documents relevant to his life, his reception, and the material production of his poem. Over the course of the twentieth century,Beginning of page[p. 126] six new biographies of Dante were written, none of which altered the long-established narrative of his life.33For an assessment of the biographical tradition in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries see Elisa Brilli, ‘Dante’s Biographies and Historical Studies: An Ouverture’, Dante Studies, 136.1 (2018), pp. 133–42.

In the new millennium, there was a surge in scholarship involving historical research, sometimes referred to as the ‘historical turn’ in Dante Studies. This historical turn is typically traced back to Carpi’s 2004 book, La nobiltà di Dante, which challenged a number of previously settled questions about Dante’s life.44See Umberto Carpi, La nobiltà di Dante (Florence: Polistampa, 2004). Carpi’s study focuses on Dante’s engagement with his political contexts. It promoted the theory of an ideological shift over the course of Dante’s exile. This work inspired a 2012 biography of Dante by Santagata, a new account of Dante’s life that presented him as a political opportunist. See Marco Santagata, Dante. Il romanzo della sua vita (Milan: Mondadori, 2012). These books were in turn followed in 2015 by a biography by Inglese which, unlike Carpi and Santagata’s accounts, was firmly grounded in both literary and documentary evidence. See Giorgio Inglese, Vita di Dante. Una biografia possibile (Rome: Carocci, 2015). These works coincided with the historical turn in Dante Studies. In her survey of historical research in Dante Studies within the context of the publication Letture Classensi, Brilli highlighted two older works: Padoan’s 1993 Il lungo cammino del ‘poema sacro’ and Pasquini’s Dante e le figure del vero. La fabbrica della ‘Commedia’, published in 2001.55The two works cited by Brilli are Giorgio Padoan, Il lungo cammino del ‘poema sacro’. Studi danteschi (Florence: Olschki, 1993); Emilio Pasquini, Dante e le figure del vero. La fabbrica della ‘Commedia’ (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2001).

The Undivine Comedy was published in 1992. I wish to highlight here the fact that historicizing approaches to Dante, which are a part of the historical turn in Dante Studies, belong to the legacy of Teodolinda Barolini’s concept of ‘detheologizing’ Dante. Within the corpus of Barolini’s writing, the series formed by The Undivine Comedy in 1992 and the articles ‘Dante and Francesca da Rimini’ in 2000 and ‘“Only Historicize”’ in 2009 represents a critical trajectory from detheologizing to historicizing.66Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), hereafter UDC. Subsequent references given in parentheses in the main text. See also Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender’, Speculum 75.1 (2000), pp. 1–28 and Barolini, ‘“Only Historicize”: History, Material Culture (Food, Clothes, Books), and the Future of Dante Studies’, Dante Studies, 127 (2009), pp. 37–54, hereafter OH. Subsequent references given in parentheses in the main text. In The Undivine Comedy, Barolini devised a Beginning of page[p. 127] new way of reading Dante, detheologizing, which among other things, offered a solution to the bind that was inhibiting the use of history to better understand Dante’s writings. In ‘Dante and Francesca da Rimini’ she produced an example of the interpretations made possible by historicizing, which she explicitly traced back to detheologizing. In ‘“Only Historicize”’ she invited young scholars to historicize Dante for themselves.

Historicizing is one among several approaches to Dante that uses history to enhance an understanding of the text. In the context of Dante Studies, the word immediately evokes Barolini’s ‘“Only Historicize”’, which in turn brings to mind two other texts; first, Fredric Jameson’s 1981 injunction to ‘always historicize’ in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Jameson’s thesis was that narratives are socially symbolic acts that negotiate and symbolically resolve the contradictions inherent in social and political life; they should therefore be interpreted within their social and historical context. Second, ‘“Only Historicize”’ also refers to E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End, published in 1910, in which the protagonist Margaret Schlegel seeks to bridge the gaps between people of different social classes and to reconcile the intellectual and emotional aspects of life. Margaret’s exhortation to ‘only connect!’ is used as an epigraph, and the passage is quoted at greater length within the article. The combination of these two references in the title ‘“Only Historicize”’ suggests to me that restoring Dante’s poem to its historical context need not undermine the view that the poem also transcends its context, and is thus exceptional. In Margaret’s words, ‘Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted’ (OH, p. 38).77OH, continuing on p. 38: ‘By “only historicize” I mean to invoke the well known injunction of E. M. Forster’s Howards End and thus to exhort rather than to restrict: “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” The fact that Forster’s plea also takes a stand that is profoundly against dualism makes it, in my view, all the more suited as a Dantean epigraph.’

To historicize the Commedia is to locate meaning in Dante’s verse that can only be accessed by considering its historical context, understood on the basis of pre-existing and contemporary sources, as well Beginning of page[p. 128] as current historiography, on the assumption that, if the context is not restored, some aspects of the poem will become obscured over time, including in the time between the writing of the poem and the earliest commentaries. To historicize the Commedia is to confront the implications of the vast historiography on Dante’s context that remains unexploited within Dante Studies. Barolini does this in ‘Dante and Francesca’, effectively participating in the historical turn before it was detected and named. Barolini discovered ‘a specialized bibliography on the historical Francesca of great erudition’ but found that it ‘rarely factored into literary readings’.88Barolini, ‘Dante and Francesca’, p. 2. Thus the fact that Dante was the only source for Francesca, highlighted by Torraca and reiterated in the Enciclopedia Dantesca, had not, she noted, informed subsequent readings of Inferno 5.

A significant part of the historiography on Dante’s historical context has yet to inform critical readings of the Commedia, a fact I had the opportunity to substantiate for myself. In dealing with the Malatesta family’s politics in ‘Dante and Francesca’, Barolini had noted the absence of interpretations of Inferno 27 that took into account Guido da Montefeltro’s impact on Romagna. In 2021, I consulted the most cited history of medieval Romagna, published in 1965,99Augusto Vasina, I Romagnoli fra autonomie cittadine e accentramento papale nell’età di Dante (Florence: Olschki, 1965). and found that the catalogue of Romagnol tyrants in Inferno 27, apparently unrelated to the second half of the canto featuring Guido da Montefeltro, became both a historical analysis of exceptional insight and an informed assault on Guido’s personal military record, when read in light of the history of medieval Romagna and of the Montefeltro bloodline.1010Nassime Chida, ‘Guido da Montefeltro and the Tyrants of Romagna in Inferno 27’, Romanic Review, 112.1 (2021), pp. 97–119. The failure to factor in historical information, latent in the first half of the canto, with respect to Guido da Montefeltro’s story in the second half of the canto left a critical void that resembled the situation described by Barolini in ‘Dante and Francesca’.

Historicizing does not involve confirming or questioning any given narrative of Dante’s life, including the material conditions of the poem’s production. When historicizing the Commedia, only the Beginning of page[p. 129] most uncontroversial facts about Dante’s life serve to support an argument, meaning any event for which there is unambiguous first-hand documentary evidence, such as his exile and his letters, or the events included in Inglese’s ‘cronologia minima’.1111Inglese, Vita di Dante. Dante’s own claims about his life are important to acknowledge when historicizing; however, these should be treated on a case-by-case basis with every effort made to maintain appropriate scepticism.1212Brilli called attention to the fact that over fifty percent of the sources for Dante’s life are Dante’s own statements, which scholars have preferred not to question even when there is counter-evidence. See Brilli, ‘Dante’s Biographies’, pp. 137–38. The uncertainty about Dante’s life can be tolerated by not basing a given interpretation of the poem on either unproven biographical data or on Dante’s own statements. For example, when historicizing Inferno 10, I found that while in 1302 Dante and the other exiles were accused of public crimes, in the time of Farinata and until 1267, mass exclusion was practiced on the basis of factional affiliation. To factor this information into a reading of Inferno 10 is to see that Dante inserted his own exile — and to some extent Guido Cavalcanti’s exile, during which Guido became terminally ill during Dante’s term as a prior — into the history of mass exclusion which he reconstructed over the course of the canto, in the form of a back and forth between the pilgrim and Farinata, the factional leader who inaugurated this very history in Florence and one of the first Ghibellines on record. Whether the accusations of corruption were grounded in truth or entirely fabricated is not relevant to this understanding of the canto, which shows Dante constructing a history of Florentine factionalism centred around moments of mass political exclusion, and presenting his own exile as a continuation of this partisan warfare, at a time of Guelf hegemony in Florence. The historical context thus shows Dante as a historian, who also used his poem to defend himself against accusations of corruption.

While historicizing, from a practical standpoint, relies on the scholarship of historians of medieval Italy and philologists of Italian literature, from a conceptual perspective it is made possible by detheologizing. In the first chapter of The Undivine Comedy, entitled ‘Detheologizing Dante: Realism, Reception and the Resources of Narrative’, Barolini took the necessary first step of deconstructing Dante’s Beginning of page[p. 130] realism: ‘Dante’s realism causes critics to tend to “believe” Dante without knowing that they believe him, i.e, to pose their critical questions and situate their critical debates within the very presuppositions of the fiction they are seeking to understand’ (UDC, p. 15). She then proposes to examine the ‘formal structures that manipulate the reader’ (UDC, p. 16) in service of Dante’s realism, calling for a ‘new formalism’ which she describes as a ‘formal method of reading’ (UDC, p. 17), because the tools of new historicism would not work on a representation so successfully engineered to be perceived as objective reality, and on a poet whom readers have traditionally read as a theologian, sometimes without realizing it.1313‘To the extent that we hearken always to what Dante says rather than take note of what he has done, we treat him as he would have us treat him — not as a poet, but as an authority, a theologian’ (UDC, p. 17). Dante is the subject of academic research carried out in theology departments as well as Italian or Romance Studies departments in the United States and in the United Kingdom. This method of reading is detheologizing.

The first traces of historicizing can be found in chapter 4 of The Undivine Comedy, where Barolini writes that Inferno 33 is ‘steeped in the people and events that shaped Ugolino’s politics, a politics whose central node was Sardinia, a Pisan possession’ (UDC, p. 96). In ‘“Only Historicize”’ Barolini refers back to The Undivine Comedy, noting that ‘the implicit hermeneutic guidelines structured by Dante into his text determine, indeed, overdetermine, interpretation’ (OH, p. 37), and that one way to deal with these is detheologizing, ‘a narrative approach that cleared the way for historicizing’ (OH, p. 38). In the 2022 revised edition of ‘“Only Historicize”’, she offered additional language about detheologizing as a method: ‘Detheologizing works by detaching our interpretive practice from the theologized thematic grid of hell versus heaven, thus allowing us to make connections that the overdetermined template occludes’.1414Teodolinda Barolini, Dante’s Multitudes: History, Philosophy, Method (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), p. 4, hereafter DM. Subsequent references given in parentheses in the main text. This revision theorizes her approach, which had previously been described in a footnote: referring to her essay ‘Dante and Francesca da Rimini’, she wrote that detheologizing allowed her to go beyond the damned/saved binary imposed by the author: ‘detheologizing allowed me to postulate interpretive categories more complex than ‘“Dante places Francesca in hell, so his view of her is negative,”Beginning of page[p. 131] and thereby opened the way for a reconsideration of Dante’s treatment of the dynastic wife’ (DM, p. 321 note 3 to chapter 1).

Detheologizing is the conceptual leap required to assess the significance of context. A systematic identification of the historical figures and events described in the poem, even if supported by a meticulous review of available sources, such as that of Torraca, merely creates the illusion that one is viewing the poem through the lens of history, when in fact one is viewing history through the lens of the poem. As a result, the accumulation of historical context falls short of complicating a pre-existing understanding of the text. Instead, the poem generates interest in the historical context. This may go some way in explaining the reluctance of Dante scholars to use history to interpret the poem for a century after Torraca’s scholarship, as well as the fact that so much historiography on Dante’s context has yet to inform readings of his poem. Without the preliminary work of detheologizing the text, a discrepancy such as the one we see in the catalogue of tyrants of in Inferno 27 — where Scarpetta’s rule over Forlì is anticipated by two years — is assumed to be the result of ignorance or bias, when there is counter-evidence for the former (Dante was a member of the exiled White Guelfs in the same year that they elected Scarpetta as their leader) and no concrete evidence for the latter.

To assess the significance of the historical context one needs, consciously or not, to detheologize the text. To do so is not to deny the moral dimensions of the poem but instead to look wilfully beyond Dante’s categories so as to bring the full complexity of Dante’s choices into view, since they include so much more than damnation and salvation. Returning to detheologizing in ‘Dante’s Sympathy for the Other’, another example of her historicizing approach to the poem, Barolini writes: ‘Which is more important: fictive damnation in a text or actual salvation in the historical record of human existence? To my mind, the answer is clear’ (DM, p. 29). Torraca himself did not aspire to establish a new critical methodology nor to occupy a unique theoretical position, his primary objective was to democratize access to Dante, particularly in educational settings undergoing reforms at the time.1515See Carlo Dionisotti, ‘Scuola storica’, in Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, ed. by Vittore Branca, 3 vols (Torino: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1973), iii, pp. 352–61; Valerio Marucci, ‘Introduzione’, in Francesco Torraca, Commento alla Divina Commedia, 3 vols (Rome: Salerno, 2008), i, pp. 9–32; Valerio Marucci, ‘Francesco Torraca e Dante’, L’Idomeneo, 31 (2021), pp. 97–106.Beginning of page[p. 132] Barolini’s essay ‘Dante and Francesca’ self-consciously relies on Torraca’s historical work, recovering his insight and reformulating it as the claim that Dante is Francesca’s historian of record.

While Dante’s representation of Francesca elicited an enduring interest in her, Dante’s realism prompted readers to grapple with her damnation as though it were a fact, and hence remain firmly ‘within the presuppositions of the fiction they are seeking to understand’ (UDC, p. 15). This effect is operative whenever one consults the available historiographical sources on a particular character, only to renegotiate the ethics of their placement in one or the other section of Dante’s afterlife, or only to determine why Dante has cast them in a particular light. As Barolini reminds her readers, ‘If we stand outside the fiction of who is damned and who is saved — if, in my terms, we “detheologize” — we can see that Dante acted as the historian of record for Francesca da Rimini, and for many other women as well’ (DM, p. 29).

Another effect of Dante’s realism is that his manipulations of history are difficult to see, because the poem changed how the past was remembered. For example, Farinata became the most famous Uberti after Inferno 10, but before Inferno 10, the most famous Uberti was likely Pierasino Uberti, a leader of the Ghibelline regime in Florence that followed Montaperti and the only Uberti to be named in the letters of Charles I of Anjou. Dante gave the Uberti who was responsible for the first mass political exclusion in Florentine history a prominence that endured through the centuries, while the Uberti who was the leader of the Ghibelline regime under which Dante himself was born faded into obscurity. To historicize the text is not only to recover such a manipulation of history, but also to decipher it. On the basis that Farinata inaugurated a new era of mass political exclusion in Florence by orchestrating the first mass political exclusion in Florentine history, I argue that Dante reconstructed a history of Florentine factionalism in Inferno 10.1616Nassime Chida, ‘Dante and the legacy of Montaperti’, Studj Romanzi, n.s., 19 (2023), pp. 163–74.Beginning of page[p. 133]

Since detheologizing is the necessary first step in historicizing, interpretations obtained through historicizing are part of the legacy of The Undivine Comedy. Barolini’s essay ‘Dante and Francesca’ is a clear example of what can be achieved by historicizing one of the most famous characters in the Commedia. A number of studies have historicized other aspects of the Commedia since then, exploring the relationship between Dante’s narrative choices and the social and political realities of his time, including Kristina Olson’s 2015 work on Dante and sumptuary laws in Florence, my 2021 reading of Inferno 27, Grace Delmolino’s 2023 essay on legal temporality and liability, and research available on Digital Dante.1717Kristina M. Olson, ‘Uncovering the Historical Body of Florence: Dante, Forese Donati, and Sumptuary Legislation’, Italian Culture, 33.1 (2015), pp. 1–15; Chida, ‘Guido da Montefeltro’; Grace Delmolino, ‘Fraudulent Counsel: Legal Temporality and the Poetics of Liability in Dante’s Inferno, Boniface VIII’s Liber Sextus, and Gratian’s De penitentia’, Speculum, 98.3 (2023), pp. 727–62. More studies like these are likely to emerge in the coming years.