The Intricate Weaving of The Undivine ComedyH. Wayne Storey

I seem to remember that Teo and I were introduced to one another in 1977 by the erstwhile librarian of the Paterno Library, Bob Connolly, long before the building’s renovation and back when the Paterno contained the core of the Italian Department’s collection of books and journals that were studied at desks and tables for long hours by graduate and undergraduate students.11Originally delivered 21 October 2022 at Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies for the conference ‘The Undivine Comedy Thirty Years Later’, I have attempted to maintain the talk’s more conversational tenor, adding only some explanations and notes. A brief history of the Casa Italiana and some photos of scenes from its pre-renovation Paterno Library are included on the website of the Italian Academy <https://italianacademy.columbia.edu/>. For a more detailed history, see Barbara Faedda, From Da Ponte to the Casa Italiana. A Brief History of Italian Studies at Columbia University (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). It was my first year at Columbia, the year I landed on the shores of the Upper West Side from the University of Florence; Teo was finishing her dissertation and would soon be Berkeley-bound. Our paths would not cross again, at least in any meaningful way, until some nine years later when Tibor Wlassics was organizing the first issues of his renegade journal Lectura Dantis and asked me to review Dante’s Poets (1984). Published in 1988, the review found its way to Teo and we started a conversation that has lasted over Beginning of page[p. 52] thirty years, at first every week or so on the phone, and after that by email, lunches and dinners for one conference or another, shared with colleagues and our families. That collaboration produced volumes such as Dante for the New Millennium (2003) and Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation (2007), more than a few conferences, and even companion essays in the first issue of Francesco Benozzo’s journal Philology.22Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Critical Philology and Dante’s Rime’, Philology, 1.1 (2015), pp. 91–114; H. Wayne Storey, ‘A Note on Boccaccio’s Dantean Categories, or, What’s in a Book? libro, volume, pistole, rime’, Philology, 1.1 (2015), pp. 115–19. But that collaboration has been perhaps even more significant in helping to shape intellectual directions, especially those of journals on which we served as editors and board members. When Dante Studies was disowned by the State University of New York Press, we found it a new editorial home, moving it to the same press that would publish our Dante for the New Millennium: Fordham University Press. Later, when Dante Studies fell further and further behind in issuing its annual volumes, we devised a series of guest-editors to bring the journal more rapidly up to date.33The first of these issues was a 2006 collection of essays devoted to the topic ‘Dante and the Malaspina Seven Centuries after his Sojourn in Lunigiana (1306–2006)’, Dante Studies, 124 (2006), and was guest edited by H. Wayne Storey and Michelangelo Zaccarello. Teo’s contributions to Textual Cultures and Medioevo letterario d’Italia, both journals with a philological focus, helped to expand their definitions of textuality and examine how the lines between philological and literary criticism were far more fungible and interrelated than most had proposed.44For example, Teodolinda Barolini’s essay ‘The Case of the Lost Original Ending of Dante’s Vita Nuova: More Notes Toward a Critical Philology’, Medioevo letterario d’Italia, 11 (2014), pp. 37–43, directly confronted the critical-interpretative nature of some of early Italian literature’s supposedly philological proposals that crossed the line into critical interpretation, all the while claiming to be ‘neutral’ because of their philological methodology. That collaboration continues to this day as it started off: the perhaps unlikely sintonia between a codicologist/philologist and a literary critic/historian, at times with two different perspectives.

I raise these memories not as a demonstration of the privilege of friendship but as part of what Teo herself would call ‘the historical record’ of The Undivine Comedy.55Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), hereafter UDC. Subsequent references given in parentheses in the main text. For I believe that back in the late Beginning of page[p. 53] 1980s, well before its publication, I might have been one of the earliest benefactors of the book’s insights. I did not read any early drafts of chapters, though I knew Teo was writing and then later working on proofs. We might have discussed the title and certainly later the translation’s title. But many of those same discussions led me through impasses in the second part of Transcription and Visual Poetics, so that I acknowledged in print that Transcription would never have been finished without those conversations with Teo.66H. Wayne Storey, Transcription and Visual Poetics in the Early Italian Lyric (New York: Garland, 1993), p. xviii. Some of our discussions were about the nature of narrative and poetics, voice and rhetorical constructions; other times we talked about Guittone and even about the influence of Guido Cavalcanti on Bob Dylan, both of us independently sure that he appears in ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. Like many of our generation, we had both been raised intellectually with a big dose of works like Scholes and Kellogg’s Nature of Narrative, Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, of course Auerbach’s Mimesis, and, later, the essays in the 1984 Yale French Studies volume (67) Concepts of Closure (edited by David Hult), a volume I would review in 1990 in Romance Philology. But for me at the core of our conversations were often questions and observations that lingered about the multiple topics and approach of Dante’s Poets, a book that so many of us, including the prize committees of the Medieval Academy of America and the Modern Language Association, had found innovative and compelling. In her treatment of Dante’s engagement with ancient poets (and the narrative trajectories of their histories) of the caliber of Guittone d’Arezzo, Guido Guinizzelli, Arnaut Daniel, and Virgil, from the Vita Nova to the Commedia, Teo interrogated the implications of multiple poetics in Dante’s re-creation of history, or — to be more precise — historiography. And at the core of that writing and rewriting is authority, the role of authoritative voice in the creation of narrative. If I had to write my 1988 review of Dante’s Poets all over again, it would focus on the rhetorical structures and essential problem of authority in narrative. But Teo saved me this hypothetical task by writing The Undivine Comedy. If Conley’s 1988 translation of Certeau’s L’Écriture de l’histoire had gathered more notice, she could have easily entitled those ten chapters Beginning of page[p. 54] and appendix ‘The Dantean (Re)Writing of History and Narrative’ as a parallel exegesis of Dante’s creation of narrative authority from multiple quadrants of his Commedia. Admittedly, this hypothetical and — let’s face it — inelegant title would have saved the book the distracting and useless controversy that ‘detheologizing Dante’ raised, if not a tidal wave, certainly a rumbling din of misperception that she was taking God out of the Commedia: a response I never understood since a calm reading of the entire book made it clear that the extraction of the divine from the Commedia — pace Trissino evviva le Terze Rime di Pietro Bembo e Aldo il Romano — was not anywhere in her agenda. The controversy risked obfuscating not only the interpretative brilliance of the whole book’s contribution of a multifaceted exposition of narrative and poetic authority that played out across individual chapters and in the sweep of an exegesis that runs from chapter 2 on incipits in the Inferno and chapter 3’s ‘Aeronautics of Narrative Transition’ to the Appendix’s analysis of the essential notion of narrative transition ‘How Cantos Begin and End’. Obviously the dry Certeauesque title would have listed toward the derivative, and in my decades of friendship with Teo, I can tell you that there is nothing derivative in her thinking. Teo charts new paths; she doesn’t follow those of others. As her subsequent works have verified, she loves to interrogate the philosophical system of poetry and poetics and Dante’s willingness — to use her words — to go against the grain of that system with his eclecticism and to create a new kind of authority, an authority at the juncture between art and philosophy. Not to my mind alone, the proposal to ‘detheologize’ the Commedia was to posit the poetic/philosophical dilemma of entering and then closing off — concluding in words, space, and time — the infinite. This Teo does by introducing us in chapter 2 to the philosophical essential instilled within the poetics of human newness, against the problem that Boethius posed centuries before of the singular wholeness of all already known in the mind of the divine. And after an array of analyses of the components of that poetics, she concludes with a final meditation on transition and closure, both time-driven and imperfect, like the human vision they encapsulate, both literally represented by defective terze rime, the incipit missing its B rhyme to initiate the narrative’s concatenation and the final rhyme of each canto missing its third rhyme to shut down the artificial structure of the canto itself. Only the Beginning of page[p. 55] repeated final rhyme of the three canticles, in stelle, enjoys a closure in a multiple of three that spans the entire work.

In chapter after chapter, The Undivine Comedy demonstrates the diverse facets and implications of Dante’s creation of narrative authority within the problematic contexts tied both to theological and classical topoi such as Hell and Paradise and especially in the realm officially recognized by the Church only in the late thirteenth century: Purgatory. Teo investigates key moments in the text to answer the question of how the writer of the sacrato poema must wrestle control of authority but with the imperfect human voice of the initiate who must nevertheless be the narrative’s fabbro.

Nowhere is the intricate task of The Undivine Comedy more nuanced and yet more resilient in its analysis of Dante’s creation of his own authoritative voice than at the center of her study, chapter 6, ‘Re-presenting What God Presented’. In many ways it is the rhetorical and methodological key to The Undivine Comedy. Chapter 5 reminds us that the climb into Purgatory is the very definition of new narrative and the untrodden path in classical literature. But as we all remember, Dante sets himself the task of going beyond art and nature, violating — as Teo reminds us — the principles of mimesis (UDC, p. 122). Fair enough, no mean task. But she is quick to remind us that the three reliefs of the first terrace have their supernatural materiality of seemingly being alive and seemingly speaking precisely because they have been made by ‘Colui che mai non vide cosa nova’ (‘The One who never saw anything new’; Purg. 10.94).77Except where noted, citations from the Commedia are taken from Dante Alighieri, Le opere di Dante. Testo critico della Società Dantesca Italiana, ed. by Giuseppe Vandelli (Florence: R. Bemporad & Figlio, 1921). When possible, English translations of the Commedia come from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. by Allen Mandelbaum, 3 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980–82). However, Mandelbaum used the 1966–67 Petrocchi edition for his translation rather than the earlier Vandelli edition. Moreover, by necessity, Mandelbaum’s translation adopts great flexibility in rendering Dante’s syntactic structures in English, at times expanding beyond even the limits of the terzina (see Purgatorio 10.106–08, which begins in his English in v. 105, creating an enjambment not in Dante’s original). In both cases I supplement Mandelbaum’s translation to render accurately the Italian verses. About this ‘visibile parlare’ Dante tells us it is new to us humans because it has never been seen in our world (‘novello a noi perché qui non si trova’, ‘but we, | who lack its likeness here, find novelty’; Purg. 10.96). This is the same newness to which Beginning of page[p. 56] she has introduced us in chapter 2, the new that ‘novum aliquid atque intentatum artis’ (‘has never been tried in art’; De vulgari eloquentia 2.13.13)88Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo in his edition of the D.v.e. in Dante Alighieri, Opere di Dante, ed. by Franca Brambilla Ageno and others (Florence: Polistampa, 2012) numbers the lines in 2.13 differently than Pio Rajna did in the 1921 edition, but this part of the text clearly constitutes a first addendum against repeated rhyme (‘rithimi repercussio’) unless the poet is attempting that which has never been done, adopting for himself as it turns out (in the sonnet ‘Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna’) the cultural right of the knight on the day he attains the rank (‘ut nascentis militia dies’). English translation mine. that operates, she reminds us, in direct contrast to the angels in Paradiso 29, whose sight is never interrupted by the new (‘non […] interciso da novo obietto’, ‘never intercepted | by a new object’; v. 80). Dante’s willingness to coin such a syntagm to render artistically what is divine and inimitable art that supersedes nature itself draws upon the unfolding of narrative in time and movement. In fact, both terms fuse activities in time and movement — perception and speech — to create a kind of impossibilium of the senses (visible orality), what Teo described as a ‘fourth dimension’. It is, of course, narrative for which we have been prepared in Dante’s descriptions of the intagli that extend through two senses: sight and sound, then eyes and nose, all systematically tempered by the verb parere to reclaim the poet’s authority, reminding us that his are the eyes that witness and ‘transcribe’ and through which we too see and hear these new truths unfold: ‘Gli occhi miei ch’ a mirare eran contenti, | per veder novitadi ond’ e’ son vaghi’ (‘My eyes, which had been satisfied in seeking | new sights — a thing for which they long’; Purg. 10.103–04). Yet it is Dante’s pivot in the very next terzina (vv. 106–08) that does something truly extraordinary: the narrator of this intense experimentation in perception breaks the spell he is casting by turning to us, his readers, to remind us of God’s authority not only in the realm of the reliefs’ superhuman perfection that God (‘lo fabbro loro’, ‘their maker’; v. 99) has created and that he is now poetically rendering, but of God’s command of their corrective moral message (the proponimento), to which we should not be too tired to pay attention:

Not since the Barbi-Vandelli debate on smagare/dismagare has this passage garnered the kind of attention it deserves.99For the methodological contexts of these debates, the most useful points of departure are still Giuseppe Vandelli, ‘Note sul testo critico della Commedia’, Studi Danteschi, 4 (1921), pp. 39–84; 6 (1923), pp. 45–98; 7 (1923), pp. 47–95; and Michele Barbi ‘Per il testo della Divina Commedia’, in Barbi, La nuova filologia e l’edizione dei nostri scrittori da Dante al Manzoni (Florence: Sansoni, 1938; facsimile repr. Florence: Le Lettere, 1993), pp. 1–34. For the wider context of Barbi’s editing of Dante, see also my own essay: H. Wayne Storey, ‘Michele Barbi, curatore di testi danteschi’, Studi Danteschi, 85 (2020), pp. 45–67. On the interpretations of and debate regarding dismagare and smagare, see Antonietta Bufano, ‘Smagare’, in Enciclopedia Dantesca, ed. by Umberto Bosco (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970) <https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/smagare_(Enciclopedia-Dantesca)/> [accessed 31 May 2025]. The subtle physicality of smagarsi (from the Old Occitan esmaiar) and the notion of a reader potentially too tired or distracted from the effort needed to comprehend Dante’s artistic ‘fourth dimension’ run up against the authority of the moral proposal (proponimento) that ‘Dio vuole’: that is, that humans pay their debt of pride through humility.1010Giuseppe Vandelli reads the address to the reader as more of a reference to ‘Dante personaggio’ than the reader. See Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia. Testo critico della Società Dantesca Italiana, ed. by Giuseppe Vandelli with revised commentary by Giovanni Scartazzini (Milan: Hoepli, 1928), ad loc. The contrast is jarring. In few places do we see such a clear rhetorical reminder from Dante that authorities have their realms. And Dante’s authority extends over the realm in which he creates a text for us to read, the realm of artificio, a term Dante uses only once and precisely in Purgatorio 12 and that Teo glosses masterfully and is here worth recalling:

The figured ground is imitated by the figured text, which now launches into its own artificio, the acrostic whose artificiosità, frequently criticized, is in fact intended to imitate divine artificio […] indeed, it should be noted that the words Dante chooses to build the artificio of Purgatorio 12 reflect the terrace’s visual (vedere) and representational (mostrare) thematics, with the result that the acrostic is not an arbitrary appendage but is fully integrated into the text. (UDC, p. 127)Beginning of page[p. 58]

The signum moralis is made flesh by the poetic text that recreates the four dimensions that — in spite of our disbelief — command our attention, the very opposite of the effect of being smagati.

I confess that in my own reading and especially in my teaching I leaned heavily and often on this chapter, frequently delving into the rhetorical constructs of textual materiality with which Dante conveyed the processes of flight (Inferno 17), morphing (Inferno 25) and most obviously in the textual representation of carvings that speak and smell but also call upon their viewers/readers to grasp their divine moral significance. Teo’s lucidity on the topic of the layering of textual and moral authority spoke as well to my students. But The Undivine Comedy required a wholly different operation when it came to applying its readings. This was not the operation of consulting many lecturae Dantis and commentaries to reassess sources and to formulate a new and perhaps more accurate or nuanced reading. The mastery of The Undivine Comedy is not a source for dipping into here and there to see what Teo thought about this episode or this term or verse. Rather its mastery lies in its integral and systematic interpretation of an artistic and rhetorical rationale upon which Dante hammered his sacrato poema into existence. Chapter 6 can stand alone, but until you read and integrate chapters 2 through 5 and add 7 to 10 into the interpretative context of Teo’s ‘poetics of the new’ and how it works in Dante’s new narrativity, you cannot grasp the breadth and intellectual precision of the poet’s taking on the task of textually visualizing the divine exempla of talking stone that is more real than the original historical figures they re-present. Nor can we understand the narratological contrast of Paradiso, which she describes in chapter 8 as the ‘dechronologizing of narrative’ and ‘struggle against the linearity of narrative [that] dramatizes the very temporality it can never evade’ (UDC, p. 166), without Teo’s meditation on ‘difference’ and her exegesis on Paradiso 29.81’s ‘per concetto diviso’ (‘interrupted concept’) in chapter 2. From that meditation stems her key explanation of Dante’s struggle and the inherent ‘problems in Paradise’ as a function of language being ‘a differential medium, unable to express simultaneity’ (UDC, p. 167), a deeply inherent defect of language with which Dante knows he must contend and sets about early and often in the canticle to bend and Beginning of page[p. 59] reshape language and the new ways we must understand it to meet the challenge he faces.

Some years ago I ran aground on a curious variant in the Heaven of the Sun in the Landiano manuscript (Piacenza, Biblioteca Comunale, Passerini Landi, MS 190), the last verses of Paradiso 12 regarding the ‘spirito profetico’ (‘prophetic spirit’) of the ‘calavrese abate Giovacchino’ (‘Calabrian Abbot Joachim’, Joachim of Flora, ca. 1145–1202). The figure of Gioacchino had, as we remember, haunted the Franciscans from the chartae of manuscripts annotated by Franciscan enthusiasts of Joachim of Flora to the pages of Salimbene’s Chronicles (where ownership of Gioacchino’s works got you a severe condemnation from the conservative Franciscan gadfly from Parma) and ultimately to the suppression of the Joachite Franciscans in the first 35 years of the fourteenth century so well documented by David Burr.1111David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century after Saint Francis (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). Often overlooked is the spread of Joachim’s ideas and the attribution of radical Franciscan doctrine to Joachim in Franciscan commentaries of prophetic books of the Bible; see Robert Moynihan, ‘The Development of the “Pseudo-Joachim” Commentary “Super Hieremiam”: New Manuscript Evidence’, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome, Moyen-Age, 98 (1986), pp. 109–42. I was especially perplexed by the internecine tensions among dantisti of the caliber of Michele Barbi and the historian Raoul Manselli surrounding the question of Dante’s ‘Franciscanism’.1212For the historical, critical and textual implications of Dante’s Franciscan leanings, see H. Wayne Storey, ‘Franciscan Controversies and Paradigms in Dante’, Medieval Perspectives, 24 (2009), pp. 1–22. I knew that if I wanted to have a better idea of the intricate narratives that bind Saint Francis and the Franciscans to Dante’s philosophical and poetic orientations in the Commedia, I would have to become more than conversant with Teo’s ninth chapter on the Heaven of the Sun. These are the cantos, we recall, in which Dante announces, especially in Paradiso 10, two addresses to the reader and two authoritative voices (or better, in this case, authoritative hands): the master artist who creates the universe (God) and the copyist (Dante) who must transcribe with all his skill, intellect, and knowledge ‘quella materia’ (‘that matter’; Par. 10.27).

Included in that ‘text’ are the lives of Francis and Dominic not recounted by Dante as a biographer but by Dante’s invented voices,Beginning of page[p. 60] respectively, of the Dominican Thomas Aquinas and the Franciscan Bonaventure, their speeches rendered, as a notary might do, by the poet. The question of rhetorical layering in the discourses of Paradiso 10–12 that report numerous narratives instilled in the saints’ lives and their praise and the criticism of their orders remains for me one of the most intricate interweavings of voice and narrative trajectory of the Commedia and certainly of Teo’s discussion of those numerous layers. Dante’s ‘re-historicization’ not only of the saints’ lives but also of their orders’ ethos and socio-political trajectories is effectively a re-invention of the unfolding of narrative truth through Dante’s fiction, his imagined witnessing — like John of Patmos (both scribe and witness) — of the two saints narrating histories within the very fluid contexts especially of the papal treatments of strict Franciscan sects underway since the reign of Boniface VIII and continuing even past Dante’s death. These are dizzying stratifications that rebound among the historical, the ethical and the poetic, all of which Teodolinda charts and analyses with insights that extend to other passages of Dante’s works.

Teo formulates her exploration of these cantos’ rhetorical density on the narrative problems inherent in the philosophical parity of Francis and Dominic and the necessary difference in the unfolding of their and their narrators’ (Thomas’s and Bonaventure’s) unfolding narratives:

By making Thomas and Bonaventure into narrators, Dante highlights narrative itself as an issue and also throws into silhouette his own narrative problems as artificer of this text. Thomas and Bonaventure are not only presenters; they are also representers. (UDC, p. 195)

At the heart of Dante’s narrative acrobatics is the impossible narrative construction that Dante gives to Thomas: ‘De l’un dirò, però che d’amendue | si dice l’un pregiando’ (‘I shall devote my tale to one, because | in praising either prince one praises both’; Par. 11.40–41). As Teo reminds us, parity is impossible in the sequentiality of narrative: ‘Despite the disclaimers, parity is breached when one saint’s story is recounted first’ (UDC, p. 201). She is careful to distinguish Thomas as an excellent narrator, a solid practitioner of difference (UDC, p. 205).Beginning of page[p. 61] But in the end, in words that guide the entirety of The Undivine Comedy, Thomas’s temporal/narrative path ‘is a miniversion of the temporal/narrative path followed by the reader of the Commedia as a whole, the discursive analogue to the journey in which the pilgrim is taken “per lo ciel, di lume in lume” and is shown “le vite spiritali ad una ad una”’ (UDC, p. 206; references to ‘from light to light in Heaven’ in Par. 17.115 and ‘the lives of spirits, one by one’ in Par. 33.24).

What can we gather, then, from Bonaventure’s rhetoric in his speech on the ‘corrupted doctrine’ of Franciscans like Ubertino da Casale and Matteo d’Acquasparta and his subsequent presentation of his companions in the second garland of saints? Is Dante imitating the moderate Franciscan party line through the well-known conservatism of Bonaventure while adhering in other places to the Joachite Franciscan line of a Peter John Olivi? If simultaneity is impossible to realize narratologically, how does the writing of Bonaventure’s discourses affect Dante’s plan for Thomas’s narratives? Equally critical is the problem of squaring Dante’s intellectual and ethical alliances and sympathies with the narrative trajectories of Paradiso 10–12. Teo’s linkage of prophecy and narrative/anti-narrative structures of Paradiso 11 and 12 crystalizes the contrastive and risky discourses of prophecy in Dante’s poem, clarifying Dante’s poetic and ethical confidence in wading into bold assessments of pivotal cultural figures, such as Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas, not to mention Joachim of Flora, who themselves weave narratives that historicize and portend in voices created, in Teo’s words, by ‘God’s scribe’ (UDC, p. 216), Dante: ‘By making Thomas and Bonaventure into narrators, Dante highlights narrative itself as an issue and also throws into silhouette his own narrative problems as artificer of this text. Thomas and Bonaventure are not only presenters; they are also representers’ (UDC, p. 195).

So when we encounter the Calabrian abbot Joachim of Flora — author of intricately interpretative and prophetic texts, especially his Concordia novi ac veteris testamenti and his Expositio in Apocalypsim, that would resound profoundly in Franciscan commentaries and in the ethical stands of Olivi and Ubertino — among the second circle of flashing lights of wisdom, the sapienti, we are surprised. Joachim is a figure of such controversy that his inclusion is already problematic for readers in the first half of the fourteenth century and beyond. But Beginning of page[p. 62] Dante goes one step further and describes the Cistercian monk as ‘di spirito profetico dotato’ (‘who had the gift of prophetic spirit’; Par. 12.141). As we recall from Inferno 19 and especially 20, prophecy beyond the prophetic books of the Bible can be tricky business and easily stray into false prophecy and a desire ‘to see too far ahead’ (‘veder troppo davante’; Inf. 20.38). Dante’s positive designation of such a dangerous figure as Joachim and his gift of prophecy must have put many early readers of the Commedia on edge. It certainly gave the original 1336 copyist of the early and famous Landiano codex pause. Though the preceding two rhymes are Donato and lato, the original copyist grammatically extends the gift of prophetic vision across all of Bonaventure’s companions in the garland with the change of dotato to dotati:

In addition to the exemplar the copyist follows, regular norms and features dictate the transcription that he or she is expected to produce beyond the consistent formation and pacing of letters, the standards of scribal ductus. Medieval punctuation of the Commedia was limited in manuscripts, and the use of majuscules occurred mostly at the beginning of verses or, as here, of a terzina (thus the N of Natan and the R of Rabano). Thus the majuscule G of Giovachino suggests special attention to the figure who is — as we remember — more than announced by name. And, as we can well imagine, rhyme is one of the copyist’s principal guides, especially when there are questions as to the lectio of a verse. The announcement of the presence of Giovachino, followed by Dante’s bold, pro-Franciscan view of the Cistercian, might well have Beginning of page[p. 63] disrupted more than the copyist’s pace and adherence to the preceding rhyme (do tati). Still in the period when papal suppression of the Joachite Franciscans, the first copyist of the Landiano manuscript breaks with the rhyme scheme to defuse the potentially heretical assignment of prophecy solely to Joachim and to extend it potentially to all of Bonaventure’s companions. Here more than ever, Teo’s exegesis of the narratological and rhetorical systems of Paradiso 10–12 had become an eloquent guarantee of the ambiguities necessarily inherent in Dante’s layering of the cultural affinities that could — in their unfolding, and in the dual strata of Bonaventure’s voice and Dante script — both censure Joachites and so uniquely eulogize Joachim.

Once the initial controversy died down — for some of us it never started — it became clear that Teodolinda Barolini’s The Undivine Comedy proposed a new paradigm. In the place of episodic analysis she demonstrated a command of the narrative threads woven by Dante’s singular artistic authority. Teo demonstrates as never before — nor since, frankly — the rhetorical and structural mechanics of Dante’s ‘poetics of the new’ founded on the richness and limitations of narrative. The Undivine Comedy left us immediately with a new challenge: to see the Commedia whole cloth, uncut, within and outside its editorially mechanical infrastructure, the reflection of a single mind on diverse cultural trajectories that constituted the intricate and multiple narratives of Florence’s exul immeritus. From that moment in 1992 the fabric of the moral and poetic vision of humanity’s condition reflected in the trope of the afterlife and the true complexity and breadth of Dante’s narrative in the Commedia were now spread before us.

Thank you, Teo.