IntroductionKristina M. Olson

Like many of the authors in this volume, I can remember the first time that I read The Undivine Comedy. It was the summer of 1999, right before I was to begin coursework at Columbia as a newly admitted graduate student, intent on continuing my studies of contemporary Italian poets — Amelia Rosselli, among others. I had completed two senior projects at Bard College in fulfillment of my bachelor’s degree: one a partial translation of Rosselli’s Documento (recently translated by our contributor Roberta Antognini) and the other a collection of my own poetry. At Bard, I had the great fortune of studying translation and contemporary Italian literature with William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli, both eminent translators. At Columbia, I planned to complete a dissertation on the figure of the beloved woman as a spiritual catalyst in modern Italian literature — Eugenio Montale’s Clizia, for example, who was based upon Irma Brandeis (1905–1990), the dantista who taught at Bard College and who wrote The Ladder of Vision (1962). While the topic is dissimilar from the scholarship I would eventually publish, I now understand the trajectory of this interest which felicitously brought me to study Dante with Teodolinda Barolini.

As an undergraduate, I had worked for many years at the Stevenson Library. High in a second-floor alcove in the antiquated part of the Beginning of page[p. 2] library, I spent several hours unpacking and reshelving — and reading — Irma Brandeis’s personal library, most of her tomes marked with an ‘Ex Libris’ stamp depicting the Florentine duomo. Dante’s poetry, it was first surmised by my naïve eye, held a fictional world that was in turn held and examined by another world, that of living scholars, translators, and poets intent on recreating it. In my senior year, I took one course on Dante with the medievalist Karen Sullivan, now Irma Brandeis Professor of Romance Literature and Culture, and was taken in more by the Vita nuova than by the Commedia, which we read only in part. I understood the Vita nuova then as a personal memoir of poetic craft and juvenile infatuation. Beatrice and Brandeis came to represent women whose intelligence and authority inspired poets in my young configurations of medieval literature and the study thereof. Like the special alcove where I was dismantling the Brandeis collection box by dusty box, I wanted to research these women and learn more about their historical, scholarly and poetic worlds.

In August 1999, I decided to prepare myself for fall courses by reading The Undivine Comedy. The preface struck me, especially its first two sentences: ‘One thinks of strange things reading the Commedia: that Dante’s spires of poetic life — terza rima — bear a resemblance to modern science’s spires of biological life, DNA; that his long obsession with the new is echoed in current research on the brain, which shows that the new things that we live actually become who we are. Dante is no naturalist, but he is the ultimate realist, preoccupied with rendering reality — even surreality — in language, “sì che dal fatto il dir non sia diverso”’.11Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. ix, hereafter UDC. Subsequent references given in parentheses in the main text. Here was a scholar who not only knew the world of Dante studies, but one who commanded a knowledge of Dante’s craft that could decode its marvelous texture. Her pages reintroduced me to Dante as a human poet, a mortal fabbro. Her book did not just pull back the curtain of Dante’s subtle narrative art but showed me how the curtain was made.

No longer in New York but in the land of gente nuova in northern Virginia, I now find myself in dialogue with my students at George Beginning of page[p. 3] Mason, a nearly minority-majority institution with a plural religious profile. Many of my students are Muslim; some have even come from Iran, where they are forbidden to read Dante. To present them with the Commedia solely as the reflection of a Christian afterlife would exclude a large population of the student body. In this context, the method of The Undivine Comedy is essential to bringing students to Dante and to making him accessible within their forma mentis. They understand the idea of a virtual reality and of world-building. For non-Christian students, The Undivine Comedy makes Dante’s afterlife less forbidden, because they have been allowed to detheologize and thus do not feel that they are supposed to take his vision at face value. Though assigning my students The Undivine Comedy sometimes solicits the reaction of the pilgrim in front of the Gate of Hell — ‘il senso lor m’è duro’ — they develop the ability to pose critical questions about Dante’s vision of the afterlife to gain both an appreciation of his mastery as well as confidence in their readerly skills. This is the spirit of detheologizing, as Barolini writes it: ‘Detheologizing is not antitheological … [but] a way of reading that attempts to break out of the hermeneutic guidelines that Dante has structured into his poem’ (UDC, p. 17).

Those who have not had the privilege to study with Barolini in person can enjoy some of that experience when reading The Undivine Comedy. Her 350-page lectura dantis mirrors the sweeping, comprehensive approach that she adopts in the classroom: a guided, intense reading that leads to a deep knowledge of the text. Students at Columbia then also had the benefit of studying with Joan Ferrante, her advisor, whose broad perspectives of continental medieval literature and history in which she contextualized Dante’s poetic project complemented Barolini’s granular study of the text. I would not have traded my rigorous study with them for anything else.

From historical women who inspired men’s verse, I had arrived in a sphere where women professed Dante with authority and command (imagine my surprise once I left the nido of Columbia). Barolini and Ferrante taught us to question the commonplaces of Dante criticism, to read ‘against the grain’, as Barolini likes to say. We could, and should, refute the facile binary of salvation and damnation, research Dante’s sources and his historical contexts, and overturn the misogynist narratives in scholarship that regarded female characters. Beatrice was Beginning of page[p. 4]‘loquax’, for Barolini, and even — in Ferrante’s phrase — the priest of an androgynous god.22Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature, with a Discussion of Dante’s Beatrix Loquax’, in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), pp. 360–378. Joan M. Ferrante, Dante’s Beatrice: Priest of an Androgynous God (Binghamton, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992). My scholarly journey thus began once my standard frameworks for literature had been overturned — once that which was divine had become undivine. The ‘brash, sometimes militant’ thirty-something, to use Barolini’s words in these pages, became my beloved forty-something advisor, an ammiraglio in poppa (to rephrase Purgatorio 30.58), who indicated the new worlds of intellectual inquiry through her rigorous pedagogy.33Quotations from the Commedia are from Dante Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. by Giorgio Petrocchi, Società Dantesca Italiana, Edizione Nazionale, 2nd rev. edn, 4 vols (Florence: Le Lettere, 1994). There were, and still are, cose nove to be discovered.

~

I begin with this personal reflection because the essays that follow are at once both personal and intellectual. While several authors in this volume are former students of Barolini (Antognini, Chida, Delmolino, DiNardo, Gragnolati, Kumar, Van Peteghem), others are her contemporaries and friends, including the first reviewers of the book (Barański, Psaki). This volume is not the published proceedings of the international symposium held at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies to examine the legacy of The Undivine Comedy thirty years after its publication (2022). A World of Possibilities includes new scholarship by luminaries in the field whose contributions widely attest to the cross-disciplinary and international breadth of The Undivine Comedy’s legacy.

Published by Princeton University Press in 1992, and in Italian as La ‘Commedia’ senza Dio (Feltrinelli, 2003), The Undivine Comedy was a clarion call for a paradigmatic shift in reading Dante’s Commedia, as Ferrante writes in the epilogue:

Thirty years ago, I was stunned by the brilliance of this book, a brilliance that was based on the simple but startling approach Beginning of page[p. 5] of focusing not on what Dante says he is doing, but on what he actually does, on how he manipulates us, forcing us to respond in his terms. Rereading the book thirty years later, I am once again overwhelmed by the striking effectiveness of looking so closely at the tools Dante uses to do this, creating tension and suspense where none should exist, using difference to enable a narrative that claims to describe unity. I am still struck by how obvious some of her points seem once she has pointed them out, not to say by how readers wrapped up in larger concepts had failed to see the most basic tools with which Dante creates his universe. The Undivine Comedy remains the most impressive work on the artistry of a great poet.

Thirty-three years after the publication of The Undivine Comedy, this volume takes a critical look at the field of Dante Studies and interrogates how it has been reconfigured. Barolini’s critical intervention, which she coins as ‘detheologizing’, is more rigorously understood as a form of methodological recalibration. It is not, as she and others here clarify, an abandonment of theology, but a refusal to let ingrained modes of interpretation dictate the field. The distinction is subtle but vital. Her book shifts the field beyond an overdetermined reliance upon the structure of damnation and salvation and into the narrative space where the wealth of the poem is more powerfully mined.

When The Undivine Comedy was released in 1992, its title provoked some controversy, as Barański and Storey recall here. Some mistook it for a rejection of Dante’s religiosity, an affront to faith, or a secularization of sacred text. But as she has clarified, the title — chosen by Princeton University Press — was a provocation aimed not at theology, but at the critical establishment that did not question inherited interpretive frameworks. In Italy, the translated title La ‘Commedia’ senza Dio stirred similar anxieties. The title’s ‘undivine’ pun was not iconoclastic but methodological. It invited readers to approach the Commedia not as a repository of theological dogma, but as a complex fiction, to which the study of narrative and history must be applied as solvents, as Barolini explains in her essay in this book.

The importance of The Undivine Comedy lies not merely in the abundant insights it offers — the poetics of the new; the figures of Ulysses and Geryon for narrative transition; the heavenly paradoxes of più e meno; the leaps of the sacred poem — but in her insistence Beginning of page[p. 6] that we read the text closely. As she writes in her essay for this volume, Barolini believed in ‘modeling what it is to read critically, using critical tools that must include an understanding of Coleridge’s suspension of disbelief — and therefore also include the critic’s ability to suspend the suspension of disbelief’. This call to action reverberates throughout the essays collected here, which variously take up her narratological and historicizing lenses and her critique of our ‘reliance on the grid of the Commedia’s structure and thematics’.

Organized into five thematic sections, A World of Possibilities traces the impact of The Undivine Comedy across multiple axes: narrative, historical, visual, and theoretical. The structure reflects the capaciousness of Barolini’s book and the wide reach of its influence, expanding our sense of what ‘detheologizing’ can cultivate in our scholarship.

Following the two solvents described by Barolini in her methodological essay, the first sections of the book are dedicated to narratological and historicized readings of the Commedia. The section ‘Detheologize to Narrative’ includes contributions by H. Wayne Storey, Roberto Antonelli, and Laura DiNardo. In ‘The Intricate Weaving of The Undivine Comedy’, Storey reminds us that The Undivine Comedy is to be read in whole and not in part as it magisterially analyzes the unified narrative threads spanning the Commedia’s three canticles, resulting in a view of Dante’s poem as ‘whole cloth, uncut’. The essay concludes with an analysis and an addition to Barolini’s reading of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic in the Sphere of the Sun to disentangle the complex ‘layering of cultural affinities’ and narrative strategies within the Commedia.

As Roberto Antonelli writes in ‘The Undivine Comedy: Dante One and Multiple’, Barolini arrives at ‘original discoveries thanks to a formal interpretation in which, as compared to her predecessors, “the form is never disengaged from the content” (UDC, p. 17)’. Extending Barolini’s method, Antonelli demonstrates how Dante employs ‘camouflaging’ techniques to divert attention from his narrative artistry by leveraging the complex functions of the poem’s great characters and its pervasive intertextual relations. What results is an additional, theatricalized narrative that engages the reader in moral and existential considerations, to which Antonelli turns our attention in his essay.Beginning of page[p. 7]

Laura DiNardo explores how Dante-poet utilizes conditional constructions (expressions like ‘if p, then q’) in the Commedia to ‘inscribe possibility into the poem’ in her essay, ‘Reasoning between Possibility, Fictional Reality, and Actuality: A Case Study in Detheologizing the Commedia’s Conditionals’. She argues that Dante employs these linguistic structures to bridge fictional reality with actuality and possibility, asserting the poem’s truthfulness through a precise semantic framework. The essay provides original readings of Inferno 9 and 27 to demonstrate how the poet’s careful use of ‘se’ (if) manipulates the reader’s understanding of possible worlds and the story’s realism. By examining Dante’s engagement with the philosophy of language, DiNardo suggests that the Commedia functions as a testing ground for the power of conditionals in bolstering its narrative as ‘a nonfalse error, a non falso errore, not a fiction that pretends to be true but a fiction that IS true’ (UDC, p. 13).

‘Detheologize to Historicize’, the second section of the book, contains essays by Nassime Chida, Alberto Casadei, and George Dameron. A line of inquiry whose seeds are planted in The Undivine Comedy, historicizing approaches to Dante’s poetry are related to the critical project of Barolini’s book in ways that were subsequently explained in her essay, ‘Only Historicize’.44Teodolinda Barolini, ‘“Only Historicize”: History, Material Culture (Food, Clothes, Books), and the Future of Dante Studies’, Dante Studies, 127 (2009), pp. 37–54. In ‘Detheologize to Historicize’, Chida claims that by moving beyond the poem’s theological framework and focusing on its formal structures, scholars can more effectively assess its historical context. Historicizing allows for new interpretations that challenge traditional understandings, such as viewing Dante as a historian who manipulated events for his own narrative — as Chida demonstrates for Guido da Montefeltro and the Romagnol families of Inferno 27 and for Farinata’s account of the Battle of Montaperti in Inferno 10.

‘Teodolinda Barolini and the Signs of Newness in The Undivine Comedy’ by Alberto Casadei discusses the poem as a ‘non-false error’ or a ‘truth that has the face of a lie’ vis-à-vis the assertion that Dante blends poetic invention with what he believed to be a genuine vision. The text revisits Barolini’s evaluation of previous critical approaches Beginning of page[p. 8] to Dante, such as those of Nardi and Singleton, and suggests that Dante’s initial cantos of Inferno may reflect an earlier, evolving stage of his thought. Casadei emphasizes the need for an historically sensitive reading that appreciates the chronology behind the Commedia’s poetic composition.

George Dameron examines Dante Alighieri’s involvement in Florentine politics and military actions, particularly his role in disrupting food supplies to Florence during his exile (1302–1304), a period of severe food scarcity, in ‘Dante’s War: Exiles, carestia, and Conflict in the Florentine Countryside, 1301–1304’. Dameron contrasts these actions with the ideals of good governance and communal nourishment that Dante espoused in the Convivio and the Commedia. His essay also explores the symbolism of food and hunger in Dante’s writings, notably in the portrayal of Count Ugolino in Inferno 33, suggesting a possible self-reflection on Dante’s part regarding his earlier participation in weaponizing food. Taking inspiration from ‘Only Historicize’, Dameron’s approach emphasizes the importance of historical context in understanding Dante’s poetry, an approach first encouraged for readings of this canto by Barolini in The Undivine Comedy (UDC, p. 97).

The next section, ‘Detheologize to Retheologize’, confronts the misguided perception that ‘detheologizing’ excludes theology from interpretations of Dante. This section demonstrates, on the contrary, that Barolini’s approach can help bring into focus the poet’s distinctive strategies of theologizing. Grace Delmolino’s ‘Dante’s Lucy in the Canon Law of Consent’ evinces Dante’s original characterization of Lucy in the Commedia. Lucy’s story played a prominent role in legal and theological discussions of rape and the will. Comparing Dante’s poem with sources in Gratian and Aquinas, Dante’s Lucia no longer appears as a mediating figure, but as an embodiment of authority.

Giuseppe Ledda’s essay, ‘Prophetic Models and Structures in an Undivine Comedy’, expands upon chapter 7 of Barolini’s book and its analysis of Dante’s prophetic identity. Ledda argues that ‘detheologizing’ does not negate the religious dimension of Dante’s work but rather uncovers the literary and poetic strategies used to construct the illusion of theological truth. Dante both aligned with and distinguished himself from the medieval visionary tradition through his unique prophetic Beginning of page[p. 9] self-fashioning in which he asserted his authority as a divinely inspired poet.

‘Divining The Undivine Comedy: Reflections and Recollections’ by Zygmunt G. Barański offers a personal reflection on the intellectual influence of Teodolinda Barolini, focusing on The Undivine Comedy. One of the first reviewers of the book, Barański explains the originality and significance of The Undivine Comedy in its challenge to established modes of interpretations. This essay celebrates The Undivine Comedy’s enduring influence on Dante scholarship and its pivotal role in shifting critical perspectives within American Dantism.

The section ‘Detheologize to Dramatize’ collects essays that treat the poet’s role in visualizing fictional worlds, whether the images evoked on the Terrace of Pride or the scenes of rape from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Further, the poet renders corporeal and visceral the experiences of love in his poetry in ways that are pointedly erotic and distinctive from contemporary medieval literature. Lina Bolzoni’s essay, ‘Dante and “visibile parlare”’, examines Dante’s poetic and visual project on the Terrace of Pride. Taking inspiration from chapter 6 of The Undivine Comedy, Bolzoni explores Dante’s vivid descriptions to make the unseen tangible and comprehensible to his readers, effectively competing with divine creation in his mimesis. She traces Dante’s intentional blurring of boundaries between divine art and his own representation, acknowledging the risks of such a challenge to divine authority, and draws our attention to how the poet educates the reader to engage their senses and emotions.

In ‘Ovidio senza Dio: Ovidian Myth and Sexual Violence in the Commedia’, Julie Van Peteghem surveys how medieval readers, particularly Dante, interpreted sexual violence in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, contrasting Dante’s approach with prevailing medieval commentaries. While earlier commentators often allegorized or omitted explicit mentions of rape and sexual assault, focusing on moral or biological meanings, Van Peteghem demonstrates that Dante’s Commedia confronts these themes differently, especially through the myth of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. Dante diverged from the medieval tradition by portraying such violence more explicitly, even infusing sexualized imagery into his descriptions of transformation and punishment in the cantos of the thieves (Inferno 24–25).Beginning of page[p. 10]

Elena Lombardi’s ‘In Praise of Detheologizing’ celebrates the liberating joy of rediscovering Dante after the publication of The Undivine Comedy and its call for a shift away from a traditional, ‘fundamentalist’ approach that treats it as divinely inspired truth. Lombardi champions Barolini’s perspective as it challenged the long-held notion of Dante as a perfect, morally unwavering author. By embracing a detheologized reading of the Commedia, Lombardi suggests, scholars can move beyond rigid, predetermined interpretations to appreciate his human artistry.

Manuele Gragnolati reads the paradoxical nature of heaven as poeticized in Dante’s Paradiso in his essay, ‘Heavenly Paradoxes and Their Pleasures’. Starting from Barolini’s analysis of the poem’s ‘jumping textuality’ (UDC, chapter 10), Gragnolati explores the third canticle’s embrace of unity alongside individual difference. Drawing on feminist and queer scholars such as Julia Kristeva and Leo Bersani, Gragnolati affirms that this textual experience reproduces the ‘paradoxical pleasure not only of losing but also finding oneself’.

The final section of the book engages The Undivine Comedy as a theoretical lens through which one can analyze the poem’s modern reception and translations. F. Regina Psaki’s contribution, ‘The Role of the Reader in Actualizing the Commedia’, meditates upon how Dante’s epic poem perpetuates itself through its readers. Psaki argues that Dante deliberately engages and forms his audience, transforming them from passive recipients into active ‘soundboxes’ where the poem’s themes and linguistic innovations resonate and persist across generations. Modern translations, particularly those by Mary Jo Bang, exemplify this ongoing actualization, making the Commedia accessible and relevant to contemporary readers by bridging the gap between Dante’s historical context and our own ‘postmodern, post-9/11, Internet-ubiquitous present’.

‘From Detheologizing to Decolonizing: Toward a Reading of Dante and Alterity’ by Akash Kumar proposes that ‘detheologizing’ the poem opens it to ‘decolonized’ readings. Drawing inspiration from chapter 2 of The Undivine Comedy, Kumar encourages readers to challenge the ingrained Eurocentric and nationalist views of Dante, whose poetry embodies his ‘love of difference’. Kumar draws our attention to the reception of Dante’s poem by Caribbean poets Derek Walcott and Beginning of page[p. 11] Lorna Goodison, whose adaptations foreground linguistic difference and political rebellion. Kumar also posits that Salman Rushdie ‘combines a decolonizing and detheologizing approach to the Commedia’.

Translator of La ‘Commedia’ senza Dio: Dante e la creazione di una realtà virtuale (Feltrinelli, 2003), Roberta Antognini delves into the complex nature of translating scholarship, while reflecting on her experience translating The Undivine Comedy. She analyzes the figure of Geryon from the Inferno as a metaphor for the intricate process through which a new text emerges from its original. The embodiment of transition and the ‘truth that has the face of falsehood’, Geryon symbolizes the delicate balance translators must strike between fidelity to the source and creating a fluid target text.

This volume — A World of Possibilities: The Legacy of ‘The Undivine Comedy’ — emerges from the conviction that Barolini’s work opened not a path but a field. That field has grown beyond the contours of any single method, and the essays collected here demonstrate just how widely her influence has reached: across continents, disciplines, and generations. I offer this book not as a Festschrift in the traditional sense, but as a constellation of encounters with the legacy of The Undivine Comedy: critical, methodological, pedagogical, and, most deeply, readerly and personal.

I heartily thank Manuele Gragnolati and Christoph Holzhey of ICI Berlin Press for their belief in this project from its earliest stages and their collaboration on the manuscript. Their editorial vision created the perfect home for this special volume. It is due to them and to Louisa Elderton and Claudia Peppel, who provided patient guidance in the book’s production and creative design, that this book became a reality. My gratitude extends to Zygmunt Barański for his friendship and support, as ever, and to Martin G. Eisner, whose many contributions to our discussions on The Undivine Comedy inform this volume. Finally, my deepest thanks to Laura DiNardo who translated several essays in this volume, and to Bridget Pupillo who copyedited each essay with expertise and precision.