Wings of the Doves: Love and Desire in Dante and Medieval Culture 9780773586949

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the wi ng s o f t he

d ov e s

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the wi ngs o f t he

dove s Love and Desire in Dante and Medieval Culture

e le na lom bard i

m cg i l l - q u e e n ’s u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2012 isbn 978-0-7735-3971-6 Legal deposit second quarter 2012 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Lombardi, Elena, 1969– The wings of the doves : love and desire in Dante and medieval culture / Elena Lombardi. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3971-6 1. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321. Inferno. Canto 5. 2. Desire in literature. 3. Lust in literature. 4. Love in literature. 5. Civilization, Medieval. I. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321. Inferno. Canto 5. II. Title. pq4445 5th l64 2012

851'.1

c2011-908451-1

This book was designed and typeset by studio oneonone in Sabon 10.2/13

contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii 3

1 hell

20

2 lust

51

3 desire

86

4 love

132

5 the kiss

175

6 reading

212

Text of Canto v and Translation

248

Notes Bibliography Index

257 343 361

For my father “… can spring be far behind?”

ac k nowle dg m e nt s

This is a book of many places, of many libraries, and of friends whose loving support has sustained me throughout the writing: Lele, Giovanna, Ilaria, Francesca, Stefano, Maggie, and Giulio. I wish to thank my family – Lucia, Alessandra, Kevin, and Russell – for their unending love and support. A very special thought goes to my husband, Sergey, who shares with me the extraordinary nature of everyday life. This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Erminio, and to my children, Alessandro and Lyubov, who incarnate and literalize for me the meaning of love.

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the wi ng s o f t he

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introduction Il y a l’amour, Bardamu! – Arthur, l’amour c’est l’infini mis à la portée des caniches (Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit)

Laboriosior est huius mundi amor (Augustine, De musica 6, 14, 44)

Inferno 5 is a multilayered and multifaceted canto that continues to challenge generations of readers. What is this canto about? Love, desire, lust, love poetry? A love poetry that is powerful enough to give the impression that lust is love? And are these things worthy of compassion, as Dante-the-traveller indicates, or of condemnation, as Dante-the-poet declares? Inferno 5 is a canto of multiple desires and multiple readings, which defies dichotomies such as poetry and doctrine, pity and condemnation, literature and reality. This book plays on the multiform nature of the canto and its surroundings by mapping onto its main poetic and rhetorical trajectory six key words (Hell, Lust, Desire, Love, the Kiss, and Reading), which meander in and out of the text to address some key questions in the culture surrounding the Comedy. Inferno 5 thus becomes a window onto a larger theme in medieval culture: the significance and interrelation of spiritual and erotic versions of love and desire. Love and desire are discussed as eschatological issues (the infernal “punishment of loss” and the nature of heavenly blessedness, chapters 1 and 3); as elements of the sin/crime of lust (chapter 2); and as the driving forces of the practice of pilgrimage (chapter 3). They are considered in connection with the all-encompassing medieval notion of beauty (chapter 4); in the context of social and religious affective practices such as the kiss (chapter 5); and in relation to intertextuality, the act of reading and the material culture of the book (chapter 6). The intricacy of Inferno 5 is best exemplified by the ambiguous message and the stratified construction of one of its central images. When summoning his poetic creatures to talk to him, Dante compares them to doves called by desire and impelled by the will (Inferno 5, 82–7; see chapter 3). This image

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introduction

can equally be taken as an illustration of the sin of lust (whereby sexual drive overtakes reason) and as the first instance of a long and complex discourse on blessedness (whereby desire and will head in the same direction toward a supernal goal). The doves of Inferno 5 evoke several passages from both secular and religious literature, and combine them to form a truly new and undecidable text. Moreover, the figure of the birds answering the call also ties two other desires at stake in this episode: the damned souls’ masochistic desire for speech (see chapter 1), and the reader’s intertextual desire for interpretation (see chapter 6). Both converge toward a cunning bird hunter: Dante-the-poet. With the same syncretic spirit, Dante faces several critical issues in this canto. The first is the fashioning of the new heroes of love poetry. Straight from the news, and with very little or no evidence in contemporary chronicles, the story of Francesca both springs from and will overshadow those of Helen, Dido, and Iseult. The second is the tradition of the theory and poetry of love – from Ovid to himself, passing through Virgil, the Provençal and French tradition, early Italian poetry, and the stilnovo. Finally, Dante addresses the overarching theme of the relation between terrestrial love and the love for God. The canto is structured in five parts.1 After the meeting with the infernal judge Minos (1–24) – a quite transformative parody of classical culture and the first instance of the confessional theme that runs through the whole Comedy – the infernal storm, “never resting” (31), provides the first, and perhaps most strictly analogical counter-penalty of hell. The lustful lovers (25–50), who in life “subject reason to desire” (39), are buffeted around by the storm (the meteorological passion) in the horrid atmosphere “mute of all light” (28), in a way that cruelly subverts the naturalness of bird flight, as they are compared to starlings, cranes and, later, doves. Within this confusion, a rank of lovers takes form. The “catalogue of the ancients” (50–69) displays “more than a thousand” (67) recognizable “ladies and knights” (71) of lofty historical and literary status. Not only do they embody important texts that are the “background library” of this episode (such as the Iliad, the Aeneid, and the romance of Tristan) but they also play central roles in large-scale historical events, testifying to the power of love over history and myth. Collectively, the list of the lovers serves to establish a connection in terms of both comparison and contrast between Francesca and grand tales and histories of love. Francesca is, and is not, one of them. Although the first definition of the sinners in this circle is apparently straightforward (they are those “who subject reason to desire,” Inferno 5, 39), this catalogue of lovers offers a more complex and polarized scenario.

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On the one hand, Dante insists on lust, with Semiramis, who “made lust licit in her law” (“che libido fé licito in sua legge,” 55); and with lustful Cleopatra (“lussuriosa,” 63). On the other hand, the theme of lust is interwoven in these very lines with that of love: Dido is “amorosa” (61); Achilles “fought at the last with love” (“con amore al fine combatteo,” 66); all the other souls in this rank departed from our life because of love (“amor di nostra vita dipartille,” 69). At the end of the catalogue, we encounter the main narrative joint of the canto, ruled by a problematic surge of Dante’s compassion (70–2), which causes an errancy in the traveller (he is “smarrito,” 72). This sense of displacement is second only to the loss of the right path at the very beginning of the poem (Inferno 1, 3 and 2, 64), which is the main motor of the Comedy’s narrative. Under the pressure of such a great tradition of love stories and love poetry, the poet too appears to be momentarily bewildered, as is underlined by the strong rhythmic pause between lines 72 and 73. With a powerful authorial gesture, however, Dante relegates the great love heroes of antiquity and the Middle Ages to the background, and calls forth the new poetic creatures. In a breath of wind the illustrious setting disappears and we are left with the mysterious and marvellous new poetic creatures, Francesca and Paolo (Inferno 5, 73–142). The longer section of the canto is articulated by four complex rhetorical figures. The simile of the doves (82–7), the third and last of a series of intricate bird metaphors, sets the high rhetorical stakes of this episode. It is followed by Francesca’s captatio benevolentiae to the pilgrim (88–93, itself containing a rhetorically precious, though logically useless, adunaton). Central to the canto are the anaphora (“Amor … Amor … Amor,” 100–7), a famous patchwork of key words from the lyric tradition, retelling the way Paolo and Francesca fell in love with each other; and the final chiasmus (133– 6), which is sustained by a romance pattern, elucidating the lovers’ fall. The four rhetorical figures are clusters of quotations from classical literature, medieval romance, and lyric poetry by Dante and his contemporaries – and illustrate the complex negotiations that take place between textuality and intertextuality, reading and authorship, fiction and seduction, poetry and lust. Moreover, the rhetorical figures are – in themselves and in the way Dante constructs them – sites of a dense clotting of poetic language, where certain key words and images are obsessively repeated (the bird image in the three similes; the world “peace” in the captatio benevolentiae; “Love,” “me,” and “him” in the anaphora; “reading” and “us” just before the chiasmus; “mouth/smile,” “kissed,” and “lover/him” in the chiasmus itself). These utterly generic words and images are given an almost unbearable heaviness

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by the thickness of stratification, the metric elaboration, and the pressure of repetition. They become a different form of language and poetry altogether. The story of Paolo and Francesca is a combination of history and legend. As Teodolinda Barolini points out, Dante, who is Francesca’s “historian of record,” only gives us four very bare indications: her name is Francesca (5, 116), she was born in Ravenna (97–9; although the geographic indication of the Po delta is, as many commentators agree, very vague itself), she and her lover were “cognati” (6, 2; sister and brother-in-law), and they were killed by one of their kin (5, 107). 2 The four bare facts (three of them placed at almost equal distance within canto 5 and the fourth just outside its borders at the beginning of canto 6) tack with stitches of “reality” an episode that is otherwise a highly rarefied and pensive ecphrasis on love. The history of the Da Polenta from Ravenna and the Malatesta from Rimini – two powerful families competing with others and among themselves for supremacy over two rich communes and the wealthy land around them – is well accounted for in chronicles and historical documents.3 Historians of the canto and of medieval Romagna explain that Francesca is a very minor player in the historical context. Her marriage to Gianciotto (John the Lame), the son of the emerging leader of Rimini, Malatesta da Verucchio, sealed the alliance between the two families. There is no historical evidence of the romance between Francesca and Paolo, Gianciotto’s younger brother. Her death, along with Paolo’s, which occurred between 1283 and 1286, did not revoke the alliance between the Polentani and the Malatesta, or even hinder further intermarrying between the two families. Francesca is a footnote in history. There is no evidence of her prior to Dante’s work, and the first reference in contemporary historical documents is a very bare allusion to her dowry within Malatesta da Verucchio’s will in 1311.4 As Barolini points out, the earliest chroniclers to mention the story of the lovers from Romagna, both post-dating Dante’s death and familiar with Dante’s text, severely downplay the event, never mentioning Francesca’s name, and describing Gianciotto’s murder of his brother as the consequence of Paolo’s lust (Marco Battagli’s chronicle) or his adultery (Cronaca malatestiana).5 Poetry reverses history, consigning Paolo to silence and giving Francesca the main voice. Dante returns to the history of Romagna several times in the poem, most notably in Inferno 27, where he describes it as the land that is never “without war in the hearts of her tyrants” (137–8), as tragically illustrated in the following canto by the horrid treason of Malatestino da Rimini (Inferno 28, 76–90), and in Purgatorio 14, where the current violent state of Romagna is contrasted to its past, within Guido del Duca’s nostalgic remembrance of

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Romagna’s courtly culture: “le donne, i cavalier, gl’affanni e gl’agi / che ne invogliava amore e cortesia” (the ladies and the knights, the toils and the sports to which love and courtesy moved us, Purgatorio 14, 109–10), a verse famously resurrected by Ariosto in the incipit of his Orlando Furioso. The wider historical context too contributes to the ambiguity of canto 5. Tyranny and courtesy and the mourning of bygone times summon two different historical and social contexts for Francesca. On the one hand, absolute power and knightly-courtly culture construct Francesca within some kind of feudal framework,6 and portray her socially as a provincial lady, and in literary terms as a minor Guinevere or Iseult. On the other hand, the depiction of Romagna in the Comedy is that of a minor-key Florence, divided between past greatness and current unrest, greed, and war. Although ruled by a more authoritarian form of politics, Romagna shared the same historical reality as Tuscany: the ruthless war between Guelf and Ghibellin powers within a fundamentally bourgeois setting. Like Dante and Beatrice in the Vita Nuova, Paolo and Francesca inhabit a historically and politically nondescript city and region, and yet the bloody and inflamed political background is visible in the distance. The vagueness of the historical context means that Paolo and Francesca are also indeterminate from the fictional point of view. The choice of which fiction we fit them in – the seigniorial and romance background of the Lancelot or the bourgeois and lyrical scenario of Dante’s Florence – is left, once again, to the reader. As I propose in chapter 5, the lovers too are confused and misled by the imprecision of their historical context, as they act upon an imagined feudal situation using fundamentally bourgeois conditions. Dante does not at all fictionalize the account of the lovers from Romagna. He consigns their story to silence, poeticizing instead the void within the bare facts. The nuts and bolts of the story of the love between two handsome youths, Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, as well as their tragic death at the hand of Francesca’s husband and Paolo’s brother, the deformed Gianciotto, are fabricated after Dante’s text. The legend of Paolo and Francesca is an invention of the early commentators, glorified into a truly novelistic text by the genius of Giovanni Boccaccio.7 Dante’s only fictional additions to the bare facts and to his reflections on love and poetry are two: the corresponding beauty of the two lovers, illustrated in the anaphora lines, and the scene of their fall, a quite curious montage of reading and kissing. Both additions have proven very fertile in the imaginations of early commentators, giving rise to expansions on the beauty of the two youths, and Gianciotto’s greater age, deformity, and ugliness. The romance subtext has brought about commentators’ inventions such

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as the marriage by proxy patterned on the story of Tristan and Iseult, which Boccaccio takes to be to be an important proof in support of Francesca’s innocence, since she “believed” she had married Paolo.8 The troubadoric subtext inherent to the anaphora lines has prompted the figure of the “lauzengier,” the envious courtier who denounces the illicit affair to the jealous husband. The rhythm of the text itself has, in my opinion, suggested fictional elaborations: the swiftness of the anaphora, precipitating love onto death in a quick turn of lines, has overlapped with the reading/kissing scene to proffer a very compact ending to the story of Paolo and Francesca, whereby falling in love, reading, kissing, (having sex), and dying all take place at the same time. Likewise, the tight unity of the lovers, which serves to emphasize some crucial conceptual issues belonging to the discourse of love within the canto (see chapter 4), has conjured up the invention of a single sword-stroke killing them both. Visual representations of the story of Paolo and Francesca are very fond of this simultaneity, and conveniently depict the lovers kissing (at times while already sitting on the edge of a bed) while the book falls from their lap, and the husband is behind a door or a curtain with a dagger.9 Moreover, Amilcare Iannucci has shown that the legend of Paolo and Francesca adheres to a literary trend that records the “joining of two irrational and destructive forces, love and war.”10 This model originates in the myth of Ares and Aphrodite, and its basic features are love, war, conformity, deformity, and poetry. The two beautiful bodies of the gods of love and war respectively “conform” to each other at the expense of the “deformed” Hephaestus, under the eyes of Apollo, the god of poetry. This structure is replicated in an earthly version in the story of Troy and in countless medieval romances, including those of Tristan and Iseult, and Lancelot and Guinevere. This narrative model has a firm connection to Inferno 5, in that it shines through in the catalogue of the ancients, where the story of Troy and that of Arthur’s court have a prominent place. Thus one may say that the commentators merely project onto Francesca a framework that is already inherent to the canto. Yet, the commentators’ operation proffers also one of the most poignant examples of the indistinguishable unity of text and reception, and of the unstable nature of history. So tight is the grip of legend over story and history that the tale of Paolo and Francesca is often taken both as written by Dante and, at the same time, as a “true” history. Besides eliciting massive historical and poetic elaboration, canto 5 has also been over the centuries the subject of an endless and varied process of interpretation.11 Ancient commentators were quite carefree: they both created the legend of Paolo and Francesca, and unproblematically accepted their damnation. Boccaccio in particular provides a healthy lesson in criticism when he

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celebrates the episode with a plethora of additions and at the same time condemns it from the moral standpoint, pronouncing a very modern divorce of the literary from the ethical. The romantic period creates another “legend” of Francesca, one of the innocent heroine caught in the vital horror and violence of the dark medieval period, as, for instance, in Ugo Foscolo’s awestruck reading of Francesca as the candid and innocent victim of her very gentleness, whose “guilty passion survives its punishment by Heaven.”12 Shortly afterward, Francesco de Sanctis viewed Francesca as the first woman to appear “real and alive” on the scenario of modern literature.13 Thus, until the middle of the twentieth century, a “heroic” reading of Francesca prevailed, along with the pervasive sense that for her – as for other titanic characters in Dante’s Comedy – hell is too tight. As quintessentially represented by Rodin’s “the Kiss” (1886), a sculpture initially devised for the Inferno-inspired group “the Gates of Hell” and subsequently turned into an independent work, the romantic reading views the lovers from Romagna as transcending hell and obliterating any trace of their guilt. As Francesca’s skills and weaknesses as reader and quoter of poetry and prose on love began to emerge, the numerous references to ancient, Provençal, French, and Italian texts (of which countless have now been outlined, although they still seem infinite in number) not only obfuscated Francesca’s spontaneity, but also made her the bearer of a pessimistic vision of love in this canto – a passion disruptive not only of the individual but also of the social order surrounding her. This often truly dark version of love is perceived as a consequence (and/or a combination) of Dido’s yoking of love and death, the fol’amor of the troubadours, the socially unsettling passion that governs romance, Cappellanus’s penchant for consummation, and Cavalcanti’s intellectual desperation. The critical tradition on Francesca coalesces into two positions. The positive reading, now slightly out of fashion, sees Francesca as the heroine of love, the powerful and unforgettable character, the woman with agency. The negative reading, inaugurated by Gianfranco Contini, is in itself twofold: Francesca the “stupid,” a poor provincial woman mesmerized by literature, ventriloquized by lyric poetry and romance, and unable to interpret, let alone protect herself, from the words she regurgitates without understanding them (see, for instance, Sanguineti); and Francesca the deceiver, the flatterer, the manipulator, obsessed with masking lust with love, and intent on dragging the traveller/reader into the grips of her sin, through the sympathy she elicits (see, for instance, Hatcher and Musa).14 Dante’s position on the themes of love and desire in this episode, perhaps the most irresolvable aspect of the canto, is much debated, spanning from the

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stern condemnation of erotic love as an errancy and mistake that has no space in the journey of spiritual salvation, to the more nuanced image of an empathetic poet, addressing with painful and compassionate awareness his own erotic and poetic shortcomings. Hell seems, however, to provide an imperative structure for interpretation. After all, like every other character in the first otherwordly realm, the lovers from Romagna too are gripped in the coils of infernal irony: Francesca, the complex tradition of love poetry that she stands for, and Dante’s own erotic and poetic past must be left behind, with or without regret and refractions. This is a perfectly valid answer to the problem, until we realize that Dante never lets go of that poetic and erotic past, and that this “mistake” silently but resiliently continues to echo throughout the Comedy, all the way to the vision of God, which is, somewhat like the flight of the doves in Inferno 5, an endeavour of desire and will articulated by love (Paradiso 33, 143–5). The most interesting recent contributions on Inferno 5 show the palindromic nature of this canto with regard to the theme of love. Teodolinda Barolini has recently framed canto 5 within a diptych, showing on the one hand the historicized and gendered character (and thus successfully separating Francesca from the future readings of Francesca), and, on the other hand, a desexualized, poeticized Francesca. 15 In tracing the rich and complex canvas of poetic references to the poets who were Dante’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries, and in particular to Guido Cavalcanti, Barolini has suggested that in the words of Francesca one can read a defence, rather than a condemnation, of love, one that “protects and defends love … from a blanket indictment like that of Cavalcanti.”16 Lino Pertile, focusing his interpretation on line 102, where Francesca deplores “the way” of Paolo’s love (“il modo ancor m’offende,” the way of it afflicts me still) presents Francesca as a woman offended (wounded, swept away) by the violence and excess of her lover, and argues that in Inferno 5 Dante firmly links excessive/erotic love and perdition, providing a “radically negative” conception of love, which is a “death sentence” from its inception.17 My argument is that Dante willingly leaves it ambiguous – indefinite and polyvalent as intertextuality and the act of reading are. With a complex construction of intertexts and hidden references, with the inflexible solemnity of high rhetorical poetry, he offers his readers a truly open text that sanctions both the uniqueness and the universality of the lovers of Inferno 5. Dante invites his readers to try at first hand the pleasures and drawbacks of interpretation and to experience the subtlety and finesse, fragility and power of the discourse of love – showing that, like Paolo and Francesca, we also are naïve (or too refined, or too partisan) interpreters of texts about love. While

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we are reading about lovers who are reading, Dante weaves ambiguity within intertextuality and then ties the knot with the literality of the new. Just as the old characters (Semiramis, Cleopatra, Helen, and especially Dido and Iseult) act as catalysts in the formation of the new character, and as the established texts merge into original poetry without disappearing into it, so the version of love in this canto is both old and new. The patchwork of quotations acquires a life of its own as soon as the reader detaches him- or herself from details and tries to contemplate it as a whole. Moreover, intertextuality involves the desires of the readers, ultimately bestowing solely upon them the (in)decisions of interpretation. In particular, it is my argument that Dante’s suspension of judgment on the theme of love relies on the subtlety, ambiguities, and constitutional ambivalence of desire – a tension perennially stretched between soul and body, the temporal and the eternal. In canto 5 desire bears both the heaviness of the sinful disposition (“talento,” 39) and the lightness of hope (“dubbiosi desiri,” 120), the impetuosity of anticipation and the dream-like delay of expectation, both encompassed in the lingering desire (“quanto disio”) that rushes the lovers to the “woeful pass” (113–14). Desire embroiders a delicate fabric of interpretation over intertextuality (the image of the doves, Guinevere’s longed-for smile) and sustains both the religious and the secular subtext of this canto. Inferno 5 is also a canto of multiple contexts: classical, lyrical, romance, theological, political, confessional, and more. Each context is supported by a more or less heavy intertextual apparatus and emerges as self-sufficient. At times, each single context appears as the most important, if not the sole, aspect of that text. In my reading, I show that the different contexts and their apparatuses are all active at the same time and challenge each other in the construction of a truly undecidable canto. I take Inferno 5 to be the Comedy’s most robust and sternest lecture in the art of reading and interpretation. Interpretation in the episode of Francesca is the continual deferral of interpretation. As in a kaleidoscope, the same few elements construct and deconfigure layers of reading under the reader’s eye. Although one peremptory assessment comes from the inscription of this tale of love in Hell, its refractions through the poem, within Dante’s other works, and beyond Dante, do not allow us to consider it a closed chapter. The lovers’ very “closing of the book” at the end of the canto (“that day we read no farther into it,” Inferno 5, 138) impresses a vertiginous spin onto the content and its interpretation. ✢✢✢

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introduction

This book is also a reflection on the nature of medieval writing on love and desire – a polysemic discourse that is open to manifold interpretations, and which, like a gigantic metaphor, links fields as far apart as woman, god, knowledge, and politics. When approaching the medieval discourse on love, three things are worth keeping in mind. First, the medieval discourse of love originates from an affective scenario that is very different from ours, and is in part lost to us. Affectivity is shaped by the culture that generates it, and by all sorts of social, economic, and medical factors – from marriage laws to dynastic or hereditary customs, to community standards relating to women’s public freedom and visibility, to women’s age in childbirth, and to life expectancy. While differences between the Middle Ages and our age are more easily accepted in other branches of culture and epistemology – say in physics, or grammar – the appreciation of the distance and diversity of the discourse on love is often reduced to the contrast between a religious and a secular age, and is often biased by the very universality of this discourse. The discourse of love is, and it is not, the same across centuries and cultures. The universality that makes it forever present and actual should not overshadow its particularity and its culture- and agebound nature. The second aspect is that love was a much more pervasive discourse in the Middle Ages than it is in modernity. The idea of love (most commonly, but not solely, conveyed by the word amor and its derivates) covered a much wider ground than it does today, accounting for almost any relation in nature and the human being, spanning from sexual desire to friendship, to political harmony, and to religion.18 Finally, it is worth keeping in mind that medieval love is triune. As Augustine famously put it in his De Trinitate, it takes three to love in both earthly and divine matters: the lover, the loved one, and love (“amans, quod amatur, amor,” De Trinitate 8, 10, 14).19 While in heaven love is the glue that holds together father and son in one firm and equal embrace (the holy ghost), on earth courtly and stilnovo poets are in constant dialogue with “Amore,” the personified relation that is often the only link between lover and beloved. The triune nature of medieval love gives rise to peculiar types of relations and internal bindings, resulting in an unmediated relation of three.20 One of the most complex, and to our days partially unresolved, issues regarding the medieval discourse of love is the relation of divine and earthly love. The incompatibility between Christian theories of love and courtly love was most vehemently articulated by Étienne Gilson. In his Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard (1940) Gilson ruled out the possibility that courtly love drew on contemporary religious and especially mystical writings (not even

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considering the opposite hypothesis that mystical literature might draw on secular writings).21 He sees the two discourses as radically incompatible, because they celebrate incompatible objects (divine and carnal love), but concedes that they shared the same “atmosphere” (186). There is no courtly love, according to Gilson, without the Christian environment that generated it. Yet: Courtly love, and the Cistercian conception of mystical love, are … two independent products of the civilization of the twelfth century. They express the different surroundings in which they were respectively born; the one codifying life as led in a princely court, and the other expressing what men make of it in a Cistercian monastery. Undoubtedly the vocabulary of the one might be helped out with terms borrowed from the other, but since it is necessary to renounce the one of these loves before embracing the other it is not to be wondered at that no definite concept exists that is common to both. (Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard, 197) On the other side of the field, literary critics such as Moshe Lazar also emphasized the incompatibility of the two discourses, by underlining the fundamental secularity of the erotic poetry of the troubadours.22 These lines have been much blurred by major studies such as those of Curtius, Leclercq, Dronke, and Zumthor, and by countless case studies on medieval mystics and poets showing many interconnections between the medieval discourses of love.23 Although the incompatibility of earthly and divine love is itself a medieval commonplace, the textual evidence of the likeness and the overlapping of secular and religious erotic rhetoric shows the troubling proximity of the two discourses. Gilson’s “atmosphere” rains down into language. In Dronke’s words: “Through the very need of communication, human and divine love are in a sense reconciled. Yet this kind of reconciliation of course entails its own opposite: for here the perception and affirmation in each metaphor of an analogy between the two experiences is continually completed by an awareness of their difference” (Medieval Latin, 58–9). Although much rarefied, the “atmospheric” theory persists, and it does work convincingly in many cases. The idea that there are two loves and one overlapping rhetoric accounts for the simultaneous inclusiveness and segregation of different discourses in medieval culture. To address a courtly woman and the Virgin Mary with the same words is likely more problematic for a modern than for a medieval reader. Cases of extreme integration of the two discourses are found in Hadewijch’s strophic poems, in Richard of Saint

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Victor’s treatise on love, and in the Italian poetry of the stilnovo, to name just a few examples – yet there is little doubt about the aims, alignment, and intended audience of such texts. Two monumental works, the Roman de la Rose and Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs, proffer an even more nuanced scenario, as they blur the borders between secular and religious eroticism in a way that allows for the simultaneous existence of the two discourses, and for the simultaneous reading of two texts. At the end of his Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love Lyric, Dronke quotes the twelfth-century poem Si linguis angelicis, in which spiritual and earthly rhetoric are integrated to the point of describing a love that is indistinguishably one, and undecidably suspended between sacred and profane.24 The “atmospheric” theory is challenged by such a poem, or by an author like Dante, who chose to make his beloved the guide to the vision of God and who, at the threshold of the divine, chose to remind his readers that this was the very woman whom he first saw at the age of nine in Florence, and that this was the very poetry he began articulating as a young man under the impulse of the love for such woman – one continuous stretch of praise, an interrupted prayer that joins the two loves into one (see chapter 3).25 Dante’s Beatrice is perhaps the clearest medieval example of the integration of the two discourses: she simultaneously de-eroticizes earthly love and eroticizes God. Like Dante, some religious writers, Hadewijch for instance, were aware of the tensions between the erotic and the secular discourses, and indeed exploited such tensions in their texts.26 Very few authors, however, acknowledge the threat of idolatry inherent to such integration, which immediately strikes the modern reader. The stilnovo poet Guido Guinizzelli does admit such a threat in the last stanza of his song Al cor gentil, where he imagines a dialogue between God and the poet. Donna, Deo mi dirà: “Che presomisti?” sïando l’alma mia a lui davanti. “Lo ciel passasti e ’nfin a Me venisti, e desti in vano amor Me per semblanti; ch’a Me conven le laude e a la reina del regname degno, per cui cessa onne fraude.” Dir Li porò: “Tenne d’angel sembianza che fosse del Tuo regno; non me fu fallo, s’in lei posi amanza.” (Al cor gentil, 52–60)

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Lady, God will say to me: when my soul stands before Him, “How could you presume? You went past heaven, coming finally to me, and tried to compare Me to a vain love. All praises are due to me alone and to the Queen of this noble realm through whom all evil ends.” But I shall say to Him, “She had the likeness of an angel from your kingdom. It is not my fault if I fell in love with her.”27 This slightly naïve exchange is quite helpful in understanding the medieval position on divine and earthly love. Both God’s reproach and the poet’s apology revolve around the notion of similarity (“semblanti,” “sembianza”). As God himself states, the relation between the two loves cannot work by means of analogy; earthly love cannot be presented as similar to divine love. One can indeed see Guinizzelli’s God rebuking the “atmospheric hypothesis.” It does work, however, at least in the poet’s response, in terms of homology – earthly love does bear the image of divine love. The woman’s beauty is that of an angel, and, therefore, the poet’s love is innocent. In other words, earthly love shares with the divine a radical although possibly obscure homology, importantly located in beauty (see chapter 4), but rejects and resists similarity, or any protracted analogy. Another quite idiosyncratic trait of the medieval discourse of love is that it is inherently linked to interpretation. The centrality of the Song of Songs in medieval culture – one can call it a medieval obsession, even an anomaly – testifies not only to the inextricability of erotic and spiritual love and the permeability of the two discourses, but also to the complex role interpretation plays in their integration. While the history of the interpretation of the Song of Songs is quite unidirectional – the erotic/sacred text is unanimously spiritualized – the reception of secular texts on love is more diversified, leading only sporadically to coherent operations such as the Ovide moralisé, the early fourteenth-century rewriting of Ovid’s Metamorphoses under the sweeping assumption that each metamorphosis is the manifestation of the soul’s search for God. The afterlife of the Roman de la Rose – a text rewritten, edited, interpolated, amplified, and abridged, which was considered by some edifying and even educational and by others immoral and heterodox – indicates the magnitude of the oscillations within the medieval art of reading and interpretation.28 In her famous critique of the Rose, Christine de Pizan reproached the textual difficulty of the poem, likening it to the books of the alchemists, whose obscurity allows completely opposite interpretations. Sés tu comment il va de celle lecture? Ainsy come des livres des arguemistes: les uns les lisent et les entendent d’une maniere, les autres qui les

16

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lisent les entendent tout au rebours; et chascun cuide trop bien entendre. Et sur ce ilz œuvrent et apprestent fourniaux, alembis et croisiaux, et soufflent fort, et pour ung petit de sulimacion ou congyeil qui leur appere merveillable, ilz cuident ataindre a merveille. Et puis quant il ont fait et fait et gasté leur temps, ilz y scevent autant comme devant, – mais que coust et despense a la maniere de distiller et d’aucunes congelacions de nulle utilité. Ainssy est il de toy et moy et de plusseurs: tu t’entens et le prens d’une maniere, et moy tout au rebours; tu recites, je replique. Et quant nous avons fait et fait, tout ne vault riens; car la matiere en est tres deshonneste, ainssy come aucuns arguemistes qui cuident fere de fiens or. You know that it happens with the reading of this book as with the books of the alchemists. Some people read them and understand them in one way; others read them and understand them in a totally opposite way. And each thinks he understands very well indeed. As a result they work to prepare furnaces, alembics, and crucibles, mixing together various metals and materials. With great effort they blow up the fire, and, because of a minute bit of sublime metal or mere residue which seems marvellous to them, they think they have worked wonders. Then after they have worked and worked and wasted their time, they know no more than before, except the cost, expense, and the art of distilling and congealing, knowledge of no value at all. So it is with you and me and many others. You understand the book in one way, and I quite the opposite. You quote; I reply. And when we have worked and worked, it is all worth nothing. For the matter is very dishonourable, much like certain alchemists who think they can transmute dung.29 If extracted from the context of Christine’s severe critique of the immorality of the Rose, the image of the alchemist beautifully frames the constitutional indecidability of the medieval discourse of love. Although rooted in human nature and based on “dung” (the fertility of embodiment and mortality), it does aspire (and in many cases succeeds) to turn itself into gold. The gold in question is indeed the little sublimation or residue that transpires in the process of reading and fills the reader with wonder, excitement, and desire (“ung petit de sulimacion ou congyeil qui leur appere merveillable”). The medieval reader/interpreter is, like the alchemist, a frantic yet indomitable character, in search of the wonder of transcendental knowledge and experience. And when, inevitably, such knowledge and experience proves itself vanishing like a chimera, medieval and modern readers alike are left with a useless yet inestimable residue: “the cost, expense, and the art” of

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reading. Every act of reading the discourse of love is an act of desire – it is, indeed, homologous to its content. It performs the alchemy of interpretation, sublimating the personal into the universal, the divine into the singular. Throughout this book I work within the assumption that there is one love and two overlapping rhetorics, both applicable to divine and earthly love: a sensual rhetoric (exploiting images of thirst, hunger, heat, and sexual impulse) and an abstract rhetoric (operating in terms of doubt, deferral, anticipation, and nostalgia). I resist calling them rhetorics of the body and of the spirit, because they both originate in the crucially embodied medieval self, and they build one upon the other, they grow into each other to form at times an indistinguishable discourse. There is no need, therefore, to look for an eroticized reading of Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs; nor to uphold a spiritualized understanding of Jaufré Rudel’s poetry. Both are, as Moshe Lazar would say in relation to the latter, exercises in “exorcism”30 – attempts at denying the fundamentally dual nature of such texts. Such attempts only mirror the opposite critical exorcism, which sees in religious texts on love merely an attack on earthly eroticism and in courtly poetry at best a parody of divine love. This book is also an inquiry into the protean and mysterious nature of desire. Desire emerges in my work as a very specific and punctual act (desiring something now) and an all-encompassing state (desiring everything all the time), as one of the most individualized features of the self, and at the same time as an overarching, all-driving, quasi-external force. I examine the normative and the transformative powers of desire, the ways it connects and disconnects, positions and repositions, deconstructs and reconstructs subjects and objects. The imperative of desire describes, in the Middle Ages, the abyss and peak of human experience, cupiditas and blessedness, lust and the love of God. The same desire underlies, as we shall see, Francesca’s perdition and Dante’s vision of God. Even more radically than love, desire is one; it is the cipher of the divine within the human being and of the human being within the divine. It is the self’s point of resistance and the O/other’s proof of existence. Finally, this book is also about love poetry – as the stretching of desire, as a form of blind vision, as a sublimation of instincts and drives. Desire (or rather, the perennial suspension and tension of desire) is the very nature of courtly/stilnovo poetry, both at the formal and the structural level.31 Love poetry is the linguistic translation of a desire (including but not limited to sexual desire) that the authorial self cannot and does not want to satisfy. Thus, the strategic exclusion and rewriting of “lust” in courtly/stilnovo poetry becomes engraved in poetry itself. Poetry is the act of lust; it is the interpretation and, therefore, the actualization and even the satisfaction of a moment

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of desire. It does not however put an end to desire, but actually originates further desire, resembling in this sense more divine charity than earthly love. Denys Turner has recently addressed the unique position of Bernard’s Sermons, which stand out within the medieval tradition of the exegesis of the Song of Songs for their engagement with the eroticism of the Canticum. This, according to Turner, is due to Bernard’s fascination with the language of the Song, rather than its meaning. Thus, Bernard’s Sermons “ought to be read not principally as an allegory, but principally as poetry,” and Bernard can be rightly considered “the poet […] of the Song’s poetry.”32 Like desire, poetry is alchemical, as it sublimates the discourse of love, yet leaves its eroticism intact. Poetry allows love to trespass over the boundaries of the divine, to meander across the border of time and eternity, to radically mutate into divinity without ever changing its nature. The central figure of the doves and the proliferation of bird imagery signal the heavy meta-poetic structure of Inferno 5, which is also (and foremost) about poetry, authorship, and meta-poetic desire. The equation bird – poetry is not only substantiated by the pun “penne” (feathers/pens), which Dante later makes explicit in the canto of poets (Purgatorio 24), 33 but also by a long-standing association between poetry and birdsong, on the grounds of their common naturalness. As Jaufré Rudel famously put it, the song of the poet is one with the modulation of the nightingale.34 For all its metrical and rhetorical apparatus, poetry is natural, as water flowing, as flowers spurting, as birdsong – and as love, one might add. By inscribing in hell the disharmonious and unnnatural flight of cranes, starlings, and doves, Dante explores and subverts ornithologically the question of the naturalness of love and poetry. Yet, Dante in this canto also shows how his – and all – love poetry turns a vision per speculum in aenigmate, a gaze into the beauty and “clarity” of a woman, into a vision face to face with the intimate nature of the human being or with what the medievals called God. I finally propose that Francesca da Rimini is a figure for love poetry itself, a beautiful canvas of rhetorical figures and complex intertextuality that enigmatically articulates love with everything else. Ultimately, the story of Paolo and Francesca is buried in hell not so much because of a moral or literary condemnation on the part of the Dante, but to exorcize a fundamental threat inherent in the poetics of love that it represents. The poetic discourse of love is a threat because, although it is the most relational and empowering of all discourses, it is radically idiosyncratic and fundamentally universal. Both situations imply solitude, nakedness, void, and the loss of all those bonds that make the historical/social/cultural subject visible to itself and to others. ✢✢✢

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The question of the divinity of love, of the “clarity” that transpires from the beauty of the (my) beloved, of how it allows the “vision face to face” of the most intricate secrets of the human nature, was posited by the medievals in the mirror of a solidly installed God. It is, however, still a vital question, present within lovers of all times, including the two postmodern lovers I saw one stormy day in England, seeking, more cautiously than Paolo and Francesca, the protection of a double umbrella, made of one stick and two canopies – yet still appearing (to me) “so light in the wind.”

1

Hell sanza speme vivemo in disio Inferno 4, 42 (without hope we live in desire)

Inferno is, apparently and intuitively, a realm of little desire. Although inordinate desire is, for Dante and medieval culture, the root of all derangements, within the coils of infernal structure there is no space for movement, transformation, growth; therefore, no space for desire. However, the great themes and issues that Dante inscribes at the beginning of his Comedy are critically linked to desire. The first four cantos of Inferno are quite uncharacteristic of hell; they are more about the presentation of the core features of the poem and the characterization of its main actors; the pilgrim and his guides.1 In this foundational block of cantos we find desire featured not only as a crucial aspect of the poem but also as the poem’s main narrative and linguistic/stylistic input. The declensions of desire at the beginning of hell differ – even diverge – among themselves, unsettling and challenging any obvious concept of desire. Desire is portrayed as the root of all sin and of all possibilities, as the engine of the narrative, and as the quasi-masochistic force that both drives the sinners to their permanent seat of damnation and spurs the pilgrim on to undertake his journey. Most important, desire is featured as the underlying punishment of Hell and as the stigma of non-Christian cultures. cantos 1 and 2: intention At the outset of the poem, Dante allegorizes the most significant sins – individual, civil, or human – in the three animals that hinder the progression of the pilgrim lost in the dark wood toward the sun that shines on top of a hill. The common interpretation understands the lion as pride (superbia), the

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leopard as lust (luxuria) and the she-wolf as greed (avaritia), but each animal exceeds these narrow definitions and traces a deeply polysemic map of sinful dispositions. The insurmountable she-wolf, in particular, causes a challenge to interpretation. Charles Singleton (ddp ad Inferno 1, 94), for instance, notices that her prominent place in the canto singles her out as a category of sin, rather than a single sin; as cupiditas in general. Investigating the relations between greed and desire, Teodolinda Barolini describes the she-wolf, “di tutte brame … carca” (laden with every craving, 49–50), as “the composite of all desires.”2 In the foundational scene of the Comedy, therefore, desire is represented not only and narrowly as erotic desire (the leopard’s lust) but also as a more undefined –and as such more dangerous – composite of appetites: material, physical, and intellectual cravings. The she-wolf also represents the first and most difficult impediment to the pilgrim’s journey. She marks indeed the conclusion of a short journey within the journey; the pilgrim’s attempt to proceed without a guide, which results in the quick hike through the dark wood and at the foot of the hill.3 In the fiction, the barrier imposed by the she-wolf is only bypassed by Virgil’s apparition. In history, only the fulfillment of the (still mysterious) prophecy of the greyhound (Inferno 1, 94–110) will forever eliminate this insatiable scourge, which “has a nature so vicious and malign that she never sates her greedy appetite and after feeding is hungrier than before” (“ha natura sì malvagia e ria, / che mai non empie la bramosa voglia, / e dopo ’l pasto ha più fame che pria,” Inferno 1, 97–9). In canto 2, where the reader is made aware of the antecedents of canto 1 and informed about the reasons for Virgil’s mission, the initial impediment to the pilgrim’s journey is presented as a risky moment of chance rather than an insurmountable barrier. Lucy, when recapping for Beatrice Dante’s extreme situation, describes him as a soldier in mortal combat, about to surrender to the tide of sinful passions: “non vedi tu la morte ch’el combatte / su la fiumana ove il mar non ha vanto?” (Do you not see the death that assails him on that flood over which the sea has no vaunt? Inferno 2, 107–8). The interpretation of the swelling river, against which the sea is powerless, is fraught with conflict.4 Commentators and critics are divided on the nature of the river. It is either interpreted metaphorically as the overflowing river of passion and sin, thus representing another reiteration of the dark wood and the she-wolf (Charles Singleton), or as a real river – the Acheron for some early commentators, or the Arno, or, more recently and convincingly, the Jordan (John Freccero). As Freccero explains, the river and the wolf are both symbols of the pilgrim’s frustrated journey, the wolf serving as an obstacle to the pilgrim and the river being characterized by Lucy as a possibility for a crossing.5 In the reading of Freccero and others, the fiumana has both negative and

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the wings of the doves

positive connotations, as the dangerous point of no return that the self needs to pass in order to begin the journey toward salvation. The interpretation of the relation between river and sea is a matter of similar debate, which centres on the choice between the variants “ove” and “onde” in line 108 – resulting in either “where the sea has no power” or “over which the sea has no power.” This could be a river that runs where there is no sea (the Acheron), that is more powerful than the sea (the Jordan as Oceanos), or that is more dangerous than the sea. Alternatively, Dante could be talking about a place where river meets sea, perhaps the mouth of a river, where often-dangerous whirlpools are created and where (“onde”) the river often overwhelms the sea. I have argued elsewhere that the relation between sea and river as described by the fiumana could be understood as that occurring in deltas.6 In a delta, a river breaks up into various streams, which run in different directions – significantly marking and modifying the landscape over time. Although not necessarily violent or even dangerous, the delta creates a space that is neither land nor sea and is highly mutable over time: certain branches in deltas run dry while others are created, some of which do indeed meet the sea. Delta rivers often flood the land, as is implicit in the word fiumana (flooding river), sometimes with beneficial effects. Just as most modern readings of Dante’s fiumana point out both its threatening and beneficial aspects, so too does the very idea of the delta convey both hazard and opportunity. The swelling river that the pilgrim faces at the beginning of the Inferno might then be a new and ambiguous branch of the delta, the flood of desire that runs in many different streams toward the sea, in which every yearning, cosmic as well as individual, finds rest. In such terms God is described by Piccarda Donati in the Paradiso: “E ’n la sua volontade è nostra pace: / ell’è quel mare al qual tutto si move / ciò ch’ella cria o che natura face” (and in His will is our peace. It is that sea to which all moves, both what It creates and what nature makes, Paradiso 3, 85–7). Analysis of the images of the she-wolf and the river shows how the fundamental mechanics of desire at the beginning of Inferno are always dual. Desire in cantos 1 to 4 is an impediment that is also a possibility; a forward motion that is laden with doubt; an invitation that might hide a deception. This is particularly true in the subsequent canto, where desire ambiguously initiates and supports Dante’s first authorial step in the Comedy. Canto 2 is busy with movement, marked by the repetition of words such as “to move,” “to go,” and “quickly.” The business in question is that of Dante’s moral and literary mandate, and it provides the answer to the pilgrim’s sensible question: “why should I go?” and the anticipation of the author’s doubt: “why should I write?” Both mandates are framed by issues of love and desire, and are conveyed through rhetorical ambiguity. With a bold

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move, Dante compares and contrasts his journey with the two other great “bodily” visits to the underworld, as well as with the two main authorial voices of his times: the Bible and the Aeneid. Why should I come? – the pilgrim wonders – I am neither Aeneas nor Paul: “Ma io, perché venirvi? o chi ’l concede? / Io non Enëa, io non Paulo sono; / me degno a ciò né io né altri ’l crede” (but I, why do I come there? And who allows it? I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul; of this neither I nor others think me worthy,” Inferno 2, 31–3). As opposed to the theological and historical implications that underlie the journeys of Paul and Aeneas, Dante’s moral authorization is a matter of love. Beatrice, colouring the perfection of heavenly desire with a nostalgic, quasipurgatorial nuance (“vegno del loco onde tornar disio”; I come from a place to which I long to return, Inferno 2, 71), summons Virgil in limbo in the name of love: “amor mi mosse che mi fa parlare” (love moved me and makes me speak, 2, 72). There is no point in trying to establish whether the love initiating the narrative is earthly, courtly, lower-case love, or heavenly, uppercase Love. It is neither indeed: it is lower-case love that mutates en route into upper-case Love: it is the end of the Vita Nuova and the beginning of the Comedy. Accordingly, the narrative input spreads by means of desire. By telling Dante how Beatrice, herself moved by Love, set him in motion, Virgil is able to inspire in the scared pilgrim the desire for the enterprise: “Tu m’hai con desiderio il cor disposto / sì al venire con le parole tue / ch’i’ son tornato nel primo proposto” (By your words you have made me so eager to come with you that I have returned to my first resolve), says Dante (Inferno 2, 136–8), upon surrendering to Virgil’s authority. In this canto, where Virgil and Beatrice exchange rhetorical roles, desire is crucially embedded in words (“parole”). As Dante della Terza notices, Virgil begins by inhabiting a stilnovistic space in order to eliminate Dante’s fear, and describes Beatrice’s appearance in tones that are heavily reminiscent of the Vita Nuova.7 Io era tra color che son sospesi, e donna mi chiamò beata e bella, tal che di comandare io la richiesi. Lucevan li occhi suoi più che la stella; e cominciommi a dir soave e piana, con angelica voce, in sua favella: (Inferno 2, 52–7) I was among those who are suspended, and a lady called me so blessed

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and so fair that I prayed her to command me. Her eyes were more resplendent than the stars, and she began to say to me, sweetly and softly, in an angelic voice. Although she is introduced as a very plain and straightforward speaker (“soave e piana,” 56), Beatrice appears to be very familiar with ancient rhetoric, as when she constructs a deeply powerful captatio benevolentiae (although a fundamentally ironic one, in its relying strategically on earthly fame and insinuating some vague hint of Virgil’s salvation).8 Twice in her reported speech Beatrice praises Virgil’s words as both formally beautiful (“parola ornata,” 67) and morally dignified (“parlare onesto,” 113). In the contrast between Beatrice’s beautiful but allegedly unadorned manner of speaking (“soave e piana”) and Virgil’s highly stylized “parola ornata” lies a fundamental crux of the whole poem: the relation between sacred truth and poetry. The world of the blessed, like that of Scripture, is the bare and truthful sermo humilis, in contrast to the deception involved in the heavily adorned language of poetry, as Benvenuto da Imola promptly noticed: “sermo divinus est suavis et planus, non altus et superbus, sicut sermo Virgilii et poetarum” (divine speech is sweet and straightforward, not high and proud, like the one of Virgil and the poets, ddp ad Inferno 2, 56 [my translation]).9 The two rhetorical spaces are, however, more complex and permeable than it appeared to Benvenuto. On the one hand, the expression “soave e piana” carries some poetic ambiguity and tints divine speech with earthly and erotic hues. These words are employed in stilnovo poetry not to imply truthfulness of utterance, but to describe the beauty of the beloved woman.10 On the other hand, at this juncture of the poem, the high and proud speech of the poets is the principal means for immediate rescue and long-term salvation. Or movi, e con la tua parola ornata e con ciò c’ha mestieri al suo campare, l’aiuta sì ch’i’ ne sia consolata. (Inferno 2, 67–9) Go now, and with your fair speech and with whatever is needful for his deliverance, assist him so that it may console me. The divine, “plain” speaker demands the services of poetry’s beauty, as well as other unspecified measures of short- and long-term relief. Ancient commentators gloss this distinction through the split inherent to Virgil’s character – literally a poet and allegorically reason – and interpret Beatrice’s mandate

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as a two-pronged injunction to apply both poetic beauty and reason, eloquence and wisdom.11 As Francesco Mazzoni notices, the word “ornata” points to the rhetorical theory of the artificium exornationum, which is one of the most imperative skills for persuasion.12 The pilgrim needs urging at this point, and persuasion, as ancient rhetoric shows, is best achieved through beautiful words. As Giuseppe Mazzotta has shown, however, the expression “parola ornata” is employed again in canto 18 in the episode of Jason to portray deception: “con segni e con parole ornate / Isifile ingannò” (with tokens and with fair words, he deceived the young Hypsipyle, Inferno 18, 91–2).13 The distance between persuasion and seduction is short, and both work by means of desire. A complex role exchange takes place in the second canto of Inferno in order to overcome the stall in the narrative caused by the pilgrim’s lack of mandate. Virgil, the character from antiquity, inhabits a stilnovistic space within which he constructs Beatrice, the stilnovo character, as the spokesperson for a sermo humilis sacrae scripturae that hides, however, the manners of ancient rhetoric. The rhetorical and poetic cultures called upon in this episode are all aimed at eliciting desire in the pilgrim and at effecting the necessary persuasion/seduction, which will make him enter the underworld. Formally, the words that stir the pilgrim’s desire are a complex combination of two traditions: that of courtly lyric and that of ancient rhetoric. Both traditions are undermined throughout the poem as bearers of sinful and lustful content, as shown by episodes such as that of Francesca, Jason, and Ulysses. Furthermore, at this juncture of the poem the distance between sermo humilis and high style also is short, as is the gap between truth and lie – a hiatus that Dante cunningly exploits in the episode of Geryon, where he describes his poem as the truth that looks like a lie (“il ver ch’ha faccia di menzogna,” Inferno, 16, 124, see chapter 6). While everyone else (Mary, Lucy, Beatrice, Virgil) is moving to rescue him, the pilgrim himself wavers between fear and desire. Cantos 1 and 2 are structured in a very similar way. In both cases the narrative is stalled by the pilgrim’s fear (“paura,” the leading theme of canto 1) or cowardice (“viltade,” the mark of canto 2) and subsequently mobilized by the desire originating in Virgil’s words.14 At the end of canto 1, the desire for seeing the three otherworldly realms, possibly ignited by the obscure wording of Virgil’s prophecy of the greyhound, overcomes the fear instilled by the three beasts. However, at the very beginning of canto 2, Dante is seized by a sudden fear (“viltade,” Inferno 2, 45) on considering the potential madness of his journey (“venuta folle,” 2, 35) and he calls a sudden halt to the enterprise he has already undertaken, acting “like one who unwills what he has willed” (“quei che disvuol ciò che volle,” 2, 37).15 This time, it takes clearer and more

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adorned words by Virgil to overcome the impasse, and a more unambiguous hint to personal salvation. At this initial stage of Inferno, the pilgrim is kept suspended by a net woven with fear and desire, until yearning overcomes cowardice. As we shall see in the next section, fear and desire describe the quintessential beginning of the infernal experience of the damned souls, as well as the poetic experience of the author.

canto 3: te nsion While the love invoked by Beatrice in canto 2 fluctuates between the erotic and the spiritual, the initial letter of God-as-Love inscribed on the gates of hell in its Trinitarian nature is to be understood as unambiguously upper case: Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore; fecemi la divina podestate, la somma sapïenza e ’l primo amore. (Inferno 3, 4–6) Justice moved my high maker; the divine Power made me, the supreme Wisdom and the primal Love. In attempts to answer the question of why Dante chose to remind the reader of the loving aspect of God in a context of utter punishment and vengeance, the traditional explanation is that he is giving a cue that hell too is a making of love, and that the mention of love contributes to reintegrating order in the universe and gives satisfaction to the just, as well as providing a compelling example for the sinners on earth. This question indeed troubles the modern reader more than the medieval one – the medieval commentary tradition taking these lines as the standard characterization of the Trinity, as featured, for instance, by Dante himself in Convivio ii, 5, 7–8.16 Interestingly, however, this slightly jarring occurrence of love connects with a more obvious anomaly within the theme of desire in the same canto. Desire in canto 3 is figured as a misplaced tension that derives from Dante’s appropriation and rewriting of the theme of desire from the sixth book of the Aeneid. The last section of canto 3 is devoted to the description of how souls are ferried across the river Acheron, and is a supreme illustration of the subtlety and refinement of Dante’s rewriting of Virgil, of his ability to create with just a few touches a wholly new text in the guise of a quasi-pedestrian translation. Such is the case for the boatman Charon, transformed by the addition of a

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pair of glowing red eyes; and such is the case for the most famous simile of this canto: Come d’autunno si levan le foglie L’una appresso de l’altra, fin che ’l ramo vede a la terra tutte le sue spoglie, similemente il mal seme d’Adamo gittansi di quel lito ad una ad una, per cenni come augel per suo richiamo. (Inferno 3, 112–17) As the leaves fall away in autumn one after another, till the bough sees all its spoils upon the ground, so there the evil seed of Adam: one by one they cast themselves from that shore at signals, like a bird at his call. The flight of the damned into Charon’s boat is beautifully patterned on the double Virgilian simile of the leaves falling from the tree and the migratory birds gathering for the seasonal travel. Huc omnis turba ad ripas effusa ruebat, matres atque viri, defunctaque corpora vita magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptaeque puellae, impositique rogis iuvenes ante ora parentum: quam multa in silvis autumni frigore primo lapsa cadunt folia, aut ad terram gurgite ab alto quam multae glomerantur aves, ubi frigidus annus trans pontum fugat, et terris immittit apricis. Stabant orantes primi transmittere cursum, tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore. (Aeneid 6, 305–14) Hither rushed all the throng, streaming to the banks, mothers and men and bodies of high-souled heroes, their life now done, boys and unwedded girls, and sons placed on the pyre before their father’s eyes; thick as the leaves of the forest that at autumn’s first frost drop and fall, and thick as the birds that from the seething deep flock shoreward, when the chill of the year drives them overseas and sends them into sunny lands. They stood, pleading to be the first ferried across, and stretched out hands in yearning for the farther shore.17

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The relation between Aeneid 6 and Inferno 3 goes well beyond the borrowing of episodes, lines, and words; it has deep conceptual implications. In particular, the sixth book of the Aeneid brings to canto 3 a whole dimension of desire. In the sixth book of the Aeneid the theme of desire is featured as a (mostly unresolved) tension, played on the tune of notions such as cupido, amor, velle, optatus and, surely, tendere.18 It begins with the Sybil acknowledging Aeneas’s great desire to undertake such an onerous task (“tantus amor mentis, tanta cupido,” 134). As opposed to Dante, Aeneas actively and urgently desires to go to the underworld, and this desire is figured as both a balanced and positive sentiment (amor) and as an unbalanced and negative drive (cupido). Two doves – his mother’s sacred birds – show him the way to the golden bough. Like the doves in Inferno 5, these birds both represent desire (as animals sacred to Venus) and are moved by desire (“tendere pergant,” 198; “sedibus optatis,” 203).19 After approaching the underworld with the Sybil, Aeneas witnesses the arrival of Charon’s boat and the crowding of the souls near the banks of the Acheron. The souls’ desire for the other bank (“ripae ulteriori amor,” 314) is represented by their dishevelled running (“turba effuse ruebat,” 305) and by the tension of their hands (“tendebant manus,” 314). Although extremely intense, this desire is both attainable and proper, as the word amor suggests. There is another group of people, however, for whom desire turns into a desperate madness. The souls of the unburied are condemned to wander on the river bank for a hundred years before they can finally find rest on the longed-for other side (“stagna exoptata revisunt,” 330). The souls’ impatient desire is so frustrated that it easily descends into folly. Such is Palinurus’s mad desire (“dira cupido,” 373) when he begs Aeneas first to bury him, and then, stretching out his arms, to drag him to the other side in spite of the gods’ will (“da dextram misero, et tecum me tolle per undas,” 370). Tension (frustrated or otherwise) – underlined by the repetition of the word “tendere” – is also the mark of Aeneas’s encounter with Anchises (680–700).20 Anchises himself describes Aeneas’s travels so far as a tension toward the meeting with the father – the only interlude being, interestingly, the encounter with Dido, the one episode of erotic desire in the Aeneid. At the same time, the affective tension toward the father is dramatically frustrated, as the famous thrice-failed embrace emphasizes, Anchises’ body being now just a shade.21 The desire for body is a problematic issue in this episode. While evincing such great desire for the tangible firmness of an embrace, Aeneas marvels at the souls’ agreeing to reincarnate (719–50): why such mad desire to see again the

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light? (“Quae lucis miseris tam dira cupido?” 721). The “dira cupido” of these souls is the reverse of Palinurus’s. Why would souls that so deeply desire the other world (so much so that their desire could be turned into madness) now want to return to it? This curiosity elicits Anchises’ explanation of the incarnation of the souls and the quite rushed (compared to the Comedy) purgatorial formalities in the Aeneid. In this passage, Anchises describes the body as a blind prison (“carcere caeco,” 734), an expression that Dante will later apply to the whole of hell (“Se per questo cieco / carcere vai per altezza d’ingeno”; If you go through this blind prison by reason of high genius, Inferno 10, 58–9). Virgil portrays human (embodied) life, enclosed in the darkness of a blind dungeon, as a succession of fears and desires, pleasures and pains (“metuunt cupiuntque, dolent gaudentque,” 733). After the souls leave their bodies they are still “contaminated”: it takes, therefore, cleansing through immersion in the Lethe, and the consequent memory loss, to allow for a renewed desire for body (“rursus et incipiant in corpora velle reverti,” 751).22 In keeping with the Aeneid’s imperial agenda, the final desire of Aeneas’s journey in the underworld is for the future glory of Rome (“incenditque animum famae venientis amore,” 889), which reactivates both action and narration. The canvas of desire in the sixth book of the Aeneid is dominated by the feature of tension or motion toward somewhere or someone else: the doves’ motion toward the golden bough, the souls’ longing for the opposite river bank, Aeneas’s desire for his father’s embrace. Desire is at times figured as a positive tension (amor) toward an appropriate object of desire (optatus) and at times as folly. The expression “mad desire” (dira cupido) is employed twice to illustrate two conflicting desires: Palinurus’s deranged desire for the other world, which leads him to dare infringe on the gods’ authority, and (Aeneas’s judgment of) the soul’s desire for embodiment. Interestingly, Aeneas’s own desire to undertake the journey is characterized as both amor and cupido. Dante borrows and reworks this complex textual heritage, focusing in particular on the notions of tension and of “mad desire,” and heightening both the dimensions of horror and desire in his rewriting of the Acheron episode.23 On the one hand, the souls’ desire for the opposite bank is underlined by several motions and emotions: their eagerness to cross, which raises the pilgrim’s curiosity (“e qual costume / le fa di trapassar parer sì pronte” Inferno 3, 74–5); their voluntary gathering near the waters (“poi si ritrasser tutte quante insieme,” 107); their rushing toward the boat, although dutifully and in orderly fashion, at Charon’s signal (“gittansi di quel lito ad una ad una, / per cenni come augel per suo richiamo,” 117–18). On the other hand,

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a sudden fear seizes the souls upon hearing the boatman’s words, followed by an all-encompassing, useless rage.24 Eventually, however, the eagerness to cross overcomes fear and wrath. In rewriting the simile of the leaves and the birds, Dante applies two minimal, but striking, modifications. First he creates an effect of estrangement for his reader, by constructing, with the mastery worthy of a film-maker, the perspective of this scene from the point of view of the branch, which “sees” its spoils falling to the ground. Second, he turns Virgil’s migratory birds, which suggest a cyclical, seasonal, “peaceful” pattern of departure, into birds of prey answering the signal of the falconer (“per cenni come augel per suo richiamo,” 117). While Charon’s gesture (“loro accennando,” 110) functions as the signal, the lure is not the most appetizing. Whereas for the souls in the Aeneid, resting in the other world is indeed a desirable and pacifying step, the desire of Dante’s damned souls to rush toward eternal torment is counterintuitive: e pronti sono a trapassar lo rio, ché la divina giustizia li sprona, sì che la tema si volve in disio. (Inferno 3, 124–6) and they are eager to cross the stream, for divine justice so spurs them that their fear is changed to desire. Here Dante modifies Virgil’s “ripae ulteriori amor,” featuring the crossing as a “dira cupido,” a mad flight toward the uselessness and fixation of infernal pain. While in the Aeneid “mad desire” is what defines Palinurus’s frustration at the delay in crossing and the eagerness of the souls to return to the dark prison of embodiment, in Dante the damned souls “madly” desire to cross toward hell, a collective and eternal blind dungeon (“cieco carcere”). While in Virgil fear and desire are the alternating impulses that guide embodied life, in Dante the two forces find a very sharp direction – much like Dante’s birds of prey as opposed to Virgil’s migratory birds – precipitously rushing the damned to a horrid reincarnation in the endless materiality and corporeality that is hell.25 The same desire for undergoing punishment marks the experience of the souls in the Purgatorio. This kind of desire is, however, more easily understood in the context of the “productive” and temporary quality of purgatorial pain,26 whereas the desire in Inferno 3 is frequently glossed as “unnatural” or “inhuman.” Traditionally, this desire is explained either as a restless disposition on the part of the souls to put an end to this moment of transition,

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motivated by the consciousness of their evil or by the fear of God, which overshadows any other fear; or as the drive (natural and/or supernatural) to fulfill the ineluctable justice that leads them there; or even as the cosmic desire to settle in one’s proper place.27 Marc Coagan explains the souls’ impulse rather as an act of love, linking it to his interpretation of hell and the contrapasso as a perverse imitation of blessedness, a place in which the damned are literally confirmed in their choice of earthly delights, only to find them horribly inverted, if not empty.28 While agreeing that this is actually an act of love, I propose to understand it as “masochistic.” Desire as described in canto 3 fits well into the description of what Sigmund Freud termed “moral masochism” – the third and most important kind of masochism studied in his 1924 essay “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” Freud argues that moral masochism exhibits a loose connection to sexuality (the mark of the first, and more incomprehensible type of masochism, the erotogenic one) and displays a less clear pattern of authority and punishment (typical of the standard, or “feminine” type of masochism). It is related to an “unconscious sense of guilt,” which feeds the destructive (death) instinct, but it is not free of libidinal drives (life instinct). Moral masochism carries aspects of the two other more basic forms of masochism to the sphere of conscience. Indeed, Freud describes moral masochism as “morality sexualized.” The masochist takes conscience and morality, which had arisen from the overcoming of the Oedipus complex, back to an Oedipal (sexualized) state. Thus: “Masochism creates a temptation to perform ‘sinful’ actions which must then be expiated by the reproaches of the sadistic conscience … or by chastisement from the great parental authority of Destiny. In order to provoke punishment for this last representative of the parents, the masochist must do what is inexpedient, must act against his own interests.”29 Moral masochism proves, according to Freud, the existence of the fusion of the instincts: although originating in the death instinct, moral masochism entertains a strong erotic component and thus, “even the subject’s destruction of himself cannot take place without libidinal satisfaction.”30 The “strange” desire that pushes the souls forward into Charon’s boat in Inferno 3, can, therefore, be read as an eroticization of their guilt, one that fulfils both the “justice” and the “love” inscribed on the gates of hell. In other words, the authoritarian Love, the inscrutable Knowledge, and the ineluctable Justice inscribed on the gates of hell elicit a masochistic desire within the sinners. Their inordinate desire in life, which brought them to damnation, is given one ultimate push on the banks of the river. Virgil’s “dira cupido” becomes in Dante’s hell the joining of desire and guilt, which these souls always kept discrete in life and which gives them the momentum to cross the river. The last derangement of the soul is, paradoxically, orderly. This may be called

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the last act of positive desire in hell, the ultimate drive of desire in search of satisfaction, as the sinners do, indeed, gain the longed-for other bank. If there is inversion of desires in hell, it only rests in this moment of counter-bliss, where the damned experience, in a deformed and single instance, the joining of desire and the will that is the mark of blessedness. There is a striking parallel between the soul’s turning of fear into desire on the shores of the Acheron and the situation of the pilgrim in the previous canto. He too is suspended between the fear of the enterprise and his desire to go. Eventually, Virgil’s savvy rhetoric, a mix of seduction and persuasion, turns his fear into desire. As mentioned before, canto 2 is a direct answer to the pilgrim’s question (“why should I go?”) and the indirect tackling of the writer’s doubt (“why should I write?”) – as well, one might add, as the even more oblique response to the issue elicited by a more hidden level of textuality, the reader’s doubt: “why should I follow you?” Can we employ the concept of masochism to describe the state of the character, the writer and the reader? While the destructive desire that the damned souls experience in canto 3 does not fit Dante’s position in canto 2, a more literary approach to masochism, such as the one put forth by Gilles Deleuze in his essay “Masochism,” can be invoked.31 Deleuze analyses masochism as a formal, rather than moral, notion: what psychoanalysis termed “perversion” is, after all, a novelistic experience, derived from the life and work of Leopold von Sacher Masoch. Thus, Deleuze brings into focus the aspect of the pleasure that comes after the pain, and the idea that masochism is fundamentally contractual, consensual, and relational. Indeed, Dante’s surrendering to Virgil’s authority, which is the outcome of the pilgrim’s fear turning into desire, evokes a masochist contract: Tu m’hai con disiderio il cor disposto sì al venir con le parole tue, ch’i’ son tornato nel primo proposto. Or va, ch’un sol volere è d’ambedue: tu duca, tu segnore e tu maestro. (Inferno 2, 136–40) By your words you have made me so eager to come with you that I have returned to my first resolve. Now on, for a single will is with us both; you are my leader, you my master and my teacher. The submissive relation of pupil to guide – concealing the sadistic dismantling of the old author by the new one – is a crucial moment in Dante’s own discourse of authority,32 which involves locating the novelty of his work

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within a dominant culture and negotiating his position as both a vernacular poet and a “truth-teller.” Still another declension of masochism can be applied to portray Dante’s authorial position in this crucial initial moment: the notion of “textual masochism,” or of “masochistic contract” found in studies of German Jewish literature to explain the position of minority literature with respect to the dominant culture. In his preface to One Hundred Years of Masochism, Sander Gilman explains that the concept of “masochistic text” conveys the “demand on the part of the author that the literary representation of the sense of powerlessness be understood as the tool to shape those who claim to have power over oneself.”33 A complex net of relations of domination is established among the mainstream culture, the minority culture, and the readers. The author both employs and transcends a discourse (language, style) of minority in order to show his belonging to a dominant culture as well as his differing from it. Likewise, his construction of an authorial self “involves his domination by others (the readers) and his supposed dominance of them.” The idea of a “masochistic text” entails thus both a union between the players (the so-called masochistic contract) and a separation between them (the distance dividing the dominated from the dominating). In the case of canto 2 we witness the “new author” Dante writing a sacred epic in the vernacular (minority) language, negotiating a masochistic contract with both the dominant culture and his readers. In turning his fear into desire, and thus acting out the masochistic step, the pilgrim-writer Dante both accepts and sublimates his minority position with respect to the dominant culture (epic and the Bible, Aeneas and Paul), and he signs a masochistic contract with Virgil and (indirectly) with Beatrice. Ultimately, the readers too are called to turn their fear into desire. The pleasure in the store for all is the text.

canto 4: s usp e nsion In canto 4 Dante explores yet another facet of desire, turning it into a form of punishment that defines all of hell. This structural notion of desire is carried by the famous line in which Virgil describes the punishment of limbo, where he and other illustrious souls dwell, penalized “only” by desire, for their “non-sin” of not having had the chance to be Christian, for historical or geographical reasons. Per tai difetti, non per altro rio semo perduti, e sol di tanto offesi che sanza speme vivemo in disio. (Inferno 4, 40–2)

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Because of these shortcomings, and for no other fault, we are lost, and only so far afflicted that without hope we live in longing. In this formulation desire is inextricably linked to hope – a connection that is remarked upon again in canto 9, where the inhabitants of limbo are defined as those whose “sole punishment is hope cut off” (“che sol per pena han la speranza cionca,” Inferno 9, 18). In Purgatorio Virgil recalls once again the loss inherent in this kind of desire, coupling it this time with mourning: State contenti, umana gente, al quia; ché, se potuto aveste veder tutto, mestier non era parturir Maria; e disïar vedeste sanza frutto tai che sarebbe lor disio quetato, ch’etternalmente è dato lor per lutto: io dico d’Aristotile e di Plato e di molt’altri; e qui chinò la fronte, e più non disse, e rimase turbato. (Purgatorio 3, 37–45) Be content, human race, with the quia, for if you had been able to see everything, no need was there for Mary to give birth; and you have seen desiring fruitlessly men such that their desire would have been satisfied which is given them for eternal grief: I speak of Aristotle and Plato and of many others. And here he bent his brow and said no more, and remained troubled. In this passage, the clash of two desires is made explicit. The desire for knowledge, by compelling questions about the essence of things (quid sit) rather than about their existence (quia est), is turned into the very punishment of the great non-Christian souls. The frustrated desire for knowledge is here connected to Incarnation and implicitly to original sin, the event that created the need for Mary’s giving birth. In Paradiso (26, 117), Dante describes original sin as a trespass, “il trapassar del segno.” The original trespassing of desire toward knowledge turns every human knowledge and desire into an imperfect and potentially damming one.34 In equating desire with mourning, Virgil fittingly portrays desire according to the classical understanding of the world. In Latin antiquity, desiderium refers to dead people and it conveys the pain and regret for something or somebody that no longer exists and is forever lost.35 The etymology de sideribus (from the stars) implies that the origin of this regret is located in the

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“other” world, in a transcendental space, as opposed to the terrestrial space of human existence. However, the remote cause of the regret “coming from the stars” is located in the very terrestrial and bodily space that it seems to bypass: it has to do with the disappearance of a tangible sign, namely a body. In antiquity the communication between the two worlds is severed: desire indicates an irreplaceable loss. But desire here translates also the theologians’ poena damni – the privation of the vision of God and of all the supernatural gifts (faith, hope, and charity) – a sort of Ur-punishment underlying all the other punishments in hell and in purgatory (where poena sensus, the punishment of the flesh is added to poena damni, the punishment of loss). Theologians considered the poena damni to be an active torment, made of grief (for having lost God) and anger (toward him). Still in our day, believers regard the poena damni as the essence of eternal punishment – an active and intense type of pain, consisting of confusion, anguish, humiliation, depression, misery, wrath, and … desire.36 What is, however, the quality and extent of this desire, which the ancient souls of antiquity share with the un-baptized children? How much torment is implicit in this desire, and how much awareness? Is the poena damni in limbo a terrifying spiritual torment, as Boccaccio warns, or a minor penalty, comparable to the feeling one has toward something for which one is not born (becoming Pope or Emperor, for instance, or the Lord of Bologna), as Benvenuto da Imola humorously glosses?37 In designing a whole new space for the great souls of antiquity, Dante, it is well known, explicitly manipulated the theological tradition, which only featured a two-fold “hem” of hell: the temporal (and obsolete after the Harrowing of Hell) limbus patruum and the eternal limbus puerorum, and held the (quasi) impossibility for an adult to be stained only by original sin. In shaping his own limbo and the poena damni therein, Dante applies and modifies elements of a flexible theological tradition, takes up suggestions from popular culture, and colours his limbo with the poetry of the Aeneid.38 The nature of the punishment of limbo has always troubled Christian theologians. Whereas the state of the Jews awaiting the advent of Christ was unambiguously featured as one of happiness, diminished only by postponement though perhaps fanned by anticipation, that of the unbaptized children became a source of much debate, as it involved problems such as guilt without personal responsibility and the infallibility of divine justice. The theological problem of limbo was caused by Augustine. Amidst the maze of the Pelagian controversy about the nature and genetics of original sin, Augustine established a very harsh standard designed to counteract the Pelagian idea that Adam’s sin was not “infective” – that it spread by imitation and not by propagation, and therefore that baptism for children was not

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a necessity. Unbaptized children, Augustine says, are to be considered sinners like anyone else in hell, and are condemned to hell’s fire and to some physical pain; a very real punishment, although the mildest of all (“mitissima sane omnium poena”).39 For Augustine desire became an argument against the Pelagians, who devised a specific state for unbaptized children, considering them worthy of eternal life but not of entering the kingdom of God. With such an arrangement, Augustine argues, the Pelagians are no less merciless than him: instead of striking the “culprits,” the Pelagians send them into exile, condemning them to the desire of the pilgrim who longs (in this case desperately) for the homeland.40 Augustine’s view was sanctioned at the council of Carthage in 418, where the Pelagian idea of a two-tiered blessedness was understood as an “intermediary place” (“medius locus”), and condemned thereafter.41 It took centuries of negotiation to mitigate this position, starting with Abelard, who reinterpreted Augustine’s “mitissima poena” as a mild spiritual punishment, akin to the desire of the Jewish fathers and mothers, albeit deprived of the beatific vision.42 This view, initially rejected, was then endorsed by Peter Lombard, who more directly stated that the “levissima poena” was not infernal fire or the “worms” of conscience, but indeed only the perpetual loss of the vision of God.43 Peter’s argument is often quoted as a turning point in the history of limbo – understandably so, as it became the basic text for other masters’ (such as Aquinas and Bonaventure) more nuanced discussion of this topic. Moreover, Peter’s discussion of limbo in the context of original sin helps connect two desires: the one inherent in original sin to that characterizing the poena damni. Distinction 33, on the fate of unbaptized children, crowns an important section of the second book of the Sentences. After discussing the Fall, Peter zeroes in on the nature of original sin, with a very dense and remarkable group of chapters (Distinctions 30– 3) where the connection between original sin and desire is central. Original sin is the underlying incentive to every sin (“fomes peccati”); and it consists of desire and/or the ability to desire (“concupiscientia vel concupiscibilitas”).44 It is called by many names (“lex membrorum,” “languor naturae,” “tyrannus qui est in membris nostris,” “lex carnis”) but one thing is certain: desire is inscribed in the flesh of the human body. Furthermore, it spreads like a genetic disease from Adam to all humankind according to a highly stringent law of propagation (“lex propagationis”), involving actual particles from Adam’s body, which are multiplied through self-reproduction with the aid of food.45 The “law of desire” is thus inscribed in the human flesh and pollutes thereafter the sexual intercourse of parents (formerly free of this ominous “incentive”), and consequently the flesh of children. Thus, by flesh

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and through flesh the genetic sin spreads, affecting the soul by means of contact only.46 Baptism represents some type of vaccination against the strongest onset of concupiscientia, or rather some kind of single-dose medication that mitigates and debilitates the disease, but does not eradicate it. While before baptism lust dominates the self (“dominatur et regnat”), it lies dormant afterward until consent revives it. Baptism also cleanses children’s flesh from parents’ lust in conception, because otherwise the pollution of the human being would only grow and eventually spin out of control. Although actually innocent, unbaptized children are potentially creatures of uncontrolled desire, since they are stained by the attraction to pleasure handed down to them by their parents’ lust in conception. Thus, within Peter’s largely clear-cut discourse, creatures of desire are penalized solely with the punishment of desire. Peter’s vision was authorized by Pope Innocent III at the beginning of the thirteenth century, establishing that the punishment for original sin is only the loss of the vision of God.47 While for Peter the nature of original sin is simply concupiscientia, Aquinas’s vision is more complex. For Aquinas, the essence of original sin is the loss of original justice, of which covetousness is but a consequence. Thus, concupiscientia is the dis-order (inordinatio) deriving from the loss of original justice, which leaves the soul unable to select righteous objects of desire.48 When commenting on the Sentences, Aquinas takes Peter’s vision on unbaptized children much further, suggesting not only that they are afflicted solely by the punishment of loss but also that they indeed enjoy some kind of natural, child-like happiness. There is proportionality, Aquinas says, in the desire for eternal life and in the pain of its loss. Children, although knowing what they are missing, are not so fully developed as to be pained by the lack of divine vision, and yet they are able to appreciate and partake of divine goodness and natural perfection.49 The state of children is thus one of both separation and conjunction: they are separated in that they do not partake of divine glory and are conjoined in the participation of the natural good. Children are, then, able to enjoy God through their natural knowledge and delight (“de ipso gaudere poterunt naturali cognitione et dilectione”).50 In the De malo (5, 3) Aquinas refines the question of children’s knowledge. The souls of children are provided with natural knowledge (consisting in the knowledge that the soul is created for happiness and that happiness consists in the attainment of the perfect good), but not with the supernatural knowledge, provided by faith, that the glory of the saints is the perfect good. Thus, they don’t know that they are deprived of such good, and, therefore, they do not suffer (“non dolent”).51

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In his own commentary on the Sentences, Bonaventure emphasizes the middle position of unbaptized children, dictated by justice and mercy and showing the wonderful order of divine wisdom. Since their flesh is stained by sin, children are physically in hell, a vile and dark place (“in loco vili et tenebroso”), but they do not experience any physical pain, because they never actualized their potential for sin.52 Insofar as spiritual pain is concerned, children truly occupy a middle ground (“quasi medium”) between consolation and desolation, joy and sadness – indeed between the blessed and the damned, as they “communicate” with both, and share both the state of grace and the state of guilt.53 Moreover, children’s desire does not comprise the pangs deriving from the sadness of unfulfilled longing, because, in their consideration, their desire is somewhat fulfilled.54 The state of children is one of balance and continuation. Their knowledge and emotion (“cognitio et affectio”) is balanced (“libratur”) and perpetuated (“perpetuator”) in such a way that they cannot fall into one state or the other. There is a sense of steadiness (“divina iustitia”…. “consolidat”) in Bonaventure’s account – an inactive, uniform, unchangeable, perfect middle ground – a neither-nor (“nec … nec”) state, an in-between (“inter”) position: Unde si tu quaeras, quid parvuli faciant, utrum addiscant vel conferant, vel aliquod aliud opus exerceant; breviter ego respondeo quod divinae iustitiae equitas et inmutabilitas in eodem statu quantum ad corpus et quantum ad animam, sive quoad cognitivam et quoad affectivam, perpetualiter eos consolidat ut nec proficiant nec deficiant, nec laetentur nec tristentur, sed semper sic uniformiter maneant, ut sint materia laudandi divinum iudicium, quod sic est aequum et iustum, ut nullum bonum remaneat irremuneratum, nullum malum remaneat impunitum, et perfectissime teneat medium inter superfluum et diminutum. Secundum hanc igitur positionem concedendae sunt rationes ostendentes, quod parvuli non sentient spiritualem dolorem. (Commentaria in quatuor libros Sententiarum 2, dist. 33, a. 3, q. 2) Wherefore, if you ask, what the little ones do, whether they learn, and/ or confer (one with another), and/or exercise any other work; I briefly respond, that the equity of the Divine Justice and the immutability in that state as much as regards the body and as much as regards the soul, or in regard to the cognitive (part) and in regard to the affective (part), consolidates them perpetually, so that they neither make progress nor are deficient, they neither rejoice nor are saddened, but they remain always thus uniformly, to be the matter of praising the Divine Judgment, which is both fair and just, such that no good remains unremunerated,

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no evil remains unpunished, and the mean between the superfluous and the diminished is most perfectly held. According to this position, therefore, the reasons showing, that little ones shall not feel a spiritual sorrow, are to be conceded.55 The “neutrality” of children is dictated by the ineffectiveness of their lust and desire in life, as they never activated the potential for desire inherent in them through the original sin.56 The nuances and wavering of Peter’s, Aquinas’s and Bonaventure’s positions on limbo exemplify the contortions of the theological tradition in its efforts to keep a balance between the mercy and sternness of God. The best illustration of this shifting and even-now hesitant corpus of theology is Duns Scotus’ statement that the children are not in error (and therefore not in pain), but are … in doubt.57

Likely because of its uncertain theological grounds or its general nondescriptiveness, limbo does not enjoy a prominent position in the culture of Dante’s own time. There is no particularly remarkable figuration of limbo in contemporary texts about hell, with the important exception of the highly dramatic moment of the Harrowing of Hell.58 The descent of Christ into hell between his death and resurrection to save the souls of the great Jewish figures is very popular in iconography, hymnology, and drama. The narrative of the Harrowing of Hell originates in the Gospel of Nicodemus (chapters 18–27) and occupies a prominent position in the Easter Liturgy – as the figuration of Christ’s death redeeming humanity and saving it from eternal death. It incorporates into Christian ritual the traditional epic theme of the descensus ad inferos, coupling it with the tenet of victory over death and evil, and it celebrates the triumphal and “imperialistic” aspect of Christ. It is heavily charged both dramatically and visually, as it deploys dramatic dialogues among the souls, between Satan and Hell, and between Satan and Christ, and exploits visual means such as a candle lit in the darkness to symbolize the entrance of Christ into hell. As Amilcare Iannucci has shown, the theme of the Harrowing of Hell was certainly familiar to Dante, who inscribed it twice in the Inferno; in canto 2 with the descent of Beatrice to summon Virgil, and in canto 9 with the episode of the celestial messenger.59 In another way, Dante’s journey in hell can be understood as a whole new harrowing of the kingdom of evil for the benefit (and salvation) of the reader. Dante’s representation of limbo is intensely ambiguous. The poet always keeps the middle ground between harshness and leniency, and makes it

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difficult to establish precisely who is suffering what in this area of hell, and to what extent. Limbo is first introduced in the Comedy as a place of suspension: “io ero tra color che son sospesi” (I was among those who are suspended),” says Virgil (2, 52) as he starts recounting his meeting with Beatrice. Indeed a rhetoric of suspension pervades canto 4, as shown most notably by the description of the source of light that illuminates parts of limbo: “un foco che l’emisferio di tenebre vincia” (4, 69). The verb “vincia” can be interpreted either as a Sicilian form for “vincea” (thus, the fire “which overcame a hemisphere of darkness”) – or as a Latinism for “vincire” (to tie; thus: a hemisphere of darkness enclosed in the fire). Light over darkness (the humanistic reading), or darkness over light (the mystical reading)? This line is truly undecidable, like many other aspects of Dante’s limbo that are designed in a way that creates suspension of judgment.60 The first degree of ambiguity is established by the differentiation of space and torment within the first and largest circle of hell. The general circle hosts a large group (“turbe molte e grandi,” Inferno 4, 30) of nondescript infants, women, and men.61 The air is dark and it is trembling with sighs (“sospiri / che l’aura etterna facevan tremare,” 4, 26–7) because of “pain without torment” (“duol sanza martiri,” 4, 28) – the latter expression being a perfectly uncomplicated characterization of the poena damni.62 The most illustrious representatives of this crowd, the souls of the so-called magnanimous, are hosted in a truly un-hellish place, a sort of a first-class lounge, as one powerful hendecasyllable declares: “in loco aperto, luminoso e alto” (4, 117). Heroes, philosophers, and poets dwell in a castle that is located in a higher place, is walled, and protected by a beautiful river. It is illuminated by the light of a fire and embellished by fresh and glistening grass. Dante explicitly describes this location as an advancement with respect to the standard state of affairs of limbo and hell (“sì li avanza,” 4, 78), and even attributes this progression to an utterly ambiguous divine “grace” (“grazia … in ciel,” 4, 78) deriving from the fame of the magnanimous on earth (“l’onrata nominanza / che di lor suona sù ne la tua vita,” 4, 76–7). This area of limbo is highly syncretic. The imagery and formal inspiration for this part of hell draws primarily from Virgil’s Elysian Fields (Aeneid 6, 637–892), which the Florentine poet notoriously turned into a much gloomier and “medieval” place, with the addition of the castle on top of the luxuriant green. The openness and luminosity of the site, the way the traveller and his guide position themselves there in order to look at the spirits, and the loftier status of the guests therein all come directly from Virgil.63 The elevated and more luminous area of the castle resonates also with Aquinas’s description of the limbus patruum, which is located in a higher and less dark place with respect to the limbo of children and the rest of hell.64 The fire

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lighting the castle, often interpreted as “the light of reason” bringing some kind of illumination to hell, could equally be interpreted as a recasting of the paschal candle, the most poignant limbo moment in the liturgical and dramatic traditions. Likewise, the representation of the seven walls encircling the castle is highly syncretic, with the walls variously interpreted as the seven liberal arts, the seven parts of philosophy, or the four moral and the three intellectual virtues, while the river is often understood as the vanity of mundane things and the green grass commonly held to represent the vitality of glory. Besides being a luminous, “Elysian” place, the castle also enjoys silence in the air, as Dante notices upon exiting (“per altra via mi mena il savio duca / fuor de la queta, ne l’aura che trema”; by another way my wise guide leads me, out of the quiet into the trembling air, Inferno 4, 150–1), thus suggesting the absence of the sighs which make the outside air tremble. The four shades of the poets who lead Dante and Virgil to the castle have “semblance neither sad nor joyful” (“sembianz’ avevan né trista né lieta,” 4, 84) – a trace of Bonaventure’s balance between joy and sadness but also, as many early commentators remark, the standard characterization of the stoic wise man, who should never excessively rejoice or feel affliction.65 Indeed, as Fiorenzo Forti suggests, the characterization of the great non-Christian men and women, their grave eyes, their authoritarian and authoritative look and gentle voices resonate with Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s discussion of magnanimity, the moral virtue that is externalized as self-confident dignity.66 The punishment of desire applies to the entire first circle, although it is manifested slightly differently in the two areas. In the larger circle the “desire without hope” is given outward expression by the sighs which make that air tremble, whereas in the castle the air is silent. The link between desire and sighs is intriguingly present in some versions of the Harrowing of Hell. For instance, in the liturgical play on the Harrowing of Hell at Barking Abbey, written in the late fourteenth century and based on Eastern Liturgy, the Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs call out to Christ, the “desired one,” with their sighs.67 Sanctorum populus qui tenebatur in morte captivus voce lacrimabili clamaverunt: advenisti desiderabilis quem expectabamus in tenebris ut educeres hac nocte vinculatos de claustris. Te nostra vocabant suspira, te larga requirebant lamenta. Tu factus es spes desolatis magna consolatio in tormentis. The people of saints who had been held captive by death cried out in woeful voice: You have come, the desired one, for whom we have

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waited in the darkness, that you might lead the fettered out of prison. We called to you with our sighs. We sought you with abundant laments. You are made the hope of the desolate, the great consolation in torment. In this context desire is featured as time, as it marks the Fathers’ and Mothers’ wait. The sighs function not only as the outward manifestation of desire, but also as the means of attracting the object of desire and obtaining the fulfillment of longing. Dante turns the Jewish Patriarchs’ and Matriarchs’ expectation into the eternal, unfulfilled waiting of the righteous non-Christian, the endless suspense that has no relieving pleasure in sight. The association between desire and sighs is very common in contemporary love poetry, where “sospiro,” the sigh, is represented as the physical consequence of frustrated desire, a way of cooling down the heated internal spirits inflamed by love. In his Canon, Avicenna describes sighing as a voluntary act encompassing two phases (inhalation and exhalation) and serving purposes of aeration and of cooling down hot vapors.68 The medical poetics of sighs is particularly active in the work of Dante’s “first friend,” Guido Cavalcanti, who, as Maria Luisa Ardizzone has shown, makes the sigh a guiding metaphor for his discourse on love, and a central image in his “rhetoric of physiology.”69 Song 9 of Cavalcanti’s Rime, describing the destructive power of the woman’s superhuman beauty and of her piercing gaze, features the “torment of sighs” (“di sospir tormento”) as the origin of the weeping that demonstrates the lover’s death to the onlookers.70 Although there is no direct evidence that Dante patterned on Cavalcanti his own “torment of sighs” in limbo, it is indeed in one of Guido’s most famous poems that the notions of “air,” “trembling,” and “sighs” are brought together, although in a different order and with a different meaning with respect to Dante’s “sospiri / che l’aura etterna facevan tremare” (sighs which caused the eternal air to tremble, Inferno 4, 26–7): Chi è questa che vèn, ch’ogn’om la mira, che fa tremar di chiaritate l’are e mena seco Amor, sì che parlare null’omo pote, ma ciascun sospira? (Rime 4, 1–4) Who is she who comes, that everyone looks at her, who makes the air trembling with clarity and brings love with her, so that no one can speak, though everyone sighs?71

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Dante employed the physiology of sighs in his own love poetry, often with a more positive slant than Cavalcanti, relating sighs to the aphasia that derives not from the destructive power of love, but from the sweetness of the woman’s beauty and gaze.72 In the song Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona, which opens the third treatise of the Convivio, Dante links sighs and desire: La sua anima pura, che riceve da lui questa salute, lo manifesta in quel ch’ella conduce: ché ’n sue bellezze son cose vedute che li occhi di color dov’ella luce ne mandan messi al cor pien di disiri, che prendon aire e diventan sospiri. (Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona, 29–35) Her pure soul, which takes from him this bliss, reveals him then in what she brings with her: for among her beauties such things are seen that the eyes of those on whom she shines send messengers to the heart, full of desire, which unite with air and turn to sighs.73 In the literal, “stilnovo,” reading of these lines, the woman’s beauty, which is the sensible outcome of the greatness of her soul, “penetrates” the lover’s body through his eyes. The eyes then produce “messengers” (spirits) that, full of desires themselves, or mixing with the heart’s desire, produce sighs. Sighs are described as the quasi-chemical mix of desire and air, which allow for the outward expression of the inner emotion, for the venting of inner heat. The medical connection between desire and sighs suggests that the punishment of the larger area of limbo is, in light of this association, if not fully corporeal, at least “physiological.” In the larger circle of limbo the poena damni is featured as a physical punishment, since it elicits the response of sighs, raising questions on whether the silence of the castle implies less sufferance or less relief. The key to the interpretation of Dante’s limbo is a beautiful and mysterious word: “sospesi” (Inferno 4, 46), first employed by Virgil in canto 2, where he locates himself as one of the “suspended”: “io era tra color che sono sospesi” (2, 52). It is very difficult to capture the exact meaning of this simple word, which elicits in the commentary tradition questions such as: are these souls suspended between heaven and hell, are they wandering somewhere, or will they wander after resurrection? My explanation is that the

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souls of limbo are kept suspended in a net whose geometry is composed of the continuously shifting relations between desire, hope, and knowledge. In glossing the term “sospesi” the earliest commentators focus on its tentative nature, explaining it as “in doubt” (Jacopo della Lana), or “uncertain” (Anonimo Selmiano). Francesco da Buti notices that “sospesi” in the vernacular refers to a temporary situation, whereas this “sospesi” needs to be interpreted eternally. Some commentators interpret it allegorically, as Dante’s own reason (Benvenuto da Imola) or human reason as allegorized in Virgil (Landino) being suspended, in doubt, confused. Generally, however, the commentary tradition glosses this term rather hastily with a “neither … nor” type of explanation – neither blessed nor damned – which overlooks the fact that the inhabitants of limbo are actually damned. The recent commentary tradition explains “sospesi” as a translation of Bonaventure’s “libratur.”74 Dante’s choice of the word itself most likely derives from Virgil; in the sixth book of the Aeneid we read about souls “suspended” in the wind (“aliae panduntur inanes suspensae ad ventos,” 736), as part of the quick purgatorial formalities for those awaiting reincarnation mentioned earlier.75 It is, however, within Aquinas’s discussion of enjoyment as the last end of human intention that the notion of suspension is linked to desire, defining precisely the restlessness of yearning. Even if it has reached something, desire does not rest long on any one object, but is “suspended” until the last end is achieved.76 In the Comedy, Dante employs the word “suspended” several times with very interesting nuances. The use of the word spans from the actual propping up of the heretics’ tombstones (“tutti li lor coperchi eran sospesi”; their covers were all raised up, Inferno 9, 121) to the absolute rapture of the pilgrim in the vision of God (“Così la mente mia tutta sospesa”; Thus my mind, all rapt,” Paradiso 33, 97). Mostly, however, it signifies a moment of total concentration of the mind toward something, which becomes a distraction from everything else. It is often connected to the admiration and amazement (or even fear) for some remarkable aspects of the otherworld and/or to the desire of learning about it.77 In his extensive study of Dante’s limbo, Tito Bottagisio offers a very persuasive explanation of “sospesi” in connection to the desire without hope that characterizes the first circle.78 Although hypothetical, ineffectual, and without hope, desire in limbo is not in fact desperate. There is a difference, according to Aquinas, between lack of hope (“privatio spei”) and desperation, which is an active turning away from the desired object (“recessus a re desiderata”).79 This turning away is what the damned experience in the other circles of hell, and it causes the “worm” of conscience, anger, and fear. The state of suspension of limbo, Bottagisio explains, is caused by the upward

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thrust of desire for the divine vision, and the downward thrust of lack of hope, which never turns into desperation. Since they were not personally or actively guilty of the loss of God, but have inherited it through original sin, the souls of limbo do not live in a state of complete despair; the movement of their desire is not fully foreclosed. There is no access to but also no recess from God. This suspension of the souls is therefore conveyed by “inactive” suspended desire. The rephrasing of the poena damni in purgatory suggests adding the issue of knowledge to the dynamics of hope and desire traced so far. Virgil explains that the non-Christian desire for knowledge, the powerful active desire of “seeing everything,” becomes eventually ineffective, fruitless (“senza frutto”). This happens because such desire drives non-Christian culture to trespassing from the physical evidence of knowledge/information (quia est) to a metaphysical type of knowledge/wisdom (quid sit) by means of reason alone. In purgatory Virgil provides an abbreviated list of the guests of the castle, singling out Aristotle and Plato – and implicitly himself, in a famous pain-laden silence – among those who had the potential to achieve the desired end (“tai che sarebbe ’l lor disio quetato,” Purgatorio 3, 41) but were unable to do so. The Aristotelian natural desire for knowledge which characterizes the human being is inscribed at the beginning of Dante’s Convivio: “Sì come dice lo Filosofo nel principio della Prima Filosofia, tutti li uomini naturalmente desiderano di sapere” (As the Philosopher says at the beginning of the First Philosophy, all men by nature desire to know, Convivio 1, i, 1).80 The relation between desire and knowledge is the object of study of the third treatise of the Convivio, where Dante celebrates his falling in love with lady Philosophy, the highly syncretic Sapienza. Wisdom is depicted there as the gateway to heavenly blessedness – where Paradise is, however, a celestial Athens (“Atene celestiale,” Convivio 3, xiv, 14) or, indeed, a heavenly limbo, in which the ancient philosophers (Stoics, Peripatetics, and even Epicureans) are happily reconciled by divine illumination.81 In Convivio 3 Dante explains that desire aims at perfection and that human perfection is knowledge. Thus, knowledge is blessedness for the human being insofar as the natural desire is concerned. Human knowledge, however, cannot explain everything: the human intellect can only dimly see the dazzling light of the metaphysical objects and of God. Still, (imperfect) human knowledge is the ultimate goal of an (imperfect) natural desire which is commensurate with the faculty of the desiring person.82 Anything that exceeds the capacity of human knowledge is an “errore.” The blueprint for Ulysses’ error/wandering/sin is all in this trespassing of desire outside of its natural boundaries:

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E però l’umano desiderio è misurato in questa vita a quella scienza che qui avere si può, e quello punto non passa se non per errore, lo quale è di fuori di naturale intenzione. (Convivio 3, xv, 9) Therefore human desire within this life is proportionate to the wisdom which can be acquired here, and this limit is not transgressed except through an error which lies outside of Nature’s intention. If Philosophy/Wisdom cannot explain everything about God, then the knowledge of God is not the natural desire of the human being: Onde, con ciò sia cosa che conoscere di Dio, e di certe altre cose, quello esso è, non sia possibile alla nostra natura, quello da noi naturalmente non è desiderato di sapere. (Convivio 3, xv, 10) This is why, since it is not within the power of our nature to know what God is (and what certain other things are), we do not by nature desire to have this knowledge. In Dante’s Convivio natural desire (imperfect, underdeveloped desire) elects knowledge as the ultimate aim of the human being. The way knowledge is characterized in the third book of the Convivio closely recalls what Aquinas granted to unbaptized children. The children’s incomplete, underdeveloped knowledge does not allow them to feel either the depth of the pain of having lost God or the joy of being united to Him. Their punishment (or lack thereof) is proportional to their knowledge; it is the inactive desire of limbo. The difference between the children and the magnanimous is, however, in their capacity for desiring. The eagerness of the magnanimous for “seeing everything” (“veder tutto”) is a powerful drive, very different from the children’s thinner desire, and becomes the very punishment of the representatives of non-Christian cultures. And, indeed, the argument of the third book of the Convivio evokes the situation of limbo. Not everybody is able to reach the perfection of knowledge, the ultimate aim of the human being, and many collapse in desperation after having glimpsed it. In the allegorical commentary of Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona, the lines about desire and sighs mentioned above are interpreted precisely in terms of knowledge failing desire: Per che aviene che li altri miseri che ciò mirano, ripensando lo loro difetto, dopo lo desiderio della perfezione caggiono in fatica di sospiri;

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e questo è quello che dice: che li occhi di color dov’ella luce ne mandan messi al cor pien di disiri, che prendon aire e diventan sospiri. (Convivio 3, xiii, 11) So it happens that the other forlorn beings who perceive this, reflecting on their shortcomings, collapse as a result of yearning for perfection out of a weariness of sighs. This is what is meant by the words: That the eyes of those on whom she shines send messengers to the heart, full of desire, which unite with air and turn to sighs. The “miseri” of Convivio 3 are in exactly the same state as the souls of the general circle of limbo: the desire for rational perfection elevates them, and the appraisal of their defective nature throws them down into sighing. The souls in the castle are placed a step up in the progress of knowledge: they are able to achieve perfect human knowledge – hence the absence of sighing in the castle – but are still kept in the thrall of desire. Having achieved the peak of wisdom (in terms of both moral and scientific virtue) they catch a glimpse of the supernatural truths but are unable to reach them.83

In summary, Dante combines several sources and inputs to shape his own limbo. The larger circle is constructed as a modification of the theological limbus patruum, from which Dante subtracts the expectation of hope. While the desire for Christ of the Jewish Fathers and Mothers is made explicit by sighs, in the general circle of limbo sighs are instead the marks of a hopeless desire, stretched and suspended for eternity. The Anonimo remarks upon this difference, comparing and contrasting the desire of the virtuous pagans to that of the Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs expecting the Harrowing of Hell: “inquanto quelli che v’erano desideravano et speravano, et venne loro la salute; et quelli che l’autore dice desiderano ma non sperano” (because those who were there were desiring and hoping, and salvation came to them; and those who the author mentions desire but have no hope [my translation]).84 The “suspension” of limbo, their hopeless desire, is an actual punishment – indeed a form of contrapasso – commensurate with the desire of “seeing everything” that defines pagan culture. Although not affecting the body, this “pain without torment” is not purely spiritual in the larger circle, since it involves the body’s physiology in the production of sighs. However, the main perpetrators of such sin, the great non-Christian philosophers, poets,

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and heroes, are placed in a different situation. The special circumstances of the castle suggest that the great non-Christian souls live in a state of lesser punishment, even milder than the already lenient punishment of the larger circle. The presence of light (which, among other things, recalls the Easter candle in the liturgical and dramatic narratives of the Harrowing of Hell), the absence of sighs, the faces neither sad nor joyous combine to suggest that these souls live in a state of incomplete grace similar to the happiness Aquinas ascribed to children. Whereas for the “underdeveloped” children the suffering of limbo as defined by Aquinas and Bonaventure is truly compassionate, when applied by Dante to the virtuous pagans, it becomes a cruel punishment, since it denigrates their intellect and knowledge, the very source of their desire. Limbo is not immune to the grinding force of ironic deformation, which is the core strategy of the writing of Inferno. From the point of view of eternity Aristotle, Plato, Virgil, and their companions are in the same position as wailing infants, notwithstanding the complex philosophical/poetic systems or heroic exemplars that they created. A powerful reminder of this is inscribed in Purgatorio 11, where, within the reflection on the evanescence of earthly fame, we find infants and exceptional adults paired together from the point of view of eternity: Che voce avrai tu più, se vecchia scindi da te la carne, che se fossi morto anzi che tu lasciassi il “pappo” e ’l “dindi,” pria che passin mill’anni? (Purgatorio 11, 103–6) What greater fame will you have if you strip off you flesh when it is old then if you had died before giving up pappo and dindi, when a thousand years shall have passed. One of the features of hell’s very punishment is the incapacity of the damned to perceive their own damnation in any way beyond the brutality of their physical torment. Dante radically exemplifies this fact with the figure of Capaneus (Inferno 14, 43–72), the only classical figure besides Virgil and Ulysses to be given extensive voice in the Comedy.85 Capaneus is so grotesquely unaware of his situation that he still curses Jupiter (“Giove,” 52), claiming no change between his life and his death (“qual io fui vivo, tal son morto”; What I was living, that I am dead, 51). Manuele Gragnolati explains that Capaneus is the prime example of all sinners’ fixation with their condition in life and of their

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absolute incapacity for repentance.86 Virgil first rebukes Capaneus vehemently, pointing out that his torment lies in his very rage, and then explains to Dante that Capaneus indeed disdained “God” (“Dio,” Inferno 14, 70). In the staged contrast between Jupiter and God, readers are made aware not only of Capaneus’s grotesque fixation with his own pre-Christian experience, but they also gain a glimpse into the status of the inhabitants of limbo, who, unlike Capaneus, are given the questionable grace of appreciating their own loss. The souls in limbo are given a chance of improvement and transformation – as it is beautifully exemplified by Virgil, who is able to recognize, discuss, and illuminate many parts of the Christian doctrine – but they also are made aware of their utter shortcomings. Through the power of its knowledge, non-Christian culture comes very close to understanding God and acknowledging the magnitude of its loss. The pagans’ desire for knowledge is transformative in that it leads them to the knowledge and understanding of God, but at the same time it takes the form of both infernal fixation, since it is unable to fully foster change and causes a relapse into lack of hope, and infernal punishment, since it generates a torment perfectly equal to itself. Deeper in hell we meet Ulysses, the opposite of Capaneus and the extreme consequence of limbo. Ulysses brings the ancients’ desire for knowledge to excess. Like a pagan Adam he trespasses God’s sign, and comes so close to intuition and salvation as to dimly see the shores of purgatory. However, Dante covers with ambiguity Ulysses’ own appreciation of how and why his shipwreck happened: his boat sank according to “someone else’s” will (“come altrui piacque,” Inferno 26, 141). ✢✢✢

At the beginning of Inferno, desire is featured in two modes: the “irrational,” masochistic drive of the souls toward their punishment and the hopeless longing and suspension of the first circle. After the “mad flight” on Charon’s boat, desire in hell exists only as poena damni, the punishment underlying the whole realm and the sole contrapasso for the first circle, where the nonChristian longing for seeing everything is collectively punished by hopeless eternal desire. At this initial stage of the journey, the pilgrim-author shares both desires. Like the souls on the river Acheron, he too is torn between the fear and the desire of acquiring access to the underworld. His desire, however, is not that of undergoing punishment like the damned; it is an eagerness “to see everything,” as the souls of limbo did in life. At this point of the journey this desire

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is, however, figured as a mad, unchecked drive (“venuta folle”), which awaits to be compared and contrasted to the “mad flight” of Dante’s more dangerous alter-ego Ulysses. Moreover, as he progresses into the first realm, the pilgrim-author becomes the sadistic bearer of another kind of desire. Throughout hell, a cruel replay of the masochistic desire of canto 3 is enacted: speech. The only extant, non-preterite, desire in hell is that for speaking. The pilgrim is moved by the desire to know the souls’ life narratives, and they are, for the most part, eager to retell it. As Leo Spitzer has shown for the episode of Pier delle Vigne, speech in hell is both painful (“dolore,” Inferno 13, 102) and an outlet for the pain (“al dolor fenestra,” ibidem) – a tyrannical need to retell a tale of loss.87 The image of Dante breaking the twig through which Piero’s “words and blood” (“parole e sangue,” 44) spring forth, can be extended to the whole realm, his infernal journey visualized as a knife inflicting wounds and providing an outlet through which doleful narratives of desire-as-loss are told.

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Lust che la ragion sottomettono al talento Inferno 5, 39 (those who subject reason to desire)

The beginning of Francesca’s tale of desire appears to be very plain and straightforward. In Virgil’s words, we are going to meet in this canto “i peccator carnali / che la ragion sottomettono al talento” (the carnal sinners, who subject reason to desire, Inferno 5, 38–9). This definition of lust, however, elicits several questions on the nature of the sin itself and on the way Dante handles it. The sin of lust connects two discourses in medieval culture. On the one hand, it has to do with the way sexuality was considered in medieval times – medieval sexuality being, as Joan Cadden notices, a complex, fragmented, diverging discourse based on a multiplicity that often defies coherence. 1 On the other hand, the theme of lust touches on the wider question of the opposition between reason and passion – whereby sexual desire becomes the blueprint or rather the excessive, quasi-grotesque embodiment of every desire. Because of its instability and ubiquity – lust being a subheading of passion, a necessity of nature, a derangement of the mind, a blind drive of the body, a partial homologue of love – sexual desire challenges and destabilizes the already complex contrast between reason and passion more than any other passion (say, craving for food or anger) does. In medieval culture, lust writes a text that contains its own concealment and which is often sublimated into love poetry. Early commentators of the Comedy offer numerous and diverse insights into the nature and mechanics of the sin of lust. Pietro Alighieri fittingly quotes two essential authorities: Augustine on the overpowering of reason by lust, and Gratian’s Decretum on the different types of lust.2 The sin of lust

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is distinguished into coitus (any intercourse that is not marital), fornication (with widows, concubines, and prostitutes), stuprum (the illicit deflowering of a virgin), adultery (extramarital), incest (among relatives), and rape (violence on an abducted woman). Francesco da Buti gives a detailed description of the different inflections, types, causes, and effects of the sin in an account that closely resembles Aquinas’s discussion of lust in the Summa Theologiae 2a–2ae, 153–4. Generally described as “the immoderate love of pleasure,” lust is linked to the sense of touch and, specifically, to sexuality. Following Aquinas, Francesco breaks lust down into six species largely similar to Gratian’s, with the chief difference that fornicatio is the sin that results from the intercourse of two unmarried people, and with the addition of the categories of sacrilege (among those who have taken vows) and sin against nature (which for Francesco “is easily understood,” and that Aquinas breaks down into self-abuse, bestiality, homosexuality, and improper use of sexual organs).3 Francesco describes three types of lust: the merely spiritual, that is, the lust committed solely by the will; the merely bodily, with which the will does not consent (as in Lucretia’s case); and the lust which is both spiritual and corporeal. The companions of lust are anxiety, fear, regret, stench [sic], shame, and ugliness.4 Lust’s “daughters” are blindness of mind, restlessness, inconstancy, precipitation, love of self, hate of God, desire for mundane things, and despair of ever reaching celestial goals.5 The commentator reads Inferno 5 as a punctual illustration of these eight consequences of lust.6 Francesco agrees with Dante that lust batters reason down more than other sins, and he mentions in addition that lust turns human beings into beasts, a connection that Dante makes more explicit on the terrace of the lustful in purgatory.7 Boccaccio too offers a very intricate explanation of lussuria, focusing largely on the degeneration of mores in contemporary times, and providing a definition of the sin similar to that given by Francesco.8 Lust’s six categories are enriched with emphasis on traditional etymology: fornicatio from fornices, the vaults under ancient theatres that were traditionally inhabited by prostitutes; stuprum from stupor, the shock felt at the mere thought of deflowering the Vestal Virgins; adulterium from “alterius ventrem terere” (to press or possess someone else’s lap); incestum from ceston, the name of a belt worn by Venus on the occasion of proper marriages; and sodomy from the biblical city of Sodom.9 Boccaccio begins his discussion with a noteworthy and problematic remark: the fact that lust is a “natural” sin – one necessary to the continuation of the species of animals and humans alike. Whereas animal lust was regulated by God and restricted to select days of the year, after which there is no further interaction between the male and female members of a species, human lust was left uncontrolled, precisely because of humans’

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rational nature. Some rare examples of continence notwithstanding, this freedom actually backfires against reason, making it the slave of desire.10 Guido da Pisa gives two contrasting definitions of lust: one, allegedly from Augustine, that understands luxuria as a fully corporeal issue, a drive located in the genitals (“libido que est in genitalibus”), and the other that describes it as a mental sin, the “prostitution” of the mind due to impure thoughts and desires.11 This twofold feature of lust occurs also in the discussion of fornicatio, where Guido makes a distinction between spiritual fornication (which generally represents the essence of all sins and specifically idolatry), and corporeal fornication (every sin of the flesh in general and the intercourse between unmarried people in particular).12 Lust deprives people of riches, fame, senses, and strength. In commenting on the two last entries, Guido refers to Isidore, doctors, and natural philosophers in order to show that lust “breaks the flesh,” makes one age sooner, and dulls the brain.13 The commentaries on Inferno 5 exemplify the complexity of the medieval debate on the theme of lust. Lust is a problematic sin, because it is quintessentially spiritual (so much so that it was equated to original sin) yet fundamentally embodied, because it is connected with two central features of the human condition, reproduction and love, and because it has societal as well as individual consequences. Lust is constructed in very different ways in the theological, monastic, and pastoral environments, and involves such different disciplines as canon law and medicine.14 Luxuria is the official name of lust as sin, whereas concupiscientia or cupiditas indicates its theological manifestation, as the “disordered affectivity, the tendency of natural desires and appetites to pursue their own objects in disregard to the proper order of reason.”15 Other inflections of lust are libido, lascivia, and incontinentia. The more philosophical intemperantia (a translation of Aristotle’s akolasia) enjoyed some academic following after Grosseteste’s translation of the Ethics.16 Both terminologically and ideologically, there is a very fine line between “impulse” and “sexual impulse” – lust being always conceived as the primary consequence and illustration of inordinate desire.17 The position of lust between soul and body, its dangerous “naturality,” and the fact that sexual drive has important implications for attraction, love, thought, and memory combine to make it a sin very difficult to define. The compiler of the Fasciculus morum, a fourteenth-century Franciscan handbook for preaching, provides four diverging definitions of the sin: spiritual intemperance, bodily incontinence, desire, and the blinding of reason: Circa primum est sciendum quod a diversis diversimode diffinitur. Quidam enim dicunt primo sic: “Luxuria est anime perverse amantis

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corporeas voluptates neclecta temperancia.” Secundo alius sic: “Luxuria est incontinencia corporis ex pruritu carnis nascens vel originem habens.” Tercio per alium sic: “Luxuria est concubitus desiderium supra modum et contra racione effluens.” Quarto, Bernardus: “Luxuria est sitis ebria, deflacio momentanea, amaritudo eterna; lucem odit, tenebras appetit, totam hominis depredatur mentem.” On the first point we should know that lechery is variously defined by various authors. Some say: “Lechery is the failure to observe moderation in a soul that perversely loves bodily pleasures.” Another author says: “Lechery is bodily incontinence which is born of or has its origin in the itching of our flesh.” Yet another definition is this: “Lechery is the desire to have sex which rises beyond measure and against reason.” And a fourth definition, according to Bernard, declares: “Lechery is drunken thirst, a momentary outburst, eternal bitterness; it shuns the light, seeks darkness, and entirely plunders man’s mind.”18 As far as the mechanics of lust are concerned, the Fasciculus morum sums them up in a verse that could be the perfect blurb for the episode of Paolo and Francesca: “visus et alloquium, contactus et oscula, factum” (sight and speech, touching and kisses, finally the deed).19 The theological and philosophical discourse on lust revolves mainly around the connection between the spiritual and the bodily aspects of the sin, on its being natural and necessary to the continuation of the species, on its declensions, and on its relation to reason. Augustine first characterized lust as a mostly spiritual sin, and made it the negative centrepiece of the soul’s search for God in the Confessions, as well as the first consequence of original sin in the De civitate Dei (14, 15–26). As Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio remark, for Augustine this original lust is not solely a sexual one but affects the whole “dynamics of desire” for the human being. Moreover, sexual lust is the channel through which the original sin is spread and the means by which the human being is stained by the “sin of desire.”20 For Augustine, sexual desire is a truly disorderly drive, one that creates a “schizophrenic” split between mind and body, and which, besides hijacking the mind, sabotages also itself (“adversus se ipsa dividitur”); and it is unable to serve its own purpose (“libidini libido non servit”), when, for instance, the body remains cold at the stimulus of the mind.21 Gregory the Great systematized the model of the seven capital sins and positioned lust as the first and least grave step in an ascending structure. Lust, however, retains its ubiquity and its problematic links to original sin and reproduction. As Carole Straw points out, Gregory traces a direct link between

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pride and lust – sexuality being the loudest reminder of the human being’s fall from grace, and “the most vivid expression of his desire to separate himself from God.”22 Straw indicates a passage in the Moralia in Job in which Gregory establishes a connection between the swelling of pride (“tumor”) and that of the genitals (“intumescere”). Lust is thus the external manifestation of internal intellectual pride, and both sins obscure the rational capacity of the human being reducing them to bestiality: Nam multis saepe superbia luxuriae seminarium fuit, quia dum eos spiritus quasi in altum erexit, caro in infimis mersit. Hii enim prius secreto eleuantur, sed postmodum publice corruunt, quia dum occultis intumescunt motibus cordis, apertis cadunt lapsibus corporis. Sic sic elati iusta fuerant retributione feriendi, ut quia superbiendo se hominibus praeferunt, luxuriando usque ad iumentorum similitudinem deuoluantur … Curandum itaque est, et omni custodia mens a superbiae tumore seruanda … Intus prius extollitur, quod foras postmodum luxuriae corruptione feriatur. (Moralia in Job 26, 17, 28) For pride has often been to many a seed-plot of lust; for, whilst their spirit raised them, as it were, on high, their flesh plunged them in the lowest depths. For they are first secretly raised up, but afterwards they fall openly; for while they swell in the secret motions of the heart, they fall with open lapses of the body. Thus, thus, elated, they required to be smitten with righteous retribution; in order that, since they set themselves above men by pride, they might be brought down, by their lust, even to a resemblance of beast … We must take heed then, and the mind must be kept, with all care, from the swelling of pride … That which is afterwards to be struck down without by the pollution of lust, is first raised up within us.23 Besides challenging reason through pride, lust retains a treacherous link to reproduction. In a famous passage from the Moralia, all the sins address like army captains the quasi-conquered human soul, proposing rational arguments (“quasi sub quadam ratione”) while inviting the soul to give in. Lust rehearses her strongest argument. Cur te in voluptate tua modo non dilatas, cum quid te sequatur ignoras? Acceptum tempus in desideriis perdere non debes, quia quam citius pertranseat nescis. Si enim misceri Deus hominem in voluptatem coitus nollet, non ipso humani generis exordio masculum et foeminam fecisse. (Moralia in Job 31, 45, 90)

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Why enlargest thou not thyself now in thy pleasure, when thou knowest not what may follow thee? Thou oughtest not to lose in longings the time thou hast received; because thou knowest not how speedily it may pass by. For if God had not wished man to be united in the pleasure of coition, He would not, at the first beginning of the human race, have made them male and female. This passage reveals two important features of lust: that lust is the consequence of the actualization of sensual desires, and that it is somehow natural and willed by God. In this context, Gregory characterizes lust as a carnal sin, together with gluttony, from which lust is also said to spring.24 The eight consequences of lust enumerated by Dante’s commentators are enlisted by Gregory as lust’s private army: “caecitas mentis, inconsideratio, inconstantia, praecipitatio, amor sui, odium Dei, affectus praesentis saeculi, horror autem vel desperatio futuri” (blindness of mind, inconsiderateness, inconstancy, precipitation, self-love, hatred of God, affection for this present world, but dread or despair of that which is to come, Moralia in Job 31, 45, 88). The thesis of the natural innocence of desire, fiercely rebuked by Gregory as the deception of lust, is embraced by Abelard, who proves to be the most moderate of medieval scholars in terms of sexuality, as he is in other matters. In his Ethics, Abelard discusses the difference between the impulse to sin, which is in itself a natural and innocent inclination, and sin per se, which takes place only through the consent of the will. Thus, sexual desire is natural and innate; and it is innocent until consented to: “Non itaque concupiscere mulierem sed concupiscientiae consentire peccatum est, nec voluntas concubitus, sed voluntatis consensus” (So sin is not lusting for a woman but consenting to lust; the consent of the will is damnable, but not the will for intercourse, Ethica 1, 3).25 Attraction ignores marriage laws. For instance, one could be attracted to a married woman without necessarily wanting to commit adultery, wishing she were free – although, as Abelard subtly observes with an early intuition of the modern notion of triangular desire, sometimes it is the power and richness of the husband that instigates the desire for a woman. The drive to pleasure overcomes all resistance – even in the frankly comical case of a chained cleric forced to lie in a soft bed and surrounded by beautiful women (Ethica 1, 3). Abelard upholds the importance of pleasure in marital intercourse, with arguments very similar to those of Gregory on lust: if God had wanted to prohibit every form of pleasure, he wouldn’t have created desiring and desirable bodies or delicious foods.26 Abelard concludes rather radically that no carnal desire or pleasure that is unavoidable is sinful, a statement subsequently condemned at the council of Sens (1140).

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Ex his, ut arbitror, liquidum est nullam naturalem carnis delectationem peccato abscribendam esse, nec culpae tribuendum in eo nos delectari, quo cum perventum sit delectationem necesse est sentiri. (Ethica 1, 3) It is clear, I think, from all this that no natural pleasure of the flesh should be imputed to sin nor should it be considered a fault for us to have pleasure in something in which when it has happened the feeling of pleasure is unavoidable.27 Although showing a deeply nuanced understanding of the theme of natural desire, Aquinas is very strict on the issue of lust. In the De malo (15) and especially in the Summa Theologiae (2a–2ae, q. 153–4), Aquinas systematizes the sin of lust in the way it is described, for instance, by Francesco da Buti. Lust is a capital sin connected to every sexual act that is not geared to reproduction and thus is not regulated by reason. Thomas gives special emphasis to lust’s threat to both natural law (reproduction) and human law (patria potestas or matrimony). Insofar as the modalities of lust are concerned, Thomas reflects mostly on the roles of kisses and embraces, which can be both chaste and lustful, and concludes that they are lustful only when pleasure (delectatio) is involved.28 He also comments at length upon the way certain kinds of lust subvert the order of nature itself, concluding that lust against nature – which runs from masturbation to bestiality and includes homosexuality and any improper, or “monstrous” use of intercourse – is the most serious type of this sin. Aquinas explores the relation between lust and reason from several angles in three successive articles (Summa Theologiae 2a–2ae, q. 153, a. 2, 3, and 5). He begins by recalling that every sin is against reason. Therefore, lust is a sin only when it is performed inordinately and without a worthy aim. Lust applied to reproduction is a rational and reasonable drive, as the desire for food is for human health.29 However, precisely because lust is needed for the reproduction of the species, so must it all the more be regulated by reason. Since it is necessary, lust can become more dangerous than other sins when it eludes the control of reason.30 Hence the definition of sinful lust: a disorderly onset of desires which escapes and threatens the order of reason and of the will more than any other sin.31 In the De malo Aquinas validates the complete submission of reason to lust by referring to 1 Corinthians and to the Glossa, stating that “in actu luxuriae tota ratio absorbetur.”32 In his discussion of pleasure (Summa Theologiae 1a–2ae, q. 31–4) Aquinas makes a distinction between good (intellectual) pleasures, which are fitting with reason, and bad (bodily) pleasures, which fetter reason (“secundum quandam ligationem”).33 Thomas calls sexual pleasure the “bonding of reason”

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(“ligamentum rationis”), even when it is carried out without malice in conjugal intercourse. Conjugal intercourse is compared to sleep: it is a momentary blackout of reason that, although not morally wrong, still reflects the moral malice of original sin.34 A similar position is upheld in one of the Paris condemnations of 1277 – the sweeping attacks against Averroism, extreme Aristotelianism, and other “deviant” philosophies of the time. Proposition 172 censures the idea that sexual pleasure does not hinder the operation and use of the intellect (“quod delectatio in actibus venereis non impedit actum seu usum intellectum”).35 This proposition bears an interesting twist on the lust-reason theme, linking lust to intellect (intellectum), not to reason (ratio) or will (voluntas). The emphasis rests thus on one particular aspect of the rational life, the exercise of intellectual activity. If superficially this may appear as a denunciation of Cappellanus’s De Amore (a text that features prominently in the 1277 condemnation), it also gives evidence of the relevance of lust in philosophical discourse. Sexuality is the point of leverage, and the point of crisis, of a wider discourse involving the relations between appetites, reason, and the will.

The idea that lust is a fundamentally spiritual sin, an act of the will that turns against the rational soul itself and makes it blind, reducing humans to mere bestiality, resonates strongly in the monastic context. In places like monasteries where the occasion for sinning is removed, lust resides in thoughts, desires, memories, and the illusions and seductions of the world, which must be fought with both bodily and spiritual discipline. Yet, it is precisely in monasteries that the medieval formulation of the soul’s love for God, patterned on, and even sexualized as, the desire for the other, finds its deepest, most complex, and most surprising formulations.36 In the world, however, lust is a very bodily sin; indeed the only sin, as Casagrande and Vecchio point out, to involve all the senses: primarily the eyes, but also the ears (seduced by words and music), the sense of smell (overwhelmed by perfumes), taste (lured by food and wines), and the touch (enticed by inappropriate contact).37 Sermons and the works of and for preachers, as well as visual representations of sin, Judgment Day, and Hell, promote a very bodily and sexualized vision of lust. Although the commentators of Dante quoted above go to great pains to prove that the poet traces in Inferno 5 a very precise account of lust, the second circle of hell is, as Teodolinda Barolini has pointed out, a highly atypical representation of the destiny of the lustful. In popular culture, sermons, and visual art, lust is often represented with strong sexual connotations, in both this world and the afterlife.38 A common twelfth-century visual allegory

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of lust, for instance, depicts it as a woman whose genitals are being bitten by a snake. Popular depictions of the afterlife, especially visual representations, feature hell as a much sexualized place, emphasizing the nakedness, genitality, and abnormal sexuality of both the sinners and the devils. In hell, it seems, lust and its declensions and consequences exceed the classification of sin to become the very motif of the first otherworldly realm. Within the already heavily sexualized representation of hell, the punishment of the lustful is oftentimes devised as sexual, featuring grotesque intercourse, obscene pregnancies, and exaggerated display of sexual organs, and at times in a rather mild manner, such as burning or whipping. Adultery and sodomy are, interestingly, the most frequent illustrations of lust. Yannick Carré and Michael Camille point out that in the thirteenth century alternative representations of lust emerge, one featuring a woman looking at herself in a mirror (and often riding a goat), which underlines the narcissistic aspect of lust, and another showing, interestingly, a couple embracing and kissing. Examples of this kind proliferate in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, at times conveniently grouping the oral gratifications of gluttony (eating and drinking) and of lust (kissing). As Carrè points out, the kiss, a very minor sin in canonical texts, becomes the overarching symbol of a mortal sin.39 Dante’s “light touch” on the representation of lust might connect to this new trend. Moreover, the tragic unity of Paolo and Francesca even in the afterlife, so beautifully exploited by Dante in Inferno 5, finds some reflections in the popular representation of adultery. Adulterers, quite intuitively, always come in pairs, and are often bound together either in a mock sexual act or by being chained together by the wrists. Jérôme Baschet cites a Last Judgment from the abbey of Conques in Spain, dating around 1125, in which the only punishment of lustful lovers appears to be a double noose that binds their heads together.40 Lust was believed to infect the body with all sorts of diseases (among which leprosy is often mentioned), and to manifest itself through a fetid stench. According to Robert Grosseteste, it potentially involved every body fluid or excretion.41 Medieval doctors were busy finding remedies for the “disease of love” (hereos), while Greek and Arabic medical texts, first appearing in translation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, treated sexuality as a “normal” phenomenon of the human body, with its own causes, effects, benefits, and remedies.42 In the medical discourse sexual desire (appetitus) and pleasure (delectatio) are often taken as contiguous conditions related physically to heat and humidity, and psychologically to the memory of a past pleasure.43 In both medical and religious discourses there are ambiguities with regard to the relation between sexual desire and gender. The medical discourse justifies

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the difference or equality between the genders through the anatomical disparity or similarity between male and female, but often ends up taking the male as the norm, especially insofar as the psychological pathology of lovesickness is concerned.44 The religious discourse constructs woman as more prone to lust than man, because she is more bodily, more material, and less endowed with reason. Man, however, as the more formal and rational part of the human being, is guiltier of lust than woman. Although every act of lust is ignited by the beauty and attractiveness of a woman, and visual representations imagined lust chiefly as female, the medieval religious and secular literature pays more attention to male sexual desire, constructing female sexual desire mostly as passive. In contrast to the quiet and dispassionate flower of the Roman de la Rose, Dante’s lustful queens and Francesca are notable exceptions.45 Besides being a sin and a disease, lust was also a crime.46 It appears to be, indeed, the only sin of incontinence that was of concern for medieval canonists on account of its societal consequences and its intersection with marriage law. Lust is featured prominently in Gratian’s Decretum, where we find the five kinds of “illegal coitus,” which become the five or six traditional declensions of lust.47 Any sexual behaviour that deviated from marriage and reproduction (or threatened the celibacy of the religious) was perceived as a menace to medieval society. Strikingly, adultery was considered the most relevant sexual crime, even the benchmark of major sexual offenses, and sexual offenses committed by women were considered more reprehensible than those committed by men.48

For theologians, preachers, and monks lust is everywhere: in the soul, in the body and all its senses, in memory, in thoughts, in fantasies, and in every attraction that is not geared to conception. It lurks even in marriage: for instance, when one (or both) spouses are particularly handsome or when the spouses love each other too much: as Jerome stated in his Adversus Iovianum (1, 49) and Peter Lombard popularized in the Sentences (4, 31, 5) even love between spouses, if excessively passionate, is adulterous to God.49 The paradoxical consequence of a society in which most of the marriages were arranged, and in which a successful marriage aimed at the absence of desire, was that every desire was funneled into the extramarital space. “Adultery” is thus the definition not only of the most frequent crime of lust but of almost every instance of attraction and indeed any form of overflowing passion in medieval culture.

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Courtly culture and poetry manage the problem of sexuality by exploiting the religious formulation of lust, by reconfiguring and customizing the legal aspects of desire, by submitting sexuality to the strict rules of courtliness,50 and by encasing and sublimating sexual attraction into the formal apparatus of poetry. As seen in the Introduction, the proximity of the secular and the religious discourses of love traces in the Middle Ages a very complex rhetorical canvas, where the two discourses overlap while continuing to run parallel. Sexuality is for both the line of resistance and breakage, and the most illusory and metamorphic aspect. While there is no lack of evident hints to sexuality in both the secular and the religious discourse of love, there is also a way of reading mystical texts or troubadour poetry without finding any reference to it. In the mainstream erotic and religious literature of the Middle Ages, the discourse of sexuality appears to contains its own concealment. At a superficial level, the main disjunction between the religious and the secular discourses is fundamentally that what the religious discourse says about lust, the secular discourse says about love. For instance, the famous definition of love in Andreas Cappellanus’s De Amore – an immoderate passion toward the other which steals away the self’s thought from any other care – resonates richly with the religious definition of lust.51 This dislocation of meaning, however, generates all sorts of rhetorical ambivalences and refractions in both discourses, with their mutual participation radically and permanently changing both and impressing a crucial spin upon the Western history of desire. The problems of interpretation in Jaufré Rudel’s “amor de lonh” (love of woman, the Virgin, God, the holy land?) are more brutally mirrored in the puzzling questions elicited by the heavy allegorical veil of the Roman de la Rose: the Virgin Mary or the female organ (and everything in between)? Radically diverging interpretations of the role of sexuality in courtly poetry – viewed by some as merely spiritual literature, in which the erotic discourse conveys mystical (and even Catharist) meanings, by others as explicitly and unproblematically sexual52 – is evidence of the profound ambiguity of that culture, an ambiguity that is deeply embedded in the language of poetry. As Sarah Kay has pointed out, “being evasive about satisfaction was, paradoxically, a way of satisfying everyone.”53 Whether representing sexuality or not, courtly desire is unquestionably extramarital and, therefore, lustful from a legal point of view. Although defying the legitimacy of marriage, the lovers establish other bonds and other forms of legality between themselves. As with marriage, the lovers’ union is exclusive and eternal. Their bond is often patterned on the feudal agreement, whereby the woman (the inferior player in marriage) takes up the position of

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the lord. However, by avoiding the pitfalls of duty and of imposition, the lovers’ bond takes on the face of divinity. In Cappellanus’s De Amore, for instance, love is presented as the opposite of marriage (“amorem non posse suas inter duos iugales extendere vires” (love cannot exert its powers between two people who are married to each other, 1, 397).54 Through his speaker, Marie de Champagne, Cappellanus contrasts the legally bound affection of marriage (“per rationem necessitate et debito”) and the gratuitousness of extramarital love (“gratis omnia largiuntur”).55 Heloise famously prefers to be called the friend – “amica” or, if Abelard is not offended, even “concubine,” mistress, or “scortum,” whore – rather than the spouse of Abelard in the name of pure love, forfeiting the sanctity and lawfulness of marriage in the name of the sweeter freedom of love.56 It is commonly understood that as soon as courtly culture moves south of the Alps, love poetry loses its feudal and court-related attributes (the notion of the feudal bond, the senhal, the figure of the lauzengier, among others) and becomes completely desexualized, beginning with the detached attitude of the so-called Sicilian School of poetry and culminating with the poets of the stilnovo and with Dante, who posit the beloved midway in the spiritual journey. This somewhat obvious conviction can be reformulated as such: in early Italian poetry, lust is poeticized to the extreme. The poetic rarefaction of sexuality is brought about “scientifically,” through a massive involvement of “new” sciences such as physics, optics, and medicine to explain respectively the naturality of love, the poetics of the gaze, and the physiology of love-sickness.57 Dante goes much further than his fellow poets, firmly anchoring the religious discourse to the erotic one. The radical “angelification” of Beatrice, elevating extramarital attraction to the utmost orthodoxy of divine love, is an outrageously innovative idea, but it is, poetically and culturally, untenable. Not Dante’s Beatrice, but Petrarch’s Laura, a more conventional (and more troubadoric) invention of desire, will be destined to immortalize the trials and wanderings of the Western narrative of love and desire. The poeticization of attraction does not, however, absolve the poets from the sin of lust – it indeed incriminates them. When trying to identify lust’s eight daughters in the narrative of Inferno 5, Francesco da Buti provides a truly forced but provocative reading of line 35, “quivi le strida, il compianto, il lamento” (there the shrieks, the moans, the lamentations): La quinta; cioè amore di sé stesso, intese quando disse: Quivi le strida, il compianto e il lamento. I lussuriosi nel mondo sono stati amatori della sua carne, e compiagnitori e lamentatori e gridatori, quando ànno cantato e composti sonetti e canzoni d’amore; e però per conveniente

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pena finge l’autore che di là; cioè nell’inferno, stridano, e compiangansi e lamentinsi, se di qua ànno cantato per amore disonesto, et amatosi troppo. (ddp ad Inferno 5, 35) (The poet represented) the fifth (daughter of lust), that is, love of the self, when he said, “there the shrieks, the moans, the lamentations.” The lustful in the world were lovers of their own flesh, and moaned, lamented, cried when they sang and composed love sonnets and love songs. Therefore, the author rightly imagines that in hell they cry, moan, and lament, if in this world they sang a dishonest love, and loved themselves too much. (my translation) Appropriately, poets come into view in the narcissistic aspect of lust (“amor di sé”). Loving oneself and singing love songs is equally sinful from the point of view of eternity. In line with Francesco’s ideas, Dante’s own “problem” with lust, as recorded in Boccaccio’s Trattatello (Life of Dante), was for many centuries related to the poetry of his youth.58 Dante’s illustration of lust spans the three canticles of the poem. Looking at Inferno 5 from the narrow viewpoint of the sin, we find that Dante targets several aspects of lust: while adultery is mostly in focus with Paolo and Francesca and with examples from the epic (Helen and Paris) and courtly (Tristan and Lancelot) traditions, the catalogue of the queens and heroes contains cases of consenting heterosexual relationships (Cleopatra) and incest (Semiramis), and draws attention to theme of widowhood (present, for instance in Gratian’s Decretum under the rubric of fornication), with the reference to Dido, “who … broke faith with the ashes of Sicheus” (“che ruppe fede al cener di Sicheo,” 61) and possibly to Semiramis, who “succeeded Ninus and had been his wife” (“che succedette a Nino e fu sua sposa,” 59).59 Moreover, the ironic mention of the legalization of lust enforced by Semiramis, who “made lust licit in her law” (“che libito fé licito in sua legge,” 56) emphasizes the legal dimension of lust. Francesca and Paolo are condemned as adulterous lovers, the midpoint in the scale of gravity of the sin and the most common occurrence of the crime of lust. As we have seen, adultery is the most poetic type of lust and also the most passionate. Insofar as lust is concerned, the only explicitly sinful event of the canto is possibly the kiss, which Dante, however, presents as the extreme consequence of a complex, multilayered, poetic, and courtly discourse of/ on love (see chapter 5). With a famously problematic move, Dante in the Inferno dislocates homosexuality under the sins against nature (canto 15), casting doubts over the exact nature of the sin of Brunetto and his fellow intellectuals.

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The characterization of lust in Purgatorio 26 is more traditional, including examples of both homosexual and heterosexual love, and it is even more metapoetic than Inferno 5. Both Guido Guinizzelli and Arnaut Daniel appear there as poets of the courtly/stilnovo tradition, and shun any biographical suppositions about their erotic excesses. The definition of heterosexual lust in Purgatorio 26 emphasizes the two opposite aspects of bestiality and legality. After describing the homosexual rank as those who share Caesar’s inclination, Guinizzelli illustrates the excesses of the heterosexual rank with the example of Pasiphae’s coupling with the bull.60 Nostro peccato fu ermafrodito Ma poiché non servammo umana legge, Seguendo come bestie l’appetito In obbrobrio di noi, per noi si legge, Quando partinci, il nome di colei Che s’imbestiò ne le ’mbestiate schegge. (Purgatorio 26, 82–7) Our sin was hermaphrodite: but because we observed not human law, following appetite like beasts, when we part from them, the name of her who bestialized herself in the beast-shaped planks is uttered by us in opprobrium of ourselves. In this passage Dante rephrases the notions of “ragione” (reason) and “talento” (desire) from Inferno 5 through their exaggerations, their pejoratives, so to speak: human law and bestiality. The expression “umana legge” (human law) is unanimously glossed with “reason” in the light of Inferno 5’s definition of lust as submitting reason to desire and of Convivio 2, vii, 4, where Dante states: “chi da la ragion si parte, e usa pur la parte sensitiva, non vive uomo ma vive bestia” (he who departs from his reason and uses merely his sensitive part lives not as a man but as a beast). When contextualized, however, the expression “human law” takes on different meanings. On the one hand, in light of the example of Pasiphae, “human law” might be rephrased as “the law of nature which supervises human intercourse.” On the other hand, if Guido Guinizzelli and Arnaut Daniel are singled out here as poets of the courtly love tradition, which celebrated extramarital love, their excess might then be waged not only against reason but also against the laws of society, namely against matrimony.61 The emphasis on bestiality (“bestie,” “imbestiò,” “imbestiate”) also elicits various reflections. By choosing to illustrate heterosexual excess through bestiality, Dante characterizes the overall sin in this canto as “lust against

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nature,” of which both homosexuality and bestiality are part. Although being or becoming “like a beast” was traditionally viewed as the cause or consequence of sin in general (see for instance Convivio 2, vii, 4), here bestiality stands for one of the subspecies of lust (species crossing): according to Aquinas, bestiality is by far the worst form of lust, as it is a sin that goes beyond the bounds of humanity. By having Guinizzelli illustrate the powerful example of Pasiphae, Dante seems to draw the reader’s attention to the ultimate similarity sub specie aeternitatis of two extreme happenings of what in Inferno 5 he discusses ambiguously as “love”: on the material/bodily side, the extreme sexual choice of species crossing; on the intellectual/spiritual side, the extreme expansion of courtly poetry. Finally, in the heaven of the the Moon (Paradiso 3–5) Dante gives a deep and problematic emphasis to what Francesco da Buti calls “sacrilege” (lust involving the religious) and to the question of the non-intentional (solely corporeal) lust, with the characters of Piccarda Donati and Constance of Altavilla, both nuns who were forced out of convent in order to serve, through marriage, dynastic power. In the heaven of Venus (Paradiso 8–9), the last heaven to be affected by the earth’s shadow, Dante gathers diverse subheadings of “excessive love”: the courtly harmony promoted by Charles Martel, Cunizza da Romano’s erotic immoderation, the poetic expansion of the troubadour-turned-bishop Folquet de Marseille, and more standard lust in the figure of the prostitute Rahab. Interestingly, excessive love is the only preterite sin mentioned in heaven by the blessed. They do so with a certain leniency toward themselves (as in Cunizza happily and indulgently acknowledging her erotic excesses in life), or carelessness toward the sin (as in Folquet’s rather casual admission of guilt).62 ✢✢✢

The complex significance of lust in medieval times and in Dante and his commentators problematizes the apparent plainness of Virgil’s definition of the sinners in the second circle as those who “subject reason to desire” (Inferno 5, 39). The always perspicacious Boccaccio is the only commentator who points out that this is a definition of sin in general rather than of lust per se.63 This observation resonates with the reading of the she-wolf in canto 1 as a symbolizing desire-as-sin (Singleton, Barolini), which was discussed in the previous chapter. Luxuria, the first actual sin that Dante addresses in hell after facing original sin in canto 4, still bears important ties to cupiditas, the Ur-sin that stains the human being after the original sin. In search of the “sources” for line 39, modern commentators have rounded up a number of texts that mention the submission of reason to desire: Cicero’s

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De officiis 1, 29, Brunetto’s Tresor (Mazzoni), the chivalric poem Tavola Ritonda (Torraca), the poetic tradition of the age up to Dante (Contini), as well as some passages in Dante himself (Vita Nuova 39, 2; Convivio 3, iii, 10 and 4, vii, 11).64 Teodolinda Barolini has pointed out references to Guido delle Colonne and Guittone d’Arezzo, and sees in Dante’s use of “ragione” and “talento” a subtle reference to Guido Cavalcanti’s poem on the nature of love Donna me prega, with the crucial warning that “what Guido says about love Dante says about lust.”65 Barolini’s caveat can be extended to all the other sources cited in the commentary tradition: when contextualized, these excerpts actually increase the ambiguity of Dante’s position in Inferno 5, rather than pinning the sin down. The reference to Cicero’s De officiis is a case in point. At this stage of his work on duty, Cicero discusses the contrast between reason and impulse (the Greek ορµη, natural desire) as the fundamental split in the human mind. While natural desire drives the human being “all over the place” (“huc et illuc rapit” – suggestively echoing into Dante’s characterization of the storm in Inferno 5), reason indicates and explains the right path to take (“docet et explanat, quid faciendum fugiendumque sit”). The necessity of reason governing passions is a defining trait of duty itself, and “when appetites overstep their bounds and galloping away, so to speak, whether in desire or aversion, are not well held in hand by reason, they clearly overleap all bounds and measure” (“qui appetitus longius evagantur et tamquam exultantes sive cupiendo sive fugiendo non satis a ratione retinentur, ii sine dubio finem et modum transeunt,” De officiis 1, 29). Desire, not lust, is at the centre of Cicero’s passage. In this context, sexual desire (libido) is merely one subheading of the general notion of “passion,” together with with anger, fear, and pleasure (voluptas).66 While the vernacular sources are for the most part generic illustrations of the risks involved in submitting reason to desire, the reference in Brunetto’s Tresor is the most specific, as it occurs within the discussion of chastity. Brunetto states that when lust takes over the self, “reason is left under desire” (“car ki se laisse vaincre, la raisons remaint sous le desirier,” Li livres du Tresor 2, 20, 6 [my translation]). Brunetto, however, discusses chastity as a healthy mid-point between the excesses of pleasure and the total deprivation thereof. Lustful people are not only those who “subject reason to desire” but also those who excessively lament the impossibility of satisfying their desire: “Et aucune fois est hon non chastes, por ce k’il se doluisist trop quant il ne puet avoir cou k’il desire” (Sometimes one is not chaste because he suffers excessively about the fact that he cannot have what he wants, Li livres du Tresor 2, 20, 4 [my translation]). This second kind of lustful sinner resembles closely Benvenuto’s poets, who are forever lamenting and chanting their desires. Reason and lust are not mutually exclusive, but rather cooperate (with

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reason leading) toward the common goal of the well-being of the person (chastity).67 Brunetto’s chastity closely resembles Aristotle’s notion of temperantia (σοϕροσυνη), the moderate use of bodily pleasures such as sex and food that is one of the steps of the virtuous life in the Nicomachean Ethics.68 Rather than lust itself, then, Brunetto’s target appears to be immoderation of both act and thought. The most complex and lengthy medieval interaction between love, lust, and reason is found in the Roman de la Rose, a text that is rarely invoked in reference to Inferno 5. The contrast between Love (Amors) and Reason (Raison) suffuses both Guillame de Lorris’s and Jean de Meun’s texts, and testifies to the ambivalence and interchangeability of all three terms. In both texts, the intervention of Reason, closely patterned on the way Lady Philosophy appears to the incarcerated Boethius at the beginning of the Consolation of Philosophy, finds the lover in despair. Unlike lady Philosophy, Reason leaves her protégé unconvinced after a quite lengthy debate. While Guillame’s Reason (Roman de la Rose, 2971–3082), targets a quite undetermined form of love, a disorder that only leads to pain and torment, Jean’s Reason (Roman de la Rose, 4199–7200), the very first speaker of Jean’s text, attacks more directly love aimed at sexual gratification, contrasting lustful love (“amors”) with “true love,” which is either a kind of love that does not aim at possession (“bon amors”) or a kind of love that aims at sexual reproduction. As in Brunetto’s case, Reason opposes the irrational aspect of sexual attraction, promoting a “rational” sexuality that does not shatter the loving subject. Sexual pleasure, rather than sexual desire is the target of Jean’s Reason. Excessive love is defined as a “mental illness” (“maladie de pensee”) which strikes among two people of the opposite sex who interact by their own will (“franches entr’eus”). It derives from desire (“ardor”) and disorderly/immoderate vision (“de vision desordenee”), and obsessively aims at sexual gratification.69 Reason’s advice to refrain from immoderate passion is ultimately unable to win the lover’s attention over, because it seems to contain its own antidote. Reason’s lecture comes through as contradictory (her first definition of love is based merely on oximora), ineffective in undermining the lover’s fixation, “unreasonable” and “mad” (the lover eventually calls her a “foolish and loose woman”), partial, in that she wants to become the lover’s beloved in lieu of the rose, and especially digressive, as she wanders sideways into the discussion of fortune, justice, wealth, power, and language. Although sexuality gives rise to the contrast between Love and Reason, it then becomes secondary to it, almost a footnote in a wider discourse. As Sarah Kay points out, the contrast between Love and Reason helps to intellectualize the quest/ question of the Rose, bringing about reflections on folly, memory, loyalty, and

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behaviour, and eventually contributing “to the anchoring of the (masculine) subject.”70 Although ultimately unsuccessful, Reason’s lecture constitutes an important milestone in the Rose’s discourse on love, showing how the dichotomy between reason and lust is unstable, and how it always exceeds its limits. While the lover is untouched by Reason’s arguments and sticks to lust, the reader, if persuaded by Reason, might reach the same conclusion. In an ironic way, Reason’s speech in the Rose proves that the “reasonable” talk about sexuality both expands and explodes well beyond its scopes and turns against itself. I find that both consequences are implied, in a less ironic and histrionic way, in Dante’s Inferno 5. There too, the “carnal sinners, submitting reason to desire” evoke, without necessarily handling, more complex scenarios.

By calling into question “ragione” and “talento,” Dante is tapping into one of the greatest debates of ancient and medieval philosophy and poetry. He verbalizes in a supremely understated way one of the most complex human struggles, the conflict between reason and passion – an issue that runs from the narrow reflection on love to the infinitely broader question of being human. The control of reason over passion is largely a philosophical imperative. In order to live the life of the mind, the philosopher must leave behind passions, and desire (sexual or otherwise) is one of the most difficult to eradicate. Indeed, the history of philosophy could be redrawn as the history of the psycomachia between reason and passion – a contrast second only to (and a consequence of) the central Western split between soul and body. Reason leads to ascent, order, and social cohesion; passion to debasement, disorder, and subversion of the social fabric. With a military rhetoric that is still visible in Inferno 5’s “subjecting reason to desire,” the human soul is regularly presented as a battleground of mind and reason versus appetite and passion. An alternative rhetoric is that of horse-riding, which, as we shall see later in this chapter, Dante exploits in the Convivio: reason, the horseman, must rein in and govern passion, the horse. From Plato’s Phaedo to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and De Anima, to Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, through Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, and all the way to Erasmus’s Enchiridion, passion and reason are regularly contrasted; the former needs to subjugate (Plato), repress (Cicero and the Stoics), or minimally cultivate and direct (Aristotle and Aquinas) the latter in order for both the individual and society to function. Passion is always associated

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with the sensible world, matter, the body, movement, change, and pleasure. Lust, although sometimes a minor subheading of a larger category, represents, together with gluttony, a powerful example and a problematic point. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics contains one of the most elaborate projects of reconciling desire and pleasure to reason with a view to moral and philosophical happiness, in which temperance (ακρασια, the moderate use of bodily pleasures such as sex and food) and its opposite (ακολασια) play a crucial role. In the tenth book of the Ethics in particular, Aristotle outlines a program of aligning happiness (the pursuit of pleasure) with intelligence and the contemplative life (and with politics). The medieval sense of irony does not spare the Philosopher. The Lai d’Aristote, once attributed to Henri D’Andeli and now to Henri de Valenciennes, rehearses a common medieval joke by having the philosopher lecture his pupil Alexander on the dangers of Eros, only to find himself subsequently stalked by Phyllis, the courtesan that Alexander abandoned at the teacher’s suggestion. Aristotle eventually gives in to all her whims, including letting her ride him and whip him like a horse, thus subverting the traditional image of reason riding passion and reining it in. When caught in this embarrassing position by his pupil, the philosopher at least gets the last word: his very situation proves the difficulty of fighting desire/lust, shows its horrid consequences, and justifies the sternness of the teacher’s lecture.71 The idea of lust as a challenge to wisdom and knowledge is topical in the Middle Ages and affects such characters as Solomon and Virgil, who, like Aristotle, are caught in unphilosophical situations involving young and attractive women.72 Even Boccaccio’s statement about Dante’s own lust in the Trattatello, which emphasizes the poet’s virtue and knowledge (“cotanta virtute … cotanta scienzia”), is probably best read along these lines. These examples posit lust as the grotesque opposite of wisdom and knowledge, but their ironic target is philosophy’s attempt to overcome every passion or desire in general. Alain de Libera argues that in the 1260s a “philosophical asceticism” develops in potential competition with the Christian idea of asceticism.73 In order to achieve a contemplative state, the philosopher must aim at the control of reason over passion, chiefly represented by lust. Through a comparison of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae 2a–2ae, 152 and Sigier of Brabant’s Quaestiones morales 4 and 5, de Libera shows that both Aquinas and Sigier discuss Aristotle’s notion of temperantia, the moderate use of pleasures which allows the human being to avoid the two opposite excesses of incontinence and anesthesia (the complete, dulling insensibility to the stimuli of the world). Both thinkers claim that sexual chastity is necessary to some and,

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being incompatible only with sexual pleasures, does not lead to a complete, “anesthetic,” numbness. If employed by those who need it, chastity does not endanger the continuation of the species. Thomas and Sigier diverge only regarding the status of the practitioners of abstinence: for Thomas, it suits those who take care of God’s business, while for Sigier, it is necessary for the philosopher. The religious life for Thomas and philosophy for Sigier equally require a “virtuous selfishness” on the part of those who practice them, involving a seclusion from the world’s pleasures centred on the renunciation of sexuality. As de Libera recalls, the figure of “selfish philosopher” originates in book 9 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.74 The selfish philosopher loves himself for selfless reasons, because he loves his own intellectual pursuit. The selfish philosopher is, according to Aristotle, intrinsically free and noble, because he obeys only his own intellectual imperatives. Alongside this philosophical virtuous selfishness, Aristotle places philosophical virtuous friendship, the dispassionate interaction with the other that allows the life of the mind to flourish. According to de Libera, the Aristotelian notion of philosophical friendship merges in the Middle Ages into the idea of the schools, and in the deep and exclusive bonds established by students in the universities. The idea of virtuous or spiritual friendship also resonates very strongly in the religious and especially the monastic environment. The notion of friendship as a form of love that domesticates lust and yokes affection and reason provides a safe alternative for the discourse of love. Cicero’s De amicitia was extremely popular throughout the Middle Ages. For instance, it acts as a catalyst within the greatest medieval love story, that of Abelard and Heloise. The notion of spiritual friendship not only fosters the metamorphosis of lust into love, but it also contributes to the uneasy position of erotic love as both extramarital and chaste.75 The De amicitia was particularly widespread through its Christian “translation” – Aelred’s De spirituali amicitia, written in the second half of the twelfth century. In this dialogue, Aelred fully assimilates the discourse of love to that of friendship – including the somewhat puzzling statement that “God is friendship” (“Deus est amicitia”) and the idea of a “spiritual kiss,” in which hearts touch as opposed to lips, but which still manages to leave behind a sweet spiritual aftertaste.76 Aelred’s friendship is human affection untainted by sin – as natural desire was before the Fall77 – and is patterned on an understanding of love that does not challenge reason but actually springs from it. Est autem amor quidam animae rationalis affectus per quem aliquid cum desiderio querit et appetit ad fruendum; per quem et fruitur eo

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cum quadam interiori suavitate, amplectitur et conservat adeptum. (De spirituali amicitia, pl 195, 663) For love is a certain affection of the rational soul whereby it seeks and eagerly strives after some object to posses and enjoy it. Having attained its object through love, it enjoys it with a certain interior sweetness, embraces it, and preserves it.78 With the exception of the adjective “rational” (which dictates the choice of calling this sentiment “affection” as opposed to “passion” or “disease”), this definition easily resounds with that of Andreas Cappellanus and the poets: love is the desire for an object and it aims to the achievement and the perpetuation of the pleasure deriving from such object. Likewise, the monastic practice of spiritual friendship is often imbued of the erotic rhetoric of longing and torment, kisses and embraces, yet never verging on despair or irrationality.79 Thus, in philosophy and spirituality, the notions of philosophical selfishness and spiritual friendship address the issues raised by the triangle reason, passion, love/lust – the former exploiting the self-sufficient powers of reason, and the latter leaning on the assimilability of the discourse of love.

The relations between reason and passion also feature prominently in love literature. Here, the balance between love and reason radically shifts in favour of love; one of the tenets of love literature is precisely the fact that love overcomes reason. From Ovid’s Medea struggling between cupido and mens to Virgil’s Dido tragically surrendering to her passion (but not to Virgil’s Aeneas, who ends up rather in renunciation), and to the many embodiments of the courtly fol’amor, love poetry acts as the scene of the defeat of reason. Willed or unwilled, sweet or bitter (or bittersweet in many cases), love is the unified label of a complex discourse of passions that remove the lover/author from the normative discourse of reason and throw him into a realm of unending desire, madness, and bodily reactions. The extension of desire often becomes more important than its attainment, because it is the nourishment of poetry – because, as mentioned before, it is poetry itself. The poems that Barolini discusses as examples of the wider lyrical context of Inferno 5 prominently feature the struggle between passion and reason. The Sicilian Guido delle Colonne, for instance, establishes a contrast between reason (“senno”) and the heart’s desire (“ardir di core”). Although reason usually subjugates (“soverchia”) the passions, in love the opposite occurs. In

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the throes of love the wise men are led astray and madness replaces reason (Amor che lungiamente m’hai menato, 48–55).80 With similar words, Guittone d’Arezzo maintains that the domain of love is one of madness as opposed to wisdom (“in tutta parte ove distringe amore / regge follore in loco di savere,” Ora parrà s’eo saverò cantare, 10–11). Guittone’s authorial (and personal) choice is one of radical renunciation of love, as a sentiment that obfuscates reason and impairs the human being.81 Stilnovo poetry handles the reason-passion question by exploiting the “natural” aspect of love. Love might be in tension with or even in opposition to reason, but love is good and necessary insofar as it is a natural impulse. The appetizing and threatening naturalness of lust in religious literature is inverted in a quasi-sacred pattern. Stilnovo love is often featured as a consequence of the orderly design of nature, which directs desires toward their proper places. Thus, in the famous incipit of Guinizzelli’s “manifesto,” love is drawn to the gentle heart as birds are to the woods: “al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore / come l’ausello in selva a la verdura.” The innate goodness of the natural impulse excuses the poet from the sins of both lust and idolatry. The beauty of woman, far from being an evil lure to lust, is the trace, the “signifier” (that which gives visible significance), and the compass to the lover’s journey of desire. The poetry of Guido Cavalcanti brings together the philosophical and erotic aspects of the passion and reason question. On the one hand, in the “master-song” Donna me prega Cavalcanti takes up the position of the philosopher who dissects and refutes the power of love. Love is an obscure passion, is the opposite of reason, contains nothing ennobling, and relates to the basest instincts of the human being. On the other hand, the rest of his collection of poems describes for the most part a lover who is completely dominated by love and physically destroyed by an ungovernable and cruel passion. In Cavalcanti’s poetry, the anatomy of love follows the discourse of the philosophers, and the physiology of love the discourse of doctors (on lust) and poets (on love). The struggle between reason and passion is a genuine crux in Dante’s work, where the very terms reason and passion fluctuate between the realms of the philosophical and the erotic. The basic establishment of the relation between desire and reason takes place in the Vita Nuova, especially in the prose. In the description of Beatrice’s first appearance at the age of nine at the outset of the libello (2, 9–10), the reader is informed that the love that sprang forth therein was, and always would be, accompanied by “the faithful advice of reason.” E avvegna che la sua imagine, la quale continuatamente meco stava,

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fosse baldanza d’Amore a segnoreggiare me, tuttavia era di sì nobilissima vertù, che nulla volta sofferse che Amore mi reggesse sanza lo fedele consiglio de la ragione in quelle cose là ove cotale consiglio fosse utile a udire. (Vita Nuova 2, 9) And though her image, which remained constantly with me, was Love’s assurance of holding me, it was of such a pure quality that it never allowed me to be ruled by Love without the faithful counsel of reason, in all those things where such advice might be profitable.82 Love is featured as an enlightened tyrant at the beginning of the Vita Nuova. Although it completely dominates the lover (see 2, 5: “dominabitur michi” and 2, 7: “signoreggiò la mia anima”), it does listen to reason’s advice in some respects. As Domenico De Robertis argues, the relation between love and reason is the very raison d’être of the Vita Nuova, and achieves a threefold goal.83 First, it establishes Dante’s libello in clear contrast with Cavalcanti’s vision of love as irrational and leading to desperation. Second, it enriches the traditional personification of love-as-god by adding a rational aspect to it. As such, Love becomes the lover’s advisor; it suggests to him, for instance, the answer to his envious friends in chapter 4 (a cunning blow against the Provençal courtly tradition, forever preoccupied by the envy of the lauzengiers).84 Later, it provides aid when the stratagem of the screen lady is complicated by the departure of the first surrogate lover (chapter 9);85 and it advises the lover to put this scheme to an end when the beloved is becoming angry because of it (chapter 12).86 When the lover goes through a “cavalcantian” phase of deep despair, the advice of Love and reason is to run away from the sight of the woman (chapter 16).87 Third, the relation that Dante sets between love and reason allows for the identification between love and intellectual activity, and establishes love as the perfection of the human being, setting the grounds for the transformation of Beatrice in the Commedia. In the light of the panorama of love literature sketched above, where love and reason are mostly figured as opposites, Dante’s yoking of the two terms in the Vita Nuova is a truly remarkable move, which involves the appropriation of both the philosophical and the spiritual discourses on love and reason. In the sonnet Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa (chapter 20), Dante combines the naturalness and the rationality of love in one powerful simile that both accepts and disavows Guinizzelli’s understanding of love as a purely natural phenomenon. The beginning of the sonnet is straightforward stilnovo, complete with acknowledgments (“Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa / sì come il saggio in suo dittare pone”; Love and the gracious heart are a single thing, as Guinizzelli tells us in his poem).Whereas Guinizzelli had

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illustrated the relation between love and the gentle heart with a series of images drawn from nature (bird, fire, stone), Dante here provides a more stringent, “Aristotelian” simile, with a puzzling effect on the reader as it compares the relation between love and the gentle heart to that of reason and the rational soul: “e così esser l’un sanza l’altro osa / com’alma razional sanza ragione” (one can no more be without the other than can the reasoning mind without its reason). Dante emphasizes the control of reason over love – stated at the outset of the Vita Nuova prose, but not always acted out in the libello – most likely in opposition both to Guinizzelli’s naturalistic and to Cavalcanti’s irrational vision of love.88 The control of reason over passion, coming through via simile, is, however, slyly suggested rather than asserted. In the last section of the Vita Nuova (35–9), a contrast is established between “appetito” (drive) and “ragione” (reason) in the episode of the “donna gentile,” the mysterious love interest of Dante after Beatrice’s death. Although originating in the woman’s compassion (“pietà”) for the lover’s mourning, the desire for the “donna gentile” soon becomes excessive (“troppo mi piacesse”), and predictably overcomes reason (“E molte volte pensava più amorosamente, tanto che lo cuore consentiva in lui, cioè nel suo ragionare”; Often I thought in still more loving terms, so much so that the heart consented to it, that is to the loving feeling, 38, 1). A powerful vision from heaven, featuring Beatrice herself, is unleashed against this enemy of reason (“contro questo avversaro della ragione,” 39, 1).89 The model of love supported by reason that Dante creates in the Vita Nuova resonates with the religious concept of spiritual friendship. However, Dante also constructs in the libello a figure of the “selfish lover” patterned on that of the selfish philosopher. Like the philosopher, Dante’s lover is able to tame and control the urges and deviant aspects of love, and make it a way of life that can be lived well. In this light, the mocking of his “first friend” Guido Cavalcanti in the Vita Nuova goes well beyond mere sections and episodes, and appears truly systematic. In contrast to the selfish lover of the Vita Nuova, Guido appears very much like Aristotle in the homonymous lai – a great philosopher who is brutally ridiculed by the very passion he tried to investigate. As is well known, Dante in the Vita Nuova (chapters 13–16) explores a “cavalcantian” phase that is marked by a dark, gloomy, and desperate image of love. The poet brings this phase to an end through the so-called “poetics of the praise,” programmatically inaugurated by a poem that yokes love and reason in its incipit: Donne ch’ avete intelletto d’amore (Ladies who have intelligence of love, Vita Nuova 19, 4). The poet places his blessedness in “that which cannot be taken from me” (“in quello che non mi puote venire meno”), the praise of the beloved, poetry itself.90 This move inaugurates a

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self-reflective mode of love, which requires neither the presence nor the encouragement of the beloved, and rests, narcissistically, in language. It is a selfish move but, like the one of the selfish philosopher, is still executed virtuously, with a view to the grander aim of situating the (adulterous, erotic and based on sensible beauty) love for a woman on the path to the understanding of God. At the beginning of the Convivio, Dante describes the present work as a continuation of the Vita Nuova, although in a different mode: while the Vita Nuova is “fervid and passionate” (“fervida e passionata,” 1, i, 16), the Convivio is “tempered and mature” (“temperata e virile,” ibid.).91 The appeal to temperance signals the centrality of the philosophical imperative that reason should govern passion, and sustains Dante’s objective in the Banquet: to transform erotic desire into the desire for knowledge. Ironically, the discourse on desire, one of the main but weakest links of the whole treatise, eventually hijacks the work of temperance. The Convivio is left unfinished at the fourth book, shortly after the most convoluted discussion of natural desire. In the Convivio, the “donna gentile” is equated to Sapientia. The (at times uneasy) identification of the erotic with the rational nonetheless facilitates the management of the relation between reason and desire, and helps draw a clear distinction between the lower drive of appetite and the higher position of thought. Dante takes up the position of the “selfish philosopher” in the Convivio and unabashedly undermines the role of erotic love. He posits that the use of reason is the very definition of the human being, its very “life,” and that to live by the animal side of the human being is equivalent to being dead.92 The way the relation between desire and reason is established in the Convivio is as unproblematic as the condemnation of lust appears at the beginning of Inferno 5: whoever abandons the route of reason lives the life of a beast, is dead to the higher aspects of life, and even potentially damned. As we have seen in the previous chapter, however, love for knowledge is also a damming love. The desire for knowledge is able to lead the human being to see only dimly the light of the metaphysical object, and does not in itself constitute a way to God; so much so that in the third book of the Convivio God is radically excluded from the area of interest of the natural desire (3, xv, 9). Natural desire and its relation to reason is indeed the aspect of the Convivio in which the reason-passion issue acquires nuances and complexity. Natural desire is the “irrational,” innate, and spontaneous instinct that drives all things – inanimate and animate alike – toward their own good. Dante first describes natural desire in Convivio 3, iii, 1–11, in the context of his claim that the “Love that discourses in my mind” in the song that opens the third treatise is not a base or sensible type of love (it is not lust), but the rational

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love for the truth. In a passage reminiscent of Augustine’s notion of the pondus amoris (weight of love), and also of several other theological and physical authorities such as Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great, Dante states that each thing has its “special love” (“speziale amore”). Simple bodies such as earth and fire always tend in one direction (earth downward, fire upward); mixed bodies, such as minerals, privilege the place where they were created; plants manifest their love in their choice of different places (humid, dry, and so on); animals in the choice of both place and species (natural desire in reproduction, “natural lust”). The human being, the most complex creature of all, shares all these loves.93 It is driven to gravity, to the place and time of its generation, to food, and to both animal desire for reproduction (which in the human being becomes a very powerful drive that needs to be controlled) and rational love for truth and friendship: E per la natura quarta, delli animali, cioè sensitiva, hae l’uomo altro amore, per lo quale ama secondo la sensibile apparenza, sì come bestia; e questo amore nell’uomo massimamente ha mestiere di rettore per la sua soperchievole operazione, nello diletto massimamente del gusto e del tatto. E per la quinta e ultima natura, cioè vera umana o, meglio dicendo, angelica, cioè razionale, ha l’uomo amore alla veritade e alla vertude; e da questo amore nasce la vera e perfetta amistà, dell’onesto tratta, della quale parla lo Filosofo nell’ottavo dell’Etica, quando tratta dell’amistade. (Convivio 3, iii, 10–11) By virtue of the fourth nature, that of the animals, namely the senses, man has another love, by which he loves according to sense perception, like the beasts; and in man it is this love which has the greatest need of being controlled, because of its overwhelming power brought about especially by delight arising from taste and touch. By virtue of the fifth and last nature, namely the truly human or, to be more precise, the angelic nature, which is to say the rational, man has a love of truth and virtue; and from this love springs true and perfect friendship, derived from what is honorable, something about which the Philosopher speaks in the eighth book of the Ethics where he discusses friendship. In this passage, the rational drive to virtue is featured as a natural desire, which encompasses and surpasses all the other natural drives, including lust. The final reference to Aristotle testifies to Dante’s position as the “selfish philosopher,” privileging friendship over love. Toward the end of the fourth book of the Convivio (4, xxi–xxii), Dante returns to the theme of natural desire.94 He does so while discussing human

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goodness and happiness in two ways: the natural way (“modo naturale,” xxi, 1–12), where he describes the birth of the rational soul, and the theological way (“modo teologico,” xxi, 13–14 and xxii, 1–18), where he begins with the discussion of seven gifts of the Holy Spirit to the human soul. Desire is the first sprout that grows from the gifts implanted in the human soul by God.95 Likely relying on Cicero’s De finibus, Dante defines this desire as “hormen,” which he first translates as “appetito d’animo” (xxi, 13) and then as “appetito d’animo naturale” (xxii, 4), placing it in an intermediate (and indeterminate) position between the spheres of the natural and the rational. This desire is indeed very similar to the natural desire discussed in the third treatise, but here it is presented as divinely instituted in human beings and, therefore, differing from the desire of inanimate objects, plants, or animals. E sì come nelle biade che, quando nascono, dal principio hanno quasi una similitudine nell’erba essendo, e poi si vengono per processo [di tempo] dissimigliando; così questo naturale appetito, che [de]lla divina grazia surge, dal principio quasi si mostra non dissimile a quello che pur da natura nudamente viene, ma con esso, sì come l‘erbate quasi di diversi biadi, si simiglia. E non pur [nel]li uomini, ma e nelli uomini e nelle bestie ha similitudine; e questo [in questo] appare, che ogni animale, sì come elli è nato, sì razionale come bruto, se medesimo ama, e teme e fugge quelle cose che a lui sono contrarie, e quelle odia. (Convivio 4, xxii, 5) Just as the various grains which at first, when springing up, look alike in the grass, and then as they grow come to lose their similarity, so this natural appetite, which issues from the divine grace, seems at first not unlike that which comes simply from nature, but is similar to it, just as the first blades of the different grains are similar to one another. This similarity is found not only in men, but in men and in animals; and this is apparent, for every animal, as soon as it is born, rational as well as brute, loves itself and fears and flees those things which are opposed to it, and hates them. Little by little (“procedendo”), the desire diversifies itself (“comincia una dissimiglianza”) from the other natural desires, and finds its rational route, electing the soul as the best, and therefore most worthy of love, part of the human being.96 A rhetoric of delight (“diletto”) articulates the soul’s love for itself, in which pleasure turns into happiness and blessedness. Dunque, se la mente si diletta sempre nell’uso della cosa amata, che è

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frutto d’amore, [e] in quella cosa che massimamente è amata è l’uso massimamente dilettoso, l’uso del nostro animo è massimamente dilettoso a noi. E quello che massimamente è dilettoso a noi, quello è nostra felicitade e nostra beatitudine, oltre la quale nullo diletto è maggiore, né nullo altro pare; sì come vedere si puote, chi bene riguarda la precedente ragione. (Convivio 4, xxii, 9) Therefore, if the mind always delights in the use of the thing that is loved, which is the fruit of love, and if in that thing which is loved most of all is found the most delightful use of all, the use of our mind is most of all delightful to us. And whatever is most of all delightful to us constitutes our happiness and our blessedness, beyond which there is no greater delight, nor any equal, as anyone can see who carefully considers the preceding argument. The relation between reason and passion is presented once again as obvious and natural (the natural desire of the human being is to cultivate the rational part of the self) although the rhetoric of the self’s love for its rational part is strongly erotic. At the end of this passage, however, Dante quite abruptly and sternly recalls that he is talking about the rational side of the soul, and of the rational appetite therein.97 Desire is, once again, safely put under the control of reason. The text then moves into a distinctly botanical digression on the ways the “root” (the hormen) can turn out badly, and how this can be rectified through the cross-pollination effected by correction and education. Later in the treatise Dante returns to the theme of the hormen, with a specific reference to chapter xxii. This time, the relation between reason and passions is staged in a notably aggressive fashion. The hormen is quite instinctual; like a horse, it pursues and flees in order to lead the human being to perfection.98 Thus, it needs to be reined in by reason: Veramente questo appetito conviene essere cavalcato dalla ragione; ché sì come uno sciolto cavallo, quanto ch’ello sia di natura nobile, per sé, sanza lo buono cavalcatore, bene non si conduce, così questo appetito, che irascibile e concupiscibile si chiama, quanto ch’ello sia nobile, alla ragione obedire conviene, la quale guida quello con freno e con isproni, come buono cavaliere. (Convivio 4, xxvi, 6) Nevertheless this appetite must be ridden by reason, for just as a horse set loose, however noble it may be by nature, cannot act as its own

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guide without a good rider, so the appetite, which is called irascible or concupiscible, however noble it may be, must obey reason, which guides it with bridle and spurs like a good horseman. In Aristotelian fashion, the restrictive element of reason is the virtue of temperance, and the spurring element is magnanimity.99 The examplar is Aeneas, who was “bridled in” when it came to Dido, and spurred on in the case of the journey to the underworld. Reason restricts lust and incites knowledge. One can only lament the absence of the seventh book of the Convivio: E quanto raffrenare fu quello, quando, avendo ricevuto da Dido tanto piacere quanto di sotto nel settimo trattato si dicerà, e usando con essa tanto di dilettazione, elli si partio, per seguire onesta e laudabile via e fruttuosa. (Convivio 4, xxvi, 8) How great was his restraint when, having experienced so much pleasure with Dido, as will be recounted below in the seventh book, and having derived from her so much gratification, he took his departure from her to follow an honorable, praiseworthy and profitable path. The discussion of natural desire in Convivio 4, xxi–xxii reads convincingly as a rough draft of the theory of love in Purgatorio 18. At the centre of the Comedy the question of reason and desire is raised again with the reintegration of the role of natural desire as a means of knowledge and a way to God. In Purgatory, Dante glosses stilnovo tenets (that love is innate in the human being, that it derives from the sight of the beloved object, and that it functions by means of desire) with a largely Thomistic framework, thus depriving those tenets of their singularity, and de-eroticizing love by framing it in the wider question of reason, passion, and free will. He does, however, re-eroticize the discourse of reason by mentioning quite obsessively his own personal object of love, Beatrice, though already presenting her as the allegory of faith. At the heart of the second cantica Dante radically rewrites the courtly and stilnovo notion that love is inevitable (and praiseworthy) because it is natural, by firmly harnessing this natural inclination to free will. Following Marco Lombardo’s explanation of free will (canto 16), Virgil describes in canto 17 the structure of the realm, and the whole system of virtues and sins, in terms of a proper understanding of love. Love is the central tenet of the Christian world where “né Creator né creatura mai fu sanza amore” (neither Creator nor creature was ever without love, Purgatorio 17, 91–2). In contrast to his

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presentation of the fleeting appetite of the Convivio, Dante here centres his discussion directly and firmly on love. In the human being a fundamental distinction is traced between the natural, instinctual side of love (“amore … natural,” 17, 93), which is free of guilt (“sempre senza errore,” 17, 94) and the elective side of love (“amore … d’animo,” 17, 93), which carries the possibility of error. Natural love is the trace of divinity within the human being, the confused suggestion that there is a goal of all desires.100 Elective love is the seed of every virtue (when it pursues the first intuition of God) and vice (when it diverges from it).101 Love can err because of the bad choice of object (“malo obbietto,” 17, 95), as demonstrated by the sins already encountered by the pilgrim (pride, envy, and wrath), because of the slowness in pursuing the primary good (sloth), or because of the excessive interest in “secondary goods” such as money, food, and sex (the sins of avarice, gluttony, and lust that the pilgrim will face in the terraces to come), which, by their very nature, cannot make the human being happy (“altro è ben che non fa l’uom felice,” 17, 133). In the next canto Dante provides a rational demonstration of the nature of love, with the intention of dispelling the mistakes of “the blind who make themselves guides” (that is, the poets and theorists of courtly love; Purgatorio 18, 18). The rational, disputative tone of the whole episode echoes that of many poems of the early Italian lyric tradition, more prone to theoretical investigations than the troubadour tradition, especially the sharply rational stance of Cavalcanti’s Donna me prega, to which this canto is one of Dante’s many answers. Love, a potentiality of the human soul, “which is created quick to love” (“ch’è creato ad amar presto,” 18, 19), is actualized by the pleasure deriving from a beautiful object (“cosa che piace,” “piacer,” 18, 20–1). The pleasant image is then abstracted (and, thus, known in an Aristotelian sense) by the faculty of apprehension, causing the soul to bend toward it. Simply put, love is an act of both bending and binding: “quel piegare è amor, quell’è natura / che per piacer di novo in voi si lega” (that inclination is love, that inclination is nature that is bound in you anew by pleasure, Purgatorio 18, 26–7). 102 As we shall see more in detail in chapter 4, “piacere” is one of the key words of Inferno 5, and is a very nuanced and mobile concept in medieval love poetry and in Dante. Its meanings range from “body” to God and it is always reductive to affix it to one in particular. In this passage, it can signify both the end point of the process of love, the object which pleases, or the process itself, the pleasure-enjoyment that is inherent in the binding act of love. Commentators are divided on the interpretation of “di novo,” which can be interpreted as either “for the first time” or “again.” This latter interpre-

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tation, especially according to Charles Singleton (ddp ad Purgatorio 18, 27), marks a split between the natural desire, which obscurely and innocently understands the existence of the pleasurable object, and the mind, which rationally perceives (apprehends) it. Whether unified or split, this drive is clearly understood as natural (“è natura,” 18, 26) and as an act of binding (“si lega,” 18, 27). The idea of love as binding is fundamentally Augustinian and resonates vividly in mystical interpretations of love.103 The captive soul (“l’animo preso”) tries to join the beloved object by means of desire, a motion of the soul (“moto spiritale”) compared to fire. It is a very vital motion, restless (“mai non posa”) as long as (“fin che”) it enjoys the beloved object. Poi, come ’l foco movesi in altura per la sua forma ch’è nata a salire là dove più in sua materia dura, così l’animo preso entra in disire, ch’è moto spiritale e mai non posa fin che la cosa amata il fa gioire. (Purgatorio 18, 28–33) Then, even as fire moves upward by reason of its form, being born to ascend thither where it lasts longest in its matter, so the captive mind enters into desire, which is a spiritual movement and never rests until the thing loved makes it rejoice. The comparison to fire establishes desire as a natural motion, indeed the most elemental impulse of the human being, the pondus amoris that is shared by the entire universe. Commentators such as Singleton often compare Dante’s theory of love in this passage with Aquinas’s account of love in the Summa Theologiae 1a–2ae, q. 26. Aquinas describes love as a passion, a circular motion, departing from and returning to the desired object (appetibile). Love is a three-step process: a complacentia for the desired object, followed by the motion of desire (“motus in appetibile, qui est desiderium”), and perfected by the peace of enjoyment (“quies, quae est gaudium”).104 Although Dante’s demonstration roughly follows these three steps, I believe that it is much more supple and open-ended than its philosophical precursor. Three elements in particular supply this flexibility: the insertion of the Augustinian and mystical idea of love as binding (“si lega”), the nuanced and polymorphous signification of “piacere,” and the fiery mobility of desire. While the three steps in Aquinas’s text are circumscribed and well defined, Dante’s process is more of

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a continuum and, while Aquinas’s love clearly ends in the peace that follows the achievement (“quies, quae est gaudium”), Dante’s text displays the opposite of peace – restlessness (“mai non posa”; it never rests, 18, 33), putting all the strain of interpretation in the following “fin che”: “fin che la cosa amata il fa gioire” – to which I shall return shortly. Virgil’s explanation of the nature of love ends abruptly on the image of expanded and restless desire, with the master convinced that he has dispelled the mistakes of courtly poets and theorists and their conviction that if love is in itself innate and good, so every love must be so.105 Yet the pupil (and the reader) remains quite confused about why there are sinful dispositions in a love that is innate and to which the soul is inevitably drawn. In response, Virgil agrees to explain more, but only insofar as the role of reason is concerned, adding that Beatrice will address the response of faith, possibly alluding to Beatrice’s explanation of natural desire in the first canto of Paradiso (1, 109–20, for which see chapter 3). The rational response expounds on the theme of natural desire and begins by relating the scholastic notion that the human soul has some specific virtues that are understood only in operation, just as the specificity of the tree is seen through its foliage.106 The specific virtue of the human soul is to have principles of knowledge (“notizie,” Purgatorio 18, 56) and desire (“affetto,” 18, 57). These principles are (mysteriously to the pagan guide) innate to the soul, and they incline it toward some universal objects of desire (“i primi appetibili”). These first desires are beyond sin and virtue (“questa prima voglia metro di lode o di biasmo non cape,” 18, 59–60), like the impulse of the bee to produce honey (“come studio in ape / di far lo mele,” 18, 58–9). The comparisons between the soul and the tree, and especially between the soul and the bee, are somewhat misleading, as they point to the vegetative (plant-like) and sensitive (animal-like) aspects of the soul. The bee, in particular, stands for the fourth nature of the human being as described in Convivio 3 – that in which lust, as the natural impulse toward the other in reproduction, is included. However, by calling the soul a “substantial form that is both distinct from matter and united with it” (“forma sustanzial, che setta / è da matera ed è con lei unita,” Purgatorio 18, 49–50), Dante is explicitly positing the first knowledge and desire in the rational soul (the fifth nature in Convivio 3). Another virtue is innate in the rational soul: “la virtù che consiglia” (the faculty that counsels,” Purgatorio 18, 62), which has the capacity to oversee the homology between the first natural desire toward the supreme good and all the other, secondary desires.107 Classical philosophers, who explored this matter in depth through rational demonstration (“color che ragionando

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andaro a fondo,” Purgatorio 18, 67) already noticed this innate freedom (“innata libertate,” 68), which counteracts the theory of the ineluctability of appetites. Here Dante possibly alludes to Aristotle’s Ethics as a compendium of the moral thought of antiquity, although the theme of free will is notoriously unclear and underdeveloped in Aristotle. Only Christianity, here emphatically embodied by Beatrice, explicitly understands this faculty as free will: “la nobile virtù Beatrice intende / per lo libero arbitrio” (This noble virtue Beatrice understands as the free will, 73–4). This innate “faculty that counsels” appears to have many traits in common with reason, and is interpreted by many as such. Bruno Nardi, for instance, convincingly argues that for Dante “free will is the free judgment of reason on action, not obstructed by appetite.”108 Line 73, “Beatrice intende,” is usually interpreted as “divine truth,” in light of the contrast established before between reason-Virgil and faithBeatrice (18, 48). This contrast, however, might be more blurred than it appears when contextualized within the negotiations taking place around the figure of Beatrice in the first half of Purgatory. Beatrice is invoked four times in the first half of Purgatory as the personification of faith or theology and is contrasted with Virgil, who embodies failing human reason. The same scene – Virgil bringing the argument only as far as reason is concerned and leaving the full explanation to Beatrice – is rehearsed in the context of three different discussions of love: how the “fire of love” from earthly prayer may encourage the purgatorial process (canto 6), the discussion of the peculiar nature of divine love which multiplies when shared (canto 15), and twice during the current discussion on the nature of love (canto 18).109 In this last instance, Dante, while putting natural love and desire under the control of reason, constructs human reason as failing and contrasts it with a faith which bears the name of his youth’s love. No rigid allegory can soften the perplexity deriving from the dichotomous nature of the context – especially when the reasonfaith contrast is constructed as a rhetoric of hunger and cravings (whereby Beatrice will satisfy “all” of Dante’s “cravings”) which was previously employed to characterize the she-wolf/cupiditas in Inferno 1. E se la mia ragion non ti disfama, vedrai Beatrice, ed ella pienamente ti torrà questa e ciascun’ altra brama. (Purgatorio 15, 76–8) And if my discourse does not appease your hunger, you shall see Beatrice and she will deliver you wholly from this and every other longing.

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Long before her actual apparition at the top of Purgatory and her stern criticism of Dante’s erroneous choice of love objects (in an episode that can be viewed as the continuation “on a personal note” of the discourse of Purgatorio 18), Dante has Beatrice, the erotic love of his youth, literally “christening” his new version of rational love. At the centre of the Purgatory, Dante uses a threefold strategy to close a circle on the question of reason and desire and to place love firmly under the control of reason. He first investigates love solely as a prerogative of the soul, without entering into the dangerous enclave of the body. Second, he confines love within the domain of the rational soul, although his examples (fire, plant, animal) actually point to the idea that desire spans the full universe, bodies as well as souls and indeed all the parts of the human soul. And third, he firmly places love under the control of reason, the “virtù che consiglia.” However, there is an aspect of this canto which resists Dante’s compulsion for order and reason: desire. The narrative strategy, which in canto 18 (lines 34–45) opposes an over-assertive Virgil to a puzzled Dante, underlines, in my reading, the fact that desire is truly the osmotic, flexible, quasi-invisible border between the guiltless natural love and the elective love governed by the will. Desire is the only truly creative and transformative force in Dante’s process of love, but it is also the only potentially dangerous drive. The first stage of Virgil’s demonstration of love ends with line 33: “fin che la cosa amata il fa gioire.” Commentators are divided on the interpretation of “fin che,” which can be read as “until,” implying that desire ceases when the beloved object makes the soul rejoice, or “as long as,” implying that desire continues to burn throughout. The first interpretation (championed, for instance, by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi) adheres more closely to the Thomistic text, which understands love as a circular process and desire as a motion with an end, which clearly implies rest (quies) and enjoyment (gaudium). The second interpretation (upheld by Mazzoni) understands desire as a more open-ended process or motion, and is supported by other references in Dante’s text.110 As I shall clarify in the next chapter, I believe that in this context, “fin che” is interpretatively neutral, like the natural inclination, neutral in and by itself, that is discussed here. It is the kind of object of desire that stands at the end of the sentence that dictates the interpretation of “fin che.” Desire is potentially an unending continuum, unless the wrong choice of the object of attraction stifles it. Whether it extinguishes itself in attainment or not, desire is duration, and it is motion. Desire is not, however, a uniform motion. Lino Pertile has analyzed several instances of desire in the Comedy, especially in the Paradiso, showing how desire has peaks and lows, burns and then subsides, rushes and

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slows down.111 As an irregular, unforeseeable, unstable process, desire conceals the possibility of deranging the process of love toward the good or toward the bad. One passage in the Convivio frames with extraordinary exactitude the critical moment of desire – the instant in which desire might defy the control of the will. It is when desiring and desired are at the closest, and desire at its peak: Dove è da sapere che quanto l’agente più al paziente sé unisce, tanto e più forte è però la passione, sì come per la sentenza del Filosofo in quello Di Generazione si può comprendere; onde, quanto la cosa desiderata più appropinqua al desiderante, tanto lo desiderio è maggiore, e l’anima, più passionata, più sé unisce alla parte concupiscibile e più abandona la ragione. (Convivio 3, x, 2) Here we must know that the more closely the agent is united with the patient the stronger is the passion, as may be understood from statements made by the Philosopher in his book On Generation; thus the nearer the object desired comes to him who desires it, the stronger is his desire; and the more the soul is impassioned, the more closely it is united with the concupiscible appetite, and the more it abandons reason. Desire and its eluding the control of reason are the keys to canto 5, not only and reductively in terms of lust, but because every love is dangerously close to madness. As we shall see in the next chapters, the irrationality of desire is desire’s very strength. In medieval culture, the idea of “subjecting reason to desire” applies equally well to the definition of lust among theologians and preachers, to love poetry, and to the description of the final leap of the mystical love for God. In Dante, the dangerous and overflowing peak of desire appears both in Inferno 5 and on the stage of the vision of God.

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Desire Quali colombe dal desio chiamate Inferno 5, 82 (As doves called by desire)

I’ cominciai: Poeta, volontieri parlerei a quei due che ’nsieme vanno, e paion sì al vento esser leggeri. (Inferno 5, 73–5) Poet, I began, willingly would I speak with those two that go together and seem to be so light upon the wind. Paolo and Francesca are introduced in Inferno 5 through an image that emphasizes both the lightness and the union of the lovers. The lovers appear as the embodied and (therefore) infernal negative of the image of the soul in Purgatorio 18, clutching to the beloved object by means of desire, with the lightness of a flame. Like the “fin che” in Purgatorio this embrace and the aerial acrobatics it recalls (especially in the context of the surrounding bird metaphors) is exegetically neutral. It is, however, emotionally biased, as it elicits an interpretative “metaphor” as old as humankind, the conviction that “lightness is good.”1 This impression is only partially curbed by the pragmatism of early commentators, who reminded the reader that to be light in a storm is hardly an asset, as it simply leads to greater buffeting. At most, however, the lovers’ lightness rewrites itself as fragility and, in passing, it writes off the corporeality of the situation. In comparison to and in opposition with the lightness, the embrace (the way in which centuries of representations have led us to read the lovers’ proximity) comes across as rather spiritual, yet so firm that

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the wind doesn’t manage to break it apart, and tilts the reader’s judgment toward leniency.2 As mentioned in the Introduction, the catalogue of the great lovers of old funnels the mingling between the themes of lust and love, steering the reader toward the latter in the contemplation of “more than a thousand shades whom love had parted from our life” (“amor di nostra vita dipartille,” Inferno 5, 67–9). And, in fact, it is in the name of love that Paolo and Francesca are summoned. Ed elli a me: Vedrai quando saranno più presso a noi; e tu allor li priega per quello amor che i mena, ed ei verranno. Sì tosto come il vento a noi li piega, mossi la voce: O anime affannate, venite a noi parlar, s’altri nol niega! (Inferno 5, 76–81) And he to me: you shall see when they are nearer to us; and do you entreat them then by the love which leads them, and they will come. As soon as the wind bends them to us, I raised my voice, “O wearied souls! Come speak with us, if Another forbid not.” The two tercets, one featuring Virgil’s suggestions and the other Dante’s not entirely compliant actions, emphasize the gap between the pagan guide and his Christian pupil. While the pilgrim appeals to the fatigue of the souls wrestling against the wind (“affannate”) and acknowledges the existence of a higher authority in hell (“s’altri nol niega”) – at the same time insinuating the providential mandate of his journey, since God does not indeed prohibit the conversation – Virgil first establishes the courteous and courtly mode of the episode (“li priega”), and underlines the self-contained and obsessive centrality of Paolo and Francesca’s attraction by suggesting an appeal to the love that impels them (“l’amor ch’i mena”). Benvenuto da Imola points out that while in the Virgilian underworld there is indeed space for love among the souls, this is not the case for the Christian hell, where only the utmost hate (“summum odium”) reigns among the damned. Benvenuto explains the appeal to love in this canto as a way of emphasizing the obsessive stubbornness of Paolo and Francesca’s sin.3 Other commentators gloss it as evidence of the lack of repentance of the sinners in hell, and as an aspect of divine justice, which forces the sinners to repeat over and over the very act that lead to their damnation.4

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Besides recalling the affective mode of his own underworld, Virgil here is also quoting his own definition of desire as a chaotic and impelling force. In the second eclogue Virgil characterized desire as necessity running like a thrill throughout nature and the human being, each carried by their pleasure: “trahit sua quemque voluptas” (each is lead by his liking, Eclogues 2, 65). The choice of the object of desire (“voluptas,” that which pleases) is dictated by some kind of tragic naturalness: a lioness hunts a wolf, the wolf hunts a goat, and the goat lustfully (“lasciva”) pursues the flower of the cythisus – and Corydon pursues Alexis.5 The context of the second eclogue – narrating the painful story of a homosexual, excruciatingly unreciprocated, obsessive love which knows no limits (“quis enim modus adsit amor?” 2, 68) – makes it a supremely appropriate reference for the circle of the lustful. Although Dante conveniently attributes the problematic plea to the guide and not to the pilgrim, it is clear that “l’amor che i mena,” which is at once the lovers’ desire, their sin, and their punishment, is the central subject of this episode. The verb “menare” – to forcefully lead – is employed three times in the canto and links the three aspects of love/lust. First, it describes the operation of the infernal storm, the contrapasso for the lover’s inordinate and unreasonable desire in life: La bufera infernal, che mai non resta, mena li spirti con la sua rapina; voltando e percotendo li molesta. (Inferno 5, 31–3) The hellish hurricane, never resting, sweeps along the spirits with its rapine; whirling and smiting, it torments them. The verb is used again to amplify the violent hustle of the storm in line 43: “di qua, di là, di giù, di sù li mena” (hither, thither, downward, upward it drives them), and also in the summary of hell in canto 11, where the lustful are indicated as they whom the wind drives (“che mena il vento,” 71). Second, it illustrates the object of Virgil’s prayer, the love that unites the lovers (“l’amor che i mena,” 78). Finally, it is employed later in the canto to describe the consequence of their attraction in life: “quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio / menò costoro al doloroso passo!” (how many sweet thoughts, what great desire brought them to the woeful pass! 113–14).6 In Virgil’s tercet, the centrifugal impulse to stray and wander is matched by an equally strong centripetal force of attraction toward the source of the plea: if called in the name of love “they will come” (“ei verranno,” 79). To come and talk to the poets implies an act of will on the part of the lovers, and

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suggests a substantial amount of “physical” strength for opposing the force of the storm. In Dante’s tercet, however, there is no trace of the souls’ determination to approach the poets. The attraction toward inordinate love in life, turned here into eternal punishment (that is, the wind), compels the lovers to come and narrate their story of perdition. It actually “bends” them (“piega”) toward the pilgrim/poet, turning the willful action of “coming” into yet another passive submission to the battering of the storm. The similarity between the expression “the wind bends them to us” (“il vento a noi li piega,” 79) and the definition of love in Purgatorio 18, as the bending of the soul toward a likable object (“quel piegare è amor”; that inclination is love, 26) clarifies the homology between love and the storm. Both the storm and love are part of nature (“quella è natura”; that inclination is nature, 26), and, as such, they are potentially dooming. The very necessity of natural desire, which is the central argument of Purgatorio 18, is portrayed in a distorted way in Inferno 5, through the identification of desire with punishment and the creation of a counterintuitive field of forces by means of the opposition of movements of leading, coming, and bending. These three actions (“mena,” “verranno,” “piega”) all illustrate the ineluctability of attraction, yet engage different gradations of the activity and passivity of desire and will. Although Dante does not take up the suggestion of his master to address the souls in the name of the love that impels them, emphasizing only their fatigue in the storm (“o anime affannate,” Inferno 5, 80), Francesca later praises him for having mercy on their “perverse ill” (“mal perverso,” 93), which is usually understood either as the earthly perversion that led the lovers to such torment, or as the evilness of the eternal punishment itself (a rephrasing of what the pilgrim called “fatigue” in line 80).7 The lovers’ “mal perverso” in fact might well accommodate both interpretations, if taken as the perversion of desire-turned-storm, illustrating the destructive consequences of turning one natural phenomenon into another. At the very outset of the episode Dante creates a situation analogous to the central theme of canto 5. The attraction between the poet and his creatures is very similar to the lovers’ attraction to each other: it is ineluctable and reciprocal. Like Paolo and Francesca’s attraction, the desire that binds poet and poetic creations is a “love, which absolves no loved one from loving” (“amor ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,” Inferno 5, 103). Thus, Paolo and Francesca are ineluctably drawn to retell the fatal ineluctability of their attraction. Dante’s appeal, “l’affettüoso grido,” is irresistible. Like a puppetmaster, the poet summons his creations, the as yet unsung Paolo and Francesca. The poetic creatures bend in desire toward him in one of the most striking images of this canto.

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Quali colombe dal disio chiamate Coll’ali alzate e ferme al dolce nido Vegnon per l’aere dal voler portate Cotali uscir de la schiera ov’è Dido, A noi venendo per l’aere maligno Sì forte fu l’affettüoso grido. (Inferno 5, 82–7) As doves called by desire with wings raised and steady come through the air, borne by their will to their sweet nest, so did these issue from the troop where Dido is, coming to us through the malignant air, such force had my compassionate cry. As R. Allen Shoaf and Lawrence Ryan have shown, the dove is a flexible image both in bestiaries and in the scriptural tradition.8 From the conflicting etymologies of the word (derived for some from “collum” for the colour change in a bird’s neck feathers, and for others from “colens lumbos” with emphasis on the loins) to the distinction between white doves (sacred to Venus, but also symbols of purity), turtle doves (symbolizing the holy ghost), and rock doves (the common pigeon), doves encapsulate images of lust, love, and the ultimate spirituality. For its very nature – timid, weak, and easily seduced (“in illa sine felle, sed seducta,” as Guibert of Nogent puts it) – the dove is an image of lapse and recall, of negligence and care.9 Like Paolo and Francesca, doves relate centrally to the act of kissing, which is interpreted both as lust (doves are said to kiss before intercourse) and as friendship (the sign of peace). Dante’s doves trace in the stormy “sky” of hell a parallel trajectory of desire and will. Under the guise of an image (and with the ambiguity that is inherent in every trope), these lines appear to be a reinforcement of the initial statement about “submitting reason to desire.” The movement of being called by desire and borne forward by the will appears at first reading as a repetition, a reinforcement of the same direction/image,10 but “chiamare” and “portare” are not the same verb: one implies a forward attraction, the other an inner impulse or push from the back; and, crucially, desire is not equivalent to will: the natural impulse calls them forward and an act of reason (as the word “will” always implies, although to different degrees) carries them.11 Although the coincidence of desire and will might be applicable to the doves (as animals, they only have appetites and not rationality), the two must be distinguished when applied to Paolo and Francesca. Moreover, the actions of calling and carrying challenge the consistency of the notions of desire and will in this context. The operation of desire,

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traditionally understood as instinctual, is described in active terms: the souls are “called” by desire and willingly respond to it. By contrast, the operation of the will, traditionally understood as more active and determinate, is here described as rather passive, or even instinctual: the souls are “carried” by their will. A combined effort of a willful desire and an involuntary will leads the souls out of the storm to meet the poets. The disorienting strategy that Dante put in place with the dynamics of “leading,” “coming,” and “bending” appears to be replicated in this exchange between desire and the will. This sense of estrangement is reinforced by the fact that the image of the doves is inserted in this canto within a triple bird metaphor: starlings, cranes, doves. This powerful structure is, as Ryan points out, strongly polysemic and even ambivalent.12 Moreover, Giorgio Barberi Squarotti argues that the triple bird image serves to underline the unnaturality of the flight of the damned: theirs is a wingless, sky-less flight that does not answer a call but just repeats eternally a useless lamentation; it is a tragic and cruel parody of a flight.13 E come li stornei ne portan l’ali nel freddo tempo, a schiera larga e piena, così quel fiato li spiriti mali di qua, di là, di giù, di sù li mena; […] E come i gru van cantando lor lai, faccendo in aere di sé lunga riga, così vid’ io venir, traendo guai, ombre portate da la detta briga. (Inferno 5, 40–3 and 46–9) And as the wings bear the starlings along in the cold season, in wide, dense flocks, so does that blast the sinful spirits; hither thither, downward, upward, it drives them … And as the cranes go chanting their lays, making a long line of themselves in the air, so I saw shades come, uttering wails, borne by that strife. This double bird image is usually understood as underlining the distinction between two groups of lustful lovers: the starlings, haphazardly flying around and possibly divided into clusters, are in the background of the scene, whereas the cranes (the more notorious lovers, or those who died a violent death because of love) come forward by tracing a clear line in the hellish “sky.” The two modes of flight, however, relate also to the operation of the two main players of the doves simile: desire and the will. On the one hand, the disarray of the starlings’ flight, reinforced by the fact that they are “carried by

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their wings” (“portan l’ali,” 5, 43) suggest an irregular and instinctual flight mode, which is understood by many commentators as yet another representation of desire-as-storm. On the other hand, the cranes are featured as chanting their lays – yet another powerful reference to the French romance14 – and flying in a highly orderly fashion, actively committed to tracing their line in the sky (“faccendo in aere di sé lunga riga,” 5, 47). Order and literacy are the main attributes of cranes in medieval bestiaries: so orderly is their flight that the grammatical and rhetorical notion of congruity was connected to them, and they were believed to draw letters in the sky.15 The simile of the cranes resurfaces twice in purgatory. In canto 24, right after the Comedy’s most crucial discussion of love poetry (Purgatorio 24, 49–62), the swift pace of the gluttons is compared to the migratory flight of cranes, which first gather in a flock and then hasten in a file (Purgatorio 24, 64–9).16 In canto 26 (43–8), the two ranks of lustful lovers are compared to two hypothetical migratory flocks of cranes, one tending south and to the sun, and the other north toward the cold (hinting, according to many, at “unnatural” homosexual lust).17 While in the similes of purgatory migration accounts for the cranes’ sense of queuing and direction, it is unclear where the army-like order is leading the group of lustful lovers in Inferno 5. In principle, the starlings’ flight should recall the workings of desire, and the cranes the workings of will. However, the starlings’ flight is linked to the more passive operation of the will in the doves’ image (the starlings are carried by the wings, “portan l’ali,” as the doves are carried by the will, “dal voler portate”), and the headstrong flight of the cranes recalls the obsessive sense of direction of the doves “called by desire.” The complex, contrasting, and disconcerting flight modes of both the souls and the birds appear to have the common aim of leveling the differences between desire and the will, and thus to challenge radically the initial presupposition of this canto; that the sin of lust derives from the collusion of two different and seemingly antagonistic forces: desire and reason. While the doves’ destination in the first half of the simile is clear, the nature of Paolo and Francesca’s “sweet nest” is more open to interpretation. The nest itself is an ambiguous place, as it recalls both offspring and lust. Bestiaries and the scriptural tradition relay contrasting interactions between the doves and their nest. These birds are images of both negligence and care with respect to offspring, and are said to carry out their lust specifically in the nest.18 The commentary tradition usually perceives a discrepancy between the attraction of the doves to the sweet nest – which is both natural and “lawful” (a couple of birds flying to their dwelling, complete with offspring) – and the flight of the adulterous lovers, who, with their act of lust threatened precisely both marriage laws and the reproduction of the species.19 Many readers

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see Paolo and Francesca rushing toward “the love that carries them,” and understand this movement either as a positive imperative and a testimony that their love is unbroken by hell, or as an image for their impulse to lust even in hell, and thus a proof of their utter incapacity for repentance.20 The object of the lovers’ desire and will is, however, not “the love which leads them,” in the name of which Virgil has suggested that the pilgrim summon the souls, but rather the conversation with Dante, the telling of their love story (“di quel che udir e di parlar vi piace / noi udiremo e parleremo a voi”; of that which it pleases you to hear and to speak, we will hear and speak with you, Inferno 5, 94–5). To put it ornithologically, the love that impels them is the bird call, played on the tune of the “compassionate cry,” but the lure is indeed the “parlare” – that very compulsive and masochistic desire for speech, which was discussed at the end of chapter 1. The desire that calls them forward is Dante’s authority, which ultimately will subsume their flimsy and inconsistent historical status into a powerful poetic image. Thus, the lovers’ headlong impulse is not an urge for lust or love; it is compulsion to poetry. The flight of the infernal doves derives from a patchwork of Virgilian images, which Dante reworks in a very forceful way. The main canvas comes from a single dove’s flight in the fifth book of the Aeneid and, as Charles Singleton notices (ddp ad Inferno 5, 82–4), Dante “strikingly alters” it. In the fifth book of the Aeneid, during the funerary rites for the anniversary of Anchises’ death, one of the racing boats is compared to a dove scared out of her nest: qualis spelunca subito commota columba cui domus et dulces latebroso in pumice nidi, fertur in arva volans plausumque exterrita pinnis dat tecto ingentem, mox aëre lapsa quieto radit iter liquidum celeris neque commovet alas: sic Mnestheus, sic ipsa fuga secat ultima Pristis aequora, sic illam fert impetus ipse volantem. (Aeneid 5, 213–19) Just as, if startled suddenly from a cave, a dove whose home and sweet nestlings are in the rocky coverts, wings her flight to the fields and, frightened from her home, flaps loudly with her wings; soon, gliding in the peaceful air, she skims her liquid way and stirs not her swift pinions – so Mnestheus, so the Dragon of herself, cleaves in flight the final stretch, so her mere speed carries her on her winged course.

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In the Virgilian episode the dove is leaving her nest and, although tentative and scared at the beginning, she starts flying in a secure and powerful fashion as soon as she is in the open air. This fits well with the context of the boat race, a journey that is not about arriving anywhere, but about returning back to shore after passing a point. Dante turns Virgil’s departure flight into an arrival flight, with a very significant destination, “il dolce nido.” The nest, which the Virgilian dove leaves, is the destination of desire and will for Dante’s doves; it is the place where their desire is truly pacified. The image of the sweet nest also is Virgilian. Dante borrows it from the first book of the Georgics, within the description of the crows’ exultation at the end of the rain, which is part of the forecast for a good day.21 As the Virgilian reference makes clear, the sweet nest implies offspring: tum liquidas corvi presso ter gutture voces aut quater ingeminant, et saepe cubilibus altis nescio qua praeter solitum dulcedine laeti inter se in foliis strepitant; iuvat imbribus actis progeniem parvam dulcisque revisere nidos. (Georgics 1, 410–14) Then the rooks, with narrowed throat, thrice or four times repeat their soft cries, and oft in their high nest, joyous with some strange, unwonted delight chatter to each other amid the leaves. Glad are they, the rains over, to see once more their little brood and their sweet nest. The Virgilian image describes a situation of pleasure rather than desire. The loud and disorderly delight of the birds is dictated by some extraordinary euphoria, indeed an unusual sweetness (“nescio qua praeter solitum dulcedine”), and by the happiness of seeing that their nest and babies have been spared by the rainfall. Interestingly, Virgil explains the crows’ hidden joy as a truly natural phenomenon. As opposed to a divinely instituted instinct (“divinitus ingenium”) or some kind of prescience (“rerum fato prudentia maior”), it is merely the change in clouds and humidity that affects the emotions of the birds.22 Another pair of Virgilian doves may have been on Dante’s mind when tracing the compulsive sense of direction of Inferno 5’s birds. In the sixth canto of the Aeneid Venus sends two doves (“geminae columbae”), certainly the white doves that were sacred to her and a symbol of sexual attraction, to guide (they are “duces”) Aeneas to the golden bough (see chapter 1). These doves have a highly obsessive sense of direction: they are moved by the desire for the golden bough (“quo tendere pergant,” 198; “sedibus optatis,”

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203), and elicit the same desire in Aeneas, who pursues them relentlessly. The flight ends in both acceleration and fulfillment, with the doves rising in the air, then gliding down, and finally resting on the desired place (“sedibus optatis”).23 Inde ubi venere ad fauces grave olentis Averni, tollunt se celeres, liquidumque per aëra lapsae sedibus optatis geminae super arbore sidunt, discolor unde auri per ramos aura refulsit. (Aeneid 6, 201–4) then, when they came to the jaws of the noisome Avernus, they swiftly rise and, dropping through the unclouded air, perch side by side on their chosen goal – a tree, through whose branches flashed the contrasting glimmer of gold. The birds of Inferno 5 also bear important traces of the Christian image of the dove. John Freccero points out a reference to Psalm 54:7: “quis dabit mihi pinnas columbae ut volem et requiescam?” (Who will give me wings like a dove, and I will fly and be at rest?) – like the dove of Venus in Aeneid 6, the Christian soul eagerly flies toward and peacefully rests in its maker.24 As Shoaf and Ryan have shown, the dove is a very prominent and nuanced image in the Christian tradition, and it is laden with moral and spiritual symbolism. The dove often recurs in the Bible and is thus heavily commented upon in scriptural exegesis. In bestiaries it is often taken to represent the ascent of the soul toward God. Shoaf discusses a very long exegetic tradition of the dove in Hosea 7:11 – “Ephraim quasi columba seducta non habens cor” (and Ephraim is become as a dove that is decoyed, not having a heart) – as an image that is read both in malo and in bono. The children of Israel, collectively embodied in Ephraim, have committed fornication; they are lost in cupiditas, the endless abuse of desires which makes every desire meaningless (“et comedent et non satiabuntur / fornicati sunt, et non cessaverunt”; And they shall eat and shall not be filled: they have committed fornication, and have not ceased, Hosea 4:10). The flight of the dove away from God is, however, matched by a movement of return and recall. Thus, the dove becomes an image of the fall of the soul through sin, and of its rising through grace. As Nicholas Perella points out, the Augustinian formulation of the holy ghost as the love that unites Father and Son may have led to the ubiquitous medieval representation of the Holy Ghost as a dove, which is prominently featured both on the stages of the Annunciation (see chapter 5), where the

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dove bears the uneasy weight of representing the de-sexualized moment of impregnation, and in the representation of the Trinity as an inseparable commingling of three different substances, in which the Holy Ghost enacts the binding between father and son.25 Perella discusses zoo-anthropomorphic representations of the Trinity, in which Father and Son are depicted as two (quasi-similar) adult males, and the Holy Ghost as a dove, connecting the mouths of the two men with stretched wings, thus performing a kiss between the two. As a perfect summary of the dove’s ambivalence and flexibility, it is worth recalling that the dove is also one of the incarnations of the bride of the Song of Songs – the text in which earthly and spiritual love are forever and inextricably linked. The bride’s eyes are like the dove’s, she is perfect and immaculate like a dove, and like a dove she is hiding in rocks and caves.26 The medieval commentary tradition usually understands the pairing of dove and bride as symbolizing the union between the Christian soul (or Christian church, depending on the interpretation) and the Holy Ghost, and often notes the connection between this dove and the “wings of the dove” in Psalm 54.27 It is perhaps because of its heavy religious significance that the dove does not often appear in the vernacular love poetry of the troubadours and of Dante’s time. In early Italian poetry there is, however, a bird that is unquestionably part of the genealogy of Inferno 5’s doves: it is the bird happily resting on the tree at the outset of Guido Guinizzelli’s Al cor gentil: “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore / come l’ausello in selva a la verdura” (Love returns always to a noble heart like a bird to the green in the forest). Guinizzelli’s bird is returning (finding refuge, or even resting, depending on the interpretation of the verb “rempaira”), as opposed to flying, and it is chosen as the first natural parallel for the justness and ease of the relation between Love and the gentle heart.28 Dante’s doves tend “competitively” (as if to win a boat race, as one Virgilian dove suggests) toward a relentlessly sought object of desire (the “sedibus optatis” of the other Virgilian doves), which is naturally and “justly” their sweet nest. With their wings firmly raised, suggesting an upward (supernal?) trajectory, the doves trace a truly Augustinian pattern of desire in the gloomy atmosphere of canto 5’s storm. A contrast is established between the absurd buffeting of the storm, the chaotic flight of the starlings, the pointless direction of the cranes, and the quite purposeful and orderly route of the dove’s journey, or pilgrimage, of desire. The image of the wings of desire resurfaces twice in Purgatorio, where it is employed to portray the desire that impels the souls toward God. To climb the steep paths of Ante-purgatory the pilgrim needs the help of wings: “ma

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qui convien c’om voli; dico con l’ale snelle e colle piume / del gran disio” (but here a man must fly, I mean with the swift wings and the plumes of great desire, 4, 27–9). In canto 11, Virgil wishes the proud souls a prompt relief from their pain: “Deh se giustizia e pietà vi disgrievi / tosto, sì che possiate muover l’ala, / che secondo il disio vostro vi lievi” (Ah so may justice and pity soon disburden you, that you might spread your wing which may uplift you according to your desire, 37–9).29 In both cases, the wings of desire represent both the agility and the magnitude of the souls’ desire for God, showing well that this figure suits an Augustinian theory of desire. In Augustine’s work and in that of many medieval Augustinians thereafter, desire becomes the fundamental trait-d’union between the Christian soul and God.30 Writing on the cusp of two eras, Augustine both adopted and tamed the classical notion of desire as an ineluctable, cosmic, chaotic, and potentially destructive drive by expunging the erratic nature of desire and giving it a unique and well-defined aim. In his Commentary on the Gospel of John, Augustine glosses the Virgilian “trahit sua quemque voluptas” as the desire for God which Christ inspires in every human being, thereby appropriating and amending the cosmic, all-driving force of ancient desire and, at the same time, emptying it of its chaotic impact. Porro si poetae dicere licuit: “Trahit sua quemque voluptas,” non necessitas, sed voluptas; non obligatio, sed delectatio, quanto fortius nos dicere debemus trahi hominem ad Christum, qui delectatur veritate, delectatur beatitudine, delectatur iustitia, delectatur sempiterna vita, quod totum Christum est? (In Ioannis Evangelio 26, 4) Moreover, if it was allowed to a poet to say, “His own pleasure draws each man,” not need, but pleasure, not obligation but delight, how much more forcefully ought we to say that a man is drawn to Christ who delights in truth, delights in happiness, delights in justice, delights in eternal life – and all this is Christ?31 Augustine impresses a crucial sense of direction onto natural desire. Still an ineluctable and instinctual drive, desire leads every part of the universe toward its proper place. Augustine’s famous formulation of the “weight of love” (pondus amoris) describes desire as a drive with momentum, which points both universe and creature from chaos to order.32 The notion of desire as an obsessive drive toward a goal not only functions in the cosmos and in individual souls but also inspires Augustine’s theory of history. Christian history consists primarily of two events: the Fall, initiating the movement of human history away from God, and the Incarnation, re-turning the

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deranged course of history toward its own beginning. Augustinian history is a story of exile, of grace, and of return, which is represented by the image of pilgrimage and understood as desire. Augustine’s De civitate Dei tells the story of three cities: the civitas homini on earth, the civitas dei in heaven, and the civitas peregrina, a Christian city and society in transit, which is still on earth but already aiming toward heaven, stranger to the two other cities and yet belonging to both. At the centre of Augustine’s theory of love stands the distinction between the transitive notion of use (uti – the love of the creature in reference to the creator) and the intransitive notion of enjoyment (frui – love per se). In the first book of the De doctrina christiana, Augustine explains the two terms through a metaphor of travel: things to be used, he says, are like the vessels that bring the pilgrim home – the only thing to be enjoyed, that which the desire of the pilgrim indicates. The mistake the pilgrim might make is to start enjoying the journey itself and lose sight of the homeland.33 In Augustine, then, human life becomes a journey of desire, a desire that must be fixed and directed toward the homeland/God, and which can never be ensnared into the traps of earthly desire, can never enjoy what must be used. ✢✢✢

The theme of the journey or pilgrimage of desire is deeply rooted in medieval culture, in which pilgrimage was a central spiritual practice. The sole truly multicultural and multilingual phenomenon of the Middle Ages, pilgrimage has important refractions in the full range of medieval culture, from spirituality, geography, economy, law, literature, and art, through architecture.34 The classical meaning of peregrinus is “foreigner,” “stranger,” and “wayfarer.” In the Middle Ages the word “pilgrim” comes to identify those who travelled for religious reasons. Pilgrimage implies journey, destination (the holy site), change and exchange, and return. Like desire, pilgrimage is “in transit.” It entails extension toward a longed-for object, attainment of that object, and return toward an equally longed-for point of departure. In the journey, desire is shaped both by the experience of the new (holy land) and by the retrieval of the old (homeland). Like desire, pilgrimage destabilizes and repositions subjects and objects through an incessant shifting of parameters. Concepts of old and new are radically changed by the journey. In the holy site, the pilgrim finds the new in the form of the fulfillment of an old, missing promise of the self; in returning to the homeland, the old is reanimated and rearticulated by renewal. Homeland and foreignness are also shifting notions in pilgrimage: in the actual homeland one is spiritually foreign, and thus needs to under-

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take the journey in order to seek the spiritual homeland, in which one is actually foreign.35 The notion of spiritual pilgrimage is intricately connected to but also differs from the practice of pilgrimage. The image of life as pilgrimage was firmly established by Paul, who described human beings as “peregrini et hospites” (pilgrims and strangers) on earth in Hebrews 11:13.36 This formulation relies on a notion of pilgrimage as a wandering rather than as a journey with a predetermined destination, and it is the result of the allegorical reading of the wanderings of the Jews in search of the homeland. In this narrative, the existence of a homeland is certain, but its (geographical or spiritual) location is unclear. Moreover, in the formulation of human life as a pilgrimage of desire, the holy land and the homeland are the same, and the experience of the new is at the same time the retrieval of the lost union of the soul in God. Life as pilgrimage is a radical experience of foreignness and estrangement. The pilgrimage for the love of God (peregrinatio pro amore dei), practised in the Celtic and early Anglo-Saxon church, represents a curious midway between the actual and the theoretical aspects of pilgrimage. The pilgrim “for the sake of God” strove to reconstruct the wandering pattern of the Jews by setting out to travel without a destination, or by establishing a destination (such as Ireland, for instance) not necessarily linked to a holy site, but rather providing the experience of estrangement. At times this choice was so radical as to suggest that the pilgrim board a ship and float away without direction. Old English poems such as The Seafarer and The Wanderer are said to reflect in literature such extreme practices of pilgrimage.37 The actual pilgrimage to a holy site is an act of both desire and will. The desire for the holy experience is supported by a deliberate determination to undertake the journey. Unlike a knight errant, the pilgrim undertakes the journey not to go after whimsical and capricious adventures but to follow a “map” that will lead him or her to the desired place via the quickest possible route. Unlike a courtly lover, the pilgrim is not carried by some kind of natural ineluctable attraction toward the object of desire, but seeks one precise object with willful determination. In spiritual pilgrimage, the boundaries between desire and will are more blurred. Since life is an uncertain wandering toward an undefined and indeterminate destination, spiritual pilgrimage harbours more space for digression and more reliance on an instinctual kind of attraction, and bears definitely less evidence of determination and will. In the pilgrimage of life, desire becomes indistinguishable from will. The ineluctable and necessarily digressive (because necessarily embodied) instinct that blindly guides the human soul back to its maker must become the deliberation and map of the journey. In the search for God, desire is not opposite to the will; it becomes

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will, as it concentrates, governs, and regulates itself. Desire for the spiritual homeland must be full and exclusive, and it needs to recognize as foreign all other desires on the road to the ultimate goal. Like Augustine’s traveller, or Dante’s doves, the pilgrim’s desire must be “firm and raised,” obstinately concentrated on the destination. The pilgrimage of desire is the route through which the earthly intersects the eternal, thanks to the anticipatory powers of desire. The very act of desiring entails some extension toward the longed-for place. Not only does desire impress order and give a map to the journey but it also projects the traveller into the longed-for place. To desire to go somewhere is, simultaneously, to be already there and not yet arrived. Desire both establishes and bridges the distance between the here and there, the now and then.

Although it is Augustine who first anchored pilgrimage and desire, nowhere more than in the work of Gregory the Great is the emotional geography of the pilgrim of desire fully sketched in all its nuances, as Jean Leclercq and F.C. Gardiner have shown. Leclercq describes Gregory’s notion of pilgrimage of desire as a paradoxical dialectic that feeds itself through the interplay of presence and absence, belonging and alienation. Gregory defined Christian desire as vertical: according to him, the peregrination toward the supernal homeland must be sustained by an equally supernal desire.38 Desiderium supernum, the desire from and for above, fills the heart of the pilgrim and makes it stretch outside of itself. Through the infusion of desiderium supernum, the soul progressively acquires awareness of the exclusivity of its celestial goal, and learns to recognize as alien other objects of desire, and even the journey itself. Desire shapes the experience of the pilgrim and is shaped by it. Although the pilgrimage of desire is an enterprise of the soul, it is heavily wrought by the body, both negatively as weight and fatigue, and positively as practice and experience.39 Metaphors of sight, thirst, and hunger provide the map for the journey to God. Very much like erotic desire, desiderium supernum is a deeply nuanced feeling, composed of pleasure and pain (“delectabiliter mordet”), uncertainty (“inquietet”), restlessness, excitement (“excitet”), and happiness (“delectabiliter,” “suaviter,” “hilariter”). Supernal desire is forceful and even aggressive: in Gregory’s rhetoric it is articulated by the verb “minari,” to violently lead, which interestingly recalls the operation of the storm and of love in Inferno 5 (“menare”).

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Unus est etenim Dominus ac Redemptor noster, qui et hic electorum suorum corda ad unanimitatem ligat, et ad supernum amorem per interna desideria semper stimulat. Unde et illic subditur: Et puer parvulus minabit eos. Quis iste est puer parvulus, nisi de quo scriptum est: Puer natus est nobis, filius datus est nobis? Qui simul habitantes minat, quia ne in terrenis rebus corda nostra inhaereant, haec per internum desiderium quotidie inflammat. Et hoc ipsum ejus minare est ad suum nos amorem incessanter accendere, ne cum nos vicissim diligimus, mente in hoc exsilio remaneamus, ne quies hujus vitae sic placeat, ut ad oblivionem patriae perducat, ne delectata mens prosperis torpeat. Unde et donis suis flagella permiscet, ut nobis omne quod nos in saeculo delectabat amarescat, et illud incendium surgat in animo quod nos semper ad coeleste desiderium inquietet, excitet, atque, ut ita dicam, delectabiliter mordeat, suaviter cruciet, hilariter contristet. (In Ezechielem 2, 4, 3. pl 76, 975a) One is our lord and redeemer, the one who binds the hearts of his chosen people with unanimity, and always spurs them to supernal love through internal desires. And the text adds: “and a little child will lead them.” Who is this little child if not the one about whom it was written “a child is born to us, a son is given to us”? He leads his people so that their hearts do not cling to terrestrial things; by inflaming each day their hearts with internal desire. His leading is the incessant kindling of his love in us, so that, while loving each other, we don’t stay in this exile, so that the tranquility of this life does not make us forget the homeland, so that the mind, while enjoying prosperity, does not get numb. Therefore, he mixes blows to his gifts, so that all that pleases us in this world becomes bitter to us, and that this fire grows in our hearts, which makes us always restlessly tending to celestial desire, and excitedly pursuing this desire, and, so to speak, bites us with pleasure, torments us sweetly, and joyfully saddens us (my translation). Although excluded from the plenitude of desire that the angels experience (which signals not the end of desire, but rather its peak), the pilgrim does not merely yearn for the supernal homeland; she or he attains it in the very process of desiring. As Gregory famously put it in his Sermon on the Pentecost: “quis ergo mente integra rem desiderat, perfecto iam habet quem amat” (those who desire their object with a fully focused mind, already have what they love [my translation]).40 The mind, however, must be “integer,” fundamentally

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absorbed in its desire in order to possess the beloved object. Similarly, Augustine describes desire as the tension that allows the civitas peregrina to be already part of the city of God. Desire throws an anchor of hope into the promised land and pulls the Christian soul firmly to its maker: Iam desiderio ibi sumus, iam spem in illam terram, quasi anchoram praemisimus, ne in isto mari turbati naufragemus. Quemadmodum ergo de navi quae in anchoris est, recte dicimus quod iam in terra sit; adhuc enim fluctuat, sed in terra quodammodo educta est contra ventos, et contra tempestates: sic contra tentationes huius peregrinationis nostrae, spes nostra fundata in illa civitate Ierusalem facit nos non abripi in saxa. (Enarrationes in Psalmos 64, 3) Already in longing we are there, already hope into that land, as it were an anchor, we have sent before, lest in this sea being tossed we suffer shipwreck. In like manner therefore as of a ship which is at anchor, we rightly say that already she has come to land, for still she rolls, but to land in a manner she has been brought safe in the teeth of winds and in the teeth of storms; so against the temptations of this sojourning, our hope being grounded in that city Jerusalem causes us not to be carried away upon rocks.41 As Michelangelo Picone has shown, the pilgrimage of desire is a recurrent, structural image in Dante’s work, and encompasses both the actual and the spiritual pilgrimage.42 Dante clarified in the Vita Nuova that the word pilgrim has both a narrow and a wide meaning: it identifies specifically those who go on pilgrimage to San Jacopo de Compostela and more generally “anyone who is outside of their homeland,” whether an earthly city or a spiritual one.43 Elsewhere “pellegrino” (pilgrim) is compared and contrasted to “cittadino” (citizen), with a perspective that is once again both civic and transcendental, in a passage that beautifully summarizes the shifting perspectives of pilgrimage. In the second terrace of purgatory Dante, the pilgrim from earth, is eager to know whether there is any Italian there (“s’anima è qui tra voi che sia latina,” Purgatorio 13, 92). One spirit quickly corrects him: O frate mio, ciascuna è cittadina d’una vera città; ma tu vuo’ dire che vivesse in Italia peregrina. (Purgatorio 13, 94–6)

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O my brother, each one here is a citizen of a true city: but you mean one that lived in Italy while a pilgrim. Although they are at different stages of their spiritual journeys, Dante and Sapia da Siena are both citizens of the civitas peregrina. Interestingly, in the subsequent conversation the purging Sapia, who is closer to the city of God, discusses earthly and political concerns (the 1269 battle between Florence and Siena), while Dante, the pilgrim who has just left the city of men, dwells more on spiritual and eschatological matters (his destiny in purgatory) – testifying to the intense communication between the two cities. In the fourth book of the Convivio, Dante applies features of actual travel to the description of the pilgrimage of desire. He characterizes desire as a pyramidal structure, where the base is the ultimate desire for God and the top each minimal desire.44 In a passage that Teodolinda Barolini describes as “virtually a blueprint for the Commedia,”45 Dante depicts the wanderings of the soul’s desire toward God as the drive that pushes the pilgrim forward on the road. For Dante, as for Augustine, each terrestrial desire needs to be inserted into the grander scheme leading to the absolute object of desire. E però che Dio è principio delle nostre anime e fattore di quelle simili a sé (sì come è scritto: “Facciamo l’uomo ad imagine e simiglianza nostra”), essa anima massimamente desidera di tornare a quello. E sì come peregrino che va per una via per la quale mai non fue, che ogni casa che da lungi vede crede che sia l’albergo, e non trovando ciò essere, dirizza la credenza all’altra, e così di casa in casa, tanto che all’albergo viene; così l’anima nostra, incontanente che nel nuovo e mai non fatto cammino di questa vita entra, dirizza li occhi al termine del suo sommo bene, e però, qualunque cosa vede che paia in sé avere alcuno bene, crede che sia esso. (Convivio 4, xii, 14–15) Now since God is the cause of our souls and has created them like himself (as it is written, “Let us make man in our own image and likeness”), the soul desires above all else to return to him. And just as the pilgrim who walks along a road on which he has never travelled before believes that every house which he sees from afar is an inn, and finding it not so fixes his expectations on the next one, and so moves from house to house until he comes to the inn, so our soul, as soon as it enters upon this new and never travelled road of life, fixes its eyes on the goal of its supreme good, and therefore believes that everything it sees which seems to possess some good in it is that supreme good.

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Dante’s pilgrim is depicted on his way toward the holy site, tentatively mapping a new road. As it happens for Augustine’s traveller, the journey might surpass the destination in importance. However, no transitory object of desire is able to provide fulfillment for the pilgrim, and just as there are some roads that are good and others bad, so too are there right and wrong means of following the path of desire: Veramente così questo cammino si perde per errore come le strade della terra. Ché, sì come d’una cittade a un’altra di necessitade è una ottima e dirittissima via, e un’altra che sempre se ne dilunga (cioè quella che va nell’altra parte), e molte altre, quale meno alungandosi, quale meno appressandosi: così nella vita umana sono diversi cammini, delli quali uno è veracissimo e un altro è fallacissimo, e certi meno fallaci e certi meno veraci. (Convivio 4, xii, 18) We may, however, lose this path through error, just as we may the roads of the earth. For just as from one city to another there is only one road which is of necessity the best and most direct, and another which leads completely away (namely the one which goes in the opposite direction), and many others, some leading away from it and some moving toward it, so in human life there are different paths, among which only one is the truest way and another the falsest, and some less true and some less false. The difference between the right and the wrong path of desire lies not only in achieving or not achieving the desired goal but also in the solace of the fatigue implied in travelling: E sì come vedemo che quello che dirittissimo vae alla cittade, e compie lo desiderio e dà posa dopo la fatica, e quello che va in contrario mai nol compie e mai posa dare non può, così nella nostra vita aviene: lo buono camminatore giunge a termine e a posa; lo erroneo mai non l’aggiunge, ma con molta fatica del suo animo sempre colli occhi gulosi si mira innanzi. (Convivio 4, xii, 19) And just as we see that the path which leads most directly to the city fulfills desire and provides rest when work is finished, while the one which goes in the opposite direction never fulfills it nor provides rest, so it is with our life. A wise traveler reaches his goal and rests; the wanderer never reaches it, but with great lethargy of mind forever directs his hungry eyes before him.

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The lustful souls of Inferno 5, heavily fatigued by the storm, can be viewed as pilgrims trapped in an unwilled, endless, meaningless, and tiring journey, a pilgrimage of desire that has no beginning and no end. The Comedy is the poem of Dante’s supernal desire. The poet casts himself as a soon-to-be exile from his homeland (Florence), and as a pilgrim searching eagerly for his spiritual city. The theme of pilgrimage within the Comedy is illustrated chiefly by two images. The first captures the pilgrim when he has just left home. Era già l’ora che volge il disio ai navicanti e ’ntenerisce il core lo dì ch’han detto ai dolci amici addio; e che lo novo peregrin d’amore punge, se ode squilla di lontano che paia il giorno pianger che si more. (Purgatorio 8, 1–6) It was now the hour that turns back the longing of seafaring folk and melts their heart the day they have bidden sweet friends farewell, and that pierces the new pilgrim with love, if he hears from afar a bell that seems to mourn the dying day. This image describes both the active, painful sense of the awareness of desire in the sudden turning and piercing of the heart (“volge,” “punge”) and the passive aspect of nostalgia in the melting of the heart and the mourning of the day (“intenerisce,” “piange”). It is also suffused with positive connotations such as the sweetness of friends and the love that springs forth from the piercing.46 The seafarer and the pilgrim are similar but different characters. The seafarer, on the one hand, suggests a consummate traveller, used to leaving and returning home. The sea voyage itself also implies a circular pattern of time, as is found, for instance, in the ancient genre of the nostos – a circular story of maritime journey and return. At this point of the Comedy, however, Dante has already tampered radically with the notion of nostos by turning Ulysses’ journey home into a mad digression toward knowledge and damnation (Inferno 26). Although the seafarer’s desire is captured in the moment of “heading home,” the emphasis is on the departure (“lo dì ch’han detto ai dolci amici addio”), not on the arrival, qualifying this desire as fully nostalgic. The pilgrim, on the other hand, is “novo”; he has left home recently and the duration of his journey is unsure. The image of his heart pierced by love at the sound of a church bell is less definite than the turning back of the

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seafarer. What painfully inflames the pilgrim could be the homeland that he has left behind, or the one that awaits him ahead; his desire could equally be nostalgic or anticipatory – or, indeed, both. The church bell is always interpreted as recalling home, but it could recall – or foreshadow – the holy site as well. Its nostalgic nuance derives from the comparison with the sailor’s desire and it is attached to the bell’s lament for the end of the day, which recalls another Augustinian feature of the pilgrimage of desire: the necessity for time, signs, and lives to pass in order to compose the discourse of desire that leads the soul to God.47 Canto 8 of the Purgatorio is often called the “canto of two exiles”48; first, from the spiritual city, a place to which all the souls in the ante-purgatory aim, and second, from the historical city. Dante’s exile from Florence is recalled in the meeting with the Tuscan friend Nino Visconti (himself an exile) and with the future guest Corrado Malaspina, who prophetically announces Dante’s sojourn in Lunigiana in 1306. In a deeply Augustinian fashion, the banishment from the historical city evinces melancholia and loss, while exile from the spiritual city is full of expectation and hope. The sweet yet painful desire elicited by the sunset embraces both connotations of exile. The second image of pilgrimage occurs in the first canto of the Paradiso, and captures the moment of Dante’s going “beyond the human.” Beatrice, likened to an eagle (“aguglia”), looks into the sun with utmost intensity, and Dante, compared to a reflected ray of light, or to a pilgrim who wants to return home, follows her gaze. E sì come secondo raggio suole uscir del primo e risalir in suso pur come pelerin che tornar vuole, così de l’atto suo, per li occhi infuso ne l’immagine mia, il mio si fece, e fissi li occhi al sole oltre nostr’uso. (Paradiso 1, 49–54) And even as a second ray is wont to issue from the first, and mount upwards again, like a pilgrim who would return home: thus of her action, infused through the eyes into my imagination, mine was made and I fixed my eyes on the sun beyond our wont. Like the seafarer of Purgatorio 8, the pilgrim here is turned toward the homeland (“tornar”), not toward the holy site. Like the seafarer, the pilgrim is framed in the moment of desire (“tornare vuole”) rather than in the actual return.49 The ensuing discussion, however, clarifies the significance of

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homeland, return, and desire. In the second part of the canto, Beatrice rephrases the Augustinian notion of pondus amoris and of natural desire, often hinting at the episode of Francesca and at Purgatorio 18. Beatrice addresses Dante’s amazement regarding how he can possibly pass through the heavens in his body (“com’io trascenda questi corpi levi,” Paradiso 1, 99) by radically rewriting the laws of earthly physics in the light of heavenly desire. Dante’s paradoxical defiance of gravity is inscribed within a much-regulated system: le cose tutte quante hanno ordine tra loro, e questa è forma che l’universo a Dio fa somigliante. qui veggion l’alte creature l’orma de l’etterno valore, il qual è fine al quale è fatta la toccata norma ne l’ordine ch’io dico sono accline tutte nature per diverse sorti, più al principio loro e men vicine; onde si muovono a diversi porti per lo gran mar de l’essere, e ciascuna con istinto a lei dato che la porti. (Paradiso 1, 103–14) All things have order among themselves, and this is the form that makes the universe like God. Herein the high creatures behold the imprint of the Eternal Worth, which is the end wherefore the aforesaid ordinance is made. In the order whereof I speak all natures are inclined by different lots, nearer and less near unto their principle; wherefore they move to different ports over the great sea of being, each with an instinct given it to bear it on. The seafaring image, the dimension of wandering, and the instinct – which, much as the wings of the doves in Inferno 5, inclines and carries the creature through the sea of being – are encapsulated into a quite rigid and severe normative system, made of order (“ordine”), form (“forma”), ends (“fine”), and norms (“norma”). The expression “sono accline” (are inclined) corresponds to the notion of “love as inclination” that is at work in Inferno 5 and Purgatorio 18, but it expresses here a bending toward order rather than toward the pleasure deriving from the beloved object (see chapters 2 and 4). Likewise, “portare” (to carry, one of the verbs from the dove simile in Inferno 5) rhymes here with ports, signalling a radical change in Dante’s theory

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and understanding of desire: sea destinations may be different and ports plural (“porti,” 1, 112), yet the natural instinct of each creature clearly identifies the right one and carries its bearer there (“porti,” 1, 114). This law of desire concerns not only the natural world but also human beings, who are defined as creatures of “intellect and love” (“intelletto e amore,” 120) – an expression that both recalls the reason and desire (“ragione” and “talento”) of Inferno 5 and encompasses the discourse on love of Purgatorio 18. The divine and providential movement of desire that leads every part of the universe to its proper place, and is now leading Dante and Beatrice to the Empyrean heaven, is likened to archery – referring to velocity, precision, and, especially, target (“la virtù di quella corda / che ciò che scocca drizza in segno lieto”; the virtue of that bowstring bears us on, which aims at a joyful target whatsoever it shoots, Paradiso 1, 125–6). The creature, as we know well at this point, has the capacity to err and deviate from the divine trajectory. The verb “piegare” (to bend), which is the word for love in Inferno 5 and Purgatorio 18, appears here in a negative sense: Così da questo corso si diparte talor la creatura ch’ha podere di piegar, così pinta, in altra parte; (Paradiso 1, 130–2) So the creature sometimes departs from its course, having the power, thus impelled, to swerve toward some other part. In this canto Dante clarifies a crucial dynamics of desire. The potentiality for errance and mistake resides in the very impulsion of desire. In the very momentum that leads the creature to its proper place (“così pinta”) lies the opportunity for swerving. Dante emphasizes the radical character of natural desire, and appears to be rectifying the position of Purgatorio 17, where natural desire was defined as innocent (“sempre sanza errore,” 94) and the chance of error rested on the creature’s will. The storm, which in Inferno 5 is set as the natural match to the lustful’s surrendering of reason to desire, is here characterized as an unnatural phenomenon: during a storm, fire falls from the sky instead of rising toward it. This image of fire crashing downward counters that of the upward movement of desire-as-fire from Purgatorio 18 (28–33). The same desire which extols the creature (“l’impeto primo”) can cause it to crash (“l’atterra”) when perverted by a false pleasure.50

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E così come veder si può cadere foco di nube, sì l’impeto primo l’atterra torto da falso piacere. (Paradiso 1, 133–5) And even as the fire from a cloud may seem to fall downwards, so the primal impulse, diverted by false pleasure, is turned toward earth. “Falso piacere” is a direct reference to Dante’s confession to Beatrice in Purgatorio 31, where Dante admits that, after the beloved’s death, the attraction of some available objects of desire twisted his journey in the wrong direction (“Le presenti cose / col falso lor piacer volser miei passi,” 34–5; the present things, with their false pleasure, turned my steps aside) This reference clarifies that the individual lover and poet is still at stake within Beatrice’s sweeping generalizations on universal order in Paradiso 1. As “false pleasures” lead to an unnatural and destructive downward crashing of desire-as-fire, so the pursuing of natural desire in an orderly fashion allows for the vivid rising of fire toward the heavens: Meraviglia sarebbe in te se, privo D’impedimento giù ti fossi assiso Com’a terra quiëte in foco vivo. (Paradiso 1, 139–41) It would be a marvel if you, being freed from hindrance, had settled down below, even as stillness would be leaving fire on earth. Like the tesserae of an ideal mosaic, Convivio 4, Inferno 5, Purgatorio 18, and Paradiso 1 combine to reconstruct the makeup of a guiltless but dangerous natural desire, of a love that originates in the instinctual bending toward an object of pleasure. In the absence of order, this love twists the self away from the right path, toward perversion. Within a normative system, however, this love inclines the self’s discourse of desire toward its proper place. In Convivio 4 the instinctual attraction to the immediate object of desire is stigmatized as straying from the order of love. Inferno 5 explores the complex and tragic nuances of such attraction, and Purgatorio 18 shelters the naturalness of love by firmly distinguishing between natural and elective love, characterizing the former as naïvely innocent and putting the latter under the strict control of the will. In Paradiso 1 Dante dislodges natural desire from

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the confinement of innocence and engages it more radically in the spiritual journey, showing how its very dangerous nature (the root of Inferno 5’s disaster) is also the spin that leads the creature upward within a new, supernal normative system, in which desire always tends upward, and never crashes on earth, both bolstering and subverting the rules of physics. At the very beginning of Paradiso Dante elucidates the significance of pilgrimage (his own and everyman’s) as pondus amoris, and that of desire as the acceleration that sustains, but also possibly imperils, the journey. Interpreters such as Dal Lungo and Chimenez (ddp ad Paradiso 1, 51) understand the word “pelerin” in line 51 not as pilgrim but as a variety of hawk (the peregrine falcon), inferring thus a double bird metaphor in the scene, where Beatrice the eagle directs Dante the falcon upward. These diverging interpretations indeed create a useful connection between bird flight and pilgrimage, between wings and desire. ✢✢✢

The wings of the doves in Inferno 5, firmly aiming at their destination and pursuing it with an ambiguous thrust of will and desire, engage the image of life as a pilgrimage of desire in several ways. Both in the flight of the doves and in the pilgrimage of desire, the distinction between desire and the will is uncertain: desire is the will and the will is desire. Moreover, the nature of the dove, innocent but easily seduced, fits well with both the strength and the fragility of natural desire, which is always without error (as stated in Purgatory) yet constantly at risk of errance (as clarified in Paradiso). Most significantly, the flight of the doves toward the nest (and that of the soul toward God) elicits crucial questions about the duration of desire. How long does desire keep burning? Is it merely the preparation to the pleasure and blessedness that awaits the dove/soul in the nest/God, or is it co-extensive with it? These questions articulate medieval theories of desire and are at the centre of Dante’s theory of love in Purgatorio 18. Poi, come ’l foco movesi in altura per la sua forma ch’è nata a salire là dove più in sua materia dura, così l’animo preso entra in disire, ch’è moto spiritale e mai non posa fin che la cosa amata il fa gioire. (Purgatorio 18, 28–33)

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Then, even as fire moves upward by reason of its form, being born to ascend thither where it lasts longest in its matter, so the captive mind enters into desire, which is a spiritual movement and never rests until[/as long as] the thing loved makes it rejoice. As mentioned in the previous chapter, commentators are divided on the interpretation of “fin che,” the indicator of duration which can express either finitude at a given point (until) or continuation (as long as). An Aristotelian reading of this passage would emphasize the dissimilarity between pleasure and desire. In the tenth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle suggests a distinction between desire, which is a motion and, as such, separated from activity, and the pleasure generated by it, which is a form of stasis and inseparable from activity.51 As long as subject and object are in the same position and condition, and in the same relation to each other, pleasure is a stable continuum.52 While human pleasure necessarily becomes discontinuous due to the mutability of the subject (10, iv, 9), God enjoys one single pleasure perpetually (7, xv, 8). In other words, for Aristotle desire is “until” and pleasure is “as long as.” A Thomistic reading of this passage also suggests understanding desire as a finite act, with a fixed beginning, the perception of the appetible object, and an equally clear terminus, the attainment of that object. The passage in Summa Theologiae (1a–2ae, q. 26, a. 2 co., for which see chapter 2) that is traditionally seen as the blueprint for Dante’s theory of love and desire in Purgatorio 18 implies desire’s finitude in the juxtaposition of desire and pacification: “motus in appetibile, qui est desiderium; et ultimo quies, quae est gaudium” (a movement towards that same object, and this movement is desire; and lastly, there is rest which is joy). The dialectics between desire and peace is crucial to Thomas’s discussion of natural desire in several other passages, most notably in the third book of the Summa contra gentiles (48–63), where Thomas considers natural desire as a bridge between this life and the next, between the experience of the human being and that of the separated substances. Although not in vain (“inane”), natural desire tirelessly aims at a blessedness that is located outside the borders of human life, and even beyond the limits of the experience of the separated substances: the beatific vision, in which every desire peacefully rests.53 In his lecture on the Gospel of Matthew, Aquinas conveniently articulates desire and peace by means of “donec,” positing that natural desire never rests “until” it reaches God, the first cause: “Istum ergo desiderium non quietabitur, donec perveniat ad primam causam, quae Deus es” (In Mattheum 5, lec. 2).

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As Caroline Bynum points out, this is a notion rephrased countless times in ancient philosophy and Christian theology; blessedness is the cessation and pacification of all desires: “beatitudo est quies omnium desideriorum.”54 Aquinas describes desire as aiming directly and intently at its object (desire doesn’t simply “desire” – it desires something) and becoming faster, more restless and more intense when it is closest to the desired object.55 The very nature of desire is to be defective, lacking, and, therefore, restlessly seeking perfection. Although the final pacification of all desires for the blessed will take place on the truly remote judgment day, Aquinas and the scholastic tradition emphasize the nature of desire as holding to the mechanics of restlessness and satisfaction, motion and completion, acceleration and stasis. Thus, every single act of desire is quenched and overcome in its attainment, thus producing a system of successive desires, all tending to the uniquely supernal blessedness of the beatific vision. In the third book of the Convivio Dante contrasts desire and blessedness, describing the former as perfect and the latter as defective (“acciò che la beatitudine sia perfetta cosa, e lo desiderio sia cosa defettiva,” Convivio 3, xv, 3). Desire, therefore, aims “at what it lacks” while beatitude seeks its own perfection. In line with Aquinas, desire is understood as something that is preordained to a particular aim, and that can indeed achieve that aim. Desire is, therefore, measured against the capacity of the desiring subject. Otherwise, one would fall into the paradox of “desiring to desire.” The continuation of desire, the desire of desiring, is an impossibility and errance of desire, connected, for instance, to greed: lo desiderio naturale in ciascuna cosa è misurato secondo la possibilitade della cosa desiderante: altrimenti anderebbe in contrario di se medesimo, che impossibile è. In contrario anderebbe: ché, desiderando la sua perfezione, desiderrebbe la sua imperfezione; imperò che desiderrebbe sé sempre desiderare e non compiere mai suo desiderio (e in questo errore cade l’avaro maladetto, e non s’acorge che desidera sé sempre desiderare, andando dietro al numero impossibile a giugnere). (Convivio 3, xv, 8–9) The natural desire within all things is proportionate to the capacity within that thing which has desire; otherwise desire would run counter to itself, which is impossible. It would run counter to itself because by desiring its perfection it would desire its imperfection, since it would always desire to continue desiring and would never fulfill its desire (and it is into this error that the accursed miser falls, by failing to perceive that he desires to continue desiring by seeking to realize an infinite gain).

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When Dante resumes the theoretical discussion of desire in Purgatorio 18, however, he stresses desire’s capacity for self-preservation rather than for extinction. The comparison between fire and desire is based on the assumption that fire moves naturally upward, because its matter lasts longer in the ether than on earth (“là dove più in sua materia dura,” Purgatorio 18, 30). In the same way, the enamoured soul desires in order to perpetuate its state, not to conclude it. Moreover, the construction “mai non posa” (never rests, 32) emphasizes the restlessness as opposed to the pacification of desire, and the adverb “mai” (never) favours extension over cessation. This line also importantly recalls the ceaseless agitation of the storm in Inferno 5 (“mai non resta,” 31). In the Purgatorio, therefore, desire appears more and more like the end of the process of love rather than its means. Thus, Dante enriches the Aristotelian/Thomistic view of desire as a finite tension toward pleasure with a notion of desire as a ceaseless extension into pleasure. The transmutation of desire from “until” to “as long as” takes place in the Augustinian/mystical traditions of the Middle Ages, and it is a consequence of, rather than an opposite of, the formulation of desire as “until.” Augustine did formulate desire as “donec” (until) – as a drive awaiting eagerly and painfully to rest in God – and inscribed it as the founding principle of his Confessions: “quia fecisti nos ad te, inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te” (“for you have formed us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in you,” Confessions 1, 1). The restlessness of the human heart is the primary link between maker and creature; desire is sown in the creature’s heart by the maker in order to drive it back to him. In this process, however, desire is featured as a continuum, a perennial stretching, extending, and reaching out of the heart, which knows neither rest nor peace in this life. In a passage of the Enarrationes in Psalmos, desire-as-life is described as an endless prayer: Sit desiderium tuum ante illum; et Pater qui videt in occulto, reddet tibi. Ipsum enim desiderium tuum, oratio tua est: et si continuum desiderium, continua oratio. Non enim frustra dixit Apostolus: Sine intermissione orantes. Numquid sine intermissione genu flectimus, corpus prosternimus, aut manus levamus, ut dicat, Sine intermissione orate? Aut si sic dicimus nos orare, hoc puto sine intermissione non possumus facere. Est alia interior sine intermissione oratio, quae est desiderium. Quidquid aliud agas, si desideras illud sabbatum, non intermittis orare. Si non vis intermittere orare, noli intermittere desiderare. Continuum desiderium tuum, continua vox tua est. Tacebis, si amare destiteris. Qui tacuerunt? De quibus dictum est: Quoniam abundavit iniquitas, refrigescet charitas multorum. Frigus charitatis,

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silentium cordis est: flagrantia charitatis, clamor cordis est. Si semper manet charitas, semper clamas; si semper clamas, semper desideras; si desideras, requiem recordaris. (Enarrationes in Psalmos 37, 14) Set your desire on Him, and the Father who sees in secret will repay you. This very desire is your prayer; and if your desire is continual, your prayer is continual too. It was not for nothing that the Apostle said: Pray without ceasing. Can we unceasingly bend our knees, bow down our bodies, or uplift our hands, that he should tell us: pray without ceasing? No; if it is thus he bids us pray, I do not think we can do so without ceasing. There is another way of praying, interior and unbroken, and that is the way of desire. Whatever else you are doing, if you long for that sabbath, you are not ceasing to pray. If you do not want to cease praying, do not cease longing. Your unceasing desire is your unceasing prayer. You will lapse into silence if you lose your longing. Who do lapse into silence? Those of whom it has been said: Because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold. The coldness of charity is the heart’s silence; its glowing ardor, the heart’s outcry. If charity is always present, you are ever crying out; if always crying out, you are ever longing; if longing, you have not forgotten repose.56 At the end of the De Trinitate Augustine describes the ultimate prayer, an oration in which the unending stretch of desire becomes one single word, with which the blessed simultaneously and eternally praise God. The many words of life cease (“cessabunt multa”) while one word remains. Desire is quintessentially embodied in one word which resonates for eternity (“sine fine dicemus”).57 In commenting on the Sentences of the Augustinian Peter Lombard, Bonaventure offers important reflections on the nature of the soul’s desire for God, which is not constrained (“arctatur”), but indeed dilated (“dilatatur”) by the encounter with each object of desire: “appetitus autem animae non sic arctatur propter unionem cum appetibili, immo dilatatur; et ideo oportet, quod perficiatur aliquo omnino summo” (But the appetite of the soul is not thus constrained on account of [its] union with a desirable, nay rather it is dilated; and for that reason it is proper, that it be perfected by something entirely most high, Ad Sententias, dist. 1, a. 3, q. 2). The soul’s desire captures the infinity of God in a finite way (“infinitum bonum finite capit”) in each act of desire, and yet desire resists completion (“insurgit”: it revolts, it fights back), until it is overcome (“viceretur”) and fully absorbed (“absorbetur”)

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in the enjoyment of God. Through desire the finite human capacity is annihilated in the infinite extension of God – it does, indeed become part of God. Ad illud quod obiicitur, quod non capit nisi finite; dicendum, quod infinitum bonum finite capit, quoniam ipsa est finita. Sed quoniam bonum illud est infinitum, ideo ab ipso totaliter absorbetur, ut iam eius capacitas undique terminetur. Unde non tantum gaudebit, sed sicut dicit Anselmus, in gaudium Domini introibit. Quod si tantum caperet et non vinceretur nec absorberetur, adhuc posset insurgere appetitus ad amplius aliquid capiendum. Patet igitur, quod ad hoc quod anima compleatur, quamvis capacitatem habeat finitam, tamen necesse est adesse bonum infinitum. (Commentaria in quatuor libros Sententiarum, dist. 1, a. 3, q. 2 co) To that which is objected, that (the appetite of the soul) does not capture except in a finite manner; it must be said, that it captures the infinite Good in a finite manner, since it itself is finite. But since that Good is infinite, for that reason it is totally absorbed by It, so that its capacity is already terminated on all sides. Whence it not only rejoices, but as Anselm says it shall enter into joy of the Lord. Because if it only captured and was not conquered nor was absorbed, the appetite could still rise up to capture something more. Therefore it is clear, that for this, that the soul be thoroughly filled, although it has a finite capacity, it is however necessary that the infinite Good be present. The notion of continual desire (desiderium continuum), a desire that is one and yet multiple and stretches endlessly throughout human life as one single motif, strongly resonates in the mystical environment of the Middle Ages. In commenting the momentary separation between the bride and groom of the Song of Songs, Bernard dwells on the figure of the bride invoking the return of the groom, and describes the desire of the soul as one single invocation of desire (“continuum desiderium”) to Christ: Return! Restat igitur ut absentem studiose requirat, revocet abeuntem. Ita ergo revocatur Verbum, et revocatur desiderio animae, sed eius animae, cui semel indulserit suavitatem sui. Numquid non desiderium vox? Et valida. Denique desiderium pauperum, inquit, exaudivit dominus. Verbo igitur abeunte, una interim et continua animae vox, continuum desiderium eius tamquam unum, continuumque revertere, donec veniat. (Super cantica canticorum 74, 2)

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It must be that when he is absent she seeks him ardently, and when he goes away she calls him back. Thus the Word is recalled – recalled by the longing of the soul who has once enjoyed his sweetness. Is longing not a voice? It is indeed, and a very powerful one. Then the Psalmist says, “The Lord has heard the longing of the poor.” When the Word departs therefore, the one unceasing cry of the soul, its one unceasing desire, is “return” – until he comes.58 Although implying eventually the culmination of desire (“donec veniat”), this formulation affords desire a considerable amount of extension and capacity, so much so that it can cover the whole experience of human life. And, as such, Bernard’s formulation of desire famously incorporates the rhetoric of all senses, all sentiments, and all the modalities of erotic desire. In one of his final sermons, Bernard fully acknowledges the unlimited and open-ended nature of the soul’s desire for God, and concedes that the true nature of desire’s satisfaction is the continuation of desire. In lectulo meo per noctes quaesivi quem diligit anima mea. Magnum bonum quaerere Deum. Ego hoc nulli in bonis animae secundum existimo. Primum in donis, ultimum in profectibus est. Virtutum nulli accedit, cedit nulli. Cui accedat, quam nulla praecedit? Cui cedat, quae omnium magis consummatio est? Quae enim virtus ascribi possit non quaerenti Deum, aut quis terminus quaerenti Deum? Quaerite, inquit, faciem ejus semper. Existimo quia nec cum inventus fuerit, cessabitur a quaerendo. Non pedum passibus, sed desideriis quaeritur Deus. Et utique non extundit desiderium sanctum felix inventio, sed extendit. Nunquid consummatio gaudii, desiderii consumptio est? Oleum magis est illi: nam ipsum flamma. Sic est. Adimplebitur laetitia; sed desiderii non erit finis, ac per hoc nec quaerendi. Tu vero cogita, si potes, quaeritandi hoc studium sine indigentia, et desiderium sine anxietate. Alterum profecto praesentia, alterum copia excludit. (Super cantica canticorum 84, 1) “Nightlong in my little bed I sought him whom my soul loves.” It is a great good to seek God; in my opinion the soul knows no greater blessing. It is the first of its gifts and the final stage in its progress. It is inferior to none, and it yields place to none. What could be superior to it, when nothing has a higher place? What could claim a higher place, when it is the consummation of all things? What virtue can be attributed to anyone who does not seek God? What boundary can be set for anyone who does seek him? The psalmist says: “Seek his face always.”

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Nor, I think, will a soul cease to seek him even when it has found him. It is not with steps of the feet that God is sought but with the heart’s desire; and when the soul happily finds him its desire is not quenched but kindled. Does the consummation of joy bring about the consuming of desire? Rather it is oil poured upon the flames. So it is. Joy will be fulfilled, but there will be no end to desire, and therefore no end to the search. Think, if you can, of this eagerness to see God as not caused by his absence, for he is always present; and think of the desire for God as without fear of failure, for grace is abundantly present. In his Tractatus de quatuor gradibus violentae charitatis, Richard of Saint Victor describes four stages of love: “amor insuperabilis,” when the subject first elects one object of desire (also called “the wound of love” or “amor vulneratus”); “amor inseparabilis” (also called “bound love” or “amor ligatus”) when desire is obsessively directed to the object; “amor singularis” when no other thought is allowed in the lover’s mind; and “amor insatiabilis,” when the object of desire itself cannot quench desire (“nec ipsum ei satsfacere potest”). Richard’s four steps apply to both earthly and spiritual love, with one crucial distinction: in spiritual matters, “more is better” (“quanto maior tanto et melior”), whereas in earthly desires excess is considered negative (“quanto maior, tanto et pejor”). The transition between the third (“exclusive”) to the fourth (“insatiable”) kind of love takes place through an extension of desire ad infinitum: Si vis illa amoris totum possidet, si amoris magnitudo totum absorbet, in quo se, quaeso, amplius dilatare valet? Si enim totum obtinuit, non est quod ulterius vindicare possit. Sed quid dicimus si totum obtinet, et totum ei sufficere non valet? Quid, inquam, dicturi sumus, si totum in potestate est, totum tamen desiderio satisfacere non potest? Certe incomparabiliter majus est quod homo non valet, quam quidquid homo valet. Utrumque tamen desiderari potest, et quod homo potest, et quod homo non potest. Vide ergo quam infinitum sit quo desiderium in se extendere possit, etiam postquam ad tertium gradum pervenerit. (De quatuor gradibus violentae charitatis. pl 196, 1212) If this power of love possesses everything, if the greatness of love absorbs everything, how can it increase still more? If it has obtained everything, there is nothing left to be claimed. But what shall we say when everything is obtained and that is still not enough to satisfy love? What, I ask, what shall we say if everything is in its power and yet this is not enough to satisfy its desire? Truly the things that are impossible

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to man are incomparably more than those which are possible. Both things therefore may be desired, what man can do and what he cannot. See therefore how infinitely he is able to extend his desire in himself, even after he has reached the third degree.59 Desire has the capacity to extend itself indefinitely and to stretch the human being beyond the constraints of its own humanity (“quod homo non valet/potest”). In becoming infinite, however, desire becomes insatiable. The fourth step describes the utmost and most rarely experienced kind of love. It is so extreme that it is difficult to express and even to conceptualize its particularity. In this stage of love, desire becomes “as long as” (“dum”): even in the very moment of satisfaction of one’s wish (“voto suo pro voto perfruitur”), desire is stirred (“irritetur”). Quartus itaque violentae charitatis gradus est quod aestuantis animi desiderio iam omnino nihil satisfacere potest. Hic gradus, quia humane possibilitatis metas semel excessit, crescendo ut caeteri, terminum nescit, quia sempre invenit quod adhuc concupiscere possit. Quidquid agat, quidquid sibi fiat, desiderium ardentis animae non satiat; sitit et bibit, bibendo tamen sitim suam non extinguet, sed quo amplius bibit, eo amplius sitit. Avidae enim, imo insatiabilis animae sitis non sedatur, sed irritatur dum voto suo pro voto perfruitur. In hoc statu non satiatur oculu viso, nec auris impletur auditu, dum vel absentem loquitur vel presentem intuatur. Sed huius supremi gradus violentiam quis digne explicare valet, quis eius supereminentiam vel digne pensare sufficiat? Quid, quaeso, est quod cor hominis profundius penetret, acerbius crucet, vehementius exagitet? (De quatuor gradibus violentae charitatis. pl 196, 1212–13) Therefore the fourth degree of passionate love is that in which nothing at all can satisfy the desire of the passionate soul. This degree, in that it has once passed beyond the bounds of human power, is, unlike others, unlimited in its expansion, for it always finds something which it can still desire. Whatever it may do or whatever it might be done to it, does not satisfy the desire of the ardent soul. It thirst and drinks, but the draught does not quench the thirst and the more it drinks the more it thirsts. When the thirst and hunger of a greedy or an insatiable soul is indulged willfully and at will, it is not slaked but stimulated. In this state the eye is not satisfied by seeing nor the ear filled by hearing, whether the soul speaks to one not seen or looks upon one not present.

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But who is able to explain this highest degree of passion worthily and who can even adequately conceive its surpassing greatness? What is there, I ask, that could penetrate man’s heart more deeply, crucify it more cruelly, agitate it more wildly? While in earthly matters this unending desire is like an incurable disease (“morbus irremediabilis”), which leads to anger and hate between lovers,60 in the spiritual kind of love the overflowing of desire is a positive element. The four steps of love are mirrored in the four degrees of divine love, consisting in the soul’s concentration into itself, ascent to God, transit in God, and descending/condescending in Christ.61 In the fourth step of divine love – which tellingly entails the meeting with the Christ (the humiliation of God that allows for the rising of the creature) – desire works by burning and melting the human soul. As with the fusion of metals, imperfections (all other desires) are pressed out, and the soul conforms fully to God. The fire/metal image concerns in particular the phase of the extension of desire between the third and the fourth stages of love. The soul is cooked (“decocta”), mollified “to the bones” (“medullitus emollita”), and liquefied (“penitus liquefacta”) by its internal desires, until it is malleable enough to conform to God’s will and become one with it.62 Sicut enim exclusores liquefactis metallis propositisque formulis, quamlibet imaginem pro voluntatis arbitrio excludunt et vasa quaelibet juxta modum congruum formamque destinatam producunt; sic anima in hoc esse ad omnem divinae voluntatis nutum facile se applicat, imo spontaneo quodam desiderio ad omne ejus arbitrium seipsam accommodat, et juxta divini beneplaciti modum omnem voluntatem suam informat. Et, sicut metallum liquefactum quocunque ei via aperitur, facile ad inferiora currendo delabitur, sic anima in hoc esse ad omnem obedientiam se sponte humiliat, et ad omnem humilitatem juxta divinae dispositionis ordinem libenter inclinat. (De quatuor gradibus violentae charitatis. pl 196, 1222) For just as the metal workers, when the metals are melted and the moulds set out, shape any form according to their will and produce any vessel according to the manner and mould that has been planned, so the soul applies herself in this degree, to be readily at the beck and call of the divine will, indeed she adapts herself with spontaneous desire to every demand of God and adjusts her own will, as the divine good pleasure requires. And as a liquefied metal runs down more easily

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wherever a passage is open, so the soul humbles herself spontaneously to be obedient in this way, and freely bows herself in all acts of humility according to the order of divine providence. The inclination (“inclinat”) of the human soul to the order (“ordinem”) of love by God – which incidentally bears the same words as Dante’s “order of love” in Paradiso (“l’ordine ch’io dico sono accline,” 1, 109) – is the production of a quite violent operation of desire, one that wrecks any sort of internal structure/order of the soul in order to conform it to the will of God. Desire as continuum also affects the pacification that follows the beatific vision. The kind of peace that awaited the souls after the attainment of the beatific vision, the nature of the angels’ contemplation, and the status of the resurrected person with respect to desire were vexing questions to medieval thinkers. Pacification (quies), although putting an end to the anxiety and painful restlessness of desire, still entails some kind of detachment, and possibly some “disgust” for the object of desire. Gregory the Great addressed these questions, with the wonderful invention of a paradoxical heavenly desire – a desire that is at once stimulated and fulfilled, that contains simultaneously its own kindling and satisfaction. Gregory acknowledged that desire has two possible downsides. On the one hand, if desire has no satisfaction in sight, it might verge on anxiety, the fruitless longing that, as Dante’s limbo shows (see chapter 1), is a punishment in itself. On the other hand, terrestrial attainment is mostly followed by a detached, disinterested, quasi-disgusted satiety. Deum quippe angeli et uident, et uidere desiderant; et intueri sitiunt et intuentur. Si enim sic uidere desiderant ut effectu sui desiderii minime perfruantur, desiderium sine fructu anxietatem habet et anxietas poenam. Beati uero angeli ab omni poena anxietatis longe sunt, quia numquam simul poena et beatitudo conueniunt. Rursum cum eos dicimus dei uisione satiari, quia et psalmista ait: satiabor dum manifestabitur gloria tua, considerandum nobis est quoniam satietatem solet fastidium subsequi. Ut ergo recte sibi utraque conueniant, dicat ueritas: quia semper uident; dicat praedicator egregius: quia semper uidere desiderant. (Moralia in Job 18, 91) For the Angels at once see and desire to see God, and thirst to behold and do behold. For if they so desire to see Him that they never at all enjoy the carrying out of their desire, desire has anxiety without fruit, and anxiety has punishment. But the blessed Angels are far removed

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from all punishment of anxiety, because never can punishment and blessedness meet in one. Again, when we say that these Angels are satisfied with the vision of God, because the Psalmist too says, I shall be satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness, we are to consider that upon satisfying there follows disgust. So then, that the two may rightly agree together, let Truth say, that they always see; and let the excellent Preacher say, that they always desire to see. The desire of the blessed and of the angels, however, experiences neither anxiety nor disgust, as it actualizes itself in each act and, at the same time stretches into a continuum. Ne enim sit in desiderio anxietas, desiderantes satiantur; ne autem sit in satietate fastidium, satiati desiderant. Et desiderant igitur sine labore, quia desiderium satietas comitatur; et satiantur sine fastidio, quia ipsa satietas ex desiderio semper accenditur. Sic quoque et nos erimus quando ad ipsum fontem uitae uenerimus. Erit nobis delectabiliter impressa sitis simul atque satietas. Sed longe abest a siti necessitas, longe a satietate fastidium, quia et sitientes satiabimur, et satiari sitiemus. (Moralia in Job 18, 91) For that there be not anxiety in desire, in desiring they are satisfied, and that there be not disgust in their satisfying, whilst being satisfied they desire. And therefore they desire without suffering, because desire is accompanied by satisfying. And they are satisfied without disgust, because the very satisfying itself is ever being inflamed by desire. So also shall we too one day be, when we shall come to the fountain of life. There shall be delightfully stamped upon us at one and the same time a thirsting and a satisfying. But from the thirsting necessity is far absent, and disgust far from that satisfying, because at once in thirsting we shall be satisfied, and in being satisfied we shall thirst. In his De diligendo deo (11, 33) Bernard singles out the state of resurrection as the fullness (the fourth and final degree) of the love for God. The human soul, which at this point will be divested not only of all terrestrial desires that are an impediment to even beginning the quest for God in life, but also of the desire for the resurrection body (which still might trouble the wholeness of love and the souls’ concentration in God) will then experience a satiety without nausea (“satietas sine fastidio”), an insatiable curiosity that is free from anxiety (“insatiabilis sine inquietudine curiositas”), a sober

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drunkenness (“sobria ebrietas”), and finally, an eternal and unfulfillable desire that does not know any want (“aeternum atque inexplebile desiderium sine aegestatem”).63 In the very formulation of Christian desire as a continuum, as an extended, stretched duration that carries the creature outside its mortal constraints and beyond its limitations all the way to the vision of God, desire mutates from “until” into “as long as.” The end point of desiderium continuum is not the pacification of desire, but the increase and the perfection of desire. Whereas for a scholastic theologian like Aquinas the dynamics of desire is linear, with pacification fulfilling each desire, and a new act of desire following the earlier, self-involved act of desire, mystical writers devise a more “generative” dynamics of desire, in which each desire is increased, dilated, stimulated, and, also, modified by another. Desires grow one from one another, feed on each other, and each becomes never-ending. As Caroline Bynum beautifully puts it, in the mystic experience on earth and in heaven for the blessed, desire is “now.” 64 In shaping his own heaven, Dante was well aware of the mystical positions on desire. Lino Pertile has explored in depth all the nuances of desire in Dante’s heaven, and has described the paradoxical quality of heavenly desire as follows: Dante’s Paradise, then, is hardly the kingdom of quiet and immobility we might have expected; indeed it is perennial motion, desire and ardour, hunger and thirst – not, however, of a human kind, for this motion does not aim anywhere, it is in itself perfect, it is the tangible form of perfect love; this desire, hunger and thirst are constantly alive and constantly replenished. In Heaven the soul is not fed and satisfied once for all, its desire extinguished for ever and ever; but as it reaches God, desire and fulfillment, perfectly balanced and simultaneous, become a timeless mode of being that is forever present.65 The Empyrean heaven, the place where blessedness is most fully experienced, is very far from being a place of quiet and stillness: it is throbbing with activity, metamorphosis, bodies, and desire. Bynum suggests that Dante’s imagery of heaven, deeply inspired by images of fertility, and gushing with desire might hint at how Dante could have understood desire as reaching beyond the after-life of the separated souls into that of the resurrected person.66 Desire in Dante’s heaven is firmly linked to eternity and uniformity. The foundational desire of the Christian universe is the one that God inspires in the cosmos:

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Quando la rota che tu sempiterni desiderato, a sé mi fece atteso con l’armonia che temperi e discerni, (Paradiso 1, 76–8) When the revolution which Thou, by being desired, makest eternal turned my attention unto itself by the harmony which Thou dost temper and distinguish.67 In the same way in which he administers the heavens, God governs the blessed desires, so that desires do not lose their singularity but also do not exceed or excess themselves. As Piccarda Donati explains in canto 3, the very essence of heavenly desire is to conform to God’s will. Piccarda invites Dante to ponder attentively the nature of love (“se la sua natura ben rimiri,” 78), in order to realize that the very formal essence of blessedness is conformity with God’s will. Frate, la nostra volontà quïeta virtù di carità, che fa volerne sol quel ch’avemo, e d’altro non ci asseta. Se disïassimo esser più superne, foran discordi li nostri disiri dal voler di colui che qui ne cerne; che non vedrai capere in questi giri, s’essere in carità è qui necesse, e se la sua natura ben rimiri. Anzi è formale ad esto beato esse tenersi dentro a la divina voglia, perch’una fansi nostre voglie stesse; sì che, come noi sem di soglia in soglia per questo regno, a tutto il regno piace com’a lo re ch ’n suo voler ne ’nvoglia E ’n sua volontade è nostra pace. (Paradiso 3, 70–85) Brother, the power of love quiets our will and makes us wish only for that which we have and gives us no other thirst. Did we desire to be more aloft, our longings would be discordant with His will who assigns us here: which you will see it is not possible in these circles, if to exist in charity here is of necessity, and if you well consider what is love’s

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nature. Nay, it is the essence of this blessed existence to keep itself within the divine will, whereby our wills themselves are made one; so that our being thus from threshold to threshold throughout this realm is a joy to all the realm as to the King who draws our wills to what He wills; and in His will is our peace. The “peace” that awaits the blessed in heaven is not the cessation of desire but the transmutation of desire from lack to fulfillment. Desire in the Paradiso is desire that burns in attainment, not in lacking or longing.68 Heavenly desire is commensurate to the capacity of the desiring subject, and, as such, does not spin out of control into greed. Moreover, desire is curbed and scaled from above by God’s will, so that each soul and each angel fully enjoys the common object of desire. Indeed, Piccarda’s description of heavenly desire resonates strongly with Richard of Saint Victor’s fourth step of love: in the realm of utmost desire, the soul is liquefied by it, and melts into God’s will. Although uniform, the desire of the blessed is neither stable nor onedimensional. Throughout Paradiso, the blessed desire increases, throbs, and exults, creating lively sound and light effects. Indeed, the pilgrim’s journey and his incessant questions are one of the causes of the increment of desire is heaven. Over and over in Paradiso the same plot is staged, where Dante refrains from formulating a question because he (rightly) thinks that the souls already know what he wants to ask, but they beg him to ask anyway, in order to fulfill better heavenly love and desire. In canto 5, the souls of the Heaven of Mercury, upon seeing Dante exclaim: “Ecco chi crescerà li nostri amori” (Lo one who shall increase our loves, 105) – meaning that the conversation with the pilgrim justifies condescension and increases heavenly love. In canto 15, Cacciaguida dwells on the need for utterance in Paradiso, both on the part of the blessed and of the pilgrim: ma perché ’l sacro amore in che io veglio con perpetüa vista e che m’asseta di dolce disïar, s’adempia meglio, la voce tua sicura, balda e lieta suoni la volontà, suoni ’l disio a che la mia risposta è già decreta! (Paradiso 15, 64–9) But in order that holy love, in which I watch with perpetual vision, and which makes me thirst with sweet longing, may be the better fulfilled, let your voice confident and bold and glad, sound forth the will, sound forth the desire, whereto my answer is already decreed.

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The ascending, vertical desire of the pilgrim meets the condescending circular desire of the souls in the writing of the poem itself, which is then bestowed to the desire of the reader. Within the pilgrim, who is still a creature of mortality, desire is characterized as generative, with one desire growing and expanding into the other. Pertile shows that the ascent of the pilgrim takes place along with a succession of doubts framed as desires and answers that satisfy them; however, “the satisfaction of each doubt increases both his knowledge and his desire to know.”69 Many cantos of the Paradiso are shaped by the dialectics of two desires: Beatrice’s explanation of one question creates a new desire for knowing, and this leads the pilgrim all the way to the vision of God. Although this succession of desires is often presented as linear in a Thomistic fashion, the pilgrims’ desire for knowledge is described as insatiable, restless as a wild animal, and growing as a shoot (“rampollo”) out of the truth.70 In the final canto of the Paradiso, Dante offers an important gloss to desire as the “fin che” of Purgatorio 18. Approaching the final vision, Dante experiences “the end” of his desires: E io ch’al fine di tutt’i disii appropinquava, sì com’io dovea, l’ardor del desiderio in me finii. (Paradiso 33, 46–8) And I who was drawing near to the end of all desires, raised to its utmost, even as I ought, the ardor of my longing. The word “finii” does not mean in this context the conclusion of desire, but its ripeness and fullness.71 The subsequent, enigmatic description of the vision of God does not clarify whether there is a further increase of desire or its appeasement. Desire is still engaged, however, in the very final image, the even movement of desire and will circling together away from the Empyrean: ma già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle sì come rota ch’igualemente è mossa, l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle. (Paradiso 33, 143–5) but already my desire and my will were revolved, like a wheel that is evenly moved, by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars. As in the image of the doves of Inferno 5, so on the stage of the vision of

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God, desire and will are one, wheeling around (instead of rushing headlong toward) the object of their longing. The figure of the revolving wheel entails evenness and uniformity but not pacification. As it happens for the blessed (see Paradiso 3, 80–1 quoted above), Dante’s desire and will are made one within God’s, and take part in the uniform throbbing of cosmic desire. To return to the question of desire as “fin che” in Purgatorio 18, the interpretation of the duration of desire as “until” or “as long as” fully rests on the object of desire that stands at the other end of the sentence. Terrestrial desire interprets “fin che” as “until,” thus needing to multiply the objects of desire, because each attainment entails loss of interest in the very object of acquisition. In supernal desire, however, “fin che” is both actualized and eternalized in “as long as”: the attraction does not exhaust itself in the achievement of the longed-for object, but desire indeed keeps on burning while beholding the beloved. Natural desire has the capacity for both the “until” and the “as long as.” It can approach objects of desire seriatim in orderly fashion, or be extended and stretched to the point of becoming insatiable (and of risking falling into greed). Desiring to desire is the benchmark both of all sin and of all blessedness; it is the horrid paradox of the she-wolf, who “after feeding is hungrier than before” (Inferno 1, 99) and of the soul in love with God, which, as Richard of Saint Victor puts it, “the more it drinks, the more it thirsts” (“quo amplius bibit, eo amplius et sitit,” De quatuor gradibus violentae charitatis, pl 196, 1212); it is the contradiction in which both the “accursed miser” of the Convivio (3, xv, 9) and the blessed souls of Heaven occur. ✢✢✢

The notion of the extension of desire is one of the tenets of love poetry, in which love feeds precisely on the procrastination and continuation of desire, and in which attainment has the dubious face of lust. Although one can argue (see this book’s Introduction) that love poetry itself is the extension of desire, such expansion bears also the threatening aspect of illness or madness, and before Dante it is rarely engaged in a positive, constructive manner. In the Convivio, for instance, Dante relates desire to the continuation, dedication, and commitment of love: “Dico poi ‘disiosamente,’ a dare ad intendere la sua continuanza e lo suo fervore” (I then say with fervent passion, to make its steadfastness and its fervor known, Convivio 3, iii, 12). Dante first sketched the idea of duration of desire in the already mentioned sonnet Amore e ’l cor gentil, which appears as a quite rudimentary draft of the theory of desire in Purgatorio 18:

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Bieltate appare in saggia donna pui, che piace a gli occhi sì, che dentro al core nasce un disio de la cosa piacente e tanto dura talora in costui, che fa svegliar lo spirito d’Amore. (Vita Nuova 20) Then beauty appears in a woman worthy of love, beauty that so pleases the eyes that in the heart is born a desire for the pleasing object; and the desire sometimes continues there long enough to rouse the spirit of Love. In this sonnet, the continuation of desire (“dura”) is instrumental to the actualization of love, which was previously a potentiality of the gentle heart. The text does not imply either the cessation (until) or the continuation (as long as) of desire: however, it does emphasize the duration and strengthening of the binding action of desire. In a sonnet on the nature of love attributed to Dante, the co-extensiveness of pleasure and desire is clarified through the use of “fin che,” which articulates two verbs of duration (“basta” and “dura”) around the word “piacere.” Io dico che Amor non è sustanza né cosa corporal ch’abbia figura, anzi è passione in disianza piacer di forma dato per natura, sì che ’l voler del core ogn’altro avanza e questo basta fin che ’l piacer dura. (Rime dubbie 29/79, 9–14) I say that Love is not a substance, nor a bodily entity that has a figure. On the contrary, it is passion in desire, a pleasure, given by nature and deriving from the contemplation of a form, so that the desire of the heart becomes superior to any other desire, and this is enough as long as the pleasure lasts (my translation). This sonnet’s definition of love clearly resonates with that given in Vita Nuova 25 (“Amore è … uno accidente in sustanzia”). It also establishes desire as the fundamental nature of love (“passion di disianza”), and emphasizes its naturalness (“per natura”) and its uniqueness and obsession (“’l voler del core ogn’altro avanza”).

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In the Vita Nuova Dante substantially reformulates the concept of the elongation of desire, which is presented as a tension that through the beloved woman leads to the divine. Throughout the text, Dante’s desire for Beatrice is progressively staged as “as long as” rather than “until.” Especially within the strategic deployment of the prose, the entire Vita Nuova is featured as the extension and stretching of desire for Beatrice – from the procrastination staged by the twofold encounter with the girl/woman at the ages of nine and eighteen to the prophetic ending, which promises more words (more poetry, more desire) on her. The prose, besides providing interpretation to the poems,72 establishes a narrative between the poems, not allowing them to be selfstanding and, therefore, self-contained. The words between the poems tell a story of continuation, of the growth of one desire into another, of the insatiability of words: each poem, which could be a stand-alone and self-contained act of desire, becomes a generative adventure of desire. After Charles Singleton’s studies, the divinization of Beatrice in the Vita Nuova has become a commonplace of Dante scholarship.73 Divine attributes, however, are bestowed not only on Beatrice, but, more important, on the poet’s desire for her. The poetics of the praise, which sustains the second half of the Vita Nuova, besides being the culmination of the strategy of the “selfish lover” (see chapter 2), is the first step of the stretching of desire. In the narcissistic tending toward poetry, the poet-lover eliminates the necessity of satisfaction. Using Gregory’s terms, the poetics of the praise removes both the anxiety that generated it in the “cavalcantian phase,” and the fastidium that may await it in attainment. Blessedness is now located “in quelle parole che lodano la donna mia” (“In those words that praise my lady,” Vita Nuova 18, 6) – but this blessedness implies continuation, not pacification. The poet/lover has internalized his object of desire, has made himself one with it, and, at the same time, has placed it at an unthinkably supernal distance. By removing the distance between himself and the unattainable object of desire, the poet eradicates the fruitless anxiety of longing. By filling the void with endless poetry, he eschews satisfaction. Desire becomes words, and, therefore, becomes again extension and elongation, an infinite discourse of actualization and suspension. At the beginning of the song Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore, which inaugurates the poetics of the praise, Dante proposes to talk about love with his female audience as a sort of outburst (“sfogo”) of the mind, which does not, however, exhaust the praise of the woman: Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore i’ vo’ con voi della mia donna dire, non perch’io creda sua laude finire,

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ma ragionar per isfogar la mente. (Donne ch’avete, 1–4) Ladies who have intelligence of love, I wish to speak to you about my lady, not thinking to complete her litany, but to talk in order to relieve my heart. The impossibility of exhausting the praise of the beloved is often interpreted as one of the many instances of the limitation of the human word versus the excess of its object. It is, however, also a promise of the elongation and continuation of the woman’s praise, prophetically restated at the end of the Vita Nuova: (“io spero di dicer di lei quell che non fue detto d’alcuna”; I hope to write of her that which has never been written of any other woman, 42, 2). “That which has never been written of any other woman” is indeed the ways in which the earthly and adulterous desire for a woman may lead a poet all the way to the vision of God. Beatrice’s death (Vita Nuova 29) is the “consequence” of this narcissistic bending of love toward poetry and allows for the stretching of desireas-praise in a supernal direction, and for the completion and termination of desire/praise in a different eschatological dimension. At the threshold of the Empyrean Dante, stunned by Beatrice’s beauty, which only God can properly enjoy, figures his poetry for her as one single utterance of praise, an extension of desire that originated in the first meeting with the girl and terminates in the Empyrean: Dal primo giorno ch’i’ vidi il suo viso in questa vita, infino a questa vista, non m’è il seguire al mio cantar preciso; ma or convien che mio seguir desista più dietro a sua bellezza, poetando, come a l’ultimo suo ciascuno artista. (Paradiso 30, 28–33) From the first day when in this light I saw her face until this sight, the continuing of my song has not been cut off, but now my pursuit must desist from following her beauty further in her verses, as at his utmost reach must every artist. As with Augustine’s figuration of life as an uninterrupted prayer (“oratio sine intermissione”), Dante’s poetry is an unceasing extension of desire for Beatrice. Like the final prayer of the De Trinitate, Dante’s extended praise

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and desire could be concentrated into one word (“una loda”), although in palinodic mode. Se quanto infino a qui di lei si dice fosse conchiuso tutto in una loda, poca sarebbe a fornir questa vice. (Paradiso 30, 16–18) If what has been said of her so far as here were all included in one single praise, it would be too slight to serve the present turn. Soon after the interruption of the praise, Beatrice entrusts Dante to Bernard and takes her place in the celestial rose. The pilgrim reached his destination, but, as Dante clarifies through two images of pilgrimage in canto 31, the achievement of the goal is generative of yet more desire and yet more poetry. First, he casts himself as the pilgrim who has reached the holy site, and is torn between appeasement and desire to retell: E quasi peregrino che si ricrea nel tempio del suo voto riguardando, e spera già ridir com’ello stea, (Paradiso 31, 43–5) And as a pilgrim who is refreshed within the temple of his vow as he looks around, and already hopes to tell again how it was so. Second, he describes the insatiable hunger of the pilgrim in front of the Veronica: Qual’è colui che forse di Croazia viene a veder la Veronica nostra che per l’antica fame non sen sazia ma dice nel pensier fin che si mostra “Segnor mio Iesù Cristo verace, or fu sì fatta la sembianza vostra?” (Paradiso 31, 103–8) As is he who comes perchance from Croatia to look on our Veronica, and whose old hunger is not sated, but says in thought so long as it is shown, “My Lord Jesus Christ, true God, was then your semblance like to this?”

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The Croatian pilgrim’s “fin che” clarifies that the achievement of the longedfor object does not imply the satisfaction of desire; on the contrary, it stimulates more questioning and more desire. ✢✢✢

The image of the doves called by desire and pushed forth by the will encapsulates and illustrates several important modes of medieval desire. The emphasis on destination assimilates the flight of the doves to the structure of the spiritual pilgrimage of desire. This pervasive medieval practice and conceptual image for life encompasses in turns two antithetic aspects of desire: the anticipatory, rushing drive toward the longed-for holy/homeland, and the retardatory expansion whereby, in desiring, one “is already there.” Moreover, it elicits reflections on the extension of desire. Desire can be seen as “until” – a defective motion lacking, and therefore rushing to, the object of its fulfillment, in which desire is surpassed by pleasure – and as “as long as,” a stretching that is eventually co-extensive with pleasure. Desiderium continuum, desire ever enkindled, extends beyond the constraints of mortality into eternity, where it keeps on burning even in blessedness. In the stretching of desire “as long as,” desire can become pleasure, can become the end of its own desires, a form of both utmost sin and utmost blessedness. Finally, in the flight of the doves (and of other birds in this canto), Dante flattens the difference between desire and will, by depicting the will as something instinctual and desire as something determinate. The melding of desire and will is also a necessity of the notions of the pilgrimage of desire and of desiderium continuum, since it implies the pursuing of the natural inclination (the weight of love) with steadfastness and full concentration of mind. However, by applying these powerful suggestions to earthly love, in which will must stay at a distance from desire and sternly govern it, Dante turns the doves’ return to the nest into the beginning of a tale of perdition.

4

Love Amor … Amor … Amor Inferno 5, 100–6

Paolo and Francesca’s tale of perdition unfolds in the lines of the anaphora (100–7), so intertextually thick as to defy recognition. The lovers’ skills as readers/quoters/interpreters are debated, but the many references indicate that the protagonist of these lines is the “Amor” of love poetry. Dante embroiders a delicate fabric of stilnovo and courtly references and then tears it asunder with the knife of “reality.” As the common interpretation goes, falling in love according to the rules and roles of courtly love leads the lovers directly to death. Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende, prese costui de la bella persona che mi fu tolta; e ’l modo ancor m’offende. Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona, mi prese del costui piacer sì forte, che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona. Amor condusse noi ad una morte. Caina attende chi a vita ci spense. (Inferno 5, 100–7) Love, which is quickly kindled in a gentle heart, seized this one for the fair form that was taken from me – and the way of it afflicts me still. Love, which absolves no loved from loving, seized me so strongly with delight in him, that, as you see, it does not leave me even now. Love brought us to one death. Caina awaits him who quenched our life.

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Besides being overwhelmingly intertextual, these lines are constructed in such a way as to leave interpretation open, and they are linked together by grammatical parallelism and by a dense web of inner references. The tight interconnection is not only signalled by the anaphora “amor,” but also by the repetition of the verb “prese,” and by two parallel constructions: “che mi fu tolta” / “che ancor non m’abbandona,” and “ancor m’offende” / “ancor non abbandona.” These lines are also amongst the most heavily glossed in the canto: interpreters of all eras have been compelled to explore all possible associations, and to construct and deconstruct alliances within this short text. Different interpretations proffer very different outlooks on love and desire, ranging from the very positive, implying even the existence of “a corner of Paradise” in Hell, to the highly negative, emphasizing the utter defeat of the two lovers.1 My argument is that Dante is not attaching any incontrovertible reading to this complex text, but is rather inviting his readers to try at first hand the pleasures and troubles of interpretation and to experience the sophistication of the discourse of love. The traditional interpretation of the anaphora lines often implies exegetical errors on the part of the lovers: in being seduced by, taking too literally, or willfully misreading the rules and roles of courtly love (“amore,” “cor gentile”) and applying them directly to their (sexualized) bodies (“persona,” “piacere”). The lovers’ “mistake” is also placed in their apparently careless superimposition of a French/Provençal model of courtly love that is more sexually explicit onto a spiritualized version of the same love culture, which is found in Italian early poetry and, most notably, in the stilnovo. Traditionally, both “persona” and “piacer” are taken to mean “physical beauty” (in some commentators, simply “body”). Thus, the first and the second tercets are understood to be the repetition of the same concept: the lovers are mutually seized by love, and their attraction originates in their physical beauty. The straightforward reading of “persona” and “piacer” as bodies might be yet another (and subtler to dispose of) fabrication of of the commentators. The Ottimo commento describes Paolo as “uomo molto bello del corpo, e ben costumato, e acconcio più a riposo, che a travaglio” (a man of great physical beauty and well mannered, and more fitted for leisure than for work, ddp ad Inferno 5, 70) and Francesca as “donna bellissima del corpo, e gaia ne’ sembianti” (a woman of great physical beauty and of lovely appearance) [my translations].2 Beauty and pleasure are, however, much nuanced concepts in Dante’s times, and they establish a complex interplay with the other elements of the anaphora lines, creating a highly multifaceted cluster of statements, which, rather than complementing each other, grow in and out of each other, and produce a wide spectrum of meanings.

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Love is the “absolute subject” of these eight lines, articulating “me” and “him” into a tragic “us.”3 “Amor” represents here the half-personified and half-notional third party of the medieval process of love. As Gianfranco Contini explained, in the first statement (“Amor che al cor gentil ratto s’apprende” / prese costui della bella persona / che mi fu tolta”) Dante masterfully fuses Guinizzelli’s famous incipit “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre Amore” (Love returns always to a noble heart) with line 11 of the same song (“foco d’amore in gentil cor s’aprende”; Love’s fire catches in the noble heart), interjecting between the two the swiftness of a coup de foudre (“ratto”).4 The bird metaphors, and especially the flight of the doves, had already suggested that Guinizzelli’s poem was the strategic and ironic target of the canto. The naturality, necessity, and purity of the relation between love and the gentle heart, illustrated by Guinizzelli with the image of the birds returning to or dwelling in the trees, as love finds refuge in the gentle heart, is undermined by the artificiality and cruelty of the infernal flight of starlings and cranes, and by the ambiguity of the image of the doves returning to the sweet nest.5 Here Dante is also notably quoting himself quoting Guinizzelli in the sonnet Amore e ’l cor gentil (see chapter 2). Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa, sì come il saggio in suo dittare pone, e così esser l’un sanza l’altro osa com’alma razional sanza ragione. Falli natura quand’è amorosa, Amor per sire e ’l cor per sua magione, dentro la qual dormendo si riposa tal volta poca e tal lunga stagione. Bieltate appare in saggia donna pui, che piace a gli occhi sì, che dentro al core nasce un disio de la cosa piacente e tanto dura talora in costui, che fa svegliar lo spirito d’Amore. Love and the gracious heart are a single thing, as Guinizelli tells us in his poem: one can no more be without the other than can the reasoning mind without its reason. Nature, when in a loving mood, creates them: Love to be king, the heart to be his home, a place for Love to rest while he is sleeping, perhaps for just a while, or for much longer. Then beauty appears in a woman worthy of love, beauty that so pleases the eyes that

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in the heart is born a desire for the pleasing object; and the desire sometimes continues there long enough to rouse the spirit of Love. The sonnet Amore e ’l cor gentil brings in a double scenario, depending on whether it is taken as a stand-alone rhyme or as a poem within the Vita Nuova. Contini and Domenico De Robertis suggest that the poem could have been written and circulated around 1285 – interestingly, the time in which the murders of Paolo and Francesca took place.6 As a self-standing rhyme, the sonnet does indeed provide the concise summary of the mutual falling in love between a man and woman. As part of the Vita Nuova (20), at the outset of the section of the poetics of praise, it marks the steering away from corporeality and toward a self-sufficient form of love. The prose surrounding the poem in the Vita Nuova emphasizes the new authority gained by Dante as a theoretician of love due to the inaugural text of the new poetics, the song Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore.7 While in the mid-eighties the homage to the “wise man” Guinizzelli probably sounded earnest and due, in the mid-nineties the newly self-authorized poet appears to challenge rather than simply to celebrate the older poet. Moreover, the prose stresses the role of the sonnet in explaining the “scientific” aspect of love (something that Guido Cavalcanti was engaged in showing in the nineties) and presents it as the illustration of how love moves from potency to act. This sonnet, however, is much more a description of the duration of love, and of the long extension of time it takes to actually “become” love. As we have seen in chapter 2, whereas Guinizzelli had illustrated the relation between love and the gentle heart with a series of images drawn from nature (bird, fire, stone, and so on), Dante here proposes a more stringent, “Aristotelian” simile, one that compares the relation between love and the gentle heart to that of the rational soul and reason. The alliance between love and the gentle heart is presented as a product of an inclination in nature (“falli natura quand’è amorosa”) and as a potentiality that could be long dormant (“dentro la qual dormendo si riposa / tal volta poca e tal lunga stagione”). Love’s actualization, as in Purgatorio 18, is initiated by the sight of a beautiful object (here “saggia donna,” combining the physical and moral virtues of the stilnovo lady). The woman’s beauty seems to be detached and detachable from her “persona”: it “appears” (“appare”) in her, but ends up belonging to the lover’s heart. The woman’s beauty pleases twice, first the eyes (“piace”) and then the heart, where she is turned into an object of desire (“cosa piacente”). While the pleasure of the eyes is impulsive and strong (“piace sì”), the desire of the heart is continuous and cautious. Not every desire is able to kindle the flame of love, but just the durable one: this statement

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resonates strongly, as we have seen in chapter 3, with the understanding of desire in its “as-long-as” version. The final admission that a worthy man can cause a similar development in a woman represents an acknowledgment of female agency, which is not common in early Italian poetry, but that Dante expounds elsewhere in his work and that relates centrally to Francesca’s own agency.8 The comparison to the sonnet shows that Paolo and Francesca’s defaillance, or ambiguity or mistake, is located not so much in the “persona” (the bodily aspect of their falling in love) but in the “ratto” – “the swiftness that defies theories,” as Francesco Torraca put it, which contradicts the necessity for potentiality and duration.9 The “fin che” of desire is here turned abruptly into a quasi-now. The image of love as fire (implied by the verb “s’aprende” and by the reference to Guinizzelli’s “foco d’amore in gentil cor s’aprende”) is a commonplace theme in both secular and religious literature. There is hardly a medieval love poem that does not describe the lover as lit, burning, or burnt or a mystical text in which the soul is not enkindled and burning. In both the religious and the secular discourse the image of fire describes love in its desiring disposition. As Dante makes clear in Purgatorio 18, it is desire, not love, that is like fire. That love is so often, “synecdochtically,” depicted as fire testifies to the central and durational role of desire in it. “Persona” does more than merely indicate a body: in the Middle Ages and in Dante’s usage it mostly means “individual.” In the definition of the Trinity (one essence in three persons), it defines the individuality of the three divine entities; in human nature, it describes the principles that “individuate” the human being: “this flesh, these bones, and this soul,” as Aquinas puts it (“has carnes, haec ossa, et hanc animam, quae sunt principia individuantia hominem,” Summa Theologiae 1a, q. 29, a. 4). As Roger Dragonetti explains, “persona” describes an individual in its corporeal disposition.10 Nowhere is this clearer than in the passage at the centre of the Paradiso, where the blessed souls celebrate the triumph of resurrection and the fullness of the union of body and soul.11 Come la carne glorïosa e santa fia rivestita, la nostra persona più grata fia per esser tutta quanta; (Paradiso 14, 43–5) When the flesh, glorious and sanctified, shall be clothed on us again, our persons will be more acceptable for being more complete.

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When recalling her “bella persona,” Francesca not only alludes to her beautiful body but to herself as she was in her embodied form, her beautiful self being the very stilnovistic combination of physical and moral virtues that in the sonnet “appears” in the body and, through sight, triggers love and internal desire. The expression “bella persona” is employed by Dante in the Vita Nuova, on the stage of Beatrice’s death (“Partissi de la sua bella persona / piena di grazia l’anima gentile”; And once withdrawn from her enchanting form, the tender soul, perfectly full of grace, 31, 11). Although one could be tempted to read here simply “body,” “persona” is still the union of body and soul. Beatrice’s soul leaves her embodied person – as is shown by contrast in Vita Nuova 8, 1, describing the death of another beautiful woman: “lo cui corpo io vidi giacere senza l’anima in mezzo a molte donne” (I saw her body without the soul, lying in the midst of many ladies); and, compellingly, by the very end of Inferno 5: “caddi come corpo morto cade” (I fell as a dead body falls). Only when the separation has taken place can one talk of “body” and “soul.”12 As opposed to the peaceful separation of Beatrice’s soul and beautiful person in the Vita Nuova, Francesca’s death was traumatically violent. Her beautiful self was “taken from her.” The subsequent “il modo ancor m’offende” (the way of it afflicts me still) has been much debated and is interpreted either in relation to the cruelty of the murder or to the excess of Paolo’s love. The two interpretations lead to two very different judgments on love. As Lino Pertile explains, according to the first interpretation Francesca is offended by the way her husband killed her, not by the mere fact of her death; according to the second interpretation, Francesca is offended by the excess of Paolo’s love. In this second interpretation, death and damnation are constitutionally linked to love, providing a “radically negative” conception of love, which is a “death sentence” since its inception.13 Contini points out that in the first tercet one can already perceive the shadow of Andreas Cappellanus’s De Amore (“Probitas sola quemque dignum facit amore”; good character alone makes any man worthy of love, 2, 8, rule 18:) and of the whole courtly culture, bringing into these lines an impression of corporeality, and turning the extramarital potentiality of the stilnovo into plain adultery.14 This trace leads metonymically to the more recognizable quotation from Cappellanus in the second tercet; “Amor nil posset amori denegare” (love can deny nothing to love, 2, 8, rule 26) famously resonates into “Amor ch’a nullo amato amar perdona.” This quotation emphasizes the role of reciprocity in the process of love, which is also a feature of the sonnet Amore e ’l cor gentil but is quite uncommon in early Italian poetry.

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The significance of the second tercet rests on the interpretation of the term “piacere.” Modern commentators after Michele Barbi mostly understand it as “beauty,” connecting it to “persona” and emphasizing the reciprocity of attraction. Some interpret “piacere” as Paolo’s love, emphasizing the inevitability of love and relating it to Cappellanus’s rule of love which precedes the one quoted above; “Verus amans nil bonum credit nisi quod cogitat coamanti placere,” (a true lover considers nothing good except what he thinks will please his beloved, 2, 8, rule 25). As Giorgio Padoan notices (ddp ad Inferno 5, 104), “piacere” is not beauty in itself, but “the effect produced by beauty.” Some ancient commentators read it as Francesca’s desire to please Paolo. Benvenuto da Imola, in particular, connects Francesca’s desire to please with her beautiful body and with the act of lust: “ad complacendum isti de mea pulchra persona” (in order to please him with my beautiful self [my translation]).15 The word “piacere” appears both in the sonnet Amore e ’l cor gentil and in Purgatorio 18. In both cases, it is featured as a component of the process of love; the “pleasure” which activates the first, swift, instinctual motion of the soul. In the sonnet, “piacere” is the spark of desire, which sometimes turns into a flame and sometimes does not. Similarly, in Purgatorio 18, “cosa che piace” (20) and “piacer” (21, 27) describe the first instance of love, followed by the “fire” of desire. The entry “piacere” in Enciclopedia Dantesca shows the nuanced and subtle spectrum of the word,16 which metonymically moves from the nominalization of the verb “piacere” (thus: the act of pleasing/enjoying), to the object that gives pleasure, and, therefore, to beauty. Since woman’s beauty represents the main epiphany of beauty in love poetry, “piacere” comes even to signify “woman” – not every woman, however, but the one who, through her beauty gives “me” pleasure. These implications of the word “piacere” are common to Dante and in early Italian poetry and they have reflections in the Provençal use of “plazer.” On the other end of the signifying spectrum, in the Paradiso God is described as the eternal and utmost pleasure (“etterno” and “sommo piacer,” Paradiso 18, 16 and 33). He is the end point of all desires and, as such, is desire turned into pleasure. At the top of purgatory Beatrice violently scolds Dante for not having been capable of going beyond her embodied person and understanding her supernatural beauty (“Quando di carne a spirto era salita, / e bellezza e virtù cresciuta m’era”; when from flesh to spirit I had ascended, and beauty and virtue were increased in me, Purgatorio 30, 127–8). In a passage that problematically brings together embodied beauty (as pleasure), God (as pleasure) and desire, the body, once separated from the soul, is reduced to beautiful limbs (“belle membra”) scattered on earth – an image famously “resur-

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rected” by Petrarca in his Canzoniere.17 In this forceful reminder of the Augustinian theory of desires as put forth in his own Convivio (4, xii; see chapter 3), Dante brings together boldly the pleasure derived from the beauty of a (now dead) body (“piacer, quanto le belle membra in ch’io / rinchiusa fui”) and God as the highest pleasure (“il sommo piacer”). Mai non t’appresentò natura o arte piacer, quanto le belle membra in ch’io rinchiusa fui, e che so’ ’n terra sparte; e se’l sommo piacer sì ti fallio per la mia morte, qual cosa mortale dovea poi trarre te nel suo disio? (Purgatorio 31, 49–54) Never did art or nature set before you beauty as great as in the lovely members that enclosed me, now scattered and reduced to dust. And if the highest beauty failed you in my death, what mortal thing should then have drawn you to desire it? Finally, “piacere” as “that which pleases” also translates into both “desire” and “will”: what pleases me is what I desire and what I want. At the top of purgatory Virgil proclaims the end of Dante’s journey of education and declares his will to be “free, straight and healthy,” advising the pilgrim to take his “pleasure” as his guide (“lo tuo piacer omai prendi per duce,” Purgatorio 27, 131). Here Virgil is rephrasing, for the second time in the poem after Inferno 5, his own “trahit sua quemque voluptas” (each is led by his liking), the formulation of natural desire as an attraction to pleasure. While in Inferno 5 Virgil’s self-quotation applied to desire-turned-storm-turned-punishment (see chapter 3), at the top of Purgatorio pleasure, guided by a cleansed will, becomes the leading principle of the last leg of the journey. Thus, Paolo’s “piacer,” which conquers Francesca, is something more complex than his beautiful body. Rather, it is “his beauty” as it pleases her and gives her enjoyment – as it ignites desire and binds love within Francesca’s soul. The statement that follows, “che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona” (that, as you see, it does not even leave me now, 105) also produces multiple interpretations. The parenthetical “as you can see” suggests that Francesca is pointing something out to Dante, which could be either the fact the she is still with Paolo, or that she is buffeted by love in the shape of the storm. The subject of “non m’abbandona” can thus be either “love” or Paolo. Each of the subjects can yield to a positive and a negative understanding. If love is taken

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to be the subject, we can read the two following statements: “as you can see love still torments me,” or “as you can see, I am still concerned by love.” This latter reading is supported by a line in the Aeneid, where the souls in the campi lugentes, among which significantly is Dido, are said to be still preoccupied by life’s cares: “curae non ipsa in morte relinquunt” (even in death the pangs leave them not, Aeneid 6, 444). If Paolo is the subject, we can also read two subsequent statements: “as you can see, I am still with him,” and “as you can see I am (unfortunately) still with him” – that is, being with Paolo can be interpreted as a source of either consolation or desolation. The lovers’ “embrace” (their being together in hell as they were outside hell) is what projects them outside of the realm of damnation, if not in Dante’s intention, at least in centuries of reading and interpretation – all the way to Rodin’s “the Kiss” and its radical incompatibility with The Gates of Hell. Ancient commentators were troubled by the lovers’ proximity, and emphasized the fact that the poet’s invention was in conflict with theology, which did not consent to love, solidarity – or even closeness – among the damned,18 whereas modern commentators take it mostly as a statement of the strength of their union. If we take the “outside hell” point of view, the union of the lovers (in themselves or through the medium of Love) describes with great precision the duration and co-extensiveness of desire-as-pleasure. The “embrace” unites Paolo and Francesca, who are simultaneously subjects and objects of the process of love, in a perpetual state of desire and reciprocation. Inside hell, one is sadly grabbing onto a shade, onto a mere vanity (“vanità che par persona,” their emptiness, which seems like real bodies – as Dante will call the shades in the next canto; Inferno 6, 36), or to a destitute and empty idea of love. In both tercets the iteration of the verb “prendere” (“s’apprende” … “prese”… “prese”) recalls a traditional theme in courtly and stilnovo poetry, the idea that love “takes hold of” the lover and “ignites like fire.”19 In Purgatorio 18 this verb identifies precisely the moment of the transition into desire: “così l’animo preso entra in desire” (“the captive mind enters into desire,” 18, 31). In her speech Francesca uses the same construction to refer to her “person” (“la bella persona / che mi fu tolta”) and Paolo’s “pleasure” (“piacer / che … ancor non m’abbandona”). The relative pronoun “che” (that) establishes a connection between a past perfect (“che mi fu tolta”), recalling, among many other things, the separation of soul and body, and a present tense (“che non m’abbandona”), emphasizing the union between soul and aerial body. Another parallel is produced by the the adverb “ancora” (still), linking a present tense in the first tercet (“ancor m’offende”) to another present tense in the second (“ancor non m’abbandona”). “Ancora” is the echo of the tem-

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poral past in Francesca’s endless present – something that originated in her mortal life and resonates in hell. Yet, as a result of the multiple interpretations of “m’offende” and “m’abbandona,” it is not clear what still haunts the lady, and what emotion is elicited in her by the lingering of the past into the present. The third “Amor” of the anaphora lines becomes so literal that it leads the lovers “to one death” – a joint one, but also a twofold, physical and spiritual, death, as they testify in Hell. Both the unity of the lovers in life and death and the pair of love and death are commonplace in antiquity and the Middle Ages, so that one isn’t sure whether to attribute this Amore-Morte to Dido, to Tristan and Iseult, to Cavalcanti, or to the plethora of tragic lovers in between.20 The multiplication of references makes these lines sound more ingenuous than the preceding ones. Their harsh style and language, jarring with respect to the preceding sweetness, has tempted critics to attribute them to the “vindictive” Paolo.21 After all, those words sound more like newscasts than poetry. That the lovers died is one of the few things we know about them, one of the few facts that Dante weaves into his fiction. Yet the truth is to the reader more unexpected than the fiction. This statement sounds even more surprising in relation to the “absolute” new: “Caina attende.” Here Dante is referring to his “future” work (Inferno 32–4), the majestic invention of the three-zoned frozen bottom of Hell, where the different kinds of traitors are punished (of one’s kin, of others, and of benefactors in Caina, Antenora, and Giudecca respectively).22 Although sanctioning the concrete separation of the lovers, and the more eschatological and more relevant separation of body and soul, as well as the point of no return of their damnation, death is presented as an instance of union between the lovers. While in the previous tercets of the anaphora lines the “I” and the “you” of the players are maintained, in death they become one. During the “foreplay” love took “him” by “my” beautiful self, and took “me” by “his” pleasant self. In death, it is “us”: “Amor condusse noi ad una morte.” The legend of Paolo and Francesca usually proffers a very concise account of their end. The reading of the book, the mounting of desire, the kiss, the possible intercourse, and Gianciotto coming into the room and killing the lovers all happen in one moment. This simultaneity, as mentioned in the Introduction, is often exploited in pictorial versions of the story. Dante’s text, however, does not suggest any of these inferences and does not insinuate anything beyond the two unconnected statements: “Love brought us to one death” and “that day we read no more.”

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The plurality of interpretations, which is not only allowed but indeed promoted and produced by the anaphora lines, suggests a further inquiry into the complex web of relations between pleasure and beauty, and how they participate in the discourse of love and desire. In the De vera religione, Augustine asks an imaginary interlocutor three questions on beauty, which combine to summarize the basics of the aesthetics of late antiquity and early Christian times. Are objects beautiful because they please, or do they please because they are beautiful (“utrum ideo pulchra sint, quia delectant; an ideo delectent, quia pulchra sunt”)? This first question posits the problem of aesthetic subjectivity, and resolves it within universality: objects give pleasure because they are beautiful. Second, Augustine asks why objects are beautiful, and defines beauty as a likeness among the parts, and a harmony that results from some kind of interior bond (“quia similes sibi partes sunt, et aliqua copulatione ad unam convenientiam rediguntur”). Finally, Augustine inquires into the nature of this unity, and concludes that objects (at this point, decidedly beautiful bodies) bear only a mere trace of the wholeness of beauty. Thus, only the interior eye can truly contemplate beauty by relating it to the utmost and only unity, which is God.23 As a consequence, to contemplate bodies with the eyes of the flesh is a form of idolatry. Universality, harmony, and wholeness are key concepts in Augustine’s aesthetic theory. Just as a body is more beautiful than its individual limbs, so too does beauty rest in the harmony of unity.24 Whether it is a matter of bodies, a poem, or the universe, beauty for Augustine is always “in the big picture” or, rather, in the way in which the organizing, binding principle of order shines through the big picture, showing its finality and giving pleasure to the human being.25 Augustine provides the centuries to come with a fascinating and enigmatic definition of beauty: “aequalitas numerosa” – identity within diversity, the unity within plurality that is found, for instance, in musical harmony.26 The tenets of Augustine’s aesthetics constitute the basis for the reflection on beauty in the Middle Ages – a pervasive discourse that enters into complex relations with concepts of goodness, contemplation, ornament, and creation. Medieval aesthetics stems mostly from the identification of God with beauty and revolves around three main points, largely borrowed from classical aesthetic theories and reworked from a Christian perspective.27 First, it is characterized by a strongly marked platonic sense of metaphysical beauty, of which earthly and corporeal beauty is but a trace. Beauty is thus connected to goodness, and, more or less directly, to God. Second, beauty is understood as that which gives pleasure when it is regarded. Beauty thus affects at a heightened level (through pleasure) the spheres of both sensation and cogni-

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tion, crucially linking aesthetics and epistemology. Third, beauty is a matter of proportion, harmony, and light/color. The luminous or radiant nature of beauty is one of the most engaging aspects of medieval aesthetic theory. The notion of “clarity” ranges from the simple acknowledgement of the beautiful shining of the sun, the brightness of the colour of flowers, and the shimmering of gold and gems, to being viewed as the very essence of beauty, knowledge, and God. God is beauty and – as the work of Dionysius the Areopagite witnesses – as such, irradiates beauty on all creation. Since beauty is a divine attribute, it is centrally connected to goodness – an association, that of καλον and α␥α␪ον, which is already present in classical antiquity and is powerfully reinforced by God’s appreciative gaze on his creation at the beginning of Genesis: “and God saw that it was good” (“vidit Deus quod esset bonum,” 1:25). The relation between goodness and beauty rests on the basis that beauty is a part of the good, and it is articulated by notions such as decorum (decorum), utility (utile), and propriety (aptum). The notion that beauty is matter of symmetry, proportion, order, number, and similarity is, once again, largely borrowed from classical aesthetics, and authorized by Scripture: according to the book of Wisdom (11:21) number (numerus), weight (pondus), and measure (mensura) are the ruling features of the good-as-beautiful act of creation. Beauty is also the manifestation of an abstract, almost mathematical – and certainly musical – pattern. The aesthetics of proportion (proportio) and likeness (similitudo) derives from the Pythagorean-Platonic harmonic number, the hidden mathematical and aesthetic proportion that governs the universe-as-beauty (cosmos). This notion, which is the basis of the definition of beauty as “aequalitas numerosa,” substantiates texts such as Augustine’s De musica and Boethius’s De institutione musica, and is widespread throughout the Middle Ages.28 The cosmos truly resonates with beauty: in the meditation of the Victorines and the school of Chartres it becomes the site of the contemplation of God. The pleasure deriving from beauty as symmetry and harmony plays a major role in the human being’s way to God, as laid out by the Augustinian Bonaventure. In the second chapter of his Itinerarium mentis in Deo, Bonaventure discusses the ways in which the external world (“macrocosmos”), which bears a trace and a glitter of the divine, enters the “small world” (“minor mundus”) of the human being through the portal of five senses and by means of three operations: apprehension (apprehensio), enjoyment (oblectatio), and judgment (diiudicatio).29 Pleasure, the main player of the second stage of experience, is the recognition of some abstract similarity between mind and object. All pleasure, according to Bonaventure, holds to the principle of proportionality: “omnis

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delectatio est ratione proportionalitatis.”30 Pleasure is the conjunction of the agreeable with the agreeable (“delectatio est coniunctio convenientis cum convenienti”) or, as rephrased in the Commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, pleasure takes place in the encounter between the pleasurable thing and the subject experiencing pleasure (“Ad delectationem enim concurrit delectabile et coniunctio eius cum eo quod delectatur,” Dist. 1, art.3, q. 2 co). Each pleasure is the revelation of the utmost pleasure of all, which is God (“Deo est … vera delectatio”).31 Pleasure takes place in three ways: according to form for beauty (pulchritudo, in sight), according to power for sweetness (suavitas, in sounds and perfumes), and according to efficacy for health (salubritas, in touch and taste).32 In this context, beauty is defined, in Augustinian words, as a numeric equality (“aequalitas numerosa”) and as a balanced collocation of the parts with the sweetness of colour (“quidam par partium situs cum coloris suavitate”). In the stage of judgment, the mind elaborates on why the object gives pleasure, recognizing the proportionality that binds it to the thing. Equality – indeed “proportion of equality” (“proportio aequalitatis”) – the abstract notion that is not bound to time, space, or object, is the guiding notion of this last stage.33 “Aequalitas numerosa,” the Augustinian definition of numerical beauty, unity in difference, the multiplicity that makes absolute oneness knowable through enjoyment, becomes at this point the benchmark for all experience, the thread that unites the three stages of the journey, and the vestige that allows the perception of God. It is the definition of the divine beauty inherent in the proportion of every object, and the pleasure experienced by similitude in every act of apprehension, enjoyment, and judgment.34 The discourse on beauty of the late Middle Ages results from the complex collusion of the traditional notion that beauty is goodness and lies in integrity and proportion, with Aristotelian psychological theories and optical theories of Arabic origin. During the new wave of scientific knowledge that became available to the West in the second half of the thirteenth century, the psychological theories of knowledge through the senses from Aristotle’s De anima were corroborated by a complex discourse on light, sight, and vision. A crucial link between beauty and knowledge was established then. Medieval theories of vision deal with light and colour, and with the ways in which the gaze works, whether by means of extramission (the gaze projecting itself outside the body and reaching the object) or intromission (the object projecting itself inward through the eyes). Subsequently they explore the ways in which the object, captured by the senses, is internalized in the mind. This step takes place through a process of apprehension; the abstraction of the external object into an internal image to which the mind can return at any time, and

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which, therefore, the mind “knows.” Sight, perception, and conceptualization are all parts of the same process and involve the different sides of the mind; the sensitive, imaginative, and cognitive soul.35 Although the main concern of medieval optics and the theory of knowledge is the way in which the mind apprehends (that is: captures with sight and transmits inward) any object, medieval theories of vision also reflect importantly on how the beautiful object reaches the mind, and which special attributes make the beautiful object more pleasing, and therefore, more attractive than the common object. Beauty shines forth as a colourful luminosity that the late Middle Ages name claritas – resplendence, radiance, “the shining,” one is tempted to call it. Although being a quality of the surface, clarity is in no way attached to the external part of the object. Clarity is literally “clairvoyant”: it establishes and fulfills a promise in the beautiful object, it both reveals and creates beauty, it is inherent in the beautiful object, and yet it is new to each act of vision and knowledge. Moreover, clarity uncovers not only the proportion and relation between the beautiful object and the “idea” of beauty and God, but also the similarity between the gazing subject and the beautiful object. The recognition of this similarity is called pleasure. Thus, the beautiful object is not only more immediately known but is also more deeply known – creating a more profound impression in the cognitive system, and more closely connecting the self to the intimate recesses of creation and creator. The aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas frequently engages the notions of pleasure and clarity. In drawing a distinction between the good and the beautiful, Aquinas underlines their formal identity, whereby the good is praised as beautiful (“bonum laudatur ut pulchrum”), but he also stresses their logical difference: whereas goodness pertains to desire (appetitus), beauty pertains to knowledge (vis cognoscitiva). The good is the final cause of everything; it is the aim toward which things move.36 The beautiful relates instead to the formal cause of things. Pulchrum autem respicit vim cognoscitivam, pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent. Unde pulchrum in debita proportione consistit, quia sensus delectatur in rebus debite proportionatis, sicut in sibi similibus; nam et sensus ratio quaedam est, et omnis virtus cognoscitiva. Et quia cognitio fit per assimilationem, similitudo autem respicit formam, pulchrum proprie pertinet ad rationem causae formalis. (Summa Theologiae 1a, q. 5, a. 4 ad 1) On the other hand, beauty relates to the cognitive faculty; for beautiful things are those which please when seen. Hence beauty consists in due

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proportion; for the senses delight in things duly proportioned, as in what is after their own kind – because even sense is a sort of reason, just as is every cognitive faculty. Now since knowledge is by assimilation, and similarity relates to form, beauty properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause. The statement “pulchra dicuntur quae visa placent” is often quoted in the commentaries on Inferno 5 as supporting evidence that “piacere” should be understood as Paolo’s physical beauty. If the Thomistic discourse on beauty is somehow in the background of canto 5, however, it brings to Paolo’s “piacere” and Francesca’s “bella persona” a highly complex perspective on beauty, vision, and desire. Thomas significantly links the pleasure deriving from beauty to reason, claiming that the senses find in the beautiful object the same proportions that govern their inner workings. Beautiful things are well-proportioned things (“res debite proportionatae”) because the senses, which are a form of reason, draw pleasure from similarity. In a subsequent passage of the Summa, when discussing the requirements of love, Aquinas specifies the difference between the good and the beautiful by making a distinction between two desires. While the good quenches desire in general, the beautiful (insofar as it is good) quenches desire for knowledge in particular. Beautiful things are not only pleasant to be seen, but the very act of perceiving them gives pleasure (“pulchrum autem dicatur id cuius ipsa apprehensio placet,” Summa Theologiae 1a–2ae, q. 27, art. 1 ad 3).37 Thus, the beautiful makes its way in the inner recesses of the person, bringing pleasure with itself. The knowledge of the beautiful object and the pleasure deriving from apprehension importantly relate to beauty’s “clarity.” While commenting on the second person of the Trinity as beauty, Aquinas famously described the three requisites of beauty as integrity, proportion, and clarity. Nam ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur. Primo quidem, integritas sive perfectio, quae enim diminuta sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt. Et debita proportio sive consonantia. Et iterum claritas, unde quae habent colorem nitidum, pulchra esse dicuntur. (Summa Theologica 1, q. 39, art. 8 co) For beauty includes three conditions, “integrity” or “perfection,” since those things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly; due “proportion” or “harmony”; and lastly, “brightness” or “clarity,” whence things are called beautiful which have a bright color.

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That beauty is connected to wholeness, harmony and, especially, light and colour is a common notion, deriving from the classical world. However, claritas is something more that colour, and only partly connected to vision and light; it is a resplendence that shines through beauty; it is beauty’s very nature, as Thomas’s teacher, Albertus Magnus stated: Dicendum quod sicut ad pulcritudinem corporis requiritur quod sit proportio debita membrorum, et quod color supersplendeat eis, quorum si altera deesset, non esset pulcrum corpus: ita ad rationem universalis pulcritudinis exigitur proportio aliqualium ad invicem, vel partium, vel principiorum, vel quorumcumque quibus supersplendeat claritas formae. (De pulchro et bono 4, art. 1 co.) The beauty of the body requires a due proportion of the limbs and colour that shines over them. If one of these is missing, the body is not beautiful. Likewise, universal beauty requires some kind of reciprocal proportion, either of parts or principles or of any other thing over which the clarity of form shines (my translation). Albert maintains that clarity is a formal quality: it does not reside in objects, or bodies, or actions, but shines through them and manifests their particular beauty. As Edgard De Bruyne notes, clarity for Albert becomes the “final and constitutive determination of the aesthetic essence”: “ad rationis pulchritudinis concurrit consonantia sicut subiectum, et claritas sicut essentia eius” (proportion contributes to beauty as subject, and clarity as essence [my translation]).38 While for Albert claritas is the very essence of beauty, for Thomas it is but one of beauty’s three requirements. For both, however, clarity belongs to the interior being, and radiates from within into and onto the body. Clarity is a virtue of Christ’s body at the moment of its transfiguration as the beaming of his divine splendour, and is one of the features of the resurrection body, together with subtlety (subtilitas) and agility (agilitas).39 In the human being, clarity is the resplendence of the soul onto the body. On the one hand, it is the colour that the vegetative soul imparts to human complexion, through the mix of humours and the composition of blood. On the other hand, it is the light of reason (“lumen rationis”), which shines through from the rational soul, showing the clarity of virtue.40 Interestingly, according to Thomas, the vice of intemperance – the Aristotelian inordinate desire, and the Gregorian composite of sins of the flesh, chiefly represented by lust – obscures one’s beauty and clarity by dimming the light of reason within.41

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Although beauty is very scarcely “in the eye of the beholder” for the medievals, the subjectivity of the aesthetic experience may be located precisely in the pleasure that is the consequence of every appreciation of beauty.42 Besides being an intrinsic quality of the object, beauty is also an event, a temporal occurrence. Beauty individuates a likeness (similitudo, but also proportio or concordantia) not only between the beautiful object and the abstract measure of beauty but also between the beautiful object and the subject that apprehends it. Pleasure springs forth from some kind of mutual recognition between the beauty within the soul and the beautiful object. One of the most radical formulations of the relation between pleasure and vision is contained in the Liber de intelligentiis, written the middle of the thirteenth century and for a long time attributed to the “perspectivist” Witelo (though more recently to an Adam de Belladonna or de Petra). Bringing together Platonic, Aristotelian, and Arabic theories of vision, this text explores both the physics and the metaphysics of light. The author describes light as the principle of all things, of life and of knowledge, and the cognitive capacity of the soul as a mirror upon which things are reflected and apprehended. The height of pleasure stands in the perception of a likeness between the luminous substance of the subject and the external light:43 Maxima delectatio est in coniunctionis convenientis cum convenienti. Ergo, si subjectum cognitionis vel virtutis cognoscitivae est lux, ex unione lucis exterioris cum ipsa est delectatio maxima. (Propositio 12) The maximum pleasure derives from the conjunctions of two things that are fit/proportional to each other. Thus, if the subject of knowledge or of the faculty of knowledge is light, the maximum pleasure is given by the union of the external light with it. In the view of the author of the Liber de intelligentiis, pleasure is the individuation of a similitude between the luminous (that is, beautiful) nature of the universe and that of the self. To sum up: In the theological and philosophical discourse of the Middle Ages, beauty intrinsically has to do with knowledge, and with the way the embodied self connects itself to the world through apprehension. Beauty elicits vision, knowledge and, crucially, pleasure. Pleasure is the effect of beauty in two ways. First, pleasure is found in the instinctive recognition of a similitude between subject and object and in the sharing of the measure of transcendental beauty in their encounter. Second, it is found in the rationalization and the internal meditation on the abstracted object that is the source of pleasure and knowledge.

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Beauty is the resplendence and brightness that can guide a person through a moment of connection with the perfect harmony of the universe. It is the radiance that makes visible the links between maker and universe, and that reveals the existence of nexuses between things. Beauty is the luminosity that reveals the likeness between self and world, self and creator. It runs on the opaque medium of bodies as an electrical tension, creating the effect of pleasure, and thus igniting desire. As Dante illustrates in his theory of love in Purgatorio 18, beauty-aspleasure elicits both the first instinctual movement of the soul toward the object (“L’animo … ad ogne cosa è mobile che piace”; the mind is responsive to everything that pleases, 19–20) and the internal “bending” of the soul toward the abstracted image of the object (“quel piegare è amor, quell’è natura / che per piacer di novo in voi si lega”; that inclination is love, that inclination is nature which is bound in you anew by pleasure, 26–7). Beautyas-pleasure feeds and sustains desire in its “fin che” (as long as) version: the pleasure given by beauty is a continuum, and, as we have seen, a way of tapping into universal and divine beauty. As long as pleasure lasts, then, the soul desires it, enduring, expanding, dilating, and stretching beyond itself.

Within the wider discourse on beauty, the question of corporeal beauty is at once simpler and more elusive. Although theologians and philosophers discuss beautiful bodies, they usually treat them rather generically as objects, or, better, as complex objects, composites of several limbs. For both the classical and the medieval worlds, corporeal beauty is still a matter of proportion and radiance/colour. In bodies, colour and luminosity are features of complexion. They are medically the result of health, and morally the result of virtue.44 In medieval culture there is, however, an uneasiness with regard to corporeal beauty. The Pauline split between the interior and the exterior human being applies to human beauty as well. Not only, as we have seen with Augustine, must beauty be measured and judged by the interior eye, but also there is no exact match between inner and outer beauty. The two may not coincide: just as the horribly tortured bodies of Jesus and the martyrs exude claritas and reveal their inner beauty, so a beautiful body, especially a woman’s, is most often a treacherous invitation to lust and hides all sorts of devilish horrors. Inner and outer beauty may coincide in other cases, as happens, for instance, in Bernard’s explanation of the beauty of the bride of the Song of Songs, shining like a light in the darkness, unable to hide itself (“latere nescia”). The bride’s beauty “erupts” (“erumpens”) from its rays and makes

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the body an image of the mind (“simulacrum”). Every outward act and appearance conforms to her interior beauty: Cum autem decoris hujus charitas abundantius intima cordis repleverit, prodeat foras necesse est, tanquam lucerna latens sub modio, imo lux in tenebris lucens, latere nescia. Porro effulgentem, et veluti quibusdam suis radiis erumpentem, mentis simulacrum corpus excipit, et diffundit per membra et sensus, quatenus omnis inde reluceat actio, sermo, aspectus, incessus, risus (si tamen risus) mistus gravitate, et plenus honesti. Horum et aliorum profecto artuum sensuumque motus, gestus et usus, cum apparuerit serius, purus, modestus, totius expers insolentiae atque lasciviae, tum levitatis, tum ignaviae alienus, aequitati autem accommodus, pietati officiosus; pulchritudo animae palam erit, si tamen non sit in spiritu ejus dolus. Potest enim fieri ut simulentur omnia haec, et non ex abundantia cordis taliter moveantur. (Sermo 85, 11) But when this beauty and brightness has filled the inmost part of the heart, it must become outwardly visible, and not be like a lamp hidden under a bushel, but be a light shining in darkness, which cannot be hidden. It shines out, and by the brightness of its rays it makes the body a mirror of the mind, spreading through the limbs and senses so that every action, every word, look, movement and even laugh (if there should be laughter) radiates gravity and honor. So when the movements of the limbs and senses, its gestures and habits, are seen to be resolute, pure, restrained, free from all presumption and licence, with no sign of triviality and idleness, but given to just dealing, zealous in piety, then the beauty of the soul will be seen openly – that is, if there is no guilt in the spirit, for these qualities can be counterfeited, and not spring from the heart’s abundance. However, outward beauty is still not a guarantee of inner beauty, since, as Bernard remarks, it can be counterfeited. Interestingly, the same concept of “simulation” applies to the mind radiating beauty onto the body (“simulacrum”) and to the fiction of beauty (“simulentur”).45 The problem of the superficiality of beauty had already been posited by Aristotle and is carried forward to the Middle Ages by Boethius, who wonders how someone, blessed with the penetrating vision of Lyncaeus, would react in seeing that Alcybiades’s body is only superficially beautiful (“superficie pulcherrimum corpus”) and hides an ugly interior.46 The disgust for the inner side of a beautiful body is featured in a double mode in the Middle Ages, connected on one hand to decay and on the other to woman. The inside

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is truer to the body’s nature then the outside, in that beauty and youth are just deceptive ornaments of an intrinsically sinful, and especially constitutionally corruptible, body. Beauty, like body (and even more quickly than body) is perishable and subject to decay. Witness the argument for the superficiality of beauty rephrased with a gender slant and some powerful rhetoric by Odo of Cluny (tenth century):47 Nam corporea pulchritudo in pelle solummodo constat. Nam si viderent homines hoc quod subtus pellem est, sicut lynces in Beotia cernere interiora feruntur, mulieres videre nausearent. Iste decor in flegmate, et sanguine, et humore, ac felle, consistit. Si quis enim considerat quae intra nares, et quae intra fauces et quae intra ventrem lateant, sordes utique reperiet. Et si nec extremis digitis flegma vel stercus tangere patimur, quomodo ipsum stercoris saccum amplecti desideramus? (Collationes 2, 9. pl 133, 556) Bodily beauty resides solely in the skin. If men were able to see what is under the skin, like the Beothian lynxes, which are said to be able to see the insides of the bodies, they would be nauseated by women. Their beauty is made of phlegm, blood, humors and gall. If we consider what is hidden in the nostrils, in the mouth and in the entrails, we find it is just dirt. And if we do not suffer to touch even with the extremities of our fingers phlegm and feces, why would we want to hug a sack of excrements? (my translation) Crucially, corporeal beauty is a feminine matter in the Middle Ages. While the androgynous beauty of young men was often portrayed through female features (rosy checks, long blond hair, and red lips), more mature and heroic men were characterized by stature, strength, and solemnity.48 As Dante’s sonnet Amore e ’l cor gentil shows, while the enamouring quality of a woman is beauty (“donna piacente”), the main attractive power in a man is his worth (“om valente”), a mix of physical and moral virtues that include courage, strength, valor, and prowess. As the common medieval anagram eva-ave succinctly recalls, two beauties stand at the antipodes of the spectrum of female beauty in the Middle Ages, both of them mothers, and both of them interestingly off-centre with respect to reproduction: Eve (humanity’s mother in the flesh) and Mary (humanity’s mother in the spirit). While the beauty of Eve is the archetype of all sinful dispositions, the very generator of cupiditas and lust, the beauty of Mary is redemptive and soothing. 49 Mary’s beauty is physical – she is described, and depicted, as an attractive woman, with rosy cheeks and fair

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complexion – but, like the bride of the Song of Songs that she is often taken to represent, her beauty is mostly a function of her internal virtues, and of her very chastity, shining forth onto her body.50 The female body, however, was considered to be more material, more imperfect, and more loathsome than a man’s body. Especially due to the abundance of bodily fluids connected to reproduction, woman’s body was perceived as more generative but also more corruptible than man’s. In medical literature women were considered weaker and more flawed than men, as well as cooler and moister, more permeable to vapours and odours, made impure by their fluids, and governed by the vagaries of their wombs. Their body was seen as a site of both beauty and putrefaction. Leprosy, the disease that had most to do with bodily decay and decomposition, was regularly and decisively linked to female lust.51 Moreover, female beauty was considered a curse, the occasion of jealousies and rivalries, as well as a straightforward invitation to lust. As Paulette L’Hermite-Leclercq notes, the most dangerous beauty was the one aware of herself as such.52 Some critics would recognize Francesca in this category, when they read in the “bella persona” the echo of some “feminine regret” (sic) for her sole asset (sic), the beautiful body that generated Paolo’s love.53 Thus, female beauty is skin deep and hides loathsome flesh and foul smells, as Dante concisely and originally summarizes in the dream of the Siren in Purgatorio 19, an episode that has important connections to that of Francesca and to the theory of love in Purgatorio 18. Virgil’s first speech on natural desire ends, as we have seen in chapter 2, with a slightly rushed caveat: those who praise every love as good in and of itself, do not take into account that “not every imprint is good, although the wax be good” (Purgatorio 18, 38–9).54 Commonly, the wax is taken to signify natural desire and the seal human will. However, I believe that the image of the seal and the wax can be also taken as a denunciation of the ambiguities and perils implied in every act of vision and experience of beauty – meaning that natural attraction might be innocent, but beauty is treacherous, and the process of vision and knowledge not always trustworthy.55 In the following canto, Dante rehearses such dangers by exploiting, with some original twists, the traditional theme of the superficiality of female beauty. The Siren who appears in the second purgatorial dream (Purgatorio 19, 7–36) is, initially, ugly – “stammering, with eyes asquint and crooked on her feet, with maimed hands, and of a sallow hue” (“una femmina balba, / ne li occhi guercia, e sovra i piè distorta, / con le man monche, e di colore scialba,” 19, 7–9). The beholder’s gaze reanimates the woman, painting her with the colours of love, and giving her a beautiful poetic voice:

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Io la mirava; e come ’l sol conforta le fredde membra che la notte aggrava, così lo sguardo mio le facea scorta la lingua, e poscia tutta la drizzava in poco d’ora, e lo smarrito volto, com’ amor vuol, così le colorava. Poi ch’ell’ avea ’l parlar così disciolto, cominciava a cantar sì, che con pena da lei avrei mio intento rivolto. (Purgatorio 19, 10–18) I gazed upon her: and even as the sun revives cold limbs benumbed by night, so my look made ready her tongue and then in by little time set her full straight, and colored her pallid face even as love requires. When she had her speech thus unloosed, she began to sing so that it would have been hard for me to turn my attention from her. With a sweeping movement, Dante makes the Siren a creature of (corrupted) vision (“io la guardava,” “sguardo”), beauty (“the colour of love”), intent attraction (of the pilgrim and later of the sailors), poetry (“lingua,” “parlare,” “cantare”), and desire for knowledge (in recalling Ulysses). He locates pleasure (“piacere”) in the song itself and perverts even the course of the Odyssey – thus possibly making the Siren the cause or perhaps even the consequence of Ulysses’ “mad flight” in Inferno 26 (125). Io son, cantava, io son dolce serena, che ’ marinari in mezzo mar dismago; tanto son di piacere a sentir piena! Io volsi Ulisse del suo cammin vago al canto mio; e qual meco s’ausa, rado sen parte; sì tutto l’appago! (Purgatorio 19, 19–24) I am, she sang, I am the sweet Siren who leads mariners astray in mid-sea, so full am I of pleasantness to hear. Ulysses, eager to journey on, I turned aside with my song; and whoever abides with me rarely departs, so wholly I do satisfy him. It takes the intervention of an holy woman (most commonly understood as Lucy, which nicely ties this episode to Inferno 2; see chapter 1) to dispel the dangerous construction of vision, beauty, and love, and to reveal once

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again female ugliness through the stench of the Siren’s womb56 – a gesture that wakes the pilgrim up to learn that “the ancient witch” (Purgatorio 19, 58) is none other than cupiditas, the composite of sins of passion that are purged on the three terraces above.57 The dream of the Siren emphasizes the fallibility (and, in a very modern fashion, the subjectivity) of vision, the volatility of beauty, and the spiritual dangers inherent to the beautiful textuality that springs forth from their encounter. And, indeed, medieval love poetry does tread on dangerous grounds in regard to the relation between vision, beauty, and knowledge. Love poetry appropriates the theological and philosophical discourse on beauty in its relation to vision, desire, pleasure, clarity, and knowledge and associates it, problematically, with the unstability of feminine beauty. In doing so, however, love poetry enacts the individualization of beauty, fostering the transition from the likable object to “the one I like,” and from body to “the body of my beloved.” The miraculous beauty of Mary is refracted in the beauty of many beloved women who shine forth a healing clarity, but may, capriciously, also fulminate the lover with their disdain. When Dante, in Purgatorio 18, locates the origins of love in the pleasure that an object gives first to the eyes and then to the mind, he is, as Bruno Nardi has shown, rephrasing the traditional philosophical view that the link between beauty and love is pleasure.58 Aristotle’s claim that the origin and principle of love is the pleasure deriving from sight is at the centre of the medieval poetic philosophy of love.59 The Greek ηδονη, the Latin delectatio, and the Italian piacere all signify the pleasure experienced by the soul when witnessing beauty. Thomas Aquinas, however, interpreted the Aristotelian notion of pleasure in a Christian light. As De Bruyne notices, Thomas develops three types of pleasure on the basis of the Nicomachean Ethics: a tactile, “biological” pleasure connected to life’s needs such as nutrition and reproduction; a visual, “aesthetic” pleasure, which is typically human and is able to appreciate beauty in itself; and finally a “mixed pleasure,” in which consists, for instance, the appreciation of female beauty (“pulchritudo et ornatus foeminae”), where the delectation in the integrity, harmony, and clarity of the beautiful body takes place in view of a physical possession.60 Love poetry treads this very fine line. On the one hand, feminine beauty individuates universal and divine beauty, attracting and radiating the clarity that is inherent to beauty in an exclusive act of sight and vision; on the other hand it contains the seeds of the sinful disposition and of the imbalance and potential destruction of the lover. Clarity, pleasure, the internalization of the beloved’s beauty, and the individuation of a similarity between lover and beloved become in love poetry

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empowering but unstable means of knowledge of both the earthly and the divine. The poet’s itinerary to God, taking as compass one (as opposed to many) volatile object of beauty and desire, becomes at once more concentrated and more risky. On the poetic stage of beauty, then, death also appears – the death that so surprisingly yet so solemnly seals the anaphora lines in Inferno 5.

The aesthetics of light is not only a theological and philosophical concern but is also the founding inspiration of medieval art and architecture, and a crucial trait in poetic writing. The use of light and vivid colour is central to French and Provençal poetry in depicting natural as well as feminine beauty. The woman’s main attribute is fairness (as the recurrence of words such as “claretè,” and “clair” shows); her hair is blond, shining and glittering as gold, she bears in herself the shining colours of flowers, and her complexion is often featured as a contrast of white and bright red.61 In early Italian poetry the description of the beloved beauty often evinces traits of imitation of the Provençal use of colours – for instance in Guinizzelli’s Voglio del ver la mia donna laudare (I want to praise my lady truly), where the woman is compared to flowers, stars, and gems.62 In the same vein, Cavalcanti describes his woman’s beauty and “pleasure” (“bieltà,” “piacere”) as the coming together of the colour of flowers and greens, light, and all that is “beautiful to see”: Avete ’n vo’ li fior’ e la verdura e ciò che luce od è bello a vedere; risplende più che sol vostra figura: chi vo’ non vede, ma’ non pò valere. (Rime 2, 1–4) You have in you the flowers and the greenery and what shines and is beautiful to see; your face gleams more than the sun; whoever does not look on you cannot be worthy. In other instances, however, Cavalcanti heavily intellectualizes the beauty of the woman. In Chi è questa che ven, a sonnet famously borrowing its incipit from the Song of Songs, Guido features female beauty as the theological claritas. As opposed to simple fairness, a beaming of light emanates from the woman’s persona and shocks the air around her.

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Chi è questa che vèn, ch’ogn’om la mira, che fa tremar di chiaritate l’âre e mena seco Amor sì che parlare null’omo pote, ma ciascun sospira? (Rime 4, 1–4) Who is she who comes, that everyone looks at her, who makes the air tremble with clarity and brings Love with her, so that no one can speak, though everyone sighs? When the moment of the abstraction and internalization of the image comes, however, Cavalcanti’s lover is constitutionally unable to grasp and apprehend the superior and supernal beauty of the woman, and admiration turns into desperation. Non fu sì alta già la mente nostra e non si pose ’n noi tanta salute che propiamente n’aviàn canoscenza. (Rime 4, 12–14) Our mind never was so lofty and never was such beatitude granted us that we could really have knowledge of her. The central claim of Cavalcanti’s poetry is that woman’s beauty and the pleasure deriving from it are beyond the capacity of the lover to apprehend. A glitch in the process of knowledge takes place. Woman’s beauty can be appreciated only in instantaneous and intermittent ways, and, therefore, it pivots a theory of love that is (quasi-) incompatible with philosophical elation.63 Working with the same key words as Cavalcanti’s, Dante strives to spiritualize the beauty of Beatrice, and to make it a positive, as opposed to destructive, epiphany. This happens, for instance in the two famous sonnets celebrating the miraculous beauty of his lady at the centre of the Vita Nuova (chapter 26). The emanation of female beauty is presented already as a composite of internal and spiritual virtues, without any physical mediation. Pleasure and beauty inhabit directly the same space as sweetness, gentleness, humility, blessedness, and faith. The apprehension of woman’s beauty is unproblematic, can be experienced by everyone, and, once experienced, leads to understanding. Like divine grace and Mary’s compassion, the beloved’s beauty is dispensed freely and liberally to all:

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Mostrasi sì piacente a chi la mira, che dà per gli occhi una dolcezza al core, che ’ntender no la può chi no la prova. e par che de la sua labbia si mova un spirito soave pien d’amore, che va dicendo a l’anima: Sospira. (Vita Nuova 26) Miraculously gracious to behold, her sweetness reaches, through the eyes, the heart (who has not felt this cannot understand), and from her lips it seems there moves a gracious spirit, so deeply loving that it glides into the souls of men, whispering: “Sigh!” As such, the lady’s beauty not only directs the lover on the path of faith but also avoids the pitfalls of envy by affecting other women around her: E sua bieltate è di tanta vertute, che nulla invidia a l’altre ne procede, anzi le face andar seco vestute di gentilezza, d’amore e di fede. (Vita Nuova 26) Her beauty has the power of such magic, it never rouses other ladies’ envy, instead, it makes them want to be like her: clothed in love and faith and graciousness. In Cavalcanti and Dante, the beauty of the lady – her claritas – is both intrinsic to the particular object and universal. Every man admires her (Cavalcanti), and she does bless everyone with her beauty (Dante). Yet, the woman’s beauty is also linked to the subjective gaze and, especially, the “apprehension” of the poet. Clarity shines for everybody, but it is individualized, internalized, and made poetry only by the gaze of the poet, thus fully realizing the subjectivity of beauty and of the gaze. The process of the internalization and knowledge of the beautiful object is one of the central dynamics of the poetic process of love. Beauty, the pleasure deriving from vision and apprehension, the intrigue of the heart, and the desire springing from it are the basic features of love as it is portrayed in the vernacular lyric tradition. As Bruno Nardi and D’Arco Silvio Avalle have shown, these elements, often combined with a notion of excess, are always simultaneously present in poems that discuss the nature and origins of love.64

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Witness them at work in one of the first “theoretical” poems on the nature of love in the Italian tradition, Giacomo da Lentini’s Amor è uno desio che ven da core:65 Amor è uno desio che ven da core per abondanza di gran piacimento e li occhi imprima generan l’amore e lo core li dà nutricamento ben è alcuna fiata om amatore senza vedere so ’namoramento ma quell’amore che stringe con furore da la vista de li occhi ha nascimento, che li occhi rapresentan a lo core d’oni cosa che veden bono e rio com’è formata naturalemente; e lo cor, che di zo è concepitore, imagina, e piace quel disio: e questo amore regna tra la gente. Love is a desire which comes from the heart as a result of the wealth of great pleasure. First the eyes generate love and then the heart nourishes it. Although at times one can love without seeing the object of his love, the passion that furiously takes hold of the lover is the one that is born from the eyes. This is because the eyes represent to the heart everything that they see, good or bad, in its natural appearance, and the heart, which conceives this image, depicts internally the object, and likes that desire. This kind of love reigns over people (my translation). Although insisting on the necessity of vision for love to be kindled, surely in contrast with the Provençal formulation of “amor de lonh,” Giacomo also emphasizes the role of the heart, and of the imagination that takes place therein. Love is a two-step process, located first in the eyes (“li occhi imprima”) and then in the heart (“il cuore”). The eyes “represent” (“rappresentan”) the beauty to the eyes, and the heart reworks it according to its internal faculties (“imagina”). Desire and pleasure are at work in both steps, and are indeed the very components of love (“Amor è un desio” … “piace quel disio”). Vernacular poets also elaborate in detail the theme of the interiorization of the beautiful object and the way the internal image of the woman is a locus of pleasure and desire. From the Sicilian School onward, the internal abstraction of the image and the work of the heart become very important aspects of the process of love, in the wake of the renewed interest in Aristotle’s

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theories of vision and knowledge. The heart’s elaboration of the inner image thus becomes the intimate nature of love.66 An anonymous sonnet in the Vatican codex 3793, quoted by Nardi, defines love as the concordance of three aspects that take hold of the lover’s body and heart: pleasure, thought, and desire (“piacere e pensare e disianza”). Another sonnet describes love as an uninterrupted thought (“un continovo pensiero”).67 Guido Cavalcanti is the poet who develops to the greatest extent the theme of the constant work of the heart. Guido’s poems are the narrative of the heart’s discourse on love, which feeds on the quite unstable internal apprehension and reproduction of the beautiful image, and on the desire and pleasure that derives from them. Guido is also the poet of a dark, destructive love, one that, very much like the love that unites Paolo and Francesca, leads to death. Cavalcanti’s doctrinal poem, Donna me prega (Rime, 27), describes love as a fierce accident (“un accidente che sovente è fero,” 2), and engages the philosophy of his times as well as the theory of love of his first friend Dante, upholding Averroistically the incompatibility between love and the intellectual process, and portraying love as a negative and deadly experience for the human being. Love originates in the sight of the beautiful object (“vèn da veduta forma che s’intende” ([Love] derives from a seen form that becomes intelligible, 21), but resides in its intellectualization in the possible intellect (“che prende – nel possibile intelletto / come in subietto, loco e dimoranza”; that takes up place and dwelling in the sensible intellect as in a substance, 22–3). The operation of the possible intellect and that of love are, however, incompatible: where love arises from corporeal qualities and feeds on pleasure, the intellect is purely intellectual and relies on contemplation. Thus, there is no “similarity” (“simiglianza”) between the two: In quella parte mai non ha possanza perché da qualitate non discende: resplende – in sé perpetual effetto; non ha diletto – ma consideranza; sì che non pote largir simiglianza. (Donna me prega, 24–8) In that part (love) has never any power. Since (the possible intellect) does not derive from quality, it shines in itself as perpetual effect; it does not have pleasure but rather contemplation; and thus it cannot create an image. Love’s nature (“essere,” being) is an excessive and restless desire – so excessive that it becomes “unnatural” (“lo volere è tanto / ch’oltra misura – di

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natura – torna”; desire is so strong that it goes beyond nature’s measure, 43– 4).68 Love originates in the physical similitude between the lover and the beloved. This likeness gives rise to pleasure and uncovers love: Di simil tragge – complessione sguardo che fa parere – lo piacere – certo: non può coverto – star, quand’è sì giunto. (Donna me prega, 57–9) From a like temperament (love) draws a glance that makes pleasure seem certain: it cannot stay hidden when it is thus conjoined. The gaze (“sguardo”) is at the centre of the process of love. It articulates the acknowledgment of a similitude between the lovers – one that, strikingly, resides in the complexion (“complessione”) of the beloved, the place where the clarity of the bodies was said to be.69 The clarity of complexion, when apprehended and intellected through the gaze, becomes the clarity of beauty (“piacere”). When two corresponding beauties recognize each other through the gaze and conjoin through pleasure, love cannot be hidden, and becomes the tragic sign impressed on the lover’s body, as many other poems in Guido’s Rime recount. The notion of similarity is by far the most original trait of Cavalcanti’s theory of love. This concept is not unknown to early Italian love poetry, where it is often employed to portray the disposition of the (male) lover to love – as, for instance, in Guinizzelli’s Al cor gentil, which describes the likeness and proportionality between the lover’s gentle heart and love. Cavalcanti, however, exploits the notion of similarity in the way it is featured in the theological and philosophical discourse on beauty, where similitudo is the individuation of a likeness between the beloved and the lover which instigates pleasure and is rooted in light. Similarity for Guido is not only the root of attraction in physical terms;70 it also engages the aesthetic discourse, where beauty describes concordance, a coming together, a proportion not only in the parts of the body but also between the gazing lover and the object. The concept of similarity is found in a text that, crucially, brings together the notions of “piacere” and “persona.” As in the anaphora lines of Inferno 5, in the ballad Quando di morte mi conven trar vita (Since from death I must draw life, Rime 32) death is the outcome of a love that is borne by the respondence of “persona” and “piacere.” In this text, Cavalcanti describes not only the interiorization of the image but also its modification. Love springs forth from similarity in beauty and creates in the heart a new person of desire:

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Amor che nasce di simil piacere, Dentro lo cor si posa Formando di disio nova persona; (Rime 32, 15–17) Love, which is born of mutual pleasure, stays within the heart, forming a new person of desire. In this context “piacere” expresses the recognition of the similarity between the lover and the beloved, and “persona” is the same pleasure as it is transferred and transformed within. A new embodied creature is born within the heart. This creature of pleasure might be entirely different from the beautiful and similar object that stands outside. In the following lines, however, Guido suggests that in this very quality of love lie its ties to death: “ma fa la sua virtù vizio cadere” (“but it makes [heart’s] strength decay to weakness,” Rime 32, 18). This poem offers an important gloss to Inferno 5 – showing how Francesca’s “persona” and Paolo’s “piacere” cannot be understood merely as physical beauty but are, rather, traces of a more complex (philosophical and theological) discourse on beauty. The two terms uncover an understanding of love that originates in the likeness between the lovers, is individuated in their beauty, and is secured by an act of vision. The similarity of the lovers is suggested by Dante through the stringent parallelism of the first two tercets of the anaphora, one mirroring into the other through the complex system of internal references sketched above. The reciprocal and simultaneous falling in love of Francesca’s “bella persona” and Paolo’s “piacer” is described in a perfectly proportional turn of lines. Moreover, Dante specifies the similarity between the lovers by featuring an uncommon aspect in medieval love poetry: male beauty, Paolo’s “piacer,” as proportional and corresponding to female beauty. While in the sonnet Amore e ’l cor gentil, which Francesca quotes at the beginning of the anaphora lines, a beautiful woman (“donna piacente”) is flanked by a valiant man (“om valente”), in Inferno 5 lover and beloved are endowed with the very same beauty-as-pleasure. Because of that, they are condemned to death. The likeness between the two lovers is underlined also by early commentators. In glossing the anaphora lines, the Anonimo Selmiano gives a short summary of the stilnovistic discourse on love (interestingly similar to that provided by Dante in the sonnet Amore e ’l cor gentil, regarding the idea that not every desire is durable enough) and explains that love takes place only between “similar” people:

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Ora nota lettore, che qui è da sapere, che amore è una passione piacevole, che sopra ciascuno cuore piacevole e passa e varca, e in quale dimora poco e in quale assai, secondo che quello cuore dove passa è aconcio a ricevere la materia di quello amore. Onde è da sapere, che ogni cuore gentile è sempre aconcio aprendere sè ad amare la cosa che piace: e anche è da sapere, che ciò ch’è amato ama, perciò che ogni simile desidera e ama suo simile, e con esso si consola. E altro non è amato da nulla persona se non è cosa simile. Adunque il simile ama chi l’ama. (Anonimo Selmiano, ddp ad Inferno 5, 100–5) Now notice, reader, that love is a pleasurable passion, which passes and crosses through every pleasurable heart. In some it dwells for a short time, in others a long time, according to whether the heart in which it passes is fit to receive the matter of that love. Every gentle heart is always fit to take up love for the object that is pleasant. Moreover, that which is loved returns the love, because everyone desires and loves that which is similar to itself, and takes solace from it. And nobody is loved by someone else, if one is not similar (to the lover). Thus, the similar loves the one who loves it. (my translation) In commenting upon the inevitability of love, the Anonimo Fiorentino underlines the necessity of a “similar complexion” (as in Cavalcanti) and “likeness” between the lovers, which (as in Purgatorio 18) fosters the “bending,” the inclination toward the pleasurable object: “quando due sono d’una medesima complessione et aguaglianza, se l’uno ama, l’altro s’inchina ad amare lui” (when two people are of a same complexion and similarity, if one loves, the other bends to love back, ddp ad Inferno 5, 103–5 [my translation]).71 With the invention of Gianciotto’s deformity, early commentators, particularly Boccaccio, further emphasized the similitude of the two lovers, who are beautiful in contrast to the ugly and deformed husband. If taken at their face value (but also after having considered the complex intertextual web that undergirds them), the anaphora lines emphasize two aspects of the story of Paolo and Francesca: reciprocity and death. Within a poetic structure based on the similarity, proportionality, and correspondence of all the terms among themselves, which, as we have seen, produces several possible meanings, Dante relates the similarity of the two lovers, the perfect correspondence of exterior and interior features (that is, the perfect harmony of their beauty) and, especially their mutual recognition and “acceptance” of their similarity through love (“prese costui” / “mi prese,” 101 and 104). For Paolo and Francesca, similarity in beauty allows the connec-

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tion to transcendental beauty and creates the utmost pleasure. Similarity also fans reciprocity and hastens the lovers to their death. ✢✢✢

The lovers’ death is at once the most powerful, most literal, and most elusive aspect of the anaphora lines. There is hardly a medieval love poet (including Dante himself) who does not, at some point, explore the love-death combination. With most of the poets, however, death is not the essence of love, but rather one of its risks. It is brought about by the absence of reward (the pseudo-Guinizzelli Con gran disio pensando lungamente), by the beloved’s failure to acknowledge the lover’s gaze and love (as in Dante’s Amor che movi tua virtù da cielo), or by the spiteful pride of the lover (Cavalcanti’s Tu m’hai sì piena di dolor la mente).72 However, only in Cavalcanti’s doctrinal song is death presented as the very nature of love itself – love being a true “death sentence” from the beginning.73 Dante’s second friend, Cino da Pistoia, had some similar ideas on the nature of love: “Amore è uno spirito ch’ancide, / che nasce di piacere e vèn per sguardo” (Love is a spirit that kills, which is born from pleasure and comes from the gaze, Rime 37 [my translation]).74 Besides the lyrical background of the canto, the key words and concepts of the anaphora lines work equally well also in the classical and romance context: reciprocity, love, and death animate the literally “fatal” attraction between Dido and Aeneas, and fit well with the courtly romance background of the canto, the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, and that of Tristan and Iseult.75 The story of love and death constructed in the anaphora lines presents, however, two particularities with respect to the tradition. First, death is presented as the immediate consequence of a reciprocal attraction based on proportional beauty and similarity – a situation which, as we have seen, is reflected in Cavalcanti’s Quando di morte mi conven trar vita. Second, the lovers appear to claim that they died together: “Amor condusse noi ad una morte,” Love brought us to one death, 106). Death achieves the union (“noi”) and fusion (“una morte”) of the lovers. In the very precipitous rhythm of the anaphora lines Dante weaves the (poetic and logical) conclusion that aesthetic homology leads to merging in death. The necessity of death for the merging of the lovers connects the anaphora of Inferno 5 to another story of similitude, beauty, love (and death): the narrative of love that unites the Christian soul to God. It is a story of passionate desire that derives from the glimpse of a similitude, and which displays the simultaneity of conjunction and death. In order to summon this story from

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the depths of the genealogical background of Inferno 5, I shall articulate it through three stories of similarity and death that are more immediately relevant to the canto: the story of Tristan and Iseult in the foreground, that of Jaufré Rudel in the middle ground of the frame, and, in the background of Inferno 5, the story of the Song of Songs.76 The story of Tristan and Iseult is the most obvious inspiration for the lovers’ common death in canto 5, not only because Tristan is mentioned in the ranks of those killed by love (“vedi … Tristano,” 67), but also because of the resemblance of the two tales, both within the context of the canto (adultery, the similarity and reciprocity between the lovers, their dying together), and in the invention of the commentary tradition – the marriage by proxy, the ugliness of Mark/Gianciotto as opposed to the beauty of the lovers, and the twist, present in certain versions of the story, that Mark killed Tristan. The existence of different versions of the Tristan story and the subsequent cascade of rewritings and translations make it difficult to pinpoint the exact relation between Dante and the corpus of Tristan, but the premises and the consequences of the two stories are strikingly similar. In the story of Tristan, the lover’s death is the end of a long drive of desire. As Simon Gaunt notices, “love is an extended death” and death is indeed the “desired conclusion of the story.”77 In death the lovers experience undisturbed physical union and, like Paolo and Francesca, they kiss. In the version of Thomas, Iseult kisses the newly dead Tristan: Embrace le e si s’estent, baise li la buche e la face e molt estreit a li l’enbrace cors a cors, buche a buche estent, sun espirit a itant rent, e murt dejuste lui issi pur la dolur de sun ami. (Tristan de Thomas, 3114–20)78 She hugs him, and lies at his side, she kisses his mouth and face, and she embraces him very tightly. Heart to heart, mouth to mouth they are, and she also dies shortly after for the pain caused by the death of her friend (my translation). True and perfect reciprocity is found only in death. As Gaunt points out, the lovers share the same potion and die one for the other (“pur mei” … “pur vos”).79 Thomas, however, diversifies the death of the lovers, emphasizing that Tristan dies for his desire and his love (“Tristrant murut pur son desir

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… pur sue amur,” 3121–3) and Iseult for the pain of not having come in time to the lover’s bedside (Ysolt, qu’a tens n’i pout venir … pur tendrur, 3122– 4). While in Thomas’s Tristan the lovers die one after the other, in the prose version of the Roman de Tristan and in its Italian “translation,” extant in several Tristano manuscripts and well established in the times of Dante, the lovers die together, Tristan killed by Mark’s’ poison and Iseult killed by Tristan’s embrace. In the deathbed scene, Tristan convinces Iseult to die with him.80 A great wonder would transpire if the lady survived the lover, like a living fish without water, or a body without a soul (“come del corpo vivere senza l’anima”). Iseult reassures Tristan that dying with him is her utmost desire (“nulla mai tanto desiderai”), but also questions the modality of her death as, unfortunately, love’s pain and sorrow cannot kill a lady (“Se per aver dolore e angoscia potesse morire nulla dama, se m’aiuti Iddio, io sere’ morta più volte”; if any lady could die from grief and anguish, may god help me, I would be dead many times over). Tristan, convinced that their common death is not merely his will but also God’s, invites Iseult onto his deathbed, where the patient lovers (“patienti”) eventually see their wish fulfilled: E allora si stende la reina supra lo suo pecto, e elli sì strinse [a] sé di tanta força com’elli avea, sich’elli le fece lo cuore partire. Et elli medesimo morie a quello punto; siché a braccia a braccia et a boccha a boccha morirono li due patienti amanti. E dimorano in tale maniera abracciati, tanto che tucti quelli di là entro che credeano che fussero tramortiti ambendue per amore. Altro riconforto non v’hae. (Tristano Panciatichiano, 535) And then the queen extends herself over his chest, and he squeezed her to him with all the strength he had so that he made her heart leave her. And he himself died at that point, so that arm upon arm and mouth upon mouth the two patient lovers died, and they stayed embraced in that manner so long that all those within believed that they had fainted from love. There is not other comfort. The Tristano repeats the theme of common death and of reciprocal beauty with an insistent symmetry that recalls the repetition of the anaphora lines in Inferno 5. In tale maniera morìo lo bello e lo pro’ [cavaliere Tristano] per amore di madama Ysotta … E la reina d’altra parte morìo per amore di Tristano … che a quello tempo era lo miglior cavalieri … Tristano

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morì per amore di Isotta, c[he] a quello tempo era la più bella dama del mondo … La reina Ysotta morì per amore di Tristano e così finirono ambendue. (Tristano Panciatichiano, 536) In this manner the handsome and valiant knight Tristan died for love of Lady Yseut … And the queen, on the other hand, died for the love of Tristan who at the time was the best knight …Tristan died for the love of Yseut who at the time was the most beautiful lady in the world … Queen Yseut died for love of Tristan, and so they both ended their lives. The story of Jaufré Rudel, which, very much like that of Paolo and Francesca is the combination of poetry and legend, casts in a different manner the links between the union of the lovers and death. Jaufré’s formulation of the “amor de lonh” – the endless and self-supporting narrative of desire directed to a distant, evanescent, even abstract beloved – has elicited several diverging interpretations of the object of his desire, ranging from an actual woman, to social status, to God. The intrinsically ambiguous nature of Jaufré’s poetry both allows for all the different interpretations and excludes all.81 The concept of “amor de lonh” in Jaufré’s legendary biography is at the source of the figure of the countess of Tripoli, with whom Jaufré falls in love without ever seeing her. The distant, even conceptual, object of desire becomes a real woman living on the opposite shores of the Mediterranean sea.82 One of the few certainties about Jaufré’s poetry is the fundamental role played in it by desire – so much so that, more than any other Occitan poet, Jaufré is known as the poet of desire. “Amor de lonh” truly resembles a secularized desiderium supernum. It is a narrative that relies solely on desire, and stretches and tends desire to incorporate and embrace fully the absolutely absent object of such longing. Desire creates the object of love and is the sole nourishment of poetry. Not surprisingly, pilgrimage plays a central role in Jaufré’s poetry, as for instance in the song Lanquan li jorn, on which the religious interpretation of Jaufré’s discourse of desire mostly centres. The poet describes himself as “bent and bowed with desire” (“de talan embroncx e clis”), unable to experience any joy. Although trusting the “lord” who established the love from afar (“ben tenc lo senhor per veray / que fermet sest’amor de lonh”), he wishes to be a pilgrim in the beloved’s land. When she sets her eyes on his staff and cloak, true joy will appear, and the lover will finally be able to experience and enjoy his nondescript goal of “l’ostal de lonh” – an inextricable mix of spiritual and courtly pleasures: Be’m parra joys quan li querray, Per amor Dieu, l’ostal de lonh,

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E, s’a lieys platz, alberguarai Pres de lieys, si be’m suy de lonh, Qu’aissi es lo parlamens fis Quan drutz lonhdas et tan vezis Qu’ab cortes ginh jauzis solatz. (Lanquan li jorn, 15–21) Indeed joy will appear to me (it will seem a joy to me) when I seek from her, for the love of God, the lodging place from afar, and if it pleases her, I shall lodge near her, although I am far away (from afar), for thus is conversation noble when a far away lover is so close that he may enjoy solace with courtly play. While Jaufré’s poetry remains forever elusive, the legend of Jaufré Rudel affords a momentary union with the lover in death. The vida allows for a brief encounter, whereby the dying poet manages to reach the longed-for shores and die in the embrace of the countess. Gaunt emphasizes the concentration on the gaze both in the vida (Jaufré falls in love “ses vezer,” undergoes the journey/pilgrimage in order to see the woman, and dies upon seeing her) and in his poems, arguing that “the lyrical subject will thus represent the visual encounter as an eternal moment of jouissance, of loss of self, of death.”83 I would add that in the legend of Jaufré two moments of vision come together, specifically the two main Christian modes of vision, as famously defined by Paul: “Videmus nunc per speculum in ænigmate: tunc autem facie ad faciem” (For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face, 1 Corinthians 13:12). Only in death is the poet allowed to gaze into the eyes of the beloved. His sight, which had so eagerly pursued the vision of the woman, is in that very vision transported into the contemplation of the mysteries of the afterlife. The gaze of the woman is the interface between time and eternity, the end of finite longing, and the beginning of infinite desire. In the Middle Ages there is one universally popular story of reciprocal attraction, of unbridled sexuality, and of likeness in beauty, complete with the kiss of the mouth – the story of the Song of Songs and of its nearly endless medieval commentary tradition. The Song is rarely invoked in the context of Inferno 5, even though the similarities between the two texts are striking. Significantly, the Cantica begins directly with a kiss on the mouth: “osculetur me osculo oris sui” (let him kiss me with the kiss of the mouth – for which see chapter 5). Moreover, much like Francesca’s, this is a story of woman’s agency. Not only does the bride have a powerful voice throughout, but also she is genuinely active in this story of desire – for instance, when she leaves her bed at night to look for her lost beloved.

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As for Paolo and Francesca, the love that unites the bride and the groom is reciprocal and swift, and springs from their beauty. The bride is inflamed both by the groom’s love and by his beauty and, in consequence, she loves him. A truly proportional pair of verses extols the beauty of the bride and the groom: “ecce tu pulchra es amica mea … ecce tu pulcher es dilecte mi” (1, 14–15). Bernard’s commentary on these lines, interpreting the bride as the human soul and the groom as Christ, still retains much of the eroticism of the original text, and could readily be taken as a commentary on the falling in love of Paolo and Francesca: Verbo igitur dicere animae, pulchra es, et appellare amicam, infundere est unde et amet, et se praesumat amari. Ipsi vero Verbum vicissim nominare dilectum, et fateri pulchrum; quod amat et quod amatur, sine fictione et fraude adscribere illi, et mirari dignationem, et stupere ad gratiam. Siquidem pulchritudo illius dilectio ejus; et ideo major, quia praeveniens. Medullis proinde cordis et intimarum vocibus affectionum tanto amplius atque ardentius clamitat sibi diligendum, quanto id prius sensit diligens quam dilectum. Itaque locutio Verbi infusio doni, responsio animae cum gratiarum actione admiratio. Et idcirco plus diligit, quod se sentit in diligendo victam: et ideo plus miratur, quod praeventam agnoscit. Unde non contenta est semel dicere pulchrum, nisi repetat et decorum, eminentiam decoris illa repetitione designans. (Sermo 45, 8) When the Word therefore tells the soul, “You are beautiful,” and calls it friend, he infuses into it the power to love, and to know it is loved in return. And when the soul addresses him as beloved and praises his beauty, she is filled with admiration for his goodness and attributes to him without subterfuge or deceit the grace by which she loves and is loved. The Bridegroom’s beauty is his love of the bride, all the greater in that it existed before hers. Realizing then that he was her lover before he was her beloved, she cries out with strength and ardor that she must love him with her whole heart and with words expressing deepest affection. The speech of the Word is an infusion of grace, the soul’s response is wonder and thanksgiving. The more she feels surpassed in her loving the more she gives in love; and her wonder grows when he still exceeds her. Hence, not satisfied to tell him once that he is beautiful, she repeats the word, to signify by that repetition the pre-eminence of his beauty. As with the story of Inferno 5, love is initiated by the lover (“he”: the groom, Christ, Paolo) in the contemplation of the beauty of the beloved (“she”: the bride, the soul, Francesca). By acknowledging her beauty he

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imparts to her the capacity of loving and being loved (“unde amet et se preasumat amari”). These faculties (“quod amat and quod amatur”) are activated in her when she calls him beloved and beautiful. The relation between beauty and love is direct and unmediated. The beauty of the groom is the love he has for the soul (“pulchritudo illius; dilectio eius”): his love appears outwardly as beauty and compels her to return love. In this light, Paolo’s “piacere” functions in all the different interpretations given by commentators: it represents his beauty, his love for Francesca, and Francesca’s desire to please him. Like Francesca, the soul, once loved, must return love with the same intensity and excess (“amplius atque ardentius clamitat sibi diligendum, quanto id prius sensit diligens quam dilectum”) and, the more she is conquered by love (“in diligendo victam”), the more she is compelled to respond in kind. The physical and emotional reciprocity of the lovers is the leitmotif of the Song of Songs. They correspond symmetrically in their bodies and so they belong to each other: “dilectus meus mihi et ego illi” (My beloved to me, and I to him, 2. 16). Their desire is also proportional: “ego dilecto meo et ad me conversio eius” (I to my beloved, and his turning is towards me, 7. 11). When asked what makes her beloved special among other men, the bride begins by singling out his colourful complexion. The beloved – like many beloved women in French and Italian lyric poetry, and like Jesus in the eyes of Jacopone da Todi’s Virgin – is both “bianco e vermiglio” (white and red):84 qualis est dilectus tuus ex dilecto o pulcherrima mulierum qualis est dilectus tuus ex dilecto quia sic adiurasti nos dilectus meus candidus et rubicundus electus ex milibus. (Canticum canticorum 5. 9–10) What manner of one is thy beloved of the beloved, O thou most beautiful among women? what manner of one is thy beloved of the beloved, that thou hast so adjured us? My beloved is white and ruddy, chosen out of thousands. The Song, as is well known, does not shrink from commenting on the violent and deadly aspects of love. As with countless love poems, the bride wounds the heart of the lover with her gaze ( “vulnerasti cor meum soror mea sponsa vulnerasti cor meum in uno oculorum tuorum,” 4. 9: Thou hast wounded my heart, my sister, my spouse, thou hast wounded my heart with one of thy eyes). The beauty and gaze of the bride are a source of trouble for the groom, who asks her to divert her gaze.85 As Lino Pertile has shown, the theme of the “vulnus amoris” (wound of love) is commonplace in both religious and secular literature of the Middle Ages, with both negative and positive connotations.86 The theme of the wounding of the heart which takes

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place through the eyes is very frequent in early Italian poetry, since it connects the dynamics of vision and apprehension to both the medical (the wound of the heart is the main symptom of the disease of love) and the spiritual aspects of love.87 In the famous finale of the Song of Songs, the deadly aspect of love is brought about, with the powerful combination of love, death, and hell – the quintessential features of Inferno 5: Pone me ut signaculum super cor tuum ut signaculum super brachium tuum quia fortis est ut mors dilectio dura sicut inferus aemulatio lampades eius lampades ignis atque flammarum. (Canticum canticorum 8.6) Put me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thy arm, for love is strong as death, jealousy as hard as hell, the lamps thereof are fire and flames. That love is stronger than death and that desire (aemulatio, the desire for the similar or for similarity) is as hard (or as durable) as hell, could be easily taken as a support for the “positive” interpretation of canto 5, which has the lovers transcending hell by virtue of the eternity of their attraction.88 In the medieval commentary tradition, the Song’s story of desire, sexuality, and reciprocity is turned into the narrative that unites the Christian soul to Christ. Like the story of Paolo and Francesca, it does, therefore, imply death. Only in death can the soul join its maker, and terminate the long discourse of desire, which had begun with a glimpse of the divine beauty still inherent in the human soul after sin, proving its similarity to God and igniting desire. In medieval Italian poetry, one can indeed find the religious counterpart of the anaphora of Inferno 5 – the repetition of the word love in the context of beauty, desire, and death as an embrace (and, possibly, a kiss). In this case the lover is the Franciscan friar Iacopone da Todi, and the beloved is Christ: Amor, Amor-Iesù descideroso Amor, voglio morire te abracciando Amor, Amor-Iesù dolce meo sposo, Amor, amor, la morte t’ademando; Amor, amor, Iesù si delettoso, tu me tt’arrenni en te me trasformando! (Amor de caritate, 283–8)

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Love, Love-Jesus full of desire, Love I want to die in your embrace, Love, Love-Jesus my sweet spouse, I ask you for death. Love, Love-Jesus, my delight, you surrender yourself to me, make me one with you.89 In his lauda Amor de caritate, Iacopone describes a love for God that shares many traits of the poets’ earthly love. The love for God is not pacification or sweetness, but torment (“tormento,” 14), subjugation of reason (“aio perduto … senno tutto,” 19), madness (“me fa pazzo gire,” 60), deceit (“e trovome d’amor quasi engannato,” 31). Love burns like fire and knows no measure (“a tal furnace perché mi menavi, / se volivi ch’io fusse in temperanza”; If it was temperance you wanted / why did you lead me to this fiery furnace? 187–8). The lauda climaxes in five stanzas that repeat obsessively the word Amore, and culminates in the last stanza quoted above. As we see with Paolo and Francesca, the attraction between the beloved and the lover is both reciprocal (Christ is indeed “descideroso,” as he desires the embrace of the soul) and fatal. Love transforms the two lovers by changing one into the other, by melding the two subjectivities into one transformative and shifting “us.” ✢✢✢

While the story of Jaufré lends itself more easily to a comparison with the narrative of the soul longing for God and dissolving itself into him, those of Tristan and Iseult and of Paolo and Francesca produce a triangulation whereby both lovers are in the position of the soul, and their love is in the position of God. This is quite literally what happens in the end of the story of Tristan: the lovers’ mutual love becomes an end in itself.90 This is also what happens in the story of Paolo and Francesca: their sin of lust is also and simultaneously a sin of idolatry. They have created out of their love another God. The idolatry committed by Francesca and Paolo is the extreme consequence (and a stunning modification) of the threat of idolatry inherent in love poetry: that of turning one’s beloved into a divinity. As seen in the Introduction, Guido Guinizzelli acknowledged the threat of idolatry in a slightly naïve but incisive way at the end of his Al cor gentil: Donna, Deo mi dirà: “Che presomisti?” siando l’alma mia a Lui davanti. “Lo ciel passasti e ’nfin a Me venisti, e desti in vano amor Me per semblanti;

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ch’a Me conven le laude e a la reina del regname degno, per cui cessa onne fraude.” (Al cor gentil, 51–7) Lady, God will say to me: when my soul stands before Him, “How could you presume? You went past heaven, coming finally to me, and tried to compare Me to a vain love. All praises are due to me alone and to the Queen of this noble realm through whom all evil ends.” Al cor gentil is a poem articulated rhetorically by simile and based on similitude – the likeness between love and the gentle heart, which is revealed and kindled by the woman’s beauty (her “piacere”). As Piero Boitani puts it: “God’s accusation is directed not simply against idolatry, but against its very basis, that analogy which has dominated the poem so far and which, pushed to the extreme, brings the poet to take God Himself as a mere ‘semblanti,’ a term of comparison for ‘vain love.’”91 The poet’s apology is an attempt at rephrasing and reconceptualizing the notion of likeness: “Dir li porò: Tenne d’angel sembianza / che fosse del Tuo regno; / non me fu fallo, s’in lei posi amanza” (But I shall say to Him, “She had the likeness of an angel from your kingdom. It is not my fault if I fell in love with her,” 58–60). The woman is not a mere analogy for God, one that can be simply framed in a simile. Her beauty captures something of the divine, and brings the figure of an angel to the lover’s perception, thus making his love for her ingenuous and innocent. In the story of Francesca and Paolo Dante applies a vertiginous spin to the traditional narrative of erotic idolatry, so neatly enunciated by Guinizzelli. The lovers of Inferno 5 modify the unidirectional attraction between the male poet-lover and the distant female beloved, whose interest in the lover, although demonstrated by gazes (both benign and petrifying) and the occasional greeting, is never constructed as an active attraction. Paolo and Francesca’s similarity in beauty and reciprocal attraction (recalling both that between the bride and the groom of the Song of Songs and that between Tristan and Iseult) hastens them into the fusion in one “soul” pursuing in death their Love-asgod, the idolatrous inversion of the Christian God-as-love. The triangulation of two lovers and God is also explicit in the “legend” of Dante and Beatrice, fabricated by Dante himself and rewritten over the years in the Vita Nuova, the Convivio, and the Comedy. In such legend, the death of the woman marks a moment of separation and not of union between the lovers. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the only connection between Dante and Beatrice across the threshold of death is poetry – the extension and

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upward direction of the lover’s “selfish” praise, which turns the beloved physicality into words and both internalizes and projects into eternity the object of desire. Dante takes Jaufré’s “amor de lonh” and makes it truly “from afar,” from a distance beyond time and space. Dante’s Beatrice is also a more cunning response to the threat of idolatry, both with respect to the model of Guinizzelli and of his own Inferno 5. On the one hand, Dante performs a more radical angelification of the beloved: although still constructed within the canon of the non-activelyattracted woman, Beatrice does not merely bring a spark of the divine on earth; she is the full embodiment of divine beauty. Beatrice does not merely look like an angel; she is one.92 On the other hand, beginning with the Vita Nuova, Dante radically merges the earthly and divine experiences and rhetorics of love, by constructing a framework of supernal reading, which acts as an invisible gloss to Dante’s own erotic text, making it, like the Song of Songs, already sacred, albeit intact in its eroticism.93 In the story of Francesca, as in the legend of Jaufré Rudel, the simultaneous union and death of the lovers also signal the end of poetry. Poetry as desire is stretched “until” that point. In Inferno 5 Dante insinuates this detail in a highly understated yet deeply powerful way – “quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante” (that day we read no farther in it, Inferno 5, 138) followed by the fainting of the poet-pilgrim. On the contrary, in the Dante and Beatrice legend, the death of the lover results in a separation that is bridged by poetry. Poetry as desire crosses the threshold of death and becomes supernal. Thus, in Dante’s work, poetry, not the love for the woman, runs the risks of becoming idolatrous. When the attraction between the lovers is eventually reinstated in the Comedy, the conjunction with the woman implies at once the death and the resurrection of the poet. At the beginning of Hell, the lady comes to the lover’s aid in a moment of mortal combat on the river of death (Inferno 2), invoking, as we have seen in chapter 1, a radically ambiguous L/love: – “Amor mi mosse che mi fa parlare” (Inferno 2, 72), which eerily both prefigures and echoes Francesca’s “Amor … mi prese” (Inferno 5, 103–4). At the top of purgatory, Dido’s word – “conosco i segni dell’antica fiamma” (I know the tokens of the ancient flame, Purgatorio 30, 48), which in the Aeneid (“agnosco veteris vestigia flammae,” 4, 23) encapsulate the excitement and fear of the Carthaginian queen in the face of her impending fall – introduce Dante’s quite unexpected meeting with his (now rather priestly) beloved. In the Paradiso, the lovers’ triangulation, sustained by the same erotic/religious rhetoric which substantiates the whole third otherworldly realm, is constructed so that Beatrice is always one step ahead of Dante and one step below God, in keeping with the all-encompassing yet diversifying economy

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of desire which animates Dante’s heaven (see chapter 3). Thus, the lovers avoid dangerous reciprocity and similarity, yet achieve fusion and divinity. In the same way in which Beatrice’s love, as opposed to that of Cavalcanti’s lady (or to the love shared by Paolo and Francesca, Tristan and Iseult, Jaufrè and the distant beloved, the soul and Christ), is not deadly for the poet, so does Dante at the end of the Paradiso obtain the unique privilege of achieving vision face to face without dying.

5

The Kiss la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante Inferno 5, 136 (he kissed my mouth all trembling)

The brutality of the anaphora’s conclusion is partially corrected, indeed even sweetened, by the pilgrim’s answer in lines 114–20, where desire conjures up alluring images. With a great narrative twist, Dante extricates himself from the last-word feeling of the “Amore-morte” lines by depicting his pilgrim as a careless listener. Feeling himself filled with sweet thoughts and desire, he is compelled to ask for more narration: Quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio menò costoro al doloroso passo! Ma dimmi: al tempo d’i dolci sospiri, a che e come concedette amore che conosceste i dubbiosi disiri? (Inferno 5, 113–14 and 118–20) How many sweet thoughts, what great desire, brought them to the woeful pass! … but tell me, in the time of the sweet sighs, by what and how did Love grant you to know the dubious desires? The pilgrim, like us readers, seems to forget about Amore-Morte (recalled very euphemistically in the “doloroso passo”) and wants to know more about “Amore–cor gentile,” and “Amore-amato.” In doing so, he reintroduces into the process of love the duration that had been suppressed in the rushed turn of the anaphora lines. Between the coup de foudre and the “woeful

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pass,” many sweet thoughts, a lot of desire, sweet sighs, and hesitation create and inhabit an extended stretch of uncertainty. Desire is always connected to sweetness in this canto. The sweet nest (“dolce nido,” Inferno 5, 83) was the destination of the dove’s pseudoAugustinian journey of desire; here sweet thoughts (“dolci pensieri,” 113) and sweet sighs (“dolci sospiri,” 118) are paired with desire, a desire that is truly ambiguous, no longer a mere instinct, not yet a full-fledged sentiment: “i dubbiosi disiri” (120). The notion of sweetness in Dante is rooted in the sensual experience of taste, and yet it becomes a wide-ranging metaphor for everything that is pleasant – to the sight, to the ear, and to memory (with a slight tint of nostalgia).1 Moreover, sweetness is a crucial metapoetic concept in Dante – one that links language, style and content. The elusive “sweet” in “sweet new style” (“dolce stil novo” – the plain, yet mysterious poetic program of Purgatorio 24, 57) is both a precise tonality of language and style and a spiritual/harmonic sweetness seeping through the poet’s verses.2 In the savouring of sweet thoughts and sighs, the “fin che” of desire is stretched again. Moreover, thoughts and sighs suddenly internalize and de-sexualize the lovers’ desire, which is abstracted into their inner selves. Thoughts, the internal revolving of the beloved image, and sighs, the physical symptom of the internal turmoil, hint to the moment of apprehension in the process of love, in which, as we have seen in the previous chapter, the lover constructs inside him/herself an image of the beloved: according to Cavalcanti, this is a “new person of desire.” This instance of extension, depicting the turmoil and indecision inside the lovers with regard to both their own feelings and those of the partner, is located between the tragic punctuality of the anaphora and the chiasmus lines, and climaxes into the “doubtful desires” (“dubbiosi disiri”), the thrilling and dangerous moment in which desire is no more a supposition and not yet a certitude.3 By pairing up doubt and desire, Dante introduces a new, more modern psychological dimension into the episode of Paolo and Francesca. Doubt also functions as a form of restraint on desire: only when reciprocity is revealed do the lovers dare to take the “woeful step.” As Francesco da Buti puts it, the fear of rejection is a powerful suppressant of sin.4 Moreover, in the expression “conosceste i dubbiosi desiri” (you knew the doubtful desires) Dante articulates the erotic with the cognitive dimension of desire. The lovers’ desires are not unsure, but are unrevealed. Although the sighs are hints of their reciprocal state of attraction, there is a need for a clearer sign in order to precipitate the kiss. Doubt ignites and sustains the lovers’ process of knowledge all the way to revelation and creates an extension in which desire fully unloads its potentiality for unsettling the balance between lust, love, and Love.5

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The pilgrim’s speech, replaying the anaphora lines in slow motion with the addition of long, pensive, and sighing pauses, and the quasi-tautological expression “dubbiosi disiri,” brings into focus a crucial dimension of desire: retardation. So far, we have explored desire as anticipatory, as the drive that allows the lover to possess the beloved thing in the very act of desiring it, and as the implication, embedded in the idea of pilgrimage, of being both en route and already there. In pilgrimage, however, desire is also what keeps the pilgrim on the road and occasionally turns him or her back toward the point of departure. Thus, desire is also what keeps the lover on track against sudden acceleration, delays the achievement of the longed-for object, and fills that delay with both pleasure and doubt. Desire stretches the lover beside and beyond self and satisfies him or her in the very act of desiring. Desire is the clash of two inside forces, acceleration and delay, anticipation and postponement. In lines 113–20 Dante portrays both aspects of desire. On the one hand a great desire (“quanto disio,” 113) rushes (“menò,” 114; the key verb in this canto, as explained in chapter 3) the lovers to the “woeful step.” On the other hand, the “doubtful desires” slow down and extend the period of sweet thoughts and sighs, a quasi-innocent time before the fall. In a brief turn of lines Dante reminds his readers that desire is both the storm that compels the lovers toward each other and the force that delays that very encounter. While the pilgrim’s speech emphasizes the hope of the “before,” Francesca’s answer points out the desperation of the “after.” Her extended lamentation for the happiness of her life on earth is embroidered with important intertextual references: E quella a me: Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice ne la miseria; e ciò sa ’l tuo dottore. Ma s’a conoscer la prima radice del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto, dirò come colui che piange e dice. (Inferno 5, 121–6) And she to me, “there is no greater sorrow than to recall, in wretchedness, the happy time; and this your teacher knows. But if you have such great desire to know the first root of our love, I will tell you as one who weeps and tells.” These lines result from a montage of Boethian and Virgilian reminiscences, and have elicited a century-long debate regarding whether the “doctor” in question is Virgil or Boethius. On the one hand, Virgil is more obviously

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Dante’s “dottore” (and is mentioned as such in Inferno 5, 70), on the other hand, the words employed by Francesca echo more directly Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (2, prose 4): “In omni adversitate fortunae, infelicissimum est genus infortunii fuisse felicem” (In all adversity of fortune, the most wretched kind, is once to have been happy).6 Virgil is implicated here through multiple personae. The commentary tradition explains that Virgil is summoned in these lines as the historical character who in life fell from the grace of Emperor Augustus (as Virgil features himself in the Eclogues), and as Dante’s fictional character who, while achieving poetic glory in earthly life, in death falls out of the grace of the celestial emperor.7 Virgil knows about misery, first as a Roman citizen but, more important, as a failed Christian. Finally, Virgil knows about misery as the poet of the fall of Troy, of Dido’s tragic love, and of his own underworld. All the Virgilian traces in this passage are connected to the story of Dido and Aeneas, and endow Francesca with elements of both Aeneas and Dido, challenging the premise that in this episode “pious” Dante is Aeneas, and tragic Francesca is Dido. The most recognizable intertextual trace comes from Aeneid 2, the beginning of Aeneas’s narration to Dido of the fall of Troy, which is also the beginning of Dido’s falling in love with him (“Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem … Sed si tantus amor casus cognoscere nostros … Quamquam animus meminisse horret, luctuque refugit, incipiam”; Too deep for words, O queen is the grief you bid me renew … yet if such is your desire to learn of our disasters … though my mind shudders to remember, and has recoiled in pain, I will begin, Aeneid 2, 3, 10 and 13).8 The themes of past happiness and present misery are also the leitmotif of Dido’s last speech in Aeneid 4, and are in fact the very climax of the episode, the content of Dido’s very last words (“novissima verba”): dulces exuviae, dum fata deusque sinebat, accipite hanc animam meque his exsolvite curis. vixi et quem dederat cursum Fortuna peregi, et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago. urbem praeclaram statui, mea moenia vidi, ulta virum poenas inimico a fratre recepi, felix, heu nimium felix, si litora tantum numquam Dardaniae tetigissent nostra carinae. (Aeneid 4, 651–8) O relics once dear, while God and Fate allowed! Take my spirit and release me from my woes! My life is done and I have finished the course

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that Fortune gave; and now in majesty my shade shall pass beneath the earth. A noble city I have built; my own walls I have seen; avenging my husband I have exacted punishment from my brother and foe – happy, too happy, had but the Dardan keels never touched our shores. Tellingly, Dido regrets two different happinesses: the one she shared while with Aeneas (“dulces exuviae,” 651), and the one she enjoyed before meeting Aeneas (“felix, heu nimuim felix,” 658). This is exactly the dilemma posited by Francesca: is she mourning her love with Paolo after the kiss, or her love before the kiss (the time of the doubtful desires, when love was happening but not yet “sinful”), or the time before Paolo, or even, most generally, life on earth? The most muffled intertextual echo comes from the last (and most eschatological) chapter of the story of Aeneas and Dido, the sixth book of the Aeneid, where Virgil twice recalls the fact that the souls in the underworld are still trapped by earthly concerns, in the campi lugentes and in the Elysian Fields.9

The quotation from Boethius, another of Dante’s “authors” who “knows a lot” about happiness, fall, and misery, injects into canto 5 a scenario completely different from the Virgilian one. The statement “quoted” by Francesca occurs in the second book of the Consolation of Philosophy, in the context of the discussion of Fortune’s capriciousness. The image of the storm recurs frequently in this section to illustrate the powerlessness of the human being in the face of changes of fortune.10 Philosophy opposes three arguments to Boethius’s claim that the saddest thing in misfortune is the remembrance of past happiness: that Boethius’s case is not that desperate, that fortune is fickle, and that the human being should not count on human happiness. Book 2 of the Consolation of Philosophy contains a lengthy discussion of the theme of the vanity of human power and glory, and ends on a slightly dissonant note: a poem in celebration of love. The poem praises love as a conjunctive force in both heaven and earth (as such it includes marital love), and as the core of human happiness: “O felix hominum genus, / Si vestros animos amor, / Quo caelum regitur, regat!” (O happy race of men if love who rules the sky could rule your hearts as well).11 While for Francesca love is the beginning of misfortune, for Boethius it is the antidote to the fickleness of human things. The casting of Francesca as an imprisoned Boethius affords the reader a glimpse into the magnitude of infernal punishment and on the

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vast difference between the earthly and the otherworldly dungeon: in Hell there is no space for philosophical consolation, but only for the sad appraisal of an unredeemable past. Boethius is for Dante and the Middle Ages the poet of consolation, of the overcoming of human miseries through philosophical abstraction.12 In the second book of the Convivio Dante strategically deploys Boethius in this role. The reading of the Consolation of Philosophy (together with Cicero’s On Friendship) begins as a form of consolation for the death of Beatrice, and ends up inspiring in Dante a love for Lady Philosophy.13 In the complex system of references that ties the end of the Vita Nuova to the Convivio (and both to the Comedy), the experience of Boethius allows for the turning of the Vita Nuova’s “donna gentile” into Lady Philosophy – that is, the turning of a suspiciously carnal passion (although one born of compassion) into the desire for knowledge that inspires the Convivio. In Purgatorio 2, however, Dante refutes his previous stand. Cato’s stern rebuke to the souls falling under the spell of the sweetness of Casella’s singing Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona – the song which opens the second treatise of Convivio, where the metamorphosis of the “gentle lady” into Lady Philosophy takes place – is a powerful reminder of Dante’s rejection of his own consolation of philosophy.14 The Virgilian and Boethian intertexts create a suspension of judgment in the reader. Although both emphasize the bitterness of the recollection of happiness in times of misery, they point to widely different outcomes: a new beginning (Aeneas), consolation (Boethius), and desperation (Dido). Moreover, the Virgilian and Boethian intertexts emphasize the theme of happiness within Francesca’s speech. In Dante, and in the Middle Ages more broadly, the concept of happiness is directly linked to natural desire, and yet not obviously or openly related to erotic love, but rather to ethics and wisdom. According to the influential Aristotelian/Thomistic definition from the Ethics, which Dante adopts in the Banquet, “happiness is activity in accordance with virtue in a perfect life” (“Felicitade è operazione secondo virtude in vita perfetta,” Convivio 4, xvii, 8).15 Happiness is a full-circle exercise of virtue according to the principle of medietas, through which one embraces virtue and avoids the excess or defect of its corresponding vice. Happiness results from both the development and the control of the natural desire, which points instinctively to the different objects of pleasure. In the fourth book of Convivio the discourse on happiness dovetails with that of desire and pleasure. Happiness represents the healthy fructification of the hormen, the divinely instituted natural desire that, as we have seen in chapter 2, serves as a compass to human development but must also be kept under the strict control of reason:

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E però vuole santo Augustino, e ancora Aristotile nel secondo dell’Etica, che l’uomo s’ausi a ben fare e a rifrenare le sue passioni, acciò che questo tallo che detto è, per buona consuetudine induri e rifermisi nella sua rettitudine, sì che possa fruttificare, e del suo frutto uscire la dolcezza dell’umana felicitade. (Convivio 4, xxi, 14) Therefore St. Augustine asserts, as does Aristotle in the second book of the Ethics, that one should make a habit of doing well and of restraining one’s passions in order that this sprout of which we spoke may grow strong through good habit and be strengthened in its uprightness, so that it may bear fruit and from this fruit bring forth the sweetness of human happiness. The fruit of happiness is sweet, like the sweet thoughts and sighs that serve as the primary sensual rhetoric in the conversation between Dante and Francesca. When raised under the strict control of reason and virtue, natural desire (described as “tallo,” the sprout) leads to happiness. And happiness, for Aristotle, Thomas, and Dante alike is the embrace or junction with the beloved object: “E quello che massimamente è dilettoso a noi, quello è nostra felicitade e nostra beatitudine, oltre la quale nullo diletto è maggiore, né nullo altro pare” (And whatever is most of all delightful to us constitutes our happiness and our blessedness, beyond which there is no greater delight, nor any equal, Convivio 4, xxii, 9). In the depths of misery, Francesca still retains the (courtly/stilnovo) conviction that natural desire is guiltless and, if pursued to its extreme consequences, will yield happiness. In Francesca’s speech, “felice” (happy) rhymes with “radice” (root), a further indication that the discourse on natural desire from the Convivio and its botanical rhetoric of fructification are still active in these lines. Not surprisingly, in the central cantos of the Purgatorio, while rewriting his theory of natural desire, Dante employs the same rhyme scheme as Inferno 5 to remind his readers in a quasi-anxious turn of phrase that there is no happiness in the excessive love of earthly things, which are not, by definition, the root (“radice”) and fruit (“frutto”) of human happiness (“uom felice”): Altro ben è che non fa l’uom felice non è felicità, non è la buona essenza, d’ogne ben frutto e radice. (Purgatorio 17, 133–5)

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Another good there is which does not make man happy, it is not happiness, it is not the good essence, the fruit and root of every good. Finally, Francesca’s tragic meditation on past happiness conjures up another crucial theme for this canto: memory. In addition to the Boethian and Virgilian references, the commentary tradition conveys also a theological reference for lines 121–6: Aquinas’s claim that “the recollection of past goods in so far as we have had them, causes pleasure; in so far as we have lost them, causes sorrow” (“Memoria praeteritorum bonorum, in quantum fuerunt habita, delectationem causat; sed in quantum sunt amissa, causat tristitiam,” Summa Theologiae 2a–2ae, q. 36, a. 1 ad 4).16 This echo is rather dull if read solely in the context of Thomas’s discussion of envy in question 36, but it does illuminate the case of Francesca when contextualized within Thomas’s discussion of pleasure, and of whether hope and memory can at all be causes of pleasure (Summa Theologiae 1a–2ae, q. 32). Thomas explains that pleasure results from the joining of the one who is pleased to the pleasurable object, and from the knowledge of this conjunction’s occurence.17 He establishes movement as the cause of pleasure, stating that change is good both in the experience of pleasure (because sometimes the continuous presence of the object of pleasure exceeds the measure of the subject, and its demotion is actually pleasurable) and in knowledge, where, in truly Augustinian fashion, things needs to come and go in order for the “big picture” to be appreciated (“aliqua non poterunt apprehendi tota simul, delectat in his transmutatio, ut unum transeat et alterum succedat, et sic totum sentiatur”).18 Only when a subject comes close to being unchangeable is it untroubled by the continuous presence of the pleasurable object and able to have simultaneous knowledge of all things. At that point, pleasure itself becomes continuous: Si ergo sit aliqua res cuius natura sit intransmutabilis; et non possit in ea fieri excessus naturalis habitudinis per continuationem delectabilis; et quae possit totum suum delectabile simul intueri, non erit ei transmutatio delectabilis. Et quanto aliquae delectationes plus ad hoc accedunt, tanto plus continuari possunt. (Summa Theologiae 1a–2ae, q. 32, a. 2 co) If therefore there be any thing, whose nature is unchangeable; the natural mode of whose being cannot be exceeded by the continuation of any pleasing object; and which can behold the whole object of its delight at once – to such a one change will afford no delight. And the more any pleasures approach to this, the more are they capable of being continual.

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Unchangeable natures (such as God, the angels, and the blessed) can experience pleasure in one simultaneous and timeless moment, without excess or loss. Aquinas argues that the actual experience of pleasure is more powerful than the recorded experience of it. Thus, there are three degrees of intensity of pleasure: in presence, in hope, and in memory – the last being the least powerful because it is only based on apprehension.19 While the memory of pleasure is foreclosed in the past, the hope of pleasure is based on “a certainty of the real presence of the pleasing good” (“inquantum importat quandam certitudinem realis praesentiae boni delectantis”). As such, it is a greater source of pleasure than even love and desire, which lack the firmness of certainty.20 Aquinas then moves on to discuss an oxymoron: can sadness cause pleasure? (Is Francesca experiencing also pleasure in the sad recollection of her tragic love?). The answer is cautiously affirmative. There are two types of sadness, one in reality and one in memory, both of which can cause pleasure. The actual sadness brings to mind the beloved, absent object, and, therefore, it causes pleasure (“inquantum facit memoriam rei dilectae, de cuius absentia aliquis tristatur”). Recollected sadness brings pleasure, as the mind acknowledges that it has overcome the moment of sadness.21 Finally, as in the case of Francesca, the recollection of pleasant things that have been lost may cause sadness (“memoria delectabilium, ex eo quod sunt amissa, potest causare tristitiam,” Summa Theologiae 1a–2ae, q. 32, a. 4 ad 2). For Francesca (and all the damned) hope is foreclosed, as peremptorily announced by the gates of Hell (“Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch’intrate” Abandon every hope, you who enter, Inferno 3, 9). The underlying condition of the damned is despair, the opposite of hope, the certainty of having forever lost both the objects of their earthly pleasures and the supreme aim of their desire (God). As opposed to the other damned, however, Francesca is “stuck” with her object of desire/pleasure – a situation that is paralleled, by contrast, only by Ugolino’s being literally stuck in ice with the object of his utmost hate. Francesca is inextricably linked to her object of pleasure, Paolo (“questi che mai da me non fia diviso”; this one, who never shall be parted from me, Inferno 5, 135:) and also to the certainty of having lost “the big picture.” Thus, she can experience neither the pleasure of the recollection of the absent love nor the pleasure of having evaded a miserable situation. A truly mutable subject, as her being buffeted by the storm proves, Francesca is condemned to experience her pleasure in a continuum, the endless present of infernal damnation. She is an imperfect subject forced to experience, again and again, perfect pleasure.

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The transition between the lines of the anaphora and those of the chiasmus problematizes the theme of desire in this canto. On the one hand, we have the pilgrim’s lingering on the moment of the “doubtful desires,” of the restless expectation and hope of the lovers. On the other hand, Francesca’s sorrowful reflection on the tragic powers of memory fixes her experience of pleasure to a bleak fastidium. Retardatory desire enacts a slow-motion process that ends up consigning the future to the past, and hope to memory. In the lovers’ endless present, hope and memory frame desire as a sort of foreclosed future anterior, the moment in which “they will have had” the experience of pleasure. Their desolate pleasure has become continuous, along with the damning knowledge of their experience. Interestingly, the “first root” of Paolo and Francesca’s love is actually pleasure. They read “per diletto” (for pleasure, for entertainment) about how Lancelot was “constrained” by love. The lovers are unwary and alone, in opposition to the crowded environment of the story about which they are reading. The absence of suspicion can be interpreted, as Francesco da Buti pointed out, either in negative (the lovers believe that Gianciotto does not know about the affair) or in positive (the lovers are innocent as they do not yet know what is about to happen, and do not guess their own feelings).22 Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse; soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto. (Inferno 5, 127–9) One day, for pastime, we read of Lancelot, how love constrained him; we were alone, suspecting nothing. Of the three elements of the “first root” of the lovers’ disaster – the pleasure of reading, their being alone, and the absence of any suspicion – “reading” is perhaps the slightly most odd, and deserving of more attention. In these lines Dante loudly asserts his only acknowledged intertext of the story of Paolo and Francesca: the story of Lancelot and Guinevere – the romance tradition that from Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot du Lac spread throughout medieval Europe by means of a vast and complex corpus of affiliated texts. It is now accepted that the book the lovers are reading is the so-called Lancelot, a prose version of the story, widely circulating both as individual text and as part of the Graal cycle. This identification rests, among other things, on the basis that the prose Lancelot features the scene of the kiss, which is not part of Chrétien’s Lancelot du Lac.23

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The critical tradition focuses mostly on the scene of the kiss, but it is worth emphasizing that Dante singles out two aspects of the Lancelot story, one preparatory to, and the other precipitating the centrepiece of canto 5, the lovers’ kiss. First, Dante focuses on “how love constrained” the knight. His phrasing suggests a close resemblance between the way in which Love took hold of the knight (“come amor lo strinse,” 128) and of the Italian lovers in the anaphora line (“amor … prese costui” / “amor … mi prese,” 101 and 104). This, however, is only partially reflected in the Lancelot. The knight, described as the most beautiful young man in the kingdom, falls in love with the queen upon seeing her for the first time at court, struck by her beauty, which overshadows the beauty of all other women. However, when he later recaps for the queen his falling in love with her, Lancelot identifies the first root of his love as the moment when the queen called him “friend.”24 Secondly, Dante focuses on the scene of the kiss, which, as Lorenzo Renzi points out, in the prose Lancelot is a long and convoluted episode involving four characters (two of them in love, and two acting as intermediaries), three couples (one of them homosexual), and two kisses.25 Following Renzi’s analysis of the scene, we have Galehault, formerly a foe of King Arthur turned into a member of the court after becoming Lancelot’s loyal friend, arranging an encounter between the queen and Lancelot (disguised as the black knight). The meeting takes place at nightfall, in a locus amoenus where the group, deliberately kept down to the minimal number of participants, is going for pleasure (“nous irons la aval deduire” – recalling Paolo and Francesca’s reading “per diletto”). The queen, Galehault, and three ladies, among whom is the dame of Malehault (in love with Lancelot), are met by Galehault’s seneschal and the black knight. Guinevere, whose interest in Lancelot is never reported previously in the text, starts pressing the black knight regarding his enterprises, and makes him confess that they were performed to win her love. She then ironically suggests that his love for her actually hides a love for another woman, at which point Lancelot is about to faint and the queen summons Galehault. Seeing the knight in such distress because of Guinevere’s verbal harassment, Galehault suggests that the queen have mercy (“merci”) on him, and proposes to her a love-contract whereby she gives Lancelot her love, takes him as her knight, and offers herself as his dame. Galehault is chosen as the guarantor of the contract, which must be signed by a kiss.26 The queen agrees. Lancelot’s response, as Renzi notices, is not quite passionate enough to call him “a great lover,” as Dante does, since all he can do is to thank her (“Dame, grans mercis!”), and the three go off in order to perform the kiss, which the queen famously impresses on Lancelot’s mouth. Notwithstanding Galehault’s intervention, the dame of Malehault sees the kiss.

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Subsequently, Guinevere, not knowing that the Dame of Malehault has seen her, obtains Galehault’s silence about the event, and Galehault in turn obtains from the queen a promise to be the sole companion of Lancelot. “Companionage” is in the medieval-knightly world a quite strong form of homoerotic friendship. It describes an exclusive and extended relationship between two knights in times of war and peace, and implies a tie that exploits the full spectrum of love rhetoric.27 And indeed, the only character who truly dies for the love of Lancelot is Galehault, who lets himself die of consumption after receiving the (erroneous) news that Lancelot has been killed. Galehault’s death is foretold in an intricate section of the Lancelot, involving dreams, interpretations, magic and, interestingly, a book. The scene of the kiss is then replayed with different characters. The queen acts as an intermediary between Galehault and the lady of Malehault, who end up kissing (“si fa tant la reine que il s’entrebaisent”). At the end of the night Galehault goes to sleep with Lancelot and the queen with the Lady of Malehault, with both couples talking about their loves. The extent of Dante’s borrowing from the Lancelot is still a matter of debate in Dante scholarship. The intertext, so loudly invoked by Dante, amounts to nearly nothing in the factual weaving of the text, especially considering that even the kiss, which Dante describes as patterned on that between the queen and the knight, is actually a misprision: while in the Lancelot the queen kisses the quasi-failing lover, in Inferno 5 Paolo famously kisses Francesca. While Paolo, who is silent throughout the episode and trembles (“tremante”) at the moment of the kiss, retains some qualities of the original Lancelot, who is also speechless in front of the queen and physically fails during the kiss sequence, the passion-driven Francesca shares virtually nothing with the composed and scheming Guinevere. The discrepancy between the two texts has led to opposite critical conclusions: that Dante employs the Lancelot just as a pretext, or that Dante might know different traditions of the Lancelot story, where male agency in the kiss is more pronounced, and/or that the intertextuality between the Lancelot tradition and Dante runs at a deeper level than the actual plot.28 Scholarly differences notwithstanding, Dante clearly singles out the Lancelot story as a fundamental text in the episode of Paolo and Francesca by quoting it three times in just a few lines: reading as the first root of love (127–8); the lovers’ enacting of Guinevere and Lancelot’s kiss (130–6); and, finally, by underlining that the role of the romance is so central that the book itself, and even its author, becomes personified as one of its characters (“Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse”; A Galehault was the book and he who wrote it, 137). With a celebrated meta-literary twist that I shall discuss at greater length in

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the next chapter, Francesca bestows upon the prose Lancelot itself (and its author) the role of intermediary that Galehault plays in the French text. The most important borrowing from the Lancelot story might well be theme of the intermediary, which helps explaining the surprising decalage between the implied and the actual role of the Lancelot within Inferno 5. As Renzi notices, the role of the intermediary is presented in a positive light in the Lancelot and in the courtly culture surrounding it.29 Just before the night of the kiss, for instance, Galehault had returned from a successful diplomatic mission. Both his and the queen’s intermediary roles are crucial and explicitly appreciated by the other parties. On the contrary, in the story of Paolo and Francesca, the role of the intermediary appears to be tainted with a negative light, due to the suggested conclusion that “it is the book/author who sent them to hell.” Until this point in the canto, the third party of this affair had been “Amor.” Love as intermediary appears at the end of the catalogue of the great lovers, sustains the anaphora lines, and lingers in the retardatory transition between anaphora and chiasmus lines. As seen in the previous chapter, this Love is constructed in a highly ambiguous manner, and may be taken to represent both the demigod protagonist of countless love lyrics and of Dante’s own Vita Nuova and/or a supremely idolatrous divinity. Without warning, Dante withdraws Amore, and leaves his lovers alone with a book, constructing a new and original trinity: the lover, the beloved, and the book. The lovers’ (non)-suspicion might then fall on the act of reading itself, which performs magic under their unwary eyes. Moreover, the book of Inferno 5 acts as an intermediary, even as a catalyst, between two romance stories that are both inherent to Inferno 5: the stories of Lancelot and Guinevere and of Tristan and Iseult. Thus, the reading of the book in Inferno 5 sets up a stage where the traditions of the Tristan and the Lancelot conflate to create not only the new text, which is born from them, but also a new framework for understanding the negotiations between love and death. The book turned Galehault of Inferno 5 has the same function as the love potion that hastens the falling in love of Tristan and Iseult. The main love scene in the Tristan episode is strikingly similar to Inferno 5, but with inverted implications: it implies the kiss and displays sexual intercourse whereas Inferno 5 parades the kiss and implies sexual intercourse. The Cornish lovers, like Paolo and Francesca, are also unsuspiciously engaged in leisure activities such as playing chess, and not thinking about love’s madness. The love potion causes a sudden change of heart in Tristan and a similar reaction in Iseult (“lo somigliante”): that is, it creates an abrupt state of

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similarity between the lovers. Like the book for Paolo and Francesca, the potion compels the lovers to look each other in the eyes and finally to interrupt their game in order to go in the boat’s cabin and start another game, which eventually leads them to death: “incominciano a fare quel giuoco che in tutta lor vita non ebbe fine et sempre vi g[i]ucarono volentieri” (and begin to play that game that never ended for the rest of their lives, and they always played it willingly).30 While in the Tristan falling in love and kissing/intercourse take place all at the same time under the spell of the philtre, in the story of Francesca the two moments are differentiated and isolated in the two rhetorical clusters of anaphora and chiasmus. The equation book/love potion, however, creates an interesting gap in the story of Paolo and Francesca, tainting, but only retrospectively, the naturalness of love asserted in the anaphora lines. Francesca recounts their falling in love as the instinctual and rightful development of their natural attraction. The book turned Galehault, however, later brings onto the stilnovo stage the shadow of the love philtre – which on the one hand upholds the innocence of the lovers, but on the other hand also hints at sexual intercourse. Most importantly, however, the book/philtre spoils retrospectively the role of love as guiltless natural attraction. The book as intermediary plays multiple roles in this story. If, on one hand, the story of Lancelot and Guinevere functions as an intermediary between Paolo and Francesca and Tristan and Iseult, on the other hand, the stories of Lancelot and Guinevere and of Tristan and Iseult coalesce through Dante. Dante’s text itself functions as an intermediary between the Lancelot and the Tristan, on the theme of love and death. Simon Gaunt points out a crucial difference between the stories of Lancelot and Tristan. In the Lancelot, the theme of dying for love is present under the guise of “talking about dying for love” – as, for instance, in the two episodes of attempted suicide by both Lancelot and Guinevere. According to Gaunt, the Lancelot “understands” the symbolic value of desire and death, whereas the theme of love and death in the Tristan is literal. Quoting Lancelot in a Tristan-like context of love and death, Dante “undoes” the symbolic understanding of desire and returns it to the plane of “reality.”31 While Lancelot simulates a suicide for love that turns out to be mere fainting, Tristan and Iseult die and look as if they had fainted from love. Dante brings the two instances together: at the end of the episode, the poet/pilgrim faints and appears to be dead: “caddi come corpo morto cade” (I fell as a dead body falls, Inferno 5, 142). The narrator of Paolo and Francesca enacts both the literal and the symbolic understanding of the theme of love and death. He both faints and dies because of the impression that the love story has made on him, thus embodying both the tragic and the

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ironic consequences of the two romances, and both implicating himself in and extricating himself from the complex game of literality and interpretation. According to Donald Maddox, the consequential acts of reading and kissing in Inferno 5 can be interpreted in the framework of the so-called Romanesque behaviour – a kind of courtly game that was in vogue in the late Middle Ages, defined by Maddox as “a remarkably serious form of amusement that could entail the adoption of the names and identities of characters of romance and reconstitution in minute detail of their language, sentiments, actions, activities and manners.”32 Game is certainly at play in the story of Paolo and Francesca. The lovers read for amusement and entertainment (“per diletto”), and their pleasure inadvertently turns into the cause of their very perdition. They inhabit a Tristan-Iseult framework, in which the lovers are playing a game of chess when they drink the potion. Yet, the potion is a book, the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, which in turn is itself cast as a character, namely the intermediary Galehault. The personification of the books suggests locating the Romanesque game on the intertextual plane rather than on the narrative and “reality” planes. Texts themselves are adopting names, identities, and manners of the characters of romance and of other texts. Rather than viewing Romanesque behaviour in Paolo and Francesca’s hastening to kiss upon reading of the kiss of Lancelot and Guinevere (which in itself would not be an accurate re-enactment), I see a carousel of imitation taking place among Lancelot-Guinevere, Tristan-Iseult, and Paolo-Francesca, so that each couple borrows something from the others and is eventually marked by this Romanesque experience. In Paolo and Francesca’s impersonation, Lancelot and Guinevere adopt features of Tristan and Iseult, while Galehault-turned-book becomes again a foe; meanwhile, different understandings of desire and death are revealed. While Paolo and Francesca are experiencing the pleasure and entertainment of reading, a much more complex pleasure awaits them at the end of the page. Throughout the reading the “doubtful desires” are made manifest by physical symptoms, the compulsion of looking into each other eyes and their blanching: Per più fïate li occhi ci sospinse quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso; ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse. (Inferno 5, 130–2) Several times that reading urged our eyes to meet and took the colour from our faces, but one moment alone it was that overcame us.

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The point that overcomes the lovers (here the reading of the kiss between Lancelot and Guinevere) has a resounding echo in Paradiso, where the pilgrim is blinded by the triumph surrounding God (“il punto che mi vinse”) and turns his eyes to Beatrice. Christian Moevs explains that this point, which the pilgrim sees for the first time in Paradiso 28, 16, is the most crucial link in the universe, “the nexus between spatiotemporal extension and selfsubsistent conscious being,” the point at which the mind trespasses into God.33 Non altrimenti il trïunfo che lude sempre dintorno al punto che mi vinse, parendo inchiuso da quel ch’elli ’nchiude, a poco a poco al mio veder si stinse: per che tornar con li occhi a Bëatrice nulla vedere e amor mi costrinse. (Paradiso 30, 10–15) not otherwise the triumph that plays forever around the Point which overcame me, seeming enclosed by that which it encloses, was gradually extinguished to my sight, wherefore seeing nothing and love constrained me to return with my eyes to Beatrice. The reference to Inferno 5 is especially evident, as Robert Hollander notes, in conjunction with the following “amor mi costrinse” (love constrained me), which parallels the “amor lo strinse” (love constrained Lancelot) of Inferno 5.34 Other details serve as important connections between the two passages. In both cases we have a “context” and a “point” that overcomes the “reader/s.” For Paolo and Francesca, the context is the narrative of “how Lancelot was constrained by love,” and the point is the kiss. For Dante, the context is the Empyrean triumph and the point is God who, as Dante clarifies at the end of his vision, is indeed a book (“legato con amore in un volume”; bound by love in one single volume, Paradiso 33, 86). The heavenly point, however, is larger than its context, because, although apparently enclosed by context, the point actually encloses it. In both cases we have two lovers and a text (PaoloFrancesca-Lancelot; Dante-Beatrice-God) and in both cases the lover’s gaze is compelled to move from the text to the eyes of the beloved – reading about love compels Paolo and Francesca (“sospinse”), while blindness and love compel Dante (“costrinse”). As a consequence, in all cases a woman’s mouth comes into focus: Guinevere’s longed-for smile being kissed; Francesca’s mouth being kissed; and Beatrice’s sweet smile being contemplated and dissolving into the fullness of divinity. While Paolo and Francesca’s proportional

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beauty leads them to reciprocal attraction, Beatrice’s blessed beauty is far superior to that of the lover, and is enjoyed only by her Creator: La bellezza ch’io vidi si trasmoda non pur di là da noi, ma certo io credo che solo il suo fattor tutta la goda. … ché, come sole in viso che più trema, così lo rimembrar del dolce riso la mente mia da me medesmo scema. (Paradiso 30, 19–21 and 25–7) The beauty I beheld transcends measure not only beyond our reach, but I truly believe that He alone who made it can enjoy it … for, as the sun does to the sight which trembles most, even so remembrance of the sweet smile shears my memory of its very self. While the lovers in Inferno 5 dissolve into each other through the kiss, the lover of Paradiso 30 sees his beloved dissolving into God. The formerly blind poet/lover is left speechless and without poetry: Dal primo giorno ch’i’ vidi il suo viso in questa vita, infino a questa vista, non m’è il seguire al mio cantar preciso; ma or convien che mio seguir desista più dietro a sua bellezza, poetando, come a l’ultimo suo ciascuno artista. (Paradiso 30, 28–33) From the first day when in this life I saw her face, until this sight, the continuing of my song has not been cut off, but now my pursuit must desist from following her beauty further in my verses, as at its utmost reach must every artist. Like Paolo and Francesca, the lover/pilgrim has also reached the conclusion and apex of a long discourse of desire. As seen in chapter 3, Dante’s uninterrupted spell of poetry can be interpreted as the extension of desire that sustains the pilgrim’s journey and leads him all the way to the vision of God. While the lovers of Inferno 5 stop reading after reaching “the point,” the pilgrim-lover gives up singing the extended praise of his beloved only after gazing into “the point” (and into Beatrice’s eyes). In both cases a black hole

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is formed around “the point” – where desire and love poetry both suddenly disappear. Yet, while the praise for Beatrice is generative of more poetry, engendering the vision of God, the poetry of Inferno 5 is petrified in the dead letter of hell. At the end of the canto, in the fainting/death of the pilgrim, Dante stages the disappearance of Francesca’s poet. When he regains consciousness, he leaves her behind to tell a completely different story of new torments and new characters (“novi tormenti e novi tormentati,” Inferno 6, 3). The final chiasmus of Inferno 5 parallels the anaphora lines not only in its rhetorical complexity, but also for its role as a second “reality check” on the meaning of desire and on the dangerous transition effected by love poetry: Quando leggemmo il disiato riso esser basciato da cotanto amante questi, che mai da me non fia diviso la bocca mi baciò tutto tremante. (Inferno 5, 133–6) When we read how the longed for smile was kissed by so great a lover, this one, who never shall be parted from me, kissed my mouth all trembling. Between “disiato riso” and “cotanto amante” at the end of the verse, and “questi” and “la bocca” at the beginning, readers of all times feel a vertiginous precipice. An abstraction (a smile) is mistaken for reality (a mouth). The “cotanto amante” turns out to be, sadly, just a “questi” – and you can hear the regret and almost the boredom in Francesca’s words. Reading of a kiss on a longed-for smile turns into the graphic kissing of a mouth, into the literal, pathetic tale of lust and adultery, when “questi” kisses “la bocca” – a strong word for medieval love poetry. In the peak of desire as “fin che,” the lovers elude the control of reason. The lovers’ death, both corporeal and eternal, is simultaneously sanctioned not so much because of the incompatibility between “literature” and “reality” but because in this very moment they have turned desire into fastidium, the unhappy satiety that follows attainment. The “fin che” of their desire is interpreted as “until,” it is not anymore “as long as” – and the lovers, caught in their fastidium for eternity, are unable to exert their wills on their desires and see them in a grander scheme.35 The very inextricability of Paolo and Francesca – one of the most estimable features of the canto, is polysemic too. While at the beginning of the episode the lightness of “quei due che insieme vanno” (those two that go

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together, Inferno 5, 74) suggested an image of desire that keeps on burning even in Hell, the sad heaviness of “questi che mai da me non fia diviso” (this one who never shall be parted from me, Inferno 5, 135) suggests that desire turned into fastidium has become their very punishment.36 Yet, Dante still envelops with ambiguity both the word and the notion of desire: even here, “disiato” is attached to the smile and not to the mouth, to the abstraction and not to the body. ✢✢✢

The kiss on the mouth is clearly the turning point of Inferno 5. The poetry of chiasmus emphasizes the kiss as the moment in which the lovers’ trajectory changes direction and both becomes the new, “unmediated” story of Paolo and Francesca and plunges into the abyss of perdition. The kiss of the mouth brings into the canto a multilayered cultural and poetic dimension, deriving from the manifold functions of the kiss in late medieval culture and from the way they were exploited in both religious and secular literature. More than a simple action of the body, the kiss is a “bodily technique,” as the sociologist Marcel Mauss calls it; is a bodily act that develops under cultural pressure and thus embodies aspects of a given culture.37 From both an anthropological and a psychoanalytical point of view, the kiss is linked to the act of eating, and also to the desire and pleasure connected to eating and infants’ suckling. Tellingly, the kiss is routinely connected to sweetness (figuratively to honey, as for instance in the Song of Songs, as well as in countless other celebrations of the erotic kiss), so that the pair eating/sense of taste is transposed into kissing/pleasure. In the Middle Ages, the kiss was a highly complex bodily and cultural act, which had a deeply symbolic connotation, was often performed in public, and established egalitarian as well as elitist relations. As Yannick Carré puts it, the mouth involved four major aspects of life in medieval culture: biological life in eating, affective life in kissing, intellectual life in speaking, and spiritual life in the coming and going of the soul as breath (animus, anima) through the mouth.38 In the formulation of all the various medieval kisses of the mouth, the sacred and profane are always inextricably linked. Theologically, the kiss is God’s “inspiration” of the soul into the creature. In liturgy, the kiss of peace (osculum pacis, or simply pax), a kiss of the mouth between the community at Mass, was the central event of communion and substituted for the lay people the experience of Eucharist throughout late antiquity and well into the Middle Ages. Legally, the kiss signified the actual signing of a contract, and also the end of hostilities between factions and even countries. The feudal

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investiture took place through a kiss bestowed by the lord on the mouth of the vassal, which Jacques le Goff depicts as a crucial moment of equality between the two men.39 In the affective sphere, the kiss on the mouth had a central role in both family (it sanctioned, for instance, the recognition of kin) and friendship. In the mystical experience, the kiss on the mouth (often un-problematically sexual and/or homoerotic) indicates the vanishing of the self into God. As Nicholas Perella points out, in both Jewish and Christian mysticism there is a crucial link between kissing and death, with kissing serving as the extreme dissolution and combination of the creature into the Creator.40 Carré quotes the quite shocking deep kiss on the mouth between Rupert of Deutz and Jesus, during a prayer in front of the cross.41 Quod cum festinus introissem, apprehendi, quem diligit anima mea, tenui illum, amplexatus sum eum, diutus osculatus sum eum. Sensi quam gradanter hunc gestum dilectionis admitteret, cum inter osculandum suum ipse os aperiet, ut profundius oscularetur. (De gloria et honore filii homins, super Matheum, 12) After entering in a rush, I took hold of him, whom my soul loves. I held him, I embraced him and kissed him for a long time. I felt that he gradually came to welcome this gesture of love, since during this kiss he opened his own mouth, in order to let me kiss him more deeply (my translation). Besides signalling the crucial moment of conjunction between self and God, the kiss of Jesus (and of saints such as Francis of Assisi) had vital healing powers throughout the Middle Ages, especially in curing leprosy, a disease which, tellingly, was connected to lust. Generally speaking, it was held that the kiss of the mouth had positive influences on the life of the human being and of society (signifying as it does peace, love, fidelity, health restored, and life itself), with two important exceptions: the kiss of lust, often depicted with the demon already lurking over the lovers, and the kiss of Judas, the one, but supremely powerful, kiss employed for treason. The erotic kiss is a cultural patchwork of all the other kisses: a gift, a contract, the sign of peace, the image of lust, and the mingling of the lovers into one another. As both Perella and Carré notice, the kiss has an important role in the vernacular poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The kiss of the mouth is one of the expected achievements of Cappellanus’s “pure love,” together with embraces and lying naked next to the beloved body.42 The kiss of the mouth figures prominently in troubadour lyrics and in

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romance, where it plays the role of uniting the lovers, enacting the exchange of their hearts and souls, as well as sealing the contract of fidelity and reciprocity between them. The lady’s kiss might at times mimic the feudal rite of vassalage: such is, according to Perella, the kiss imparted by Guinevere onto Lancelot’s mouth in the presence of the witness Galehault.43 Thus the kiss is the seal/sign of acceptance of the relation, a bond that is both physical and symbolic.44 The kiss is often presented as the bestowing of grace on the part of the woman and/or the vehicle of healing and blessedness for the lover. Medieval poets are not always in agreement as to whether the kiss is the prelude or the terminus for the love affair. For some, the kiss is the beginning of love and quite clearly serves as a prologue to sexual intercourse. For others, the kiss is the point of arrival of a long discourse of love, already containing all the possible blessedness and remaining the only physical intercourse between the lovers.45 According to Carré, the kiss on the mouth in all its versions is the very essence of a Middle Ages that was founded on equality, harmony, and community, and that flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.46 He observes a decline in the custom of the kiss of the mouth at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of fourteenth century, precisely the time period in which the story of Paolo and Francesca and Dante’s writing took place. In this period, we witness not only repeated clerical attacks against courtly love and kisses (culminating in the 1277 condemnation of Andreas Cappellanus’s De Amore), but also the last recorded kiss on the mouth of a leper (by St Francis), the changing of the liturgical Eucharistic kiss on the mouth into the kiss of an intermediary “instrument of peace” (“instrumentum pacis”) for the laity (for the clergy the kiss of the mouth was first eliminated in 1368 amongst the Carthusians), and the abolition of the kiss in contract law. By the fifteenth century, the kiss on the mouth had also disappeared with respect to peace treaties and feudal homage. The complex medieval discourse of the kiss of the mouth is reflected in the kiss of Inferno 5 and in the other occurrences of kissing in the Comedy. In the poem there are only three other kisses after the one between Paolo and Francesca. The kiss between the whore and the giant within the allegorical representation in Eden is clearly singled out as lustful, and politically seals the monstrous alliance between the Roman Church and the kingdom of France.47 The encounter between James and Peter in Paradiso 25 is articulated by the simile of doves kissing in friendship, which both conceals and implies the actual meeting of mouths.48 On the terrace of the lustful the purging souls, divided into heterosexual and homosexual ranks, exchange quick kisses of peace, in obvious contrast to the kiss of Inferno 5:

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Lì veggio d’ogne parte farsi presta ciascun’ ombra e basciarsi una con una sanza restar, contente a brieve festa; così per entro loro schiera bruna s’ammusa l’una con l’altra formica, forse a spïar lor via e lor fortuna. (Purgatorio 26, 31–6) Then on every side I see all the shades making haste and kissing one another, without stopping, content with brief greetings: thus within their dark band one ant touches muzzle with another, perhaps to spy out their way and their fortune. The comparison to the ants is interesting in that it recalls not only the industriousness and rationality of the ants (thus emphasizing the role of the will in restraining lust), but also because it resets the question of love both within the natural impulse (the affective communication among insects) and within the framework of a journey or pilgrimage of desire (the kiss gives indication on the road and on fortune).49 The kiss of Inferno 5 stands out among the Comedy’s other kisses for the force – one may even say the brutality – with which it tears asunder the delicate fabric of the discourse of love, and establishes at the same time the novelty and the unforgettable nature of the story of Paolo and Francesca. The kiss is a complex seal within the episode of Francesca and beyond – it signals the ends of words and the beginning of bodies. Although presented as the moment of maximum literary mimesis, it is also the instance in which love and love poetry “get out of hand.” The kiss creates and inhabits an unassailable, wordless space. Like the rest of the episode, the kiss of Inferno 5 is set on the cusp of the sacred and the profane. I shall discuss it in the context of two kisses on the mouth that are rarely invoked in its background, one verging on the spiritual and the other on the sexual: the kiss of the Song of Songs and the kiss of the pastourelle. I shall then contextualize the kiss between Paolo and Francesca with two non-kisses, both treading the border of sacred and profane: the kiss between Flamenca and Guillem and that between Dante and Beatrice.

The kiss that most inextricably mixes the sacred and the profane is the blunt first line of the Song of Songs: “let him kiss me with the kiss of the mouth” (“osculetur me osculo oris sui”). Bernard dedicates the first nine sermons of

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his commentary on the Song to the line in which the bride invokes the groom’s kiss of the mouth. The kiss, which Bernard interprets as the meeting of the human nature and God in Christ, goes through several transformations in the course of these texts. Throughout, however, it is presented as the endpoint of a long journey of desire of the human soul, a desire that is often troubled by restlessness and doubt. As in the case of Francesca, the kiss of the mouth of the Song of Songs in Bernard’s interpretation is the culmination of a long stretch of sweet thoughts and doubtful desires. Bernard begins by recalling the restless longing of the Fathers who lived before the coming of Christ, and their impatient bursts against signs and prophecies. Racked by doubt and in need of a tangible sign, the holy man begs: let him kiss me with the kiss of the mouth.50 The kiss is not a mere touching of the lips, but it is the true fulfillment of a burning desire: an infusion of joy, a revelation, and the indistinguishable mix of human and divine (“infusio gaudiorum, revelatio secretorum, mira quaedam et quodam modo indiscreta commixtio superni luminis et illuminatae mentis”). Surprisingly, it takes three to kiss, as it takes three to love. Bernard features the kiss as the fullness of the encounter between God (the kissing mouth) and human nature (the kissed mouth) in Christ (the kiss itself) – which is once again presented not as the mere pressing of two lips but as union.51 Subsequently, the kiss of the mouth is taken more legally, as a seal of assurance of the peace between God and humankind. At the beginning of the third sermon, Christ’s kiss is described as both the fulfillment and the stimulus of all desires, and as a unique and unexplainable experience: only those who receive it can properly grasp it (“neminem vel scire posse quid sit, nisi qui accipit,” 3, 1) and only those who eat of this manna can still hunger for more (“et solus qui edit, adhuc esuriet,” 3, 1).52 The kiss is an important turning point in the process of the desiderium supernum discussed in chapter 3; it is the moment when humankind’s “doubtful desires” are reassured and, at the same time, brought to their utmost burning. In the fourth Sermon Bernard examines the slightly odd phrasing of the Song, the emphasis on the mouth, when it would have been sufficient to say “let him kiss me.”53 The kiss of the mouth is explained as the apex of two other kisses. Since the soul might not be cleansed enough to aspire to the kiss of the mouth, “she” must undergo a process of salvation that passes through the kiss of the feet and the kiss of the hand (Sermons 3 and 4). After a digression on the virtues and vices of the body (Sermons 5 and 6), Bernard returns to the kiss as a sign of the strength and boldness of the bride’s love. She plainly and straightforwardly wants a kiss (not freedom, or a gift, or an inheritance, or knowledge: she wants a kiss) because she is in love: “amat autem quae osculum petit.” Bernard underlines the directness of the bride’s

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request. Her love is so pressing that she rushes into speech, and does so in a plain manner, without seduction, and in plain language, without rhetorical flourish. Unlike Francesca, the bride does not resort to any ornament of speech, like a proem or a captatio benevolentiae (“non facit prooemium, non captat benevolentiam”), but boldly and directly requests the kiss of the mouth.54 In Sermon 8 Bernard draws a comparison between the kiss of the Song of Songs and the moment in the Gospels when Jesus bestows the Holy Ghost unto the apostles, thus explaining the kiss as a matter of knowledge as well as love. The kiss of the bride, and that of the Apostles is then compared to another, ineffable kiss, the one between the Father (the kisser), the Son (the kissed), and the Holy Ghost (the kiss itself). Bernard makes a distinction between “the kiss of the kiss” (“osculum de osculo”), an act of condescension and participation, such as, for instance, the kiss between God and Paul, and the “kiss of the mouth” (“osculum de ore”), a kiss of equality and fullness, that between the Father and the Son.55 The kiss of the mouth that holds the Trinity together is beyond the claim of any creature, beyond all knowledge and blessedness: “Osculum est ore ad os sumptum; sed nemo appropiat. Osculum plane dilectionis et pacis; sed dilectio illa supereminet omni scientiae, et pax illa omnem sensum exsuperat” (This is a kiss from mouth to mouth, beyond the claim of any creature. It is a kiss of love and of peace, but of the love which is beyond all knowledge and that peace which is so much greater than we can understand, Sermo 8, 7). Bernard’s last reflection on the kiss eventually returns to the theme of desire and enjoyment. He imagines a dialogue between the bride and a group of the groom’s friends, who find her sad, even inconsolable. The friends recall the previous lapse of the bride (the sinful soul) and the groom’s (the Christ’s) forgiveness of her sins. He has allowed her to kiss his feet and hands, which, from the point of view of her fallen state, was all she could ask for. The bride/soul is aware of the groom’s/Christ’s favours and kindness. However, she cannot rest; she wants more: Age tamen, dic unde queamus satisfacere tibi. Non quiesco, ait, nisi osculetur me osculo oris sui. Gratias de osculo pedum, gratias et de manus; sed si cura est illi ulla de me, Osculetur me osculo oris sui. Non sum ingrata, sed amo. Accepi, fateor, meritis potiora, sed prorsus inferiora votis. Desiderio feror, non ratione. Ne, quaeso, causemini praesumptionem, ubi affectio urget. Pudor sane reclamat; sed superat amor. Nec ignoro, quod honor regis judicium diligit; sed praeceps amor nec judicium praestolatur, nec consilio temperatur, nec pudore frenatur, nec rationi subjicitur. (Sermo 9, 2)

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But please, they said, do tell us what it is, then we can supply what you need. I cannot rest, she said, unless he kisses me with the kiss of his mouth. I thank him for the kiss of the feet, I thank him too for the kiss of the hand; but if he has genuine regard for me, let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth. There is no question of ingratitude on my part, it is simply that I am in love. The favors I have received are far above what I deserve, but they are less than what I long for. It is desire that drives me on, not reason. Please do not accuse me of presumption if I yield to this impulse of love. My shame indeed rebukes me, but love is stronger than all. I am well aware that he is a king who loves justice; but headlong love does not wait for judgment, is not chastened by advice, not shackled by shame nor subdued by reason. Like Francesca and all of the lustful, the bride is transported by desire and not by reason (“desiderio feror non ratione”), her imperative love cannot be submitted to reason (“nec rationi subjicitur”). Love is headlong (“preaceps”) and will not stop short of the kiss of the mouth. She has done all her penance and sacrifices, she is living a chaste and righteous life. However, this only provides fidelity (“consuetudo”), not pleasure (“dulcedo”). After so many years, she wants to rejoice in perpetual desire and to dissolve into her beloved through the kiss of the mouth: Rogo, supplico, flagito, osculetur me osculo oris sui. En gratia ipsius multis jam annis caste sobrieque vivere curo, lectioni insisto, resisto vitiis, orationi incumbo frequenter; vigilo contra tentationes, recogito annos meos in amaritudine animae meae. Sine querela me arbitror, quantum in me est, conversari inter fratres, superioribus potestatibus subdita sum, egrediens et regrediens ad imperium senioris. Aliena non cupio; mea potius et me pariter dedi. In sudore vultus mei comedo panem meum: A caeterum quod in his omnibus est, totum constat de consuetudine, de dulcedine nihil. Quid nisi, juxta prophetam, vitula Ephraim sum docta diligere trituram? Denique in Evangelio qui hoc solum quod facere debet, facit, servus inutilis reputatur. Mandata forsan utcunque adimpleo; sed anima mea sicut terra sine aqua in illis. Ut igitur holocaustum meum pingue fiat: Osculetur me, quaeso, osculo oris sui. (Sermo 9, 2) I ask, I crave, I implore; let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth. Don’t you see that by his grace I have been for many years now careful to lead a chaste and sober life, I concentrate on spiritual studies, resist vices, pray often; I am watchful against temptations, I recount all my

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years in the bitterness of my soul. As far as I can judge I have lived among the brethren without quarrels. I have been submissive to authority, responding to the beck and call of my superior. I do not covet foods not mine; rather do I put both myself and my goods at the service of others. With sweat on my brow I eat my bread. Yet in all these practices there is evidence only of my fidelity, nothing of enjoyment. What can I be but, in the words of the Prophet, another Ephraim, a well-trained heifer that loves to tread the threshing floor? On top of that the Gospel says that he who does no more than his duty is looked on as a useless servant. I obey the commandments, to the best of my ability I hope, but in doing so my soul thirsts like a parched land. If therefore he is to find my holocaust acceptable, let him kiss me, I entreat, with the kiss of his mouth.56 In Sermon 7, Bernard emphasizes a notable aspect of the amorous eruption of the bride: strikingly like Francesca, the bride points her lover to an audience and does not use his name (for the bride, the lover is merely the “him” implied in the verb; for Francesca, it is “questi”).57 However, in doing so the bride discloses her desire, while Francesca forecloses her future. The difference between the two sets of lovers is the difference that runs between the optative “osculetur” and the past “baciò,” between the future of desire and the past of fastidium.

While the kiss of the bride is direct, blunt, and free of rhetorical seduction, the other kiss that I shall compare to Francesca’s is highly entwined with the question of style. Lorenzo Renzi has explored the occurrence of kisses in early Italian poetry and has found very few examples.58 The only obvious kiss on the mouth (which is an organ mentioned much more often as the conveyor of smiles and words than of kisses) is found in Guinizzelli’s Chi vedesse Lucia.59 Other examples close to Dante are Cavalcanti (In un boschetto trovai pasturella) and Dante da Maiano (Provedi saggio ad esta visione), in which the combined expression of kissing and embracing (“basciare” and “abbracciare”) recurs. In both Cavalcanti and da Maiano, the figure of reticentia is applied so as to veil the moment of sexual intercourse. This figure is believed to be at work also in Francesca’s reticent closing of the book: “that day we read no farther into it” (Inferno 5, 138, see chapter 6). Although substantially different from each other, these three texts can all be located at the margins of love poetry under the vague heading of “playful poetry” (“poesia giocosa”), which often includes even murkier or “comic” or “realistic” poetry.

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To different degrees, the three texts share some features with a more defined genre, that of the pastourelle, which was quite popular in Occitan and French medieval literature, and is very problematic from the point of view of both gender/sexuality and style.60 Medieval pastourelle is a variant of the pastoral genre which spans the history of Western literature from ancient Greece to the eighteenth century. It is inspired by the erotic aspects of the Virgilian bucolic genre – for instance, the (homo)erotic features of Virgil’s second eclogue. The pastourelle is a subgenre of love poetry that revolves around the issue of cross-class sexual intercourse and explores comic and sexually explicit language.61 It is largely a dialogic text (connected thus to the genre of contrasto), with an ample stylistic spectrum, mostly employed for comic purposes. The pastourelle is a courtly genre set apart from the court that originates it, and revolves around a simple and repetitive plot: the knight, away from the court, in a pastoral/ rural setting meets a beautiful young woman – a shepherdess, a villanelle, often called Marion. The central theme of the pastourelle is the knight’s seduction of the young woman. In most poems, seduction is followed by some kind of sexual exchange, which in many texts takes the form of rape. Many critics see in the pastourelle the “direct translation” of Andreas Cappellanus’s recommendations regarding the “love of peasants” (“de amore rusticorum”), prescribing that should the lover “through lack of foresight” be in the position of desiring the love of a peasant woman, he should first praise her and then unproblematically rape her (“violento potiri amplexu”).62 The critical debate on the pastourelle remains active, especially with regard to the allegedly satirical aspect of the genre and the role of comic therein, to the kind of social and political negotiation that take place in it, and to the pastourelle’s role in aestheticizing violence against women. While the sexual attraction to the courtly lady is veiled in poetry by words that are almost always inconclusive (so much so that they often harbour and reflect religious spirituality), the shepherdess, the villanelle, and any young woman of the people are the poetic objects of explicit sexual interest, and words like embracing and kissing recur very frequently in those verses. Kathrin Gravdal points out that while the noble or courtly woman is silent in Occitan poetry, the shepherdess of the pastourelle is given voice, and she deploys, in interacting with the knight, a nuanced and complex language. Gravdal sees rape as the consequence of the attainment of this voice.63 One puzzling detail connects the bride of the Song of Songs to the pastourelle: in both cases the (social or spiritual) status of the “lovers” is discrepant. Jean Leclercq notices that when Bernard “wants to speak of God’s love for mankind, he chooses to do so by means of the literary theme of a pastoral, in which a nobleman falls in love with a shepherdess, a girl whose

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social standing is beneath its own.”64 However, while in the spiritual pastoral the “lower” woman seeks incessantly the male kiss, in the secular pastourelle, it is the “superior” man who assaults the woman. In a text famously discordant with the bulk of his stilnovo corpus, Guido Guinizzelli articulates his intention to rape a young woman, an impulse that is restrained only by the thought that his action might upset “somebody” (the courtly woman? God?). Chi vedesse a Lucia un var capuzzo in cò tener, e como li sta gente, e’ non è om de qui ’n terra d’ Abruzzo che non ne ‘namorasse coralmente. Par, sì lorina, figliuola d’un tuzzo de la Magna o de Franza veramente; e non se sbatte cò de serpe mozzo come fa lo meo core spessamente Ah, prender lei a forza, ultra su’ grato, e bagiarli la bocca e ’l bel visaggio e li occhi suoi, ch’èn due fiamme de foco! Ma pentomi, però che m’ho pensato ch’esto fatto poria portar dannaggio ch’altrui despiaceria forse non poco. Seeing Lucia with a fur hat on her head, and seeing how well it fits her, there would be no one from here to the land of Abruzzo that would not fall in love with her with all his heart. Dressed in this way, she looks like the daughter of some lord from Germany or France. The head of a snake, when severed, does not beat so quickly as my heart does. Oh, to take her by force, beyond her will and kiss her mouth and her beautiful face and her eyes which are two flames of fire! But I repent of my thoughts because this could bring a damage that might displease someone else. (my translation) In this poem, the kiss on the mouth and on the face signal precisely the explicitly sexual and aggressive intention (“Ah, prender lei a forza, ultra su’ grato, / e bagiarli la bocca e ’l bel visaggio”). Interestingly, Lucia appeals to the poet because of an uncommon fur hat that she is wearing,65 which makes her look like the daughter of a French or German aristocrat (“Par, sì lorina, figliuola d’un tuzzo / de la Magna o de Franza veramente”). Lucia is clothed as a noblewoman, but she is not: this cleavage between imagination and reality is what excites the sexual intention of the poet.

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The social and stylistic context of the pastourelle, and the fantasies implicit in Guinizzelli’s poem, might well have a reflection on the kiss of Inferno 5. If the intertext of the story of Inferno 5 is courtly, its broader context is bourgeois. We are routinely conditioned to think of Francesca as a courtly lady (as Poggioli, for instance, saw her), and she does act largely in that manner.66 Yet, as historians of the canto recall, both she and Paolo are members of powerful families that were party leaders in their hometown, but still very much mere citizens among the citizenry.67 Both the Polentani and the Malatesta were on their way to leadership and even tyranny, with a cruelty that Dante records and reproaches in Inferno 27, but they still were part of the very mobile (and fundamentally non- or anti-aristocratic) Italian political space. There is no court around Paolo and Francesca, no damsels, no squires or fellow knights, and nobody to hide from like Guinevere and Lancelot, and countless Provençal lovers.68 Culturally, Romagna was quite provincial with respect to the main axis of culture which developed from Bologna to Tuscany. Gianfranco Contini’s definition of Francesca as “a provincial intellectual” signifies the distance between Francesca’s social context and the centres of power and culture in the Middle Ages.69 As seen in the Introduction, the historical and social background of the story of Paolo and Francesca is depicted as uncertain throughout the Comedy. In Inferno 27 and 28 Dante underlines the state of tyranny that prevails in contemporary Romagna, and contrasts it in Purgatory 14 with its legendary courtly past, celebrating “the ladies and the knights, the toils and the sports to which love and courtesy moved us” (le donne, i cavalier, gl’affanni e gl’agi / che ne invogliava amore e cortesia,” Purgatorio 14, 109– 10). However, notwithstanding its penchant for absolutism, the political context of Romagna is far from being knightly and lord-like, and much more similar, in its tragically local fabric, to that of Tuscany. Thus, Paolo and Francesca’s Romanesque game might try to mimic the imagined courtly past of Romagna – or more directly, the mythical courtly background evoked earlier in the canto, when classical and medieval lovers are cumulatively defined as “le donne antiche e i cavalieri” (the ladies and the knights of old, Inferno 5, 71), but the lovers are also bound to the fundamentally bourgeois status of medieval Italy. Michel Stanesco points out that, contrary to a much ingrained critical stand that sees a firm opposition and aversion between aristocracy and bourgeoisie in medieval France, the Romanesque behaviour – that is, the practice of imitation of courtly language and content in “real” life – actually acted as a form of social cohesion between the classes and within the bourgeoisie, especially in fourteenth and fifteenth century France.70 However, such practices of imitation can successfully take place only in a social situation in

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which the boundaries between the classes are clear. Such boundaries are well delineated, for instance, in Andreas Cappellanus’s De Amore. Cappellanus explores the social question of love throughout the end of book 1 of De Amore, punctually recording the manners and rhetorical style that a man should employ when addressing his feelings to a woman of a lower, equal, or higher position, in a set of dialogues that involve all possible interchanges between the bourgeoisie, lower nobility, and higher nobility. The most difficult negotiations, and the examples of unrequited love, take place when lovers from different classes are involved, especially when the male lover is of an inferior class to that of the lady. In these situations, themes such as nobility of heart and the inevitability of love are often invoked by the male lover and contested by the courtly lady.71 The Italian scenario of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries appears to be more fluid and more uncertain with regard to the boundaries and interactions between the classes. This fluidity has implications also on the ways the lovers relate to each other. The erotic genres from France often prescribed unequal statuses between the lovers – this is mandatory for the setup of the pastourelle, where the knight is an aristocrat and the woman is of the people, and it is also often found in troubadour lyric and romance, where the woman is positioned on a higher social status than her lover. Italian love poetry gradually dispenses with the social formalities of the northern genres. Cappellanus’s pleas of the lover from a lower social status become, in the more bourgeois Italian context, the leading ideas of stilnovo poetry. Paolo and Francesca, like Dante and Beatrice, come from the same social class, and their living situation is that of a fundamentally bourgeois city. Back in Rimini or Gradara, we have the lovers playing a dangerous intertextual game, in which Francesca pretends to be a courtly lady, taking up the manners of a grand dame and the language of both romance and stilnovo lyric. In the chiasmus lines, the kiss on the mouth of the pastourelle suddenly sunders the courtly plot of romance and the comic word “bocca” breaks into the language of love poetry. Like Lucia, Francesca too is clothed in the appearance of a noble woman, but she is actually a rich bourgeoise. Francesca is endowed with a rich and complex apparatus of courtliness which, like Lucia’s fur hat, is merely an exotic lure to the male’s blind attack. In her intertextual game, Francesca too looks foreign (French indeed, like Lucia, and Occitan as well), but she is not so in reality. Her intertextual clothes place her in the position of a lady of the highest nobility (Guinevere) and situate the silent and trembling Paolo in that of a slightly lower-ranking knight (Lancelot). Unlike Guinevere, however, Francesca does not get the upper hand in the kiss; she is unable to establish a relation of vassalage and a contract of mutual engagement, but she is “in reality” swept away by Paolo’s kiss.

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The negative reading of Paolo’s “way” (“il modo ancor m’offende”; “the way of it afflicts me still,” Inferno 5, 102, for which see chapter 4) as a form of love that emotionally violates Francesca finds support in the comparison to the pastourelle. Like the countless Marions of the pastourelle, Francesca is given a courtly voice only to express her tragic decline. The illusion of literature is not only spiritual but also social. In this sense Francesca is the first Madame Bovary, as Gianfranco Contini, René Girard, and Edoardo Sanguineti depict her, a bourgeois heroine socially and emotionally led astray by literature.72

The blunt kisses of the Song of Songs and of the pastourelle – one featuring female imperative wish, and the other male aggression – bring to the fore one important aspect of the kiss of Inferno 5. When the kiss is displayed with immediacy in language (“osculetur,” “basciare,” “basciò”), it tears the context asunder – creating a space of violent subversion of the spiritual, literary and social order. However, the kiss of Inferno 5 is also the locus of very creative transformations within the canto. Intertextually, the kiss is the moment of the creation of the new text, in which the literary cast that had been established since the beginning is discarded. In the narrative, it is the moment of the actual fusion of the lovers: while their bodies become one in the connection of the lips, Francesca’s “persona” and Paolo’s “piacere” are truly mutated into a “new person of desire.” Eschatologically, the kiss enacts the problematic eternal merger of the lovers: the tragic union that death and punishment don’t manage to tear apart begins here. Such a transformative power of the kiss via the book is found, in a comic mode, in Flamenca, a Provençal romance written around the mid-thirteenth century that is usually understood as both an ars amandi with deeply Ovidian echoes and a romance proper. While narrating various episodes in the complex love story between Flamenca of Nemours, married to the jealous Archambaut of Bourbon, and the young cleric and knight Guillem, the text reflects frequently on the rules and roles of courtly love. Written when the decadence of the Occitan courts and the condemnation of courtly behaviours were already underway, Flamenca can be viewed as both a passionate defence and an ironic repository of courtly ideals. The story of Flamenca displays both courtly/romance and popular features: on one hand it conveys the ideals of courtly or chivalric love, and on the other it dovetails with genres such as the “mal mariée” (stories of young women wrongly married) and of the “castia-gilos” (stories of castigations of jealous husbands). Flamenca is an inverted Francesca, a “mal mariée” who manages to exploit the jealousy of

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the husband to her own benefit, and to profit fully from her lover’s company. Like Francesca, Flamenca is a well-read woman, although she inhabits a more stable courtly universe. In one famous scene, not compared, as far as I know, to the episode of Francesca in Inferno 5, Guillem manages to kiss the as-yet-unknown Flamenca through a book (Flamenca, 2408–615). This quite long and complex episode displays a very sharp commingling of the sacred and profane, and literalizes to the extreme the performative role of the book. Flamenca walks into church, surrounded by the brightness of a ray of sunlight, and Guillem, impressed by her beauty, starts singing the Signum Pacis, the hymn connected to the exchange of kisses in church. Taken by the beauty of the lady, Guillem has a seizure and falls on a choir pew. Shortly afterward, the altar boy gives Flamenca the instrumentum pacis, the object that substituted for the direct kiss on the mouth at Mass: in this case, unconventionally, it is a breviary. Guillem, hiding behind the choir, sees through a hole Flamenca pressing her mouth on the page. Indeed, all he sees through the hole is her beautiful red mouth, which becomes a synecdoche for the woman’s body (“Guilem ha vist, dal pertuset, que for a ples del menor det, sa bella boqueta vermeilla”; William saw through the hole that the smallest finger filled her beautiful vermillion mouth, 2570).73 This detail notably connects the stories of Flamenca and Francesca. At the moment of kissing via the book, the perspective onto both women contracts down to the mouth. Following the advice of Fin’Amor, Guillem first manages to take possession of the book (interestingly, by asking the clerk when it will be Pentecost, which is the moment of the “kiss” between Jesus and the Apostles). Later, Guillem asks the boy which part he gave as “peace” and starts ecstatically kissing the Psalter (“plus de mil ves lo foil baisa”; kissing the page more than a thousand times, 2604) while peeking through the hole. The scene of the kissing of the book is repeated a second time in Flamenca (Flamenca, 3105–225) this time involving the contents of the text – a situation that parallels even more closely that of Francesca. In order to identify better where Flamenca will place her lips, Guillem asks the altar boy to offer her one particular page in the Psalter, where the words “fiat pax in virtute” appear. Flamenca’s kiss then verifies a biblical kiss, which David, the author of the Psalter, suggested Solomon impress on the book: e tot’ora le deves dar en fiat pax in virtute! e non voil che movas lo pe entre qu’ ie.us diga la raso; David o dis a Salamo,

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quant hac fait lo sauteri tot, que cascun jorn baises cel mot; et tan quan Salamos reinet sos regnes en gran pas estet. (Flamenca, 3168–76) All the time you ought to give it at fiat pax in virtute and I don’t want you to take a step until I give you the reason why. David said this to Solomon when he had finished all the Psalms that each day he should kiss this verse; and as long as Solomon ruled, his kingdom remained in lasting peace. Through a performative act of reading and kissing, the advice given by the book’s author becomes the guarantee of the strength and durability of the lovers’ affair. The notion of peace retains multiple attributes here: it is the context of the sentence (“fiat pax in virtute”); the outcome of the initial kissing and reading (the peace that reigns over Solomon’s kingdom because of his kissing of the book); the religious kiss exchanged by the faithful (osculum pacis, or, simply pax); the name of the book insofar as it is the mediating object (instrumentum pacis or, simply pax); and, finally, the “pacification” of the desire of the lover and his ambition for the future of the relationship.74 As Mark Amsler shows, the kissing of a book is a complex act of “affective reading.” It enacts a multilayered form of textuality, in which the kissing lips may erase and assimilate the words/images that the reading lips are scanning.75 In the case of Flamenca the kissing lips of both lovers assimilate and utterly transform the sacred text that they are reading. While Flamenca and Guillem turn the page into a kiss (into the locus of the meeting of two pairs of lips), the content of the book is both interpreted literally (the lovers kiss the page as David kisses the Psalter) and utterly transformed into the celebration of erotic, secular, and adulterine love. Paolo and Francesca’s kiss too is utterly transformative of the book and of their context. While the Provençal lovers assimilate and rewrite the page with their lips, the Romagnol lovers assimilate and rewrite through the eyes. By simultaneously reading and looking into each other eyes they transform themselves into their own version of Lancelot and Guinevere. While Guillem and Flamenca kiss each other by transforming the page, Paolo and Francesca transform the page by kissing. In this sense, the kiss, and not the book, is the catalyst and eventually the byproduct of the making of new literature. The theme of eyes working like kisses is very active in Dante’s work and in that of his contemporaries. The kiss of the mouth in Inferno 5 sounds so shocking to the reader not only for the manner in which it is encased in

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its context, but also because it is an indisputable hapax in Dante’s work. Throughout his corpus, Dante appears to “have a problem” with mouths and kisses, with the exception of the Fiore, the paraphrase of the Roman de la Rose almost unanimously attributed to Dante, and equally universally consigned to a lack of critical interest as a derivative type of work that does not fit easily within Dante’s oeuvre. The several kisses of the Fiore display largely erotic undertones and indeed well reflect both the spirit and the letter of the French source.76 In the commentary to the song Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore (Vita Nuova 19), Dante cautions the reader about the manner in which the image of the beloved mouth should be understood:77 Questa seconda parte si divide in due; che ne l’una dico degli occhi, li quali sono principio d’amore; ne la seconda dico de la bocca, la quale è fine d’amore. E acciò che quinci si lievi ogni vizioso pensiero, ricordisi chi ci legge, che di sopra è scritto che lo saluto di questa donna, lo quale era de le operazioni de la bocca sua, fue fine de li miei desiderii mentre ch’io lo potei ricevere. (Vita Nuova 19, 20) This is again divided in two. First I speak of her eyes, which are the initiators of love; then I speak of her mouth, which is the supreme desire of my love. So that here and now any perverse thought may be dispelled, let him who reads this remember what has been previously said about this lady’s greeting, which was an action of her mouth, and which was the goal of all my desires so long as I was allowed to receive it. Notably, the song being commented upon here does not mention Beatrice’s mouth, but, more generically, deals with her face, the place where “no one dares hold his gaze too long” (“non pote alcun mirarla fiso”).78 When he mentions the mouth as “love’s end,” (“fine d’amore”) Dante is aware that his reader might think about a kiss (the end, for some troubadours, of the lover’s quest; for others, merely the beginning), so he immediately glosses it with the idea of the greeting. By emphasizing the necessity of dispelling any perverse thoughts, Dante brings into sharp relief that for him the mouth is dissociated from the kiss and associated with the greeting. In the third treatise of the Convivio, in glossing the heavenly qualities of his beloved’s eyes and smile in the song Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona (56–7), Dante explains that both the eyes and the mouths are the “balconies” of the soul, since all of the soul’s passions appear through them.79 When dis-

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cussing the mouth, Dante immediately turns it into … a smile, itself the trace of a silent laughter that conveys the pleasure (“dilettazione”) of the soul: E che è ridere se non una corruscazione de la dilettazione de l’anima, cioè uno lume apparente di fuori secondo sta dentro? … Ahi mirabile riso de la mia donna, di cui io parlo, che mai non si sentia se non de l’occhio! (Convivio 3, viii, 11 and 12) The soul reveals herself in the mouth, almost like a color behind glass. What is laughter if not a coruscation of the soul’s delight – that is, a light appearing outwardly just as it is within? … Ah, wonderful smile of my lady of whom I speak, which has never been perceived except by the eye! Later, in the allegorical explanation of the same lines, Dante compares the eyes to Philosophy’s demonstration, in which the truth shines directly; and the smile to its persuasions, in which the truth shines under some kind of veil (“velame”).80 In both cases the mouth is a less unequivocal mirror of the soul and of truth than the eyes. The mouth interposes some kind of mediation between the woman’s soul and the gaze of the lover. In the mouth, the woman’s internal beauty shines through as colour does through glass (an image famously employed to describe the appearance of the blessed in the heaven of the Moon81) or under a veil (the covering of rhetoric in the allegorical reading). The comparison between the eyes and the mouth of the beloved is commonplace in medieval love poetry, and it usually results in the superiority of the eyes to the mouth.82 In Italian love poetry, where the attention to the philosophical and medical aspects of love is more pronounced, the eyes, their operation, and the visual field they articulate become truly central. It is through vision that the beautiful image of the beloved is captured and internalized, becoming an individualized and personalized staple inside the poet. Moreover, the eyes are the battlefield for the deadly battle of the spirits. The emanations from the woman’s eyes reach the lover’s eyes and heart, often wounding him internally. Indeed, it could be argued that the kiss, so conspicuous in its absence from Italian medieval lyrics, is transformed by the Italian poets into the encounter of the eyes. The meeting of the eyes is an encounter of bodies much more prominent than any other form of contact could be. Furthermore, the exchange of loyalty between the stilnovo lovers does happen through the mouth, but not through a kiss; rather, as we have seen in Dante, it takes place through a greeting. This operation of the mouth retains

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at least one feature of the kiss. Like the kiss impressed on a leper’s mouth, the beloved greeting heals, at least in the much exploited pun “saluto”/“salute” (greeting/health). In searching for the non-kiss between Dante and Beatrice, one is forced to look into intense gazes rather than meetings of the mouth (or even of the smile, which is only contemplated and never kissed).83 The whole of the Paradiso can be seen as an uninterrupted kiss between the lovers, through the medium of their eyes. The closest that Dante and Beatrice come to each other is the “kiss through the eyes” that takes place at the beginning of the Paradiso, during Dante’s “going beyond the human.” While Beatrice gazes intensely into the sun, Dante’s refracted gaze, which as we have seen in chapter 3 behaves “like a pilgrim who would return home” (Paradiso 1, 51), looks intently into her: Beatrice tutta ne l’etterne rote fissa con li occhi stava; e io in lei le luci fissi, di là sù rimote. Nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei, qual si fé Glauco nel gustar de l’erba che ’l fé consorto in mar de li altri dèi. (Paradiso 1, 64–9) Beatrice was standing with her eyes all fixed upon the eternal wheels, and I fixed mine on her, withdrawn from there above. Gazing upon her I became within me such as Glaucus became on tasting the grass that made him sea-fellow of the other gods. Dante is brought into paradise through a conjunction of the eyes, which corresponds, in an exemplary sense, to an act of eating – Glaucus’s eating of the grass, an act that will make him divine. The union that takes place thorough the gaze is marked by a linguistic reticence as we find in Inferno 5: “trasumanar significar per verba / non si poria” (the passing beyond humanity may not be set forth in words, Paradiso 1, 70–1). The moment of going beyond the limits of the human being implies the interruption of words. This is, as Adam Phillips notes, precisely what a kiss performs, engaging the mouth in something other than speaking.84 The reticence and following silence are then referenced through an example of eating (Glaucus), itself the primal instinct embedded in the kiss. ✢✢✢

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Paolo and Francesca’s kiss of the mouth has elicited a constellation of other kisses (or non-kisses), which challenge its nature as a simple operation of intertextuality and a mere act of lust. The passion-driven, unadorned kiss of the bride of the Song of Songs has explained the kiss as the ultimate subjugation of reason to desire and the moment of the fusion of the lovers. In both texts this moment implies the death and dissolution of the lovers into each other. The stylistically charged and gender-aggressive kiss of the pastourelle has unveiled the dressing up in Francesca’s intertextuality and the violence implied in the tearing asunder of the intertextual embroidery. Flamenca’s kiss “by the book” has conjured up the ironic potentiality of the episode, showing how the courtly kiss may successfully spring forth from a book (and a sacred one in addition). Finally, the “kiss of the eyes” between Dante and Beatrice suggests a remapping/dislocation of the bodily loci of exchange between lovers in medieval poetry – which nonetheless retains both the pleasure and the transformative powers of the kiss of the mouth.

6

Reading quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante Inferno 5, 138 (that day we read no farther into it)

Besides displaying one of the highest concentrations of terms such as love and desire in the entire Comedy, Inferno 5 is also the canto with the greatest number of references to the act of reading. Dante creates a kaleidoscopic framework in which (we) readers are reading about lovers who are reading about lovers, and painstakingly insists that this act of desire is also an act of reading. Within the list of the great lovers from antiquity, Semiramis is the one “of whom we read” (“di cui si legge,” 58). The lovers “were reading” (“noi leggiavamo,” 127), and that reading compelled them to look into each other’s eyes (“lo occhi ci sospinse / quella lettura,” 130–1). Significantly, they kiss while reading (“quando leggemmo,” 133). Finally, after having “accused” the book, the lovers read no more: “Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse: / quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante” (Gallehault was the book and he who wrote it; that day we read no farther in it; 137–8). In this last instance, Dante connects in one compact turn of sentence the acts of reading and of writing, emphasizing the tight relation between readership and authorship. What today is for the most part the individual and silent leafing through a number of paper sheets enclosed by two boards, was then a lively operation related to a very dynamic, precious and unique object.1 Reading in the Middle Ages was the stratification of several intellectual operations and even of bodily practices. In addition to being read, books were often heavily glossed, hugged and kissed, touched, and consumed. Modes of reading were different, spanning from the silent reading to oneself (as Ambrose famously did, filling the young Augustine with wonder), to mumbling/murmuring the words (ruminatio, a practice that had to do with the “digestion” of the text;

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that is, meditation and memorization), to reading aloud to a crowd or oneself – scanning a text that for the greater part of the Middle Ages was written without spaces between the words (scriptura continua, employed in Italy until the eleventh century). Levels of literacy were very different and were distributed across society in ways that, as research progresses, look more and more complex than the standard assumption that the most-educated people were male clerics reading and writing in Latin.2 Importantly, one did not need to be literate in order to be a reader, since reading took place through the ears as well as with eyes. The person who listens to a book being read aloud is as much a reader as the person actually scanning the text. Reading is thus inextricably linked with the reception and interpretation of texts. As D.H. Green reports, Hugh of Saint Victor identified three kinds of reading, that of the teacher (“lectio docentis”), that of the pupil/listener (“lectio discentis”), and that of the individual reader (“lectio per se inspicientis”).3 Not only were eyes, lips, and ears involved in reading, but also hands, as one of the most common practices of reading was to follow the writing with the index finger. Readers were often touching and kissing (thus, scraping and dissolving) images or parts of texts from their manuscripts, a habit that at times can be linked to devotional practices (for example, the scraping or even kissing of the face of Christ or of the Saints), but which appears at other times just an idiosyncrasy of the act of reading itself.4 Moreover, there were two dimensions of reading, which originated, as did many other medieval dichotomies, in the crucial split between the outer and inner human being. Inside the creature, as Augustine famously explained in his De magistro, lies the only and true teacher, Jesus Christ, who “verifies” the meaning of each word and sentence. Thus, one reads with the eyes of the flesh, but also with those of the spirit. The inner evaluation and meditation of the text passes through several degrees of interpretation, as the fourfold understanding of the scriptures (literal, moral, theological, and anagogic in Dante’s formulation) shows. “Intelligere” (to understand) is “intus legere,” to read inside – deeper, further, and also beyond. To understand is to interpret. Reading is closely associated with memory, as Mary Carruthers has shown. Entire texts were memorized, and they were “re-read” from memory not from the original. Indeed, when looking for the library of a medieval writer (Dante included) the scholar should look in memory rather than on hypothetical bookshelves. The misquoting or misprision that denotes so many medieval texts, and which makes of them such challenging and subversive examples of intertextuality, is for the most part due to the fact that these authors

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were quoting from memory. And, as Gianbiagio Conte has shown, the memory of the poets is both the most loving and the most transgressive.5 The notion of text and of book exceeded widely and wildly the text that the literati read. Any symbolic cluster, real or imagined, is a text; any written, sculpted, painted, or musically notated story is a book. Nature, history, and even bodies are books that anyone can and must read. Likewise, the heart, reason, and memory are often represented as books, which one can inscribe, leaf through, and modify. Medieval figurative art was made for reading rather than for seeing. It contained narratives and complex symbolic constellations that the reader was invited to decode and interpret. It is also worth recalling that the practices of binding were also quite different from modern ones. A medieval codex often appears like an erratic product to us, as one single binding often brought together, linked, and united heterogeneous texts that were very different from each other. Practices of reuse, such as the shaving of the vellum in order to write another text on top, or the employment of “obsolete” texts as the binding of another book testify to the complex and volatile nature of the medieval volume. Every codex is a discourse whose logic often escapes us, but which certainly had an impact on the medieval practice of reading. This discourse was then complemented and paralleled by that of the illuminations, which established yet another layer of reading and interpretation. Alongside this complex intellectual practice of reading, the book throughout the Middle Ages also elicited a somatic and affective responses. The act of reading involved the body and the person’s emotions much more than today. Not only were books touched, kissed, and caressed, but reading was also held to stimulate intense responses such as happiness, anger, shame, and even sexual arousal. Moreover, reading involved an aspect of magic, both miraculous and ominous, and effected all sorts of performative operations. “Legunt, eligunt et dilugunt” (“they read, they choose, they love,” Confessions 13, 18):6 thus Augustine’s angels read the book of God. Likewise, the medieval reader enjoyed the act of reading freely and deeply, with emphasis on interpretation and affective response. The way Dante employs the notion of reading reflects the vitality and flexibility of the book in medieval culture, and shows a rich and diverse understanding of both the literal and the symbolic ideas of the book. The Vita Nuova is famously presented as Dante’s book of memory, complete with rubrics and infused by the strong affirmation of the author’s editorial personality.7 In the Comedy, one can leaf through books as Paolo and Francesca did, read in human faces, understand the body of the moon as a book, view the human world as the succession of pages in a quire, prophetically read in

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the book of history, and peruse religious orders as if they were a book. Above all, one reads in God, who is characterized at the very end of the Paradiso as a volume, in which one finds, “bound by love … that which is dispersed in leaves throughout the universe” (“legato com amore in un volume / ciò che per l’universo si squaderna,” Paradiso 33, 86–7).8 Dante appeals to his reader (“lettore”) more frequently than any other classical or medieval author does. This practice, possibly derived from the canons of Christian exegesis and linked to Dante’s own aim of presenting the Comedy as a sacred poem, does however confirm that the writer constantly had his audience in mind and viewed his work as a book that someone would be leafing through or listening to. Each appeal “snaps” us readers out of the captivating story we are following and reminds us of our duties as interpreters, spurring us to “intus legere”: read deeper, further, and beyond. It also reminds us of our status as readers, of what we are doing, and how (and possibly why) we are doing it. ✢✢✢

Much scholarly attention has been devoted to establishing “what” Paolo and Francesca were reading (the Lancelot en prose, as the common scholarly position goes) and to discussing how well they understood and interpreted it. Several scholars classify Francesca as a “bad reader,” one who is unable to go beyond “the point” – so much so that she doesn’t even reach the end of a sentence, let alone the end of the story and its morals.9 As Carruthers and Renzi notice, if we take their reading of the Lancelot en prose literally, Paolo and Francesca stop reading in the middle of the sentence, since the kiss of the Lancelot is followed by more narrative. The point (“punto”) that overcomes the lovers does not even have the completeness of a full-stop (“punto”). However, misreading is not a crime in Dante and medieval culture. Dante clearly makes this point in Purgatorio 22, where he depicts Statius gaining salvation thanks to his misreading of a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid.10 One can and must, according to Dante, misread potentially perilous texts such as pagan poetry and romance, in order to find one’s own direction, as Dante affirms in the same episode by recalling the collective Christian misinterpretation of Virgil’s fourth eclogue, which made the Roman poet an unwilling prophet.11 The romance of Flamenca contains an instructive example of misreading and free interpretation of the sacred text in favour of secular love. Not long before the scene of the kiss discussed in chapter 5, Guillelm, after praying devoutly to God, Mary, and the Saints, casually opens the Psalter:

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Quant Guillelms ac l’orazon dicha un sautier pren e ubri lo; un vers trobet de que.l saup bo: Zo fon Dilexi quoniam. “Ben sap ar Dieus que voliam, ” Ha dih soau, e.l libre serra. (Flamenca, 2297–302) After William had said the prayer, he took a Psalter and opened it; he found a verse he knew well, which was Dilexi quoniam. “Now God is quite aware of what we want,” he murmured, and closed the book. The beginning of Psalm 116, which indeed celebrates God’s understanding and “lending an ear” to the lamentation of the human being, becomes in this context the assurance that God knows and sanctions the adulterous relation.12 Thus, in both religious and secular literature misreading is vital. Misreading and misinterpretation create a new text that, like a mirror, reflects the subjective position of the reader. Paolo and Francesca, however, go further than that in their misreading: they become the new text themselves. I propose to frame the question of Paolo and Francesca’s reading from a more material standpoint, and ask: what were their reading practices? Let us begin with textual clues. Their act of reading is contained by and contains the episode of their fall. It begins with a verb of duration (“noi leggiavamo,” 127), it climaxes into a performative moment, where the act of reading turns into kissing (“leggemmo – baciò,” 133 and 136) and ends, abruptly, with a sharp cut (“più non vi leggemmo avante,” 138). Like the way they appear in hell (“quei due che ’nsieme vanno,” 74), like their death (“Amor condusse noi ad una morte,” 106), and their status in hell (“questi che mai da me non fia diviso,” 135) – but unlike their falling in love (“costui … persona” and “mi prese … costui,” 101 and 104) and their kiss (“questi … la bocca,” 135– 6) – the act of reading is featured as something that inextricably binds the lovers, involving them as “us.” While their innamoramento and their kissing single them out as two discrete persons, reading and death make them one. Paradoxically, reading and death enact what love and the kiss should: the union of the lovers. The emphasis on the lovers’ act of reading and on the role played by the book elicits several questions. How (in Dante’s imagination) were the lovers reading? Was Paolo reading to Francesca, or Francesca to Paolo? Were they reading together aloud or silently, or acting some kind of dramatic dialogue, as it has been proposed?13 Where were they reading? In Francesca’s private chamber (where so much of female reading took place during the Middle

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Ages), in a garden, in a secret hideout chosen by them, or in a public room of the house where they were left alone by chance? What kind of book were they reading? A large, richly illuminated manuscript, lying on a stand between them, or a little pocket book bringing the lovers’ faces to touch? Did the manuscript contain illustrations? Where they reading figures as well as text? These questions cannot be answered because of the elliptic quality of the narration; yet they need to be posited in order to realize how many different possible scenarios the sentence “we were reading” elicits. For instance, the compact way in which the lovers summarize the elaborate scene of the kiss from the Lancelot could suggest that they were reading an illumination of the kiss, which was a common feature in illustrated manuscripts.14 Francesca and Paolo’s situation is possibly not unique. Green indicates a plate in the Manesse manuscript, a richly illustrated manuscript compiled in Zurich at the beginning of the fourteenth century, which contains the most important collection of love poetry in German, listing about 140 Minnesangers and their texts. The ornately illustrated plates depict the poets, frequently through their heraldry. One such plates (311r) shows two lovers reading a text, which has been identified as the Lanzelet of Ulrich von Zatzikhoven (circa 1200).15 According to Hellmutt Salowsky, the text on the page reproduces the beginning of the Lanzelet: “swer recht wort merchen kan, der gedenche wie …” (whoever understands the words well, think how …). The Manesse lovers are sitting on a bench, under a rosebush whose trunk separates them and whose two branches come together in the shape of a heart and carry a shield on which the word “Amor” is inscribed. The woman holds the book and shows it to the audience while tracking the letters with her index finger, while the man appears intent on listening. This particular image is linked to the poet Alram von Gresten, of whom (and of whose poetry and heraldry) very little is known. There is, therefore, the sense that this illumination is a generic illustration of “love.” It is very difficult to say whether it could be inspired by Dante, as the two texts are exactly contemporary. As Martine Meuwese points out, the image of the rosebush is very recognizable in romance iconography. It originates in the Roman de la Rose, but is applied to illuminations of version of the stories of Tristan and Lancelot. On the stage of the Manesse plate, the Rose, the Lancelot and Inferno 5 conflate in mysterious ways.16 The fact that Francesca is a female reader also has several implications. First, it begs the question of how Dante figures her level of literacy. Female readers of the Middle Ages were considered to be more illiterate than their male counterparts insofar as litteratura (Latin) went, often to the point of being portrayed as exclusive vernacular speakers. Dante depicts women as such in his theory of the birth of vernacular poetry in the Vita Nuova:

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E lo primo che cominciò a dire sì come poeta volgare, si mosse però che volle fare intendere le sue parole a donna, a la quale era malagevole d’intendere li versi latini. E questo è contra coloro che rimano sopra altra matera che amorosa, con ciò sia cosa che cotale modo di parlare fosse dal principio trovato per dire d’amore. (Vita Nuova 25, 6) The first poet to begin writing in the vernacular was moved to do so by a desire to make his words understandable to ladies who found Latin verses difficult to comprehend. And this is an argument against those who compose in the vernacular on a subject other than love, since composition in the vernacular was from the beginning intended for treating of love. However, Dante portrays Francesca as a quite literate reader: although reading in the vernacular, as the women of Vita Nuova, Francesca actually reads in a different vernacular, the French of the Lancelot, and appears therefore as a highly educated reader.17 Moreover, even disregarding the thick embroidery of quotes in the anaphora lines, if we take the “dottore” of line 123 to be Boethius (or even Virgil in his persona as writer), we need to accept that Dante constructed Francesca as Latinate in addition to literate. Or, Francesca could be illiterate and still be a reader – she could be one of those readers who are “read to,” one who reads “with the ears.” As Green notices, the formula “we read” was often employed to identify a congregation that was listening to a text, and thus a collective act of reading/interpreting.18 Francesca’s reading skills are paralleled and surpassed only by those of Virgil and of “the” other woman of the Comedy, Beatrice, who is famously characterized as an avid, albeit severely critical, reader of love poetry (especially the oeuvre of her beloved), and as literate and Latinate as a university master. Throughout her speech, Francesca is also featured as a skilled rhetorician. Perhaps only Pier delle Vigne (Inferno 13), who was one of the most accomplished writers of his times, matches her rhetorical prowess in the Comedy. Francesca deploys in succession four complex rhetorical figures – adunaton, anaphora, chiasmus, and prosopopeia – and she freely quotes classical, Provençal, French, and Italian poets. The second issue related to female reading is that women were considered to be unable to go beyond a literal understanding of the text. As Rita Copeland has shown, a long tradition of medieval hermeneutics links women to literality.19 When interpreting “hermeneutically” the Pauline split between the flesh (letter), which kills, and the spirit (interpretation), which enlivens (2 Corinthians 3: 6), Augustine posits woman, traditionally aligned to flesh, body, and materiality, on the side of the letter. Interestingly, accusations of

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being confined to literal reading and the vernacular were made about heretics as well as women. Moreover, it was believed that women were unable to appreciate the finesse of texts, such as rhetorical intricacy, and irony.20 Christine de Pizan famously upheld literal reading, aligning literality with clarity and interpretation with murkiness. Christine’s defence of literal reading occurs in the context of the famous querelle of the Roman de la Rose, which opposed her to Pierre Col. Christine criticized the Rose for its vulgar content, and condemned Col’s attempt to present the Rose as a spiritual text through allegorical reading, famously labeling allegorical reading as fantasy driven: “tu … mervilleusement interpretes ce qui est dit clerement et a la lectre” (you interpret in an extraordinary way what is said clearly and literally).21 The medieval norm, however, was a prejudice against carnal and literal (female/ heretic) reading. The clarity of the letter is rarely of interest to the medieval reader and, when sexuality is involved, the letter becomes indeed a locus of danger and denial, as the endless commentary tradition of the Song of Songs testifies. The naked sentence (“sententia nuda”) and the crude letter (“lettera cruda”) of the Cantica were considered dangerous for weak readers, who could be lead astray by literal interpretation.22 The accusation of literality also falls short of Francesca. Her reading is interpretative, and she is featured as a quite aggressive and transgressive reader. Francesca understands the letter of Lancelot, but, by her own admission in the chiasmus lines, the lovers come up with a quite complex interpretative operation. It is commonly held that the point that overcomes the lovers is contained in the following sentence: Et la roine voit que li chevaliers n’en ose plus faire, si le prent par le menton et le baise devant Galaholt assés longuement si que la dame de Malohaut seit qu’ele le baise. Seeing that the knight dared no more, the queen took him by the chin and gave him a prolonged kiss in front of Galehault, so that the lady of Malehault knew that she was kissing him.23 The elliptical way in which the lovers take this sentence represents one of the great hermeneutic problems of the canto. Paolo and Francesca certainly do not stop at the letter of the text, as they modify the direction of the kiss (Guinevere kisses the knight and not vice versa) and obliterate the public context of the romance. Misreading, however, does not necessarily make them bad or weak readers. Like any other cunning interpreters, Francesca and Paolo take from the sentence what they need for their “argument” and context, and discard what they don’t need; that is, the presence of Galehault

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and of the dame of Malehault. Galehault is invoked later in the same canto through the prosopopeia of the book. The lady of Malehault too enjoys some kind of resuscitation in a small cameo in Paradiso 16.24 Both instances testify to Dante’s (conscious or unconscious) wish to inform the reader that he actually knew the text of the Lancelot well. In the scene of the kiss, both Galehault and the lady of Malehault are superfluous to Paolo and Francesca’s literary, social, and especially textual context. Not only was the corollary of damsel and squires disposed of as unnecessary by the Italian version of courtly poetry and the bourgeois context that originated it, but also, as mentioned earlier in the text (Inferno 5, 129), our lovers are alone. Moreover, the lovers operate a quite stunning transposition of what they read with regard to the central moment of the kiss. As profusely remarked by critics, the Italian lovers invert the direction of the kiss.25 “Questi” (he) substitutes “elle” (she), which in the French text underlines the agency of the queen. Such agency is displayed even more emphatically in a variant of the French passage: “le prent ele meïsme par le menton” (it was she who took him by the chin [my translation]).26 More importantly, the interpretation of the kiss itself is quite daring. Francesca claims that they read “the longed-for smile” being kissed. In the French text, the only facial hint to a kiss on the mouth is more prosaically a chin (“menton”). While the French text talks about the queen taking the lover by the chin and subsequently kissing him, the lovers read about a longed-for smile being kissed, and, consequently they kiss on the mouth. Rhetorically, they first employ a metonymy (chin for face), then turn it into a metaphor (smile for mouth) and then, re-literalize it according to their own desires (smile to mouth). The mouth of Inferno 5, which is absent from the French text, is the product of the rhetorical collusion of chin and smile. The lovers enact a double process of interpretation. They take the letter of the French text, where there is no smile (but a chin), no headlong desire (but a “deal” struck by Galehault) and, especially no great lover (but the timid and trembling Lancelot), and they first interpret it in a truly idealized way, abstracting and rarefying its language. They impress on the Lancelot a spiritualized direction that appears almost an exercise in Christian hermeneutics. Any Christian interpreter of the Song of Songs could easily turn a chin into a smile, and a man into a great lover (they do so, for instance, when turning the groom into Christ), and, especially, could easily embroider on top of a fundamentally literal statement (“the queen took him by the chin and kissed him”) a discourse of desire, as Francesca does by calling Guinevere’s smile “longed-for” (“disiato riso”). Subsequently, the lovers undo the spiritualized interpretation: “such a great lover” becomes again “him” (“questi”), and the “longed-for smile” (formerly “chin”) becomes the “unspeakable”

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mouth (“bocca”). Thus, Francesca and Paolo do not read too little, or too literally in the text, they read too much and too freely. This complex rhetorical and interpretative process achieves en route the central aim of the canto, the union and fusion of the lovers. Not even Tristan monstrously murdering Iseult in his deadly embrace reaches the absolute peak of becoming one with the lover. Through interpretation Paolo and Francesca bind themselves together in a volume. The interruption of reading at the point of the kiss, so often stigmatized by commentators as a “bad reading behaviour” is actually a crucial moment in the process of the lovers’ union. Dante emphasizes this point, drawing the reader’s attention to the fact that the lovers read no more that day (“quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante,” 138 – where the word “avante” stresses the fact that they don’t go beyond the point). The lovers stop reading to become a text idolatrously bound by love. This interruption is sometimes interpreted as the moment in which the lovers were murdered, but most commentators understand this as an example of reticentia, a way to allude to the lovers’ sexual intercourse without mentioning it. Interpreters often praise either Francesca’s or Dante’s modesty and tactfulness (and Dante’s “art”) in saying with “honest” words that which cannot be said without blushing (see, for instance, Landino in dpp ad Inferno 5, 138). Modern commentators often bring up the image of a veil to describe this line, a word that is usually employed in describing allegory: the curtain falls on Francesca’s episode with a squeamish veil of reticentia.27 As the Ottimo commento concisely states, Dante’s closing statement fully engages the attention and imagination of the reader: “Conchiude sua narratione lasciando a chi legge il rimanente ad intendere” (he ends his narration leaving the reader to appreciate the rest, ddp ad Inferno 5, 138 [my translation]). The figure of reticentia is often exploited in poetry to allude to the sexual “surplus”: it is employed as such, for instance, in Cavalcanti’s pastorella.28 Importantly, as Jacquart and Thomasset point out, reticentia was often used in Western medical literature when talking about sex.29 Rather than simply alluding to some kind of post-reading satisfaction of desire, I take the final line of Francesca’ s speech to be the first address to the reader of the Comedy. If compared to the warmly personal and fully pedagogic appeals to the reader in the episode of the city of Dis (Inferno 8 and 9),30 which are usually held to be the first in the poem, the one in canto 5 emerges as a widely unguided and perilous taster; a “sink-or-swim” kind of lesson, in which the master/author asks the reader/pupil to face cupiditas, the want for more, by putting him in the waters of the same shipwreck in which the pilgrim/ reader was at the beginning of Inferno, on the banks of the river of death (see chapter 1). The lovers’ “reading no more” unleashes the reader’s desire for

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more, and starts him/her on a dangerous tangent of unguided interpretation. Moreover, the closing of the book is reinforced by the fainting of the pilgrimpoet at the end of the canto. The lovers close their book; I, the narrator, faint: what are you, reader, going to do? The last line of Francesca’s speech can be seen as challenging the reader in two ways. Most obviously, it seems to engage the reader’s imagination in a lustful way. The reader is left alone by a double “closing of the book” and his/her imagination, like that of most of the commentators, is free to roam wild and to explore and expand on the theme of sexual intercourse. Like the builders of a gothic cathedral imagining lust as a kiss and sex as the “surplus,”31 Dante might unwillingly push his readers to read more into the episode precisely by having the lovers read no more. Although modest and tactful, allusion might be more dangerous than a statement. Or, Dante could be willingly confronting his readers with the consequences of “lustful reading,” making his own text as dangerous as the Lancelot was for his characters. Strangely, however, sex is not the point of Inferno 5. We know that Francesca and Paolo are in the circle of the lustful. We suppose they are there because of the adulterous love they shared and its physical manifestation: whether that sin took place through the conjunction of mouths or genitals does not really matter from a theological or eschatological point of view. Then again, Dante might be engaging the reader’s attention and imagination in a hermeneutic way, pushing the reader to read further into his text. Dante could be asking his readers not to repeat the error of the lovers, who embroidered their reading with fantasies and complemented it with their own additions, to the point that the text became pretextual and eventually redundant. He might be asking his readers not to stop reading, but to actually read deeper into his text – not imagining what happened after, but considering what happened before. The textual power of Inferno 5’s reticentia is comparable to that which marks the ending of the episode of Ugolino in Inferno 33: “Poscia più che ’l dolor potè ’l digiuno” (fasting did more than grief had done, 75). This line, like the closing line of Francesca’s speech, has challenged the imagination of readers of all times. Did he really eat his children? Or did he just die? This is the same dilemma that marks the ending of the episode of Francesca. Did they really have sex? Or did they just die? In both cases the latter implication (“just dying”) is also the weaker, some sort of secondary suggestions that only aggrandizes the perceived protagonist of the episode (sex, cannibalism). John Freccero has shown that the canto of Ugolino is fundamentally about interpretation, and that it centres on something “unspeakable.”32 At the beginning of the episode, Dante erases the unspeakable from a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid. “Tu vuo’ ch’io rinnovelli / disperato dolor” (You will

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have me renew desperate grief, Inferno 33, 4–5) is the quasi-literal translation of Aeneid 2, 3: “Infandum, regina iubes renovare dolorem” (Beyond all words, O queen, is the grief thou bidst me to revive), a passage that is also one of the intertextual layers of Francesca’s commemoration of past misery and present happiness (see chapter 5). Aeneas’s “unspeakable” grief is turned into a “desperate” one, pointing to the fact that “the unspeakable” is indeed the heart of this episode. This intertextual black hole, along with some clear Biblical references to the death of Christ throughout the episode, shows that Ugolino’s “unspeakable” (the pervasive “gossip” that he ate his children) only foregrounds the “utterly unspeakable”: the cannibalism implied and tamed in Eucharist, which is horribly inverted in this episode and, therefore, reverted to its taboo status. What, then, is the “utterly unspeakable” in Francesca’s episode? What is more sexual than the lover’s intercourse? What taboo have the lovers infringed? They have made of their love the God of an otherwise godless world. They have reversed the dictum that God is Love into their own private “Love is God.” Theirs is not the venial sin of countless ancient, courtly and stilnovo poets, the dusty prosopopeia of the pagan god of Love, figured, for instance, in Dante’s Vita Nuova as the companion and advisor of the young poet/lover. Their love is a truly Trinitarian entity. Much more than in the powerless three-headed Satan at the bottom of Hell (Inferno 34), a trinity is buried in Inferno 5, indeed Augustine’s ineffable Trinity: the lover, the beloved and Love. Similarly to Dante’s God at the end of the Paradiso, this God is conflated in a book. As Ugolino’s unfathomable eating of the flesh interferes with the Eucharist, putting into focus its horrid facet, so Paolo’s and Francesca’s erotic Trinity impinges sexuality on divinity. ✢✢✢

Another significant aspect of the act of reading in this canto is its performativity. Some scholars, most notably Swing and Hollander, have pointed out the striking similarity between Francesca’s “that day we read no more” and Augustine’s “nec ultra volui legere” in the conversion scene of the Confession.33 Although not substantiating, in my opinion, the thin confessional pattern in the episode of Francesca,34 this reference does invite reflections on the performative nature of reading. In order to argue for the performative quality of Francesca’s reading, I shall focus for a moment on Augustine’s own interrupted reading.35 The conversion scene of the Confession (Book 8) is prepared and followed by other narratives of conversion – that of Victorinus (chapter 2) and that of Antonius (chapter 6). Augustine’s own conversion functions in turn as the

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blueprint for the conversion of his alter-ego, Alypius. Augustine’s conversion is ignited by an aural suggestion, the androgynous voice of a child (“pueri an puellae”), who bids him to “pick up and read.”36 Before obeying the injunction, Augustine tries to interpret this sign. He first tries to relate the voice to a children’s game (“genus ludendi”), but is then forced to understand it as an imperative from God (“divinitus mihi iuberi”). I have argued elsewhere that between the two sides of interpretation there stands a poignant moment in which the relation of signification is stripped from the imperative, and the sign lies suspended and “naked.”37 The story of Paolo and Francesca too is introduced by the mention of other love stories from the past. They too initially take their reading as a game (“per diletto”), but soon realize that something more powerful is hidden in it, which makes them react to the reading first symptomatically (the paling) and eventually performatively. Between the kiss as game and the kiss as “reality” here too stands a moment fraught with powerful suspension, the strong rhythmical pause in the middle of the chiasmus between the ending of line 134 (“amante”) and the beginning of line 135 (“questi”). This pause, generated poetically by the juxtaposition of different rhythms in the two sides of the chiasmus, which only a reader reading aloud can fully appreciate, is truly vertiginous and leaves the kiss “naked” for a moment – no longer the game of intertextuality and of rhetoric, and not yet “reality.” In Augustine’s conversion scene, the command from God finds its first reference in the story of Anthony, and matches it both through the use of the imperatives (“vade, vende, da, veni, sequere” in Anthony’s story, which parallel Augustine’s “tolle! lege!”), and in the instantaneousness of conversion.38 The detour in Anthony’s story is reassuring and instructive: imperatives do become actions. Accordingly, “tolle! lege!” becomes “arripui, aperui et legi in silentio” (I seized it, opened it and in silence read).39 What Augustine reads in the random passage of the Letter to the Romans (13: 13–14) is a summary of his past debauchery (exemplified by gluttony and lust) and yet another imperative for his future: to put on God (“induite Dominum”) and, interestingly, to avoid cupiditas of the flesh (“carnis providentiam ne feceritis in concupiscientiis”). There is no need to read further. Yet Augustine puts a bookmark in his text. As with the androgynous voice of the children, it is once again an ambiguous sign (“digito aut nescio quo alio signo”). Nec ultra volui legere nec opus erat. Statim quippe cum fine hiusce sententiae quasi luce securitatis infusa cordi meo omnes dubitationis tenebrae diffugierunt. Tum interiecto aut digito aut nescio quo alio signo codicem clausi et tranquillo iam vultu indicavi Alypio. Ille quid in

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se agetur (quod ego nesciebam) sic indicavit. Petit videre quid legissem: ostendi et attendit etiam ultra quam ego legeram. Et ignorabam quid sequeretur. Sequebatur vero: “Infirmum autem in fide recipite.” Quod ille ad se rettulit mihique aperuit. (Confessions 8, 12, 29–30) No further would I read, nor did I need; for instantly, as the sentence ended – by a light, as it were, of security infused into my heart – all the gloom of doubt vanished away. Closing the book, then, and putting either my finger between, or some other mark, I now with a tranquil countenance made it known to Alypius. And he thus disclosed to me what was wrought in him, which I knew not. He asked to look at what I had read. I showed him; and he looked even further than I had read, and I knew not what followed. This it was, verily, “Him that is weak in the faith, receive”; which he applied to himself, and discovered to me. There are three striking similarities between Francesca’s and Augustine’s acts of reading. First, at the basis of both scenes there is some kind of entertainment (Augustine’s children game; the lovers’ Romanesque game). Second, their act is performative. As one reads of conversion and is converted, the others read of love, and do (as opposed to make) love. Third, as a consequence of the performative quality of their reading, neither Augustine nor the lovers need to read further. Augustine closes the book, the lovers read no more. However, Augustine emphasizes that he reaches the end of the sentence and gains, thus, confidence in what he is doing: “cum fine hiusce sententiae quasi luce securitatis infusa cordi meo omnes dubitationis tenebrae diffugierunt” (as the sentence ended – by a light, as it were, of security infused into my heart – all the gloom of doubt vanished away ). On the contrary, our lovers famously do not reach a full stop, nor they do bookmark the text for future reference. Finally, both models of reading are potentially transferrable to others. Augustine’s story is willingly open-ended, his conversion acting as a sign for Alypius and, through him, for all his readers. Just as Alypius picks up the book and reads from where Augustine left off, so Dante’s readers begin reading further in Francesca’s story at the moment when the lovers read no more. As contrasted with Augustine, however, Dante more covertly shirks responsibility and faints, with the awareness of having consigned to his readers a wonderful and dangerous story of love and death. Indeed, one could argue that the poet’s unconscious body functions like Augustine’s finger inserted in the book to mark the page, as it reinforces the lover’s act of closing the book, and indelibly bookmarks the episode.

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The performative nature of Francesca’s reading invites the comparison with another performative act of reading which involves female sexuality and womanhood: the late medieval iconography of the Annunciation. The encounter between Mary and Gabriel on the topic of Mary’s future pregnancy with the son of God is a very popular subject in the Middle Ages.40 A very intricate iconography develops from the quite bare account of the Gospel of Luke.41 While in the earlier Middle Ages the focus was mostly on the angel and the role of the Virgin was rather passive, from the twelfth century onward the iconography of the Annunciation changes under the pressure of the waking Marian cult, to show a much more proactive Mary, and introduces a new detail: the book. In late medieval iconography the book, which is not testified in the Gospel or in other stories of annunciation, replaces a spindle and wool for weaving that were often present in the early medieval annunciation scene, marking the transition toward a conception of Mary as being literate (even scholarly: she is the mistress of liberal arts) in addition to devout, humble, and wise. According to Green, through this kind of iconography Mary became a role model for women readers, and several aristocratic ladies were consequently depicted reading.42 The late medieval iconography of the Annunciation follows this general pattern: Mary appears on the right of the picture and is caught in the quite specific act of being distracted from her reading by the arrival of the angel. The precise moment of this event is constructed in painting by having the woman’s body still facing the book, while her head turns to the angel. The expression of Mary’s face is often one of amazement and/or fear, as reflected in the gospel of Luke. Often, however, her face and body quite clearly convey the expression of someone who is interrupted while doing something that implies concentration. Mary’s hands lie on the book, and often she is represented running the index finger on the text, which was an action typical of the medieval practice and iconography of reading. The book is sometimes portrayed as lying on a stand and/or enveloped in rich fabric, in order to underline its preciousness. At times, the book is a portable copy and instead lies closed in Mary’s hand. In this case, the interruption of reading is suggested by Mary’s grasping onto it and often interjecting a finger into it. This is, for instance, the case in the famous annunciation by Simone Martini (1333), where Mary clutches at the book with the thumb inside as a bookmark and with an expression of intense annoyance (or so it appears to the modern viewer) at having been interrupted in her reading. The angel usually comes from the left side, either carrying a scroll bearing the text of the Annunciation (“Ave gratia plena”), or speaking the words, usually in golden letters on a single line connecting the angel’s mouth to

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Mary’s mouth. Thus, a flowing band of letters connects the two mouths in what can easily be interpreted as a kiss. Often Mary too speaks her lines (“Ecce ancilla domini”). While the sacred text connects the two figures, some kind of architectural device separates them: the angel is outdoors while Mary is indoors, or both are in the same space but divided by a column. The Holy Ghost impregnating Mary is often represented by a dove flying into the room. The indoor space is often figured as bedchamber, displaying a massive bed adorned with Mary’s three colours: bright red sheets (love) and white (chastity) or green (fertility) pillows. The traditional interpretation of this scene features Mary reading the Old Testament, namely the book of Isaiah, announcing the birth of the Messiah, when suddenly the “new” scripture irrupts in her space and interrupts the reading in order to “incarnate” it. Through Mary’s body the new scripture verifies, reifies, and obliterates the old. Christian history is the history of two books, hinging on each other and bound together by one bodily event. Christian history is an act of reading, understanding, and interpretation, whereby one book merges into the other to become one new text that is both old and new, and which both foresees and validates itself. Biblical allegory is, indeed, the embrace of two texts: old and new testament become one, like lovers, under the spell of the supernal kiss. A newly old book is inscribed in Mary’s body – she is the page on which a new chapter is written, and this chapter, in turns, binds the two books together. Throughout the Middle Ages there is indeed a strong link between Christ and the book. Some illustrations feature baby Jesus cuddled and cradled in the rib of a book; others show the crucified Jesus as the spine of a book. Indeed, Christ is often treated as volume, his wounded body on the cross like an open book for the Christian to read, its pages made of skin and its ink of blood.43 David Linton argues that in late-medieval iconography there are several hints that allow for an eroticized reading of the annunciation scene, such as the allusive imagery of the bedchamber and the arrangements and juxtaposition of objects (the staff often carried by the angel, or the position of Mary’s hand on her lap).44 In particular, Linton argues that the book is eroticized, and comes to stand for female genitalia. Mary’s and Francesca’s interrupted reading show some remarkable similarities. Like Francesca’s, Mary’s reading is interrupted by a mysterious event, which involves, if not sexuality, womanhood. Mary too is “alone” and “without suspicion,” as her puzzled gaze at the angel testifies. Mary’s pregnancy is a fulfillment of the scripture. Likewise, Francesca’s fall is a fulfillment of a (courtly) scripture. Finally, in both the iconography of the Annunciation in the bed chamber and in Inferno 5 a consequential link between interrupted reading

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and “intercourse” is suggested. The episode of Francesca’s interrupted reading does function as an annunciation tableau. In the same way that the sexual (indeed the sexual taboo) and the spiritual converge in Mary in ways that are inextricable, so Inferno 5 conflates inextricably the sexual and the poetic, interpreting the old and foreshadowing the new. The word incarnate provides interpretation to the old scripture: it is the clue sown by the divine author in order to twist the reader toward a correct reading of his book. With Francesca’s kiss, Dante too provides a key of interpretation to a vast previous corpus of courtly literature about love. The episode of Francesca might indeed be viewed as the first round of the long challenge between Dante-the-author and God-the-author on the grounds of performative powers. ✢✢✢

While the readers within Inferno 5 are challenged by the perfomative nature of their reading, the readers outside the text are in equal danger of being overcome by the “point” and losing sight of the context. The reaction of Dante’s early commentators to the reading of the Lancelot in Inferno 5 shows their awareness of the dangers of reading love literature. “Go-between” and “intermediary” are words often used in commentary to illustrate the role of the book-as-Galehault. Ancient commentators quite plainly called it/him “pimp” (“leno,” “mezzano”). Commentators also recall the church’s prohibitions against reading erotic literature, such as those recorded by Isidore of Seville and Jerome.45 The medical literature of the Middle Ages was also aware of the power of reading in stimulating imagination and sexual pleasure. In their Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset point out that in the Arabic treatises devoted to eroticism, from which the Western medical literature on sexuality largely derives, the didactic parts were always mixed with anecdotes devised to stimulate erotic imagination.46 Jacquart and Thomasset relate a very interesting anecdote of “interrupted reading” by Ibn Falîta (beginning of the thirteenth century): A man reads in the Koran the story of Joseph and his host’s wife. After Joseph’s refusal to give in to the advances of the temptress, the reader closes the book and says to himself: “My God, if at least you had led me to her, I would have shown ways of performing coitus that she does not know and which she has never even heard of.”47

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A thin and moralistic story of refused sexual advances stirs in the reader’s mind a much more concrete sexual desire. Like Paolo and Francesca, the Arabic reader “reads no more” midway into the story, and transforms the words on the page into his own fantasy. The dangers of reading about lovers had already been put in sharp relief by Augustine, in a passage that, as Giuseppe Mazzotta has shown, is in the background of canto 5.48 At the beginning of his Confessions, when relating the story of his own education, Augustine famously recalls his reading of the episode of Dido in Virgil. In his commentary to the Confessions, James O’Donnel points out that, in quoting literally the text of the Aeneid (“flebam Didonem ‘exstinctam ferroque extrema secutam,’” Aeneid 6, 457), Augustine applies to the Aeneid a procedure that he often reserves for scriptural texts. He does more than simply commiserate the fate of Dido: “dead Dido is incorporated in the text of the Aeneid. It was not just a story or a figure of myth that appealed to him, but a text: the authorized version.”49 According to Marilynn Desmond, the figure of Dido in this passage stands for both female sexuality and pagan literature, and recalls Augustine’s traumatic experience of both sexuality and reading as a conflict of desire and will.50 The ingredients of this short episode within the Confessions are remarkably similar to those of Inferno 5, as they engage with the relation between love poetry and lust. In both cases, the reader is caught in the trap of lust while weeping for a tale of love. While the character on the page (Dido, Iseult, Guinevere, Francesca) is lead to death or danger by love, the reader is threatened with spiritual death. Augustine emphasizes the role of compassion in sinful reading, noting that the reader’s compassion is the most covert ally of lust. It is Dido’s death, and not her act of lust (her meeting with Aeneas in the cave, for instance) that troubles the reader, by soliciting his/her compassion. As we shall see later in this chapter, this offers an important gloss on the thorny question of Dante’s “pietà” in Inferno 5. While young Augustine reads and weeps about the love and death of Dido, he not only forgets his own spiritual death (“flente Didonis mortem, quae fiebat amando Aenean, non flente autem mortem suam, quae fiebat non amando te”; shedding tears over the death of Dido for love of Aeneas, but shedding no tears over his own death in not loving You), but he also already commits an act of lust (“fornicabar abs te”: committed fornication against You).51 Augustine singles out reading as a very devious form of lust, since it is the vehicle for a necessary skill (learning how to read and write), and because it is acclaimed by others as a serious intellectual enterprise. Society itself, therefore, fosters reading as lust through education. Augustine accuses the

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“stream of human custom” of fostering reading-as-lust, through a complex sailing metaphor that involves both a river and a sea. Interestingly, they are a river and sea of death (“flumen tartareum,” “mare magnum et formidulosum”), which quite directly recall Dante’s own “river of death” in Inferno 2 (see chapter 1). Sed vae tibi, flumen moris humani! Quis resistet tibi? Quandiu non siccaberis? Quousque volves Evae filios in mare magnum et formidulosum, quod vix transeunt qui lignum conscenderint? Nonne ego in te legi et tonantem Iovem et adulterantem? Et utique non posset haec duo, sed actum est, ut haberet auctoritatem imitandum verum adulterium lenocinante falso tonitru. Quis autem paenulatorum magistrorum audit aure sobria ex eodem pulvere hominem clamantem et dicentem: Fingebat haec Homerus et humana ad deos transferebat; divina mallem ad nos? Sed verius dicitur, quod fingebat haec quidem ille, sed hominibus flagitiosis divina tribuendo, ne flagitia flagitia putarentur et ut quisquis ea fecisset, non homines perditos, sed caelestes deos videretur imitatus. (Confessions 1, 16, 25) But woe unto you, you stream of human custom! Who shall stay your course? How long shall it be before you are dried up? How long will you carry down the sons of Eve into that huge and formidable ocean, which even they who are embarked on the cross can scarce pass over? Do I not read in you of Jove the thunderer and adulterer? And the two verily he could not be; but it was that, while the fictitious thunder served as a cloak, he might have warrant to imitate real adultery. Yet which of our gowned masters can lend a temperate ear to a man of his school who cries out and says: These were Homer’s fictions; he transfers things human to the gods. I could have wished him to transfer divine things to us. But it would have been more true had he said: These are, indeed, his fictions, but he attributed divine attributes to sinful men, that crimes might not be accounted crimes, and that whosoever committed any might appear to imitate the celestial gods and not abandoned men. The reader finds himself in a situation of quasi-drowning, similar to the position of Dante the pilgrim in Inferno 2. In Augustine, the deadly river becomes a text, in which the reader reads (“in te legi”) the more overtly lustful (and more comic) episode of the rape of Danae. At one and the same time, Augustine has four targets in his sights: Homer, the responsible for popularizing the lustful attitude of the pagan gods; Cicero, the philosophical “excuser” of

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Homer (not mentioning his name but with a direct citation of the Tusculan disputations);52 Ovid, the unspoken target of this passage, the singer of the gods’ lusts and metamorphoses; and, finally, Terentius, through whom one can appreciate the dangers of imitation. Et tamen, o flumen Tartareum, iactantur in te fili hominum cum mercedibus, ut haec discant, et magna res agitur, cum hoc agitur publice in foro, in conspectu legum supra mercedem salaria decernentium, et saxa tua percutis et sonas dicens: “Hinc uerba discuntur, hinc adquiritur eloquentia rebus persuadendis sententiisque explicandis maxime necessaria.” Ita vero non cognosceremus verba haec, imbrem et aureum et gremium et fucum et templa caeli et alia verba, quae in eo loco scripta sunt, nisi Terentius induceret nequam adulescentem proponentem sibi Iovem ad exemplum stupri, dum spectat tabulam quandam pictam in pariete, ubi inerat pictura haec, Iovem quo pacto Danaae misisse aiunt in gremium quondam imbrem aureum, fucum factum mulieri? Et vide, quemadmodum se concitat ad libidinem quasi caelesti magisterio: At quem Deum! inquit. Qui templa caeli summo sonitu concutit. Ego homuncio id non facerem? Ego illud vero feci ac libens. (Confessions 1, 16, 26) And yet, you stream of hell, into you are cast the sons of men, with rewards for learning these things; and much is made of it when this is going on in the forum in the sight of laws which grant a salary over and above the rewards. And you beat against your rocks and roarest, saying, Hence words are learned; hence eloquence is to be attained, most necessary to persuade people to your way of thinking, and to unfold your opinions. So, in truth, we should never have understood these words, golden shower, bosom, intrigue, highest heavens, and other words written in the same place, unless Terence had introduced a good-for-nothing youth upon the stage, setting up Jove as his example of lewdness: – Viewing a picture, where the tale was drawn, “Of Jove’s descending in a golden shower / To Danaë’s bosom … with a woman to intrigue.” And see how he excites himself to lust, as if by celestial authority, when he says: – “Great Jove, / Who shakes the highest heavens with his thunder, / And I, poor mortal man, not do the same! / I did it, and with all my heart I did it. The last example parallels quite closely the situation of Paolo and Francesca. In Terence’s Eunuchus, one reads about a reader reading into a picture the story of Jupiter’s seduction of Danae, and being thus induced to act on his

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own lust. As in Inferno 5, a comparison is established between the greatness of the lovers in the picture/text (“Deum … Qui templa caeli summo sonitu concutit”) and the mortal self (“homunculus”). In both cases, the authority of the texts and characters leads the simple reader to sin (“se concitat ad libidinem quasi caelesti magisterio”). Turning again to the Aeneid, with one direct quotation from and a couple of references to Book 1, Augustine explores another dangerous aspect of intertextuality: rewriting. While young Augustine is busy rewriting the Aeneid in prose, he does not acknowledge the onset not only of lust, but of cupiditas – the general sin of desire, which leads the boy to theft, gambling, and other vices.53 Mindful of his linguistic background, Augustine absolves the words – beautiful containers – and accuses the content: “Non accuso verba quasi vasa electa atque pretiosa, sed vinum erroris, quod in eis nobis propinabatur ab ebriis doctoribus” (I do not blame the words, they being, as it were, choice and precious vessels, but the wine of error which was drunk in them to us by inebriated teachers, Confessions 1, 16, 26). Words such as “rain” “golden,” and “lap” are not lustful until they are woven together into the poet’s beautiful deception. Augustine places the weight of guilt fully on poetic texts and their authors, which allure an otherwise innocent reader into lust and sin. Augustine’s reader, standing on the banks of the river of death, encompasses two related characters from the beginning of Inferno: the pilgrim in canto 2 and Francesca in canto 5. On the one hand, Augustine’s reader shares with Francesca the “misery” of bad reading, and the resulting spiritual death.54 The comparison with Augustine supports the characterization, recurrent in early commentators, of Francesca as an innocent reader, who is poisoned by love literature. On the other hand, Augustine the authorreader is reflected in Dante’s own self, fighting his battle on the river of death in canto 2 of Inferno. As a reader-author at the beginning of his greatest authorial feat, Dante too is threatened by the misery of bad reading – his own misreading and the misreading of others. Tellingly, he is rescued from this uneasy spot by the intervention of that very Virgil/Aeneid who is Augustine’s polemic target, albeit on the mandate of Beatrice/stilnovo. In explicitly pointing the finger at “the book and he who wrote it” (“il libro e chi lo scrisse,” Inferno 5, 137), Dante acknowledges that the problem of lustful reading does not reside on the reader’s part only. In the mirror image of the lovers who are reading about lovers who are reading about … Dante points to his own writing, and to himself as an author creating the magic of reading. This elicits questions on how Dante positions himself as an author of erotic literature – as a Galehault who might persuade other lovers to overlook the dangerous side of love. Is the shell of Hell a strong enough

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protection for an author who is challenging Virgil’s Dido and all the great Romanesque lovers, as well as the Provençal and courtly tradition, in shaping new, authoritative lovers? By the late Middle Ages, Augustine’s gesture of rejecting Dido, although well established and upheld by many, had become insufficient to account for the problematic relation between classical and medieval culture, especially with regard to “lascivious” texts. The century-long process of assimilation, rejection, and allegorization of Ovid’s erotic writings, culminating in the successful enterprise of the Ovide moralisé at the beginning of the fourteenth century, testifies to the complexity of this tradition and to the vitality of the medieval art of interpretation. A very sophisticated negotiation among love literature, authorship, the ethics of writing, and spiritual perdition, which may illuminate Dante’s position in Inferno 5, is at work in Guibert of Nogent’s Autobiography (circa 1115). In chapter 17 Guibert describes himself as a young monk who is excessively (“ultra omne modum”) involved in the study of verse-making. His interest in the formal aspect of poetry leads him to challenge the great love poets of antiquity – Ovid and the pastoral poets (most probably Virgil of the Bucolics, which is taken to allude to a homoerotic context). He first tries out images, then letters, and finally, seduced by “this contagious indulgence” (“virulentae huius licentiae lenociniis”), he tries out poetry, and finds himself doubly captive (“utrobique raptabar”). On the one hand, young Guibert is seduced into lust by sweet words borrowed from the poets (“verborum dulcium, quae a poetis acceperam”) and by his own words; on the other hand, these words cause a stirring in his own flesh (“immodica carnis meae titillatione tenerer”). The monk is helpless and his tongue can only put forth what his thought prompts: obscene words, immodest writings, and indecent compositions. The Lord himself intervenes, appearing in dream to the abbot: “I want you to render an account of these poems that were composed; the hand who wrote them is not that of the man who drew these letters.” In interpreting this injunction, the abbot and the young monk understand not only that there will be a change in the hand who wrote the poems but also that Guibert could apply to virtue what he had employed in the pursuit of vice. Divine intervention notwithstanding, the young monk continues to write obscene verses in secret (“latenter”), showing them in private to “a few like-minded peers” and reading them aloud under a pen name (“mentito auctore”), the only satisfaction being the enjoyment – or rather the shame – of writing them. God then strikes him with bodily infirmity, as a way of strapping the wandering soul “with the belt of adversity” (“animum evagante adversitate cinxisti”). Love poetry leaves a vacuum that the author’s wandering self fills with the pursuit of spiritual knowledge, the reading of

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religious authorities, and, eventually, the writing of a commentary on Genesis, which turns him into a “good” (although possibly still ambitious and proud) author.55 In his journey of writerly conversion, Guibert moves from versification to style, to content, to bodily unrest, to lustful poetic production, to problematic and submerged authorship, to bodily infirmity, to “good” authorship. The author experiences the pleasures and dangers of lustful literature twice in his body; first as arousal and second as illness. Dante stages some similar routes in his experience of love literature in Hell. The poetic creatures are first summoned from a “library” of love literature (“the troop where Dido is,” Inferno 5, 85). In the anaphora lines the poet/pilgrim explores the powers of intertextuality and falls prey to his very invention, which affects him physically and elicits his desire to know more. Notwithstanding the peremptory ending of the anaphora lines (“Love brought us to one death,” Inferno 5, 106), Dante chooses to linger more on the “sweet desires” that caused it. Interestingly, the pilgrim/author and the damned/poetic creature experience the same bodily reaction to the story, which is, just as expected, crying. To Dante’s claim that Francesca’s torments “make me weep for grief and pity” (“a lagrimar mi fanno tristo e pio,” 117) Francesca answers “as one who weeps and tells” (“come colui che piange e dice,” 126). Like Guibert, Dante too elects an alias for himself – Lancelot, the “Galehault” book and author – through which he fully explores the dangers of love literature. Only when stricken by bodily infirmity, the seizure at the end of the canto (“caddi come corpo morto cade,” 142) does the pilgrim/author truly turn the page, and become able to move on and consider “new torments and new tormented souls” (“novi tormenti e novi tormentati,” Inferno 6, 4). Dante’s reader/author is, however, less ingenuous than Augustine’s and Guibert’s, and gives his own reader a more mixed message about the misery and delight of “lustful reading.” As mentioned in chapter 3, the central figure of the doves that are called by desire and propelled by the will is, among other things, also an image for authorship. Dante the “bird hunter” puts forth a signal, the affectionate cry (“l’affettuoso grido”), luring two characters from the ranks of the illustrious protagonists of love poetry. The two creatures bend toward him in desire.56 Dante stages in the same way the erotic and the authorial attraction. Just as the lover’s attraction is ineluctable and spreads from Paolo to Francesca, absolving “no loved one from loving,” so Paolo and Francesca are ineluctably drawn to talk to the pilgrim, and to illustrate the ineluctability of their love. By surrendering to “the affectionate cry,” by turning themselves into objects of poetry, Paolo and Francesca reverse the fatal fall and re-enter the realm of desire. Dante’s authority has bestowed upon them the language of poetry, and ultimately undone their carnality.

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Paolo and Francesca are not, however, the only birds lured by Dante’s craft. Readers too are called by the author’s affectionate cry to witness and experience the making and unmaking of the new poetry. As love takes hold firmly of the gentle heart, so the author takes firmly hold of his reader’s attention through various expedients. As seen in chapter 4, one of these stratagems is at work in the anaphora lines, where the poet quite unexpectedly switches from the complex intertextual embroidery of the first four lines to the bare, “realistic” account of the last two lines: “Love brought us to one death. Caina awaits him who quenched our lives” (Inferno 5, 106–7). Here Dante is appealing to the curiosity of the reader by referring to his own future work, the grandiose and unique three-zoned frozen bottom of Hell, where the traitors are punished (Inferno 32–4). This is a great novelty for the first-time reader, who is palely introduced to it in canto 11 (63–5) but has to await canto 32 to appreciate its magnificence, underlined by a new proem and the call for a new language of poetry.57 Dante “the bird hunter” has entrapped his readers too, by fanning their desire with the lure of established love poetry and then entangling them in the birdlime of the new. In order to discover Caina, the reader has to bear with the poet and cross his Hell with all his beautiful new inventions. The words of the poetic tradition are transfixed by the literality of death in canto 5, while new poetry is given life and wings. Dante, however, does not keep the reader’s attention only with the thrill of novelty. He does so also by emotional means, relying on the pathetic aspect of the episode and characterizing his own pilgrim as a weak and compassionate character. The pilgrim’s “smarrimento” and “pietà” (Inferno 5, 72), his erring, and his fainting are very problematic aspects of Hell, and particularly of this canto. Early commentators perceived Dante’s compassion as theologically flawed, since a Christian is not supposed to feel pity for the sinners condemned in Hell. The distinction between the moral rigour and rigidity of hell and the compassion for what happens therein is one of the leading themes of Inferno – a leg of the journey that Dante characterizes as a war (“guerra”) of both the passage (“cammino”) and compassion (“pietate,” Inferno 2, 4–5). This contrast has often been interpreted as one of the textual signs of the schism between the sadistic, controlling poet and the erratic and weak pilgrim. The pilgrim’s “pietà” is alternatively understood as anxiety, turmoil, involvement in the fiction, identification with the sinner (and, thus, self-pity), and a necessary step in the pilgrim’s assessment of sin.58 Most frequently, however, it is interpreted as the “very human” sentiment of compassion. Rather than being markers of a generic humanity of the poet, however, compassion and affection are the narrative joints of this canto, as well as a

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crucial rhetorical device. The metapoetic function of the pilgrim’s “pietà” becomes immediately clear at the outset of the episode. The list of the great lovers of old is concluded by Dante’s pity and bewilderment (“pietà mi giunse e fui quasi smarrito”: pity overcame me and I was as one bewildered, Inferno 5, 72). The power of this compassion is underlined by the strong rhythmic pause between lines 72 and 73, signalling the panic of both the pilgrim and the poet, who has lost his thread under the pressure of this great tradition of love stories and love poetry. The episode of the Italian lovers is then set in motion by Dante’s lure, the “affectionate cry” (“affettuoso grido,” 87). At the beginning of her speech, however, Francesca rephrases it as Dante’s compassion, blessing the pilgrim for having “pity on our perverse ill” (“pietà del nostro mal perverso,” 93) – that is, she rephrases affection/desire in terms of compassion. Later in the canto the pilgrim is overcome by sadness and compassion (he becomes “tristo e pio,” sad and pious, 117) and his “affection” (“affetto,” 125) spurs narration again, overcoming Francesca’s grief in the recollection of past happiness. Compassion is the reason for Dante’s fainting, as remarked both at the ending of canto 5 and the beginning of canto 6.59 In Inferno 5, the theme of the pilgrim’s “pietà” is stretched to an extent so as to point out that the pilgrim’s self- (or selfless) compassion is also a skillful rhetorical invention, aiming at keeping the reader’s attention through the classical mandate of “commotion” (“movere”). The pilgrim’s heavy display of compassion constantly provokes the reader’s attention and alertness, by emphasizing the intensely dramatic and profoundly emotional nature of the episode. Moreover, the comparison with Augustine’s compassion for Dido’s death suggests that Dante’s “pietà” could be yet another “pedagogical” trap that the author sets for his reader. Like Augustine’s reader, Dante’s pilgrim and reader linger in empathy for the greatness of “the ladies and the knights of old […] whom love had parted from our lives” (71, 69) or Francesca’s “martyrdom” (116), and meanwhile they are threatened by lust and in danger of perdition.60 Like a skilled rhetorician, Dante involves his audience by affective and emotional means. As a pedagogue, however, he invites them to reflect on the dangers of involvement. The most pronounced meta-literary moment of the canto occurs in the image of the book-turned-Galehault. A very interesting zigzag on the border of meta-textuality takes place in this figure: an actual author and a real book are turned into the fictional character that they portray. This character, in turn, is presented as actual go-between in a “real” event (the story of Paolo and Francesca), subsequently recorded and fictionalized by Dante. Something similar, although in a less meandering fashion, takes place in the Garden of Eden on top of the Purgatory, where a reference to Inferno 5 is both least and most expected.61 In Eden, a long train of personified books

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acts as intermediary for the first post-mortem encounter and the first actual conversation between Dante and Beatrice. The old men and the animals in the bizarre parade that surrounds and facilitates the meeting of the two lovers are, like Galeotto, books turned into people. The front of the procession is made by seven banners symbolizing the gifts of the holy spirit, twenty-four old men (the books of the Old Testament) clad in white and crowned with lilies, and four animals (the Gospels). The centrepiece is the triumphal chariot (the Church), lead by the griffin (Christ) and flanked by seven women (the virtues). The train of the procession is made by seven more old men (the extant books of the New Testament) equally clad in white, but crowned with red flowers. The personified books of this group bear characteristics of their author and/or content.62 The Apocalypse, which prophetically closes the parade as “an old man, coming alone, asleep, with keen visage” (“un vecchio solo / venir, dormendo, con la faccia arguta,” Purgatorio 29, 143–4), is also the major source of inspiration for the whole scene. It is, however, in Jerome’s prologue to the Vulgate that the twenty-four elders and the four animals surrounding God’s throne are interpreted as the books of the Bible. The meta-literary structure of this figuration is so evident that at a certain point Dante, almost irritated, sends the readers directly to his sources.63 In the same way in which the kiss of Paolo and Francesca is precipitated by a book/author turned person/character, in Purgatorio a personified book, chanting its own content, instigates the encounter between Dante and Beatrice. Interestingly, this book is the Song of Songs: e un di loro, quasi da ciel messo, Veni, sponsa, de Libano cantando gridò tre volte, e tutti li altri appresso. (Purgatorio 30, 10–12) and one of them, as if sent from heaven, singing cried thrice, Veni, sponsa de Libano and all the others after. Meta-textuality furiously continues, with the angels joining in and quoting the Gospel of John (“benedictus qui venis,” 19) and Virgil’s Aeneid (“Manibus oh date lilia plenis,” 21). Both in the circle of lust and in Eden the lovers are brought to each other by the intervention of a personified book. In hell the secular book performs its magic like a love-philtre, while the sacred books of purgatory play a divinely instituted role. The meta-textual event of hell precipitates the lovers into the eternal loneliness of damnation, whereas that of purgatory unites them in the contemplation of Christian history and community. While the former

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event takes place in a heavily rhetorical context and is mediated by several rhetorical devices and figures of speech (triple bird simile, captatio benevolentiae, adunaton, anaphora, chiasmus), the latter occurs in the midst of an extreme allegory. The meta-textual comparison of the two episodes suggests, therefore, Dante’s condemnation of isolated figures of speech as seduction and his upholding of allegory as direction: while the beauty of rhetorical figures works in isolation and causes deception, that of allegory works in context and produces meaning.

Dante handles the connection between love/lust and rhetoric, like any other recurrent theme in his work, in manifold and contrasting ways. Central to this theme is the comparison between rhetoric and Venus in the second book of the Convivio.64 The first point of comparison between the science and the planet is clarity (“chiarezza”), which I understand as both luminosity and claritas, the specific quality of beauty. Clarity makes Venus the most beautiful of all planets and rhetoric the most beautiful of sciences.65 The heaven of Venus in the Paradiso hosts the spirits of the lovers, and constitutes the last part of the triptych on lust/love, which encompasses Inferno 5 and Purgatorio 26.66 There, alongside the reconciliation of earthly love, we find God as a Rhetorician – his love for the creature “embellishing” (“addorna,” Paradiso 9, 106) the art of creation. Slightly changing the terms of the equation, Dante elsewhere suggests that both rhetoric and seduction imply beauty. As already mentioned in chapter 1, he does so by employing the same expression – “ornate words” – in relation to Virgil (“parola ornata,” Inferno 2, 67) and to the seducer Jason (“parole ornate,” Inferno 18, 91). Ornatus – beauty’s “apparel” – constitutes a very interesting declension of beauty. Its spectrum ranges from the beautiful arrangement of the universe, through which the beauty of God shines, to the frequently criticized female cosmetic art. With respect to textuality, ornatus signifies both the beauty of language itself and the deceptive cosmetics of rhetoric and poetry. The comparison between rhetorical ornatus and female beauty (ornatus foeminae) is frequently employed in ancient and medieval writers to point out the fundamentally deceptive nature of figurative language and female beauty.67 Dante employs this association in several and conflicting instances throughout his work. In the Convivio, Dante strategically compares the simpler beauty of prose to the natural beauty of woman, and the metrical and rhyming apparatus of poetry to her “accidental ornament.” In the prose, the reader will be able to enjoy more directly the linguistic and rhetorical

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beauty of the vernacular, “the smoothness of the flow of its syllables, the appropriateness of its constructions, and the sweet discourses that it makes”: in sum, the vernacular’s “sweetest and most exquisite beauty” (“dolcissima e … amabilissima bellezza”).68 Poetry, on the other hand, overshadows the beauty of language with its own apparel of rhyme and rhythm. In the De vulgari eloquentia, language is characterized as one of the ornaments of textual beauty, as opposed to beauty itself. The beginning of the second book of the De vulgari eloquentia is precisely devoted to the art of poetic “makeup” – exornatio. Since embellishment is the principal aim of the poet, it appears that all poets should employ the greatest ornament of all, the illustrious vernacular.69 However, the beauty of the illustrious vernacular can only be properly handled by poets who are endowed with “good thinking” (“optimis conceptionibus optima loquela conveniet”) – that is, knowledge and intelligence (“scientia et ingenium”). To mix the beauty of the language with an inferior content would further expose the limitations of the lesser material, as happens to an ugly woman when she is in the company of beautiful ones, or when she is clothed in excessively beautiful ornaments.70 Successful poetry, then, is the coming together of beautiful form and complex intellectual content – differentiated into salus (well-being), venus (love), and virtus (virtue). The song’s formal beauty derives from the proper choice of stylistic register (tragic), of powerful metre (hendecasyllable), of flavoured, graceful, and striking grammatical constructions, and of excellent words. With a resumption of “grooming” rhetoric, beautiful words are defined as either “combed” (“pexa”) or “shabby” (“irsuta”). Interestingly, while moral and didactic poetry aim at some kind of self-improvement, love poetry is purely aesthetic. Like beauty, its aim is delectatio, pleasure.71 The lesson about combining rhetorical beauty and intellectual difficulty seems to have been taken on board by Dante’s friend,Guido Cavalcanti in the congedo of Donna me prega – a text that is frequently mentioned in the second book of the De vulgari eloquentia, and possibly not by chance. For Guido poetic beauty (that is, rhetorical complexity) is the key to appreciating intellectual complexity. Form and content are one, and they feed each other in the experience of a choice group of talented readers. Tu puoi sicuramente gir, canzone, là ’ve ti piace, ch’io t’ho sì adornata ch’assai laudata – sarà tua ragione da le persone – c’hanno intendimento: di star con l’altre tu non hai talento. (Donna me prega, 71–5)

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You, song, can safely go where you like, for I have so embellished you that your argument will be greatly praised by those persons who have understanding: you have no desire to be with others. On the contrary, Dante in his early work is slightly more cautious than Guido, as he makes a distinction between poetic beauty, which can be appreciated by anyone, and intellectual complexity, which might lead to the rejection of the canzone that opens the second treatise of Convivio. Canzone, io credo che saranno radi color che tua ragione intendan bene, tanto la parli faticosa e forte. Onde, se per ventura elli adivene che tu dinanzi da persone vadi che non ti paian d’essa bene acorte, allor ti priego che ti riconforte, dicendo lor, diletta mia novella: “Ponete mente almen com’io son bella!” (Voi ch’intendendo il terzo ciel movete, 53–61). My song, I think they will be few indeed who’ll rightly understand your sense, so difficult and complex is your speech. So if by chance it comes to pass that you should find yourself with some who do not grasp it well at all, I pray you then, dear newborn song, take courage again and say to them: “Consider at least how fair I am!” In accordance with the theories of De vulgari eloquentia, in the commentary to this song (Convivio 2, xi) Dante explains that the formal beauty of the song is rendered by a combination of grammatical, rhetorical, and musical qualities.72 He acknowledges that both form and content provide pleasure (“diletto”) to the reader, but underlines the superiority of intellectual pleasure (goodness, “sentenza”) to rhetorical pleasure (beauty, “ornamento”), quite in line with the Convivio’s vision of desire, which, as we have seen in chapter 2, privileges intellectual desire over any other kind of desire.73 Rhetorical beauty and ornateness are also relevant to of the episode of Geryon (Inferno 17), in itself one of the most intense reflections on textuality in the whole Comedy. In her essay “Ulysses, Geryon, and the Aeronautics of Narrative Transition,” Teodolinda Barolini has explained that Geryon “is both the poem and its antithesis.” Like the poem, Geryon is the “truth which looks like a lie,” but it is also the image for mendacity and fraud.74 Although

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for the most part a horrible beast, Geryon is also beautiful – his back adorned with the splendour of textiles so rich and complex that “Tartars or Turks never made cloth with more colors of groundwork and pattern, nor were such webs laid on the loom by Arachne” (“non fer mai drappi Tartari né Turchi, / né fuor tai tele per Aragne imposte,” Inferno 17, 17–18). The connection between the art of weaving and textuality is as old as literature itself, and Dante shows awareness of this crucial link when he places Arachne as an example of pride in the purgatorial terrace he reserves for his own afterlife, calling her “folle” (like himself and Ulysses) in her challenge to the divine text.75 In the episode of Geryon, Dante emphasizes the textile nature of the monster’s beauty and displays some remarkable knowledge of the art of weaving. Geryon’s figure results from a montage of beautiful and ugly parts. In addition to revealing itself in the outward, benign appearance of his face (“faccia d’uom giusto / tanto benigna avea di fuor la pelle,” Inferno 17, 10–11), the monster’s beauty is located in the circlets and knots (“nodi” and “rotelle”) of his trunk, where beautiful colours (interpreted as rhetorical colours, colores rhettorici)76 are embedded both in the “sommesse” (groundwork of a weaving, or warp of the textile) and the “sovrapposte” (the weaving or the weft of a textile). lo dosso e ’l petto e ambedue le coste dipinti avea di nodi e di rotelle. Con più color, sommesse e sovraposte non fer mai drappi Tartari né Turchi, né fuor tai tele per Aragne imposte. (Inferno 17, 14–18) his back and breast and both his sides were painted with knots and circlets. Tartars or Turks never made cloth with more colors of groundwork and pattern, nor were such webs laid on the looms by Arachne. Whether this is a matter of weaving or embroidery – or both – it is clear that the issue of poetic beauty is both at the heart and on the surface of his text.77 Poetic beauty is here presented as something complicated, knotted (“nodi”), twisted (“rotelle”), and heavily embroidered and coloured. The comparison with textiles shows that beauty is not only found in the surface but is woven into the very “stuff” of poetry, colouring both the groundwork and the pattern. One enigmatic detail ties the episode of Geryon to the sin of lust. At the end of canto 16, the reader is for the first time made aware that the pilgrim had attempted some kind of reaction against the three beasts that hindered

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his passage at the beginning of poem; namely, he had tried to capture the leopard, traditionally symbolizing lust, with a rope that he wore around his body, and which he now hands to Virgil in order to summon Geryon: Io avea una corda intorno cinta, e con essa pensai alcuna volta prender la lonza a la pelle dipinta. Poscia ch’io l’ebbi tutta da me sciolta, sì come ’l duca m’avea comandato, porsila a lui aggroppata e ravvolta. (Inferno 16, 106–11) I had a cord girt around me, and with it I once thought to take the gay-skinned leopard. After I had quite loosed it from me, as my leader bade, I passed it to him knotted and coiled. The symbolism of the cord is still quite mysterious. This belatedly announced garment, however, clearly indicates two things: it connects fraud and lust, and states that something that is fit to capture lust is also fit as a lure, or as a signal, to fraud. Such a signal is administered by Virgil, possibly in his allegorical embodiment as reason. Ancient and modern commentators agree that both lust and fraud imply seduction.78 Both also originate in desire79 and have ties to beauty and, especially, to ornate and ornament – as both the leopard’s “gay” and “painted” skin (“gaetta pelle,” Inferno 1, 42 and “pelle dipinta,” 16, 108) and Geryon’s beautifully ornate middle part (“dipinti … di nodi e di rotelle,” 17, 15) show. With Geryon, Dante problematizes the relation between “inner” and “outer” poem creating a tension that is left unresolved at this point of the narrative. On the one hand, Dante classifies his own fiction as “a truth that looks like a lie” (“ver ch’ha faccia di menzogna,” Inferno 16, 124), and he does so precisely when introducing the “unbelievable” character of Geryon to his reader. On the other hand, Geryon is the image for fraud, “a lie which looks like the truth.” Fraud, appearing outwardly benign and concealing evil disposition, is like physical beauty that conceals horror, and like beautiful poetry estranged from high intellectual content. Like lust, it elicits and exploits inordinate desires. The tension between inner and outer poetic beauty posited by Geryon is dealt with in the poem through the figures of the Siren, the ugly woman/ poetry that the lover/poet conceals through rhetorical ornaments aimed merely at aesthetic pleasure, and of Matelda, the constitutionally beautiful

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woman/poetry, in which the inner (internal worth and high intellectual content) and the outer (beauty and sweetness) correspond. The Siren in Purgatory 19 adds a further layer to the meta-poetics of the Comedy. Like Geryon, the Siren is a figure of fraud – beauty that hides ugliness and deception. Unlike the infernal monster, however, her deceptive nature is a making of the dreamer/beholder/lover/poet. As seen in chapter 4, through the dream of the Siren Dante might denounce the shortcomings of a process of love (and knowledge) founded on vision and generated by beauty. Here I would add that in the figure of the Siren Dante might also attack the lyric (courtly and stilnovo) tradition that insistently portrays and authorizes such model. Not only is the emphasis of the episode located in the Siren’s “voice” (“lingua,” “parlare,” “cantare,” “cantava,” “sentire” “canto”: Purgatorio 19, 13, 16, 17, 19, 21, 23) and her pleasure expressed in terms of song (“tanto son di piacere a sentir piena”: so full am I of pleasantness to hear, 19, 21), but her initial ugliness can be almost fully related to the poetic art. Her stammering (“balba,” 19, 7) hints at poor fluency; her squinting (“guercia,” 19, 8) targets the eyes, the main engine of the process of love and the chief image of love poetry; her limping on crooked feet (“sovra i piè distorta,” 19, 8) could allude to unstable metrical feet; and her pale complexion (“di colore scialba,” 19, 9) convey the lack of rhetorical colour. The gaze of the beholder/lover/poet rectifies all such flaws, constructing an image of female beauty and beautiful poetry, making her tongue fluent, setting her straight and colouring “her pallid face even as love required” (19, 12–15), creating a visual/textual attraction that absorbs all the beholder/listener’s desires. If such an interpretation is correct, the Siren’s opposite in bono would be Matelda – the other mysterious figure of beauty and poetry that Dante meets in Earthly Paradise (Purgatorio 28). Through a detailed analysis of how Matelda’s feet (“piedi,” 34 and 54) are positioned in her walking and dancing, Patrizia Pizzorno has suggested that she is a personification of the lyrical canzone, which Dante discusses in second book of the De vulgari eloquentia.80 Matelda is set in a lyrical context of singing birds – the prime Provençal image for lyric poetry as a natural-artistic event. The birds do not cease “practising all their arts” (“non […] tanto, che li augelletti per le cime / lasciassero di oprar ogne lor arte,” 28, 13–15) and joyfully sing while the leaves “keep burden to their rhymes” (“tenevan bordone a le sue rime,” 28, 18). While it takes the poet’s gaze to warm up the Siren’s stammering tongue and crooked limbs (“come il sol conforta le fredde membra […] così lo sguardo mio le facea scorta la lingua e poscia tutta la drizzava,” 19, 10–13), Matelda is already beautiful, as she is warmed by the rays of love itself, and, therefore, her external beauty is true to her interior one:

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Deh, bella donna, che a’ raggi d’amore ti scaldi, s’i’ vo’ credere a’ sembianti che soglion esser testimon del core vegnati in voglia di trarreti avanti, diss’ io a lei, verso questa rivera, tanto ch’io possa intender che tu canti. (Purgatorio 28, 43–8) Pray, fair lady, who do warm yourself at love’s beam, if I may believe outward looks which are wont to be testimony of the heart, I said to her, may it please you to draw forward to this stream so near that I may understand what you sing. Both the Siren’s and Matelda’s song are unspecified, but, while the former focuses merely on superficial beauty, the latter conveys both sweetness and meaning (“dolce suono” … “intendimenti”; 28, 59–60). Thus, two figures of beauty and poetry stand at the antipodes of the metapoetics of Purgatorio. Interestingly, they come before and after the so-called cantos of the poets (21–6), where Dante meets the classical poet Statius and the vernacular poets Bonagiunta da Lucca, Guido Guinizzelli, and Arnaut Daniel, and where he loudly enunciate his own rules of the “sweet new style” (Purgatorio 24, 52–4). The Siren embodies cupiditas, a love (and a love poetry) that narcissistically revolves around the lover/poet himself, while Matelda is figure of caritas, in which outer and inner beauty correspond to form a meaningful text. Beautiful poetry that conveys complex intellectual content is not, however, immune to dangers, as it might lead the lover/poet astray to explore forbidden grounds such as divinity. Teodolinda Barolini has shown the tight connections between the episodes of Ulysses and Geryon, which are both animated by aeronautics imagery and are both loci of reflection on Dante’s own daunting poetic enterprise. While Geryon ties together poetry and beauty, Ulysses famously binds poetry and the desire for knowledge – proffering a “mad” (“folle,” Inferno 26, 125) foil to Dante’s poetic and epistemological enterprise. With a famous “oration” (Inferno 26, 112–20) Ulysses convinces his crew to follow him in his deranged route of exploration, appealing to their desire for “virtue and knolwedge” (120). As expected, the full embrace of knowledge, poetry, and beauty takes place only in the safe haven of Paradiso. The figure of Beatrice encompasses, among many other things, complex intellectual poetry – a poetry that can accommodate both scientific and theological content and still retain confidence in its beauty, as exemplified by Paradiso 2. At the outset of this canto, Dante-

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Ulysses (with a hint also of Guido Cavalcanti and the finale of Donna me prega) appeals to a small group of talented readers, inviting them to follow him in his navigation, and promises to amaze them with poetic and scientific wonders, which coalesce in the poetic solemnity and intellectual complexity of Beatrice’s demonstration of the moon spots (Paradiso 2, 49–148).81 In the following canto, Dante comments on Beatrice’s first lesson by bringing together erotic love, the sweet aspect (that is, the poetic aspect) of beautiful philosophical truth, and more desire for learning. Quel sol che pria d’amor mi scaldò ’l petto, di bella verità m’avea scoverto, provando e riprovando, il dolce aspetto; e io, per confessar corretto e certo me stesso, tanto quanto si convenne leva’ il capo a proferer più erto; (Paradiso 3, 1–6) That sun that first heated my breast with love, proving and refuting had uncovered to me the sweet aspect of fair truth and, to confess me corrected and assured, I raised my head more erect to speak. The image of the sun’s rays warming up the Siren’s limbs, Matelda, and the lover in Paradiso concisely brings together the three metapoetic episodes discussed so far. In the comparison of the three passages, sweetness moves from being a quality of outward beauty in the episode of the Siren (“dolce serena,” Purgatorio 19, 19) to being a feature of poetry itself in the episode of Matelda (“dolce suono,” Purgatorio 28, 59), and to becoming the nature of philosophical truth itself in Heaven; a truth that is both sweet (“dolce”) and fair (“bella,” Paradiso 3, 2–3).

As seen in chapters 3 and 4, Beatrice’s beauty grows in the heavenly ascent, and human language fails progressively to capture it in poetry, until a true “incision” in the poem occurs (Paradiso 30, 16–33). At the beginning of Paradiso 30 the pilgrim is overcome and blinded by the light emanating from God, a “punto” that is in turn strongly reminiscent of the textual “point” which overcomes Paolo and Francesca (see chapter 5). The pilgrim manages to exit the impasse imposed by “the point” by focusing on Beatrice, only to find that her “outrageous” beauty also proffers “a point” that overcomes his art, signaling the alleged end of earthly poetry. Beatrice’s beauty transcends

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measure (“trasmoda”), dissolves into absolute pleasure (“frui”), and can be appreciated only by her Author, while her poet is overcome, at the “point” (“punto”) of touching the limits of art. La bellezza ch’io vidi si trasmoda non pur di là da noi, ma certo io credo che solo il suo fattor tutta la goda. Da questo passo vinto mi concedo più che già mai da punto di suo tema soprato fosse comico o tragedo: (Paradiso 30, 19–24) The beauty I beheld transcends measure not only beyond our reach, but I truly believe that He alone who made it can enjoy it all. At this pass I concede myself defeated more than ever comic or tragic poet was defeated by a point in his theme. For the third time in the poem a “point” overcomes the context/discourse, and annihilates the witness. The beauty of Beatrice, transformed beyond measure (“trasmoda”) and turned into a perfect form of Augustinian fruition, transforms the mode of poetry as well. The Empyrean, the immaterial heaven outside time and space, is also the locus of a new poetry. When God appears as a volume in the final vision, he might well be a book of poetry, binding together the metre of the universe. As God binds together with love in one volume the scattered universe, so the poet, binder of words, lovingly sustains his language with the system of rhyme and rhythm.82 Fulfilling the promise of the Convivio’s etymology “auieo” (Convivio 4, vi, 3–4)83 – which singles out authors/poets as binders of words and likens their operation to that of God, Dante moves from being a poet to becoming an author of poetry, from practice to creation, from exornatio to beauty. This poetic beauty is one with perfect knowledge: in the final vision desire and the will revolve in delight. In Inferno 5, Dante investigates the potentiality and limitations of the beauty of love poetry. Just as the corresponding beauty of the lovers leads them to explore the paramount and most secret recesses of love and knowledge, so the beauty of poetry, its ornatus, which is traditionally made of rhetorical coloration and musicality, leads the readers to experience the same heights, pleasures, and dangers. The language of love poetry might have its limitation, it might be unfit to represent the abysses of evil and good, but its beauty is daunting. Like the lovers’ “Amor,” love poetry establishes its own divinity,

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idolatrously worshipping its own beauty and pleasure. Paolo and Francesca’s volume eventually encloses only the two of them in the self-absorbed reading of the multiple nuances of love poetry, of which they become part. Much has been said about the identification between Dante and Ulysses in the Comedy, an identification that begins with Dante’s mad enterprise (“venuta folle”) in Inferno 2 (35), develops through Ulysses mad flight (“folle volo”) in Inferno 26 (125), and terminates in the redemption of the desire for knowledge in Paradiso 2, encompassing figures of shipwreck, storms, waves, wings, and desire. Ulysses’ journey becomes the foil, mirror, and negative example for Dante’s own poetic enterprise. The same could be said for Inferno 5. “Francesca c’est moi”: Dante could easily repeat the famous claim of identity between the author and the creature of Madame Bovary (one of Francesca’s offsprings in Girard’s and Sanguineti’s opinion), not so much on the grounds that Francesca is the summary of all of Dante’s mistakes from his poetic and affective youth, but because this enigmatic feminine figure is love poetry itself. It is a poetry that works in rhetorical figures and through a complex intertextual embroidery. It is a poetry that articulates love with everything else (knowledge, God), and threads dangerous philosophical and spiritual grounds. ✢✢✢

In the story of Lancelot, Galehault facilitates the kiss between the lovers by providing secrecy. In certain versions of the story, he hides the lovers from other people’s sight with his own, gigantic body. In the illumination of an early fourteenth-century manuscript of the Lancelot du Lac, now at the Morgan Pierpont Library in New York (M 805. Lewis Cass Ledyard Fund, 1938), Galehault encloses the lovers with his body, functioning almost like the binding of a two-leaved book. The lovers of Inferno 5 are already alone, yet the book still shelters them, by enclosing them in a fiction that is ultimately more persuasive then reality. The text, both the Lancelot and Dante’s own fiction, encloses the lovers in a metaliterary perspective that somehow redeems them. In every act of reading, Paolo and Francesca’s textuality – a rich and many-layered canvas when compared to the bareness of their historical “reality” – turns again, and anew, their mouth into a smile.

i nf e rno : canto v

[Canto quinto, nel quale mostra del secondo cerchio de l’inferno, e tratta de la pena del vizio de la lussuria ne la persona di più famosi gentili uomini.] Così discesi del cerchio primaio giù nel secondo, che men loco cinghia e tanto più dolor, che punge a guaio.

3

Stavvi Minòs orribilmente, e ringhia: essamina le colpe ne l’intrata; giudica e manda secondo ch’avvinghia.

6

Dico che quando l’anima mal nata li vien dinanzi, tutta si confessa; e quel conoscitor de le peccata

9

vede qual loco d’inferno è da essa; cignesi con la coda tante volte quantunque gradi vuol che giù sia messa.

12

Sempre dinanzi a lui ne stanno molte: vanno a vicenda ciascuna al giudizio, dicono e odono e poi son giù volte.

15

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249

“O tu che vieni al doloroso ospizio,” disse Minòs a me quando mi vide, lasciando l’atto di cotanto offizio,

18

“guarda com’ entri e di cui tu ti fide; non t’inganni l’ampiezza de l’intrare!” E ’l duca mio a lui: “Perché pur gride?

21

Non impedir lo suo fatale andare: vuolsi così colà dove si puote ciò che si vuole, e più non dimandare.”

24

Or incomincian le dolenti note a farmisi sentire; or son venuto là dove molto pianto mi percuote.

27

Io venni in loco d’ogne luce muto, che mugghia come fa mar per tempesta, se da contrari venti è combattuto.

30

La bufera infernal, che mai non resta, mena li spirti con la sua rapina; voltando e percotendo li molesta.

33

Quando giungon davanti a la ruina, quivi le strida, il compianto, il lamento; bestemmian quivi la virtù divina.

36

Intesi ch’a così fatto tormento enno dannati i peccator carnali, che la ragion sommettono al talento.

39

E come li stornei ne portan l’ali nel freddo tempo, a schiera larga e piena, così quel fiato li spiriti mali

42

di qua, di là, di giù, di sù li mena; nulla speranza li conforta mai, non che di posa, ma di minor pena.

45

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E come i gru van cantando lor lai, faccendo in aere di sé lunga riga, così vid’ io venir, traendo guai,

48

ombre portate da la detta briga; per ch’i’ dissi: “Maestro, chi son quelle genti che l’aura nera sì gastiga?”

51

“La prima di color di cui novelle tu vuo’ saper,” mi disse quelli allotta, “fu imperadrice di molte favelle.

54

A vizio di lussuria fu sì rotta, che libito fé licito in sua legge, per tòrre il biasmo in che era condotta.

57

Ell’ è Semiramìs, di cui si legge che succedette a Nino e fu sua sposa: tenne la terra che ’l Soldan corregge.

60

L’altra è colei che s’ancise amorosa, e ruppe fede al cener di Sicheo; poi è Cleopatràs lussurïosa.

63

Elena vedi, per cui tanto reo tempo si volse, e vedi ’l grande Achille, che con amore al fine combatteo.

66

Vedi Parìs, Tristano”; e più di mille ombre mostrommi e nominommi a dito, ch’amor di nostra vita dipartille.

69

Poscia ch’io ebbi ’l mio dottore udito nomar le donne antiche e’ cavalieri, pietà mi giunse, e fui quasi smarrito.

72

I’ cominciai: “Poeta, volontieri parlerei a quei due che ’nsieme vanno, e paion sì al vento esser leggieri.”

75

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251

Ed elli a me: “Vedrai quando saranno più presso a noi; e tu allor li priega per quello amor che i mena, ed ei verranno.”

78

Sì tosto come il vento a noi li piega, mossi la voce: “O anime affannate, venite a noi parlar, s’altri nol niega!”

81

Quali colombe dal disio chiamate con l’ali alzate e ferme al dolce nido vegnon per l’aere, dal voler portate;

84

cotali uscir de la schiera ov’ è Dido, a noi venendo per l’aere maligno, sì forte fu l’affettüoso grido.

87

“O animal grazïoso e benigno che visitando vai per l’aere perso noi che tignemmo il mondo di sanguigno,

90

se fosse amico il re de l’universo, noi pregheremmo lui de la tua pace, poi c’hai pietà del nostro mal perverso.

93

Di quel che udire e che parlar vi piace, noi udiremo e parleremo a voi, mentre che ’l vento, come fa, ci tace.

96

Siede la terra dove nata fui su la marina dove ’l Po discende per aver pace co’ seguaci sui.

99

Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende, prese costui de la bella persona che mi fu tolta; e ’l modo ancor m’offende.

102

Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona, mi prese del costui piacer sì forte, che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona. 105

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Amor condusse noi ad una morte. Caina attende chi a vita ci spense.” Queste parole da lor ci fuor porte.

108

Quand’ io intesi quell’ anime offense, china’ il viso, e tanto il tenni basso, fin che ’l poeta mi disse: “Che pense?”

111

Quando rispuosi, cominciai: “Oh lasso, quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio menò costoro al doloroso passo!”

114

Poi mi rivolsi a loro e parla’ io, e cominciai: “Francesca, i tuoi martìri a lagrimar mi fanno tristo e pio.

117

Ma dimmi: al tempo d’i dolci sospiri, a che e come concedette amore che conosceste i dubbiosi disiri?”

120

E quella a me: “Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice ne la miseria; e ciò sa ’l tuo dottore.

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Ma s’a conoscer la prima radice del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto, dirò come colui che piange e dice.

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Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse; soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto.

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Per più fïate li occhi ci sospinse quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso; ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse.

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Quando leggemmo il disïato riso esser basciato da cotanto amante, questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,

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la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante. Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse: quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.”

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Mentre che l’uno spirto questo disse, l’altro piangëa; sì che di pietade io venni men così com’ io morisse. E caddi come corpo morto cade.

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t rans l at i o n by charl e s singleton Thus I descended from the first circle into the second, which girds less space, and so much greater woe that it goads to wailing. There stands Minos, horrible and snarling: upon the entrance he examines their offenses, and judges and dispatches them according as he entwines. I mean that when the ill-begotten soul comes before him, it confesses all; and that discerner of sins sees which shall be its place in Hell, then girds himself with his tail as many times as the grades he wills that it be sent down. Always before him stands a crowd of them; they go, each in his turn, to the judgment; they tell, and hear, and then are hurled below. “O you who come to the abode of pain,” said Minos to me, when he saw me, pausing in the act of that great office, “beware how you enter and in whom you trust; let not the breadth of the entrance deceive you!” And my leader to him, “Why do you too cry out? Do not hinder his fated going: thus it is willed there where that can be done which is willed; and ask no more.” Now the doleful notes begin to reach me; now I have come where much wailing smites me. I came into a place mute of all light, which bellows like the sea in tempest when it is assailed by warring winds. The hellish hurricane, never resting, sweeps along the spirits with its rapine; whirling and smiting, it torments them. When they arrive before the ruin, there the shrieks, the moans, the lamentations; there they curse the divine power. I learned that to such torment are condemned the carnal sinners, who subject reason to desire. As their wings bear the starlings along in the cold season, in wide, dense flocks, so does the blast the sinful spirits; hither, thither, downward, upward, it drives them. No hope of less pain, not to say of rest, ever comforts them. And as the cranes go chanting their lays, making a long line of themselves in the air, so I saw shades come, uttering wails, borne by that strife; wherefore I said, “Master, who are these people that are so lashed by the black air?”

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“The first of whom you wish to know,” he said to me then “was empress of many tongues. She was so given to lechery that she made lust licit in her law, to take away the blame she had incurred. She is Semiramis, of whom we read that she succeeded Ninus and had been his wife: she held the land the Sultan rules. The next is she who slew herself for love and broke faith to the ashes of Sichaeus; next is wanton Cleopatra. See Helen, for whom so many years of ill revolved; and see the great Achilles, who fought at the last with love. See Paris, Tristan,” and more than a thousand shades whom love had parted from our life he showed me, pointing them out and naming them. When I heard my teacher name the ladies and the knights of old, pity overcame me and I was as one bewildered. “Poet,” I began, “willingly would I speak to those two that go together and seem to be so light upon the wind.” And he to me, “You shall see when they are nearer to us; and do entreat them then by that love which leads them, and they will come.” As soon as the wind bends them to us, I raised my voice, “O wearied souls! come speak with us, if Another forbid it not.” As doves called by desire, with wings raised and steady, come through the air, borne by their will to their sweet nest, so did these issue from the troop where Dido is, coming to us through the malignant air, such force had my compassionate cry. “O living creature, gracious and benign that go through the black air visiting us who stained the world with blood, if the King of the universe were friendly to us, we would pray Him for your peace, since you have pity on our perverse ill. Of that which it pleases you to hear and to speak, we will hear and speak with you, while the wind, as now, is silent for us. “The city where I was born lies on that shore where the Po descends to be at peace with its followers. Love, which quickly seizes the gentle heart, seized this one for the fair form that was taken from me – and the way of it afflicts me still. Love, which absolves no loved one from loving, seized me so strongly with delight in him, that, as you can see, it does not leave me even now. Love brought us to one death. Caina awaits him who quenched our life.” These words were borne to us from them. And when I heard those afflicted souls I bowed my head and held it bowed until the poet said to me, “What are you thinking of?” When I answered, I began, “Alas! How many sweet thoughts, what great desire, brought them to the woeful pass!” Then I turned again to them, and I began, “Francesca, your torments make me weep for great grief and pity; but tell me, in the time of the sweet sighs, by what and how did Love grant you to know the dubious desires?”

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And she to me, “there is no greater sorrow than to recall, in wretchedness, the happy time; and this your teacher knows. But if you have such great desire to know the first root of our love, I will tell as one who weeps and tells. One day, for pastime, we read of Lancelot, how love constrained him; we were alone, suspecting nothing. Several times that reading urged our eyes to meet and took the color from our faces, but one moment alone it was that overcame us. When we read how the longed for smile was kissed by so great a lover, this one, who never shall be parted from me, kissed my mouth all trembling. A Gallehault was the book and he who wrote it; that day we read no farther into it.” While one spirit said this, the other wept, so that for pity I swooned, as if in death, and fell as a dead body falls.

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notes

i nt roduct i on 1 I quote the Commedia from the text established by G. Petrocchi, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. Translations are taken from The Divine Comedy, translated with a commentary by C.S. Singleton. Commentaries are accessed through the online Dartmouth Dante Project, henceforth ddp (http://dante. dartmouth.edu/). 2 T. Barolini, “Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender,” 5. 3 For the historical context of the canto see in particular F. Torraca, “Il canto v dell’Inferno”; J. Larner, The Lords of Romagna: Romagnol Society and the Origins of the Signorie; P.J. Jones, The Malatesta from Rimini and the Papal State; and Barolini, “Dante and Francesca da Rimini.” 4 Barolini, “Dante and Francesca da Rimini,” 26. The document reads as follows: “pro dotibus olim dominae Franciscae ab eo receptis uxoris olim Johannis dicti sui filii et matris dictae dominae Concordiae.” 5 For these two texts see Barolini, “Dante and Francesca da Rimini,” 25–6. 6 In Inferno 27 Dante underscores the tyrannical and authoritarian nature of Romagna’s government in contrast to the more democratic status of the Tuscan communes on the other side of the Apennines, especially in the depiction of the city of Cesena, situated “between the plain and the mountain” and “between tyranny and freedom” (“e quella cu’ il Savio bagna ’l fianco, / così com’ ella sie’ tra ’l piano e ’l monte, / tra tirannia si vive e stato franco,” Inferno 27, 52–4). 7 For the operation of the commentators see D. Della Terza, “Inferno 5. Tradizione ed esegesi”; N. Mineo, “La tragedia di Paolo e Francesca nella storia e nei commenti trecenteschi”; A. Iannucci, “Forbidden Love: Metaphor and History (Inferno v)”; Barolini, “Dante and Francesca da Rimini”; and L. Renzi, Le conseguenze di un bacio. L’episodio di Francesca nella “Commedia” di Dante.

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notes to pages 8–9

8 Boccaccio, ddp ad Inferno 5, 97: “che ’l detto messer Guido dovesse dare per moglie una sua giovane e bella figliuola, chiamata madonna Francesca, a Gian Ciotto, figliuolo di messer Malatesta. Ed essendo questo ad alcuno degli amici di messer Guido già manifesto, disse un di loro a messer Guido: – Guardate come voi fate, per ciò che, se voi non prendete modo ad alcuna parte, che in questo parentado egli ve ne potrà seguire scandolo. Voi dovete sapere chi è vostra figliuola, e quanto ell’è d’altiero animo; e se ella vede Gian Ciotto avanti che ’l matrimonio sia perfetto né voi né altri potrà mai fare che ella il voglia per marito. E perciò, quando vi paia, a me parrebbe di doverne tener questo modo: che qui non venisse Gian Ciotto ad isposarla, ma venisseci un de’ fratelli, il quale come suo procuratore la sposasse in nome di Gian Ciotto. – Era Gian Ciotto uomo di gran sentimento e speravasi dover lui dopo la morte del padre rimanere signore; per la qual cosa, quantunque sozo della persona e sciancato fosse, il disiderava messer Guido per genero più tosto che alcuno de’ suoi fratelli. E, conoscendo quello, che il suo amico gli ragionava, dover poter avvenire, ordinò segretamente così si facesse, come l’amico suo l’avea consigliato. Per che, al tempo dato, venne in Ravenna Polo, fratello di Gian Ciotto, con pieno mandato ad isposare madonna Francesca. Era Polo bello e piacevole uomo e costumato molto; e, andando con altri gentili uomini per la corte dell’abitazione di messer Guido, fu da una delle damigelle di là entro, che il conoscea, dimostrato da uno pertugio d’una finestra a madonna Francesca, dicendole: – Madonna, quegli è colui che dee esser vostro marito. – E così si credea la buona femina; di che madonna Francesca incontanente in lui puose l’animo e l’amor suo. E fatto poi artificiosamente il contratto delle sponsalizie e andatone la donna a Rimino, non s’avvide prima dello ’nganno che essa vide la mattina seguente al dì delle noze levare da lato a sé Gian Ciotto; di che si dee credere che ella, vedendosi ingannata, isdegnasse, né perciò rimovesse dell’animo suo l’amore già postovi verso Polo. Col quale come ella poi si giugnesse, mai non udi’ dire se non quello che l’autore ne scrive; il che possibile è che così fosse: ma io credo quello essere più tosto fizione formata sopra quello che era possibile ad essere avvenuto, ché io non credo che l’autore sapesse che così fosse.” 9 For the pictorial and visual afterlife of Paolo and Francesca, see Renzi, Le conseguenze di un bacio, 183–216. 10 Iannucci, “Forbidden Love: Metaphor and History.” 11 The bibliography on Inferno 5 is too extended to engage with it in a single footnote. Throughout this book I engage with it seriatim. Excellent and up-to-date bibliographical surveys on the canto are available in Renzi, Le conseguenze di un bacio and M. Marazzi, “La bocca mi baciò tutto tremante.” For the history of the reception of the episode of Francesca in criticism, literature, and visual art, see Renzi, Le conseguenze di un bacio. 12 U. Foscolo, Studi su Dante (1821), 188. 13 F. De Sanctis, “Francesca da Rimini” (1869). 14 G. Contini, “Dante come personaggio-poeta della Commedia,” especially 42– 8; E. Sanguineti, “Il realismo di Dante”; A. Hatcher and M. Musa, “The Kiss:

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21 22 23

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Inferno v and the Old French Prose Lancelot.” For a survey of the critical debate see Renzi, Le conseguenze di un bacio, 161–81. Barolini, “Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno v in Its Lyric Context,” and “Dante and Francesca da Rimini.” Barolini, “Dante and Cavalcanti,” 42. L. Pertile, “Mal d’amore.” On this point see G. Bond, The Loving Subject: Desire, Eloquence, and Power in Romanesque France, 4. De Trinitate 8, 10, 14: “Quid est autem dilectio vel caritas, quam tantopere Scriptura divina laudat et praedicat, nisi amor boni? Amor autem alicuius amantis est, et amore aliquid amatur. Ecce tria sunt: amans, et quod amatur, et amor. Quid est ergo amor, nisi quaedam vita duo aliqua copulans, vel copulari appetens, amantem scilicet, et quod amatur? Et hoc etiam in extremis carnalibusque amoribus ita est.” The medieval discourse of love is the antithesis of postmodern models of desire, such as, for instance, René Girard’s idea of “triangular desire,” where an external (and often hostile) subject mediates the relation between subject and object of desire. See R. Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel. E. Gilson, The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard, especially 170–97. M. Lazar, Amour courtois et “fin’amors” dans la littérature du XIIe siècle. E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages; P. Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of the Medieval Love-Lyric; P. Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale; and J. Leclerq, Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France. Dronke, Medieval Latin, 318–31. On the radically indistinguishable erotic/divine nature of Beatrice (and of lyric and divine poetry) see R. Psaki, “Love for Beatrice: Transcending Contradiction in the Paradiso; V. Montemaggi, “In Unknowability as Love: The Theology of Dante’s Commedia”; and T. Kay, Eros, Spirituality and Vernacular Poetry in Dante. A. Suerbaum, “Between ‘Unio’ and Alienation: Expressions of Desire in the Strophic Poems of Hadewijch.” Guinizzelli’s texts and translation are taken from The Poetry of Guido Guinizelli, edited and translated by R. Edwards, unless otherwise noted. The reception of the Rose is illustrated by S. Hout, The Romance of the Rose and Its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Tradition and A. Minnis, Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics. Christine’s text is taken from Le débat sur le Roman de la Rose, 126. The translation is from La querelle de la Rose: Letters and Documents, 125. M. Lazar, “Fin’amor,” 72–3, quoted by Kay, Eros and Spirituality, 9. See L. Spitzer, L’amour lointain de Jaufré Rudel et le sens de la poésie des troubadours. For a more closely Lacanian interpretation of desire in the troubadours, see J.C. Huchet, L’amour discourtois: la “fin’amors” chez les premiers troubadours and S. Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry.

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notes to pages 18–24

32 D. Turner, “Metaphor, Poetry and Allegory: Erotic Love in the Sermons on the Song of Songs of Bernard of Clairvaux,” quotations on 216. 33 Purgatorio 24, 52–60: “I’ mi son un che, quando / Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo / ch’e’ ditta dentro vo significando. / O frate, issa vegg’ io, diss’ elli, il nodo / che ’l Notaro e Guittone e me ritenne / di qua dal dolce stil novo ch’i’ odo! / Io veggio ben come le vostre penne / di retro al dittator sen vanno strette, / che de le nostre certo non avvenne.” 34 Jaufré Rudel, Quan lo rius de la fontana: “Quan lo rius de la fontana / s’esclarzis, si cum far sol, / e par la flors aiglentina, / e’l rossinholetz el ram / volf e refranh ez aplana / son dous chantar e l’afina, / be’ys dregz q’ieu lo mieu refranha.” Jaufré’s texts and translations are taken from The Songs of Jaufré Rudel, edited and translated by R.T. Pickens. ch ap t e r one 1 For the non-infernal qualities of Inferno 1–4, see in particular the distinction between the “proemial” cantos (1–2) and the “Virgilian” cantos (3–4) proposed by A.M. Chiavacci Leonardi, “I canti proemiali e la figura di Virgilio,” 34. 2 T. Barolini, “Guittone’s ‘Ora parrà,’ Dante’s ‘Doglia mi reca,’ and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire,” 37. 3 For this short journey within the journey see J. Freccero, “The Firm Foot on a Journey without a Guide.” 4 For the complex interpretation of the fiumana, see in particular C. Singleton, “‘Sulla fiumana ove ’l mar non ha vanto’ [Inferno, ii, 108]”; J. Freccero, “The River of Death: Inferno ii, 108”; R. Hollander, “The ‘Canto of the Word’ (Inferno 2)”; C. Ryan, “‘Su la fiumana onde ‘l mar non ha vanto’ Inferno ii.108: A Continuing Crux”; R. Jacoff and W.A. Stephany, “Inferno ii.” 5 J. Freccero, The Poetics of Conversion, 57: “The duality of the imagery in the prologue scene, with the pilgrim using the wolf and Lucy the river as descriptions of the same dramatic action, indicates a dialectic fundamental to this poem and to any novel of the self: the perspective of the self that was corrected and reinterpreted by the perspective of the author, the self that is.” 6 E. Lombardi, “‘Per aver pace co’ seguaci sui.’ Civil, Spiritual and Erotic Peace in the Episode of Francesca.” 7 D. della Terza, “Dante e la virtualità della trama. Gli inizi della ‘favola’ nella Commedia,” 40. Della Terza explains this stylistic switch as Dante “offering” a stilnovistic space to Virgil in return for his reading of Virgil’s work in Christian terms. 8 Inferno 2, 59–61: “O anima cortese mantoana, / di cui la fama ancor nel mondo dura, / e durerà quanto’l mondo lontana” and 74–5: “Quando sarò dinanzi al segnor mio, / di te mi loderò sovente a lui.” 9 E. Auerbach, “Sermo humilis.” See also the Anonimo Fiorentino (ddp ad Inferno 2, 67): “Virgilio parlò ornato più che niuno altro poeta; et da lui chiunque ha voluto parlare ornatamente ha seguito lo stile suo, et ciò che i poeti pagani si sieno adorni di fiori della sua eloquenzia; ma i dottori della

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santa Chiesa hanno parlato con suoi proprj vocaboli: Salve sancta parens, iterum salvete retecti etc., et quasi per tutta la Scrittura santa si truovono ornamenti di parole stratte da’ Poeti. Leggesi di santo Girolamo che una notte gli parve essere menato dinanzi a uno giudice, et il giudice il dimandò chi egli era, et quelli rispose: Ego sum Christianus; e ’l Giudice rispose: Imo es Ciceronianus, però che santo Girolamo sempre s’ingegnava di seguire il parlare di Tulio Cicerone: et perchè troppo s’era dato a quello parlare ornato et pulito, il volle Iddio correggere. Dice che quello giudice, dette queste parole, a’ suoi sergenti aspramente il fece battere, tanto che lunghi tempi se ne sentì.” Bosco and Reggio, ddp ad Inferno 4, 57, quote Cavalcanti’s S’io prego (Rime 17, 8) and Dante’s own Di donne io vidi (Rime 69, 9–10). See for instance Guglielmo Maramauro, ddp ad Inferno 2, 67: “cioè col to libro e con altre cose inductive, aiutalo a campare.” Benvenuto da Imola (ad idem): “Et dicit: ‘con la tua parola ornata,’ idest cum tua florida eloquentia, ’e con ciò ch’èe mestiero al suo campare,’ idest cum rationibus et persuasionibus, quibus potest uti ratio naturalis.” Francesco da Buti (ad idem): “Or muovi, e con la tua parola ornata; cioè muovi te, Virgilio, e col tuo ornato parlare. Qui litteralmente intende dell’ornato parlare del poeta Virgilio, per lo quale, chi bene lo ragguarda, l’uomo è confortato alle virtù e spaventato da’ vizi; et allegoricamente si può intendere con le suasioni della ragione pratica significata per Virgilio.” And, especially, Cristoforo Landino (ad idem): “Hor muovi, et con la tua parola ornata: due chose sono necessarie nello eloquente, copia, et ornato di parole, et gravità di sententie. Adunque pose l’uno et l’altro dicendo chon la parola ornata, cioè chon eloquentia, et con ciò che fa mestieri, cioè chon quelle argumentationi et ragioni che sono di bisogno. Et se consideriamo a Virgilio, optimamente dixe con la tua parola ornata, perchè è poeta ripieno d’eloquentia et di doctrina. Et riferendo allegoricamente alla ragione superiore, la quale habbi a persuadere, certamente è necessaria la eloquentia insieme chon la sapientia. Il perchè non sanza ragione si duole M. Tullio di quegli e quali queste due cose insieme congiunte hanno diviso; et alchuni si sono dati solamente alla eloquentia, la quale sanza sapientia et doctrina è chosa furiosa et nociva a gli huomini; et alchuni solamente alla sapientia, la quale per sè poco può giovare non potendo persuadere quello che intende. Questo fu anchora el giudicio de’ più excellenti nella nostra religione, e quali furono docti et eloquenti chosì apresso de’ Greci chome de’ Latini. Et Augustino nel libro De religione christiana dimostra quanto la eloquentia sia utile; l’aiuta sì ch’io ne sia consolata: non sarà piccolo aiuto, ma sarà abbastanza alla salute sua se sia in forma aiutato che chi l’ama ne resti consolato.” Mazzoni, ddp ad Inferno 2, 67, quotes Convivio 2, vi, 6: “Ma però che in ciascuna maniera di sermone lo dicitore massimamente dee intendere a la persuasione, cioè a l’abbellire, de l’audienza, sì come a quella ch’è principio di tutte l’altre persuasioni, come li rettorici [s]anno.” G. Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert, 157–8. The word “fear” occurs four times in Inferno 1 (6, 15, 19, and 43). In line 90

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Dante recalls the effect of fear with the word “tremare,” trembling. In canto 2 the word “cowardice” occurs twice (45 and 63). Also, compare the ending of the two cantos: Inferno 1, 130–5 “Poeta, io ti riecheggio / per quello Dio che tu non conoscesti, / a ciò ch’io fugga questo male e peggio, / che tu mi meni là dov’ or dicesti, / sì ch’io veggia la porta di san Pietro / e color cui tu fai cotanto mesti. Allor si mosse, e io li tenni dietro” and Inferno 2, 139–42: “Or va, ch’un sol volere è d’ambedue: / tu duca, tu segnore e tu maestro. / Così li dissi; e poi che mosso fue, / intrai per lo cammino alto e silvestro.” As Nicola Gardini has suggested, this canto (and, more generally, the three initial cantos of the Comedy) are ruled by the backward movement of cowardice (“viltade”) and the forward movement of desire (“disio”), which, interestingly, mimic the movement of the terzina (aba bcb, etc.), Dante’s great metrical innovation in the Comedy, which continually regresses to the previous central rhyme in order to progress. Gardini has suggested this idea in conversation and has not yet developed it in print. Instead of a full reference, my warmest gratitude. Interestingly, Gardini’s argument resonates evocatively with John Freccero’s explanation of the structure of the Comedy in his essay “The Significance of Terza Rima.” On the troubling aspect of this question see in particular E. Malato, Studi su Dante, 16–17 and M. Coagan, “Delight, Punishment, and the Justice of God in the Divina Commedia.” For the co-presence of God’s justice and mercy in damnation, see Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a, q. 21, a. 4 (cited by Berthier in ddp ad Inferno 3, 6). Translations from Virgil are taken from Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, translated by H.R. Fairclough, revised by G.P. Goold. For the theme of desire in the sixth book of the Aeneid see J. Warden, “Ripae ulterioris amore: Structure and Desire in Aeneid 6.” Aeneid 6, 197–204: “Sic effatus vestigia pressit, / observans quae signa ferant, quo tendere pergant. / Pascentes illae tantum prodire volando, / quantum acie possent oculi servare sequentum. / Inde ubi venere ad fauces grave olentis Averni, / tollunt se celeres, liquidumque per aera lapsae / sedibus optatis geminae super arbore sidunt, / discolor unde auri per ramos aura refulsit.” Aeneid 6, 684–703: “Isque ubi tendentem adversum per gramina videt / Aenean, alacris palmas utrasque tetendit, / effusaeque genis lacrimae, et vox excidit ore: / Venisti tandem, tuaque exspectata parenti / vicit iter durum pietas? Datur ora tueri, / nate, tua, et notas audire et reddere voces? / Sic equidem ducebam animo rebarque futurum, / tempora dinumerans nec me mea cura fefellit. / Quas ego te terras et quanta per aequora vectum / accipio! quantis iactatum, nate, periclis! / Quam metui, ne quid Libyae tibi regna nocerent! / Ille autem: Tua me, genitor, tua tristis imago, / saepius occurrens, haec limina tendere adegit: / stant sale Tyrrheno classes. Da iungere dextram, / da, genitor, teque amplexu ne subtrahe nostro. / Sic memorans, largo fletu simul ora rigabat. / Ter conatus ibi collo dare brachia circum, / ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago, / par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno.”

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21 On the thrice-failed embrace and its resonance in the Comedy see M. Gragnolati, “Nostalgia in Heaven: Embraces, Affection and Identity in Dante’s Comedy.” 22 Aeneid 6, 724–52: “Principio caelum ac terras camposque liquentis / lucentemque globum Lunae Titaniaque astra / spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus / mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet. / Inde hominum pecudumque genus, vitaeque volantum, / et quae marmoreo fert monstra sub aequore pontus. / Igneus est ollis vigor et caelestis origo / seminibus, quantum non noxia corpora tardant, / terrenique hebetant artus moribundaque membra. / Hinc metuunt cupiuntque, dolent gaudentque, neque auras / dispiciunt clausae tenebris et carcere caeco. / Quin et supremo cum lumine vita reliquit, / non tamen omne malum miseris nec funditus omnes / corporeae excedunt pestes, penitusque necesse est / multa diu concreta modis inolescere miris. / Ergo exercentur poenis, veterumque malorum / supplicia expendunt: aliae panduntur inanes / suspensae ad ventos; aliis sub gurgite vasto / infectum eluitur scelus, aut exuritur igni; / quisque suos patimur Manes; / exinde per amplum / mittimur Elysium, et pauci laeta arva tenemus; / donec longa dies, perfecto temporis orbe, / concretam exemit labem, purumque relinquit / aetherium sensum atque aurai simplicis ignem. / Has omnes, ubi mille rotam volvere per annos, / Lethaeum ad fluvium deus evocat agmine magno, / scilicet immemores supera ut convexa revisant, / rursus et incipiant in corpora velle reverti.” 23 For the Virgilian echoes in this canto see in particular E. Paratore, “Canto iii.” 24 Inferno 3, 101–6: “Ma quell’ anime, ch’eran lasse e nude / cangiar colore e dibattero i denti, / ratto che ’nteser le parole crude. / Bestemmiavano Dio e lor parenti, / l’umana spezie e ’l loco e ’l tempo e ’l seme / di lor semenza e di lor nascimenti.” 25 Paratore in his commentary to the Aeneid 6, 733 points out that the alternation of fear and desire in human life is a philosophical commonplace in antiquity; it is found, for instance in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (3, 11) and Horace’s Epistles (1, 6, 12). 26 For the notion of productive pain and the fluid complexity of the purgatorial mixture of pain and joy see M. Gragnolati and C. Holzhey, “Dolore come gioia. Trasformarsi nel Purgatorio di Dante.” 27 The ever-colourful Benvenuto compares the fear turned desire of canto 3 to the desire for undergoing punishment felt by those awaiting capital punishment and, with a touch worthy of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, to the restlessness of the not-yet-convicted murderer. See ddp ad Inferno 3, 126: “idest timor volvitur in desiderium, sive appetitum, sicut gratia exempli videmus aliquando in mundo isto quod homo peccator post peccatum sponte vadit ad mortem et supplicium cum posset evadere, ita peccatum obcaecat ipsum urgente divina justicia. Imo audivi de uno, qui cum interfecisset hominem et evasisset, post tempus sponte accessit ad judicem confitens delictum suum et petens decapitari, quia nunquam poterat dormire vel quiescere.”

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28 M. Coagan, “Delight, Punishment, and the Justice of God in the Divina Commedia,” 43–5. 29 Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” 169–70. 30 Ibid., 170. 31 G. Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs. 32 For Dante’s discourse of authority see A.R. Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author. For Dante’s discourse of authority in connection to masochism see E. Lombardi, “Plurilingualism sub specie aeternitatis and the Strategies of a Minority Author.” 33 S. Gilman, “Preface,” One Hundred Years of Masochism. Literary Texts, Social and Cultural Contex, quotations on v and viii. See also G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature and S. Gilman, Kafka. The Jewish Patient, 26–8. 34 A thought-provoking manuscript variant has “saper tutto” (know everything), which is even more supportive of my argument. For the expression “dato a lor per lutto,” compare Apocalypse 18, 7: “quantum glorificavit se et in deliciis fuit, tantum date illi tormentum et luctum.” In the biblical passage, “luctus” (grief) is employed to express the counter-penalty for exultation in sin. If Dante had this passage in mind when writing the Purgatorio verses, the desire of seeing everything can be interpreted as an active sin, and the grief that the sinners now suffer (the desire of the poena damni) is an active torment. Interestingly, Aquinas employs the same passage to demonstrate the difference between poena damni and poena sensus. See Super Sententiis 2, d. 33, q. 2, a. 1: “Praeterea, acerbitas poenae sensibilis delectationi culpae respondet. Apocal. 18, 7: quantum glorificavit se et in deliciis fuit, tantum date illi tormentum et luctum. Sed in peccato originali non est aliqua delectatio sicut nec operatio: delectatio enim operationem consequitur, ut ex 10 Ethic. patet. Ergo peccato originali non debetur poena sensibilis.” 35 When discussing disorder (“perturbatio”) in book 4 of the Tusculanae disputationes, Cicero lists desiderium under the heading “pleasures” (together with malice, rapture, ostentation, anger, rage, hate, greed): “desiderium libido eius, quod nondum adsit, videndi” (4, 9). 36 See for instance the definition of poena damni from The Catholic Encyclopedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07207a.htm): “The poena damni, or pain of loss, consists in the loss of the beatific vision and in so complete a separation of all the powers of the soul from God that it cannot find in Him even the least peace and rest. It is accompanied by the loss of all supernatural gifts, e.g. the loss of faith. The characters impressed by the sacraments alone remain to the greater confusion of the bearer. The pain of loss is not the mere absence of superior bliss, but it is also a most intense positive pain. The utter void of the soul made for the enjoyment of infinite truth and infinite goodness causes the reprobate immeasurable anguish. Their consciousness that God, on Whom they entirely depend, is their enemy forever is overwhelming. Their consciousness of having by their own deliberate folly forfeited the highest blessings for transitory and delusive pleasures humiliates and depresses them beyond meas-

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ure. The desire for happiness inherent in their very nature, wholly unsatisfied and no longer able to find any compensation for the loss of God in delusive pleasure, renders them utterly miserable. Moreover, they are well aware that God is infinitely happy, and hence their hatred and their impotent desire to injure Him fills them with extreme bitterness. And the same is true with regard to their hatred of all the friends of God who enjoy the bliss of heaven. The pain of loss is the very core of eternal punishment. If the damned beheld God face to face, hell itself, notwithstanding its fire, would be a kind of heaven. Had they but some union with God even if not precisely the union of the beatific vision, hell would no longer be hell, but a kind of purgatory. And yet the pain of loss is but the natural consequence of that aversion from God which lies in the nature of every mortal sin.” It is worth noting that in Inferno 3 Dante had already featured one main aspect of poena damni, the anger of the damned toward God and others (Inferno 3, 104–6: “Bestemmiavano Dio e lor parenti, / l’umana spezie e ’l loco e ’l tempo e ’l seme / di lor semenza e di lor nascimenti”). 37 See Boccaccio, ddp ad Inferno 4, 40–2: “E quantunque molto faticosa cosa sia il ferventemente disiderare, è, oltre a ciò, quasi fatica e noia importabile l’ardentemente disiderare e non conoscere né avere speranza alcuna di dover potere quello, che si disidera, ottenere: e perciò, quantunque prima facie paia non molto gravosa pena essere il disiderare senza sperare, io credo ch’ella sia gravissima; e ancora più se le aggiugne di pena, in quanto questo disiderio è senza alcuna intercessione”; and Benvenuto da Imola (ad idem): “idest in desiderio, sencia spene, ergo sine pena, vel parva pena; quia si non spero esse imperator, vel papa, nullum dolorem, nullam penam sentio, si non pervenio ad hoc. Ita isti, qui non sperant pervenire unquam ad beatitudinem visionis Dei, non cruciantur quamvis desiderent hoc; sicut si ego desidero esse dominus Bononiae, non doleo si non possum ad hoc pervenire, quia video me non aptum natum ad hoc.” 38 For Dante’s limbo see in particular T. Bottagisio, Il Limbo dantesco: studi filosofici e letterari; F. Mazzoni, “Il canto iv dell’Inferno”; G. Paparelli, “Virgilio e le anime del Limbo”; G. Padoan, “Il Limbo dantesco”; A. Iannucci, “Limbo: The Emptiness of Time”; and “Il limbo dei bambini.” For the theological discussion on the possibility of salvation for the virtuous pagans, see in particular Bottagisio, Il Limbo dantesco, 93–102; Padoan, “Il limbo dantesco”; and Iannucci, “Limbo: The Emptiness of Time.” A very accurate document on the history of Limbo has been recently drawn by the theological commission appointed in 2004 by Pope John Paul II and led by the future pope Cardinal Ratzinger, which discussed the position of children’s Limbo in today’s Catholic belief. The resultant document (2007) is available online: http://www.ewtn.com/library/CURIA/itclimbo.HTM. Interestingly, the outcome of this document is as hesitant as the medieval theological reflection, stating that there is no certainty, but hope, about the salvation of unbaptised children. 39 Enchiridion 23, 93: “Nec prima tamen, qua suum corpus anima relinquere

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cogitur, nec secunda, qua poenale corpus anima relinquere non permittitur, homini accidisset si nemo peccasset. Mitissima sane omnium poena erit eorum qui praeter peccatum quod originale traxerunt, nullum insuper addiderunt, et in ceteris qui addiderunt, tanto quisque ibi tolerabiliorem habebit damnationem quanto hic minorem habuit iniquitatem. Quod remanentibus impiis in damnatione aeterna tunc scient sancti quid boni eis tulerit gratia.” Augustine repeats the children’s condemnation in several passages of the polemical works against the Pelagians. He never specifies the nature of this punishment, although in a passage of the Contra Iulianum he states it is still preferable to non-existence. See Contra Iulianum 5, 11, 44: “Ego autem non dico parvulos sine Christi Baptismate morientes tanta poena esse plectendos, ut eis non nasci potius expediret; cum hoc Dominus non de quibuslibet peccatoribus, sed de scelestissimis et impiissimis dixerit. Si enim quod de Sodomis ait, et utique non de solis intellegi voluit, alius alio tolerabilius in die iudicii punietur; quis dubitaverit parvulos non baptizatos, qui solum habent originale peccatum, nec ullis propriis aggravantur, in damnatione omnium levissima futuros? Quae qualis et quanta erit, quamvis definire non possim, non tamen audeo dicere quod eis ut nulli essent quam ut ibi essent, potius expediret.” 40 Sermo 294, 6, 6: “Quare enim patrimonium regni coelorum abripis innocenti? A quo regnum coelorum non acquiritur, profecto magno bono fraudatur. Quae est ista iustitia? Dic, quare? Quid offendit parvulus non baptizatus, nullam habens culpam, nec suam, nec de parente tractam? Quid offendit, dic mihi, ut non intret in regnum coelorum, ut separetur a sorte sanctorum, ut sit exsul a societate Angelorum? Videris enim tibi misericors, quia non ei aufers vitam: damnas tamen, quem separas a regno coelorum. Damnas: non eum percutis, sed in exsilium mittis. Nam et qui exsulant, vivunt, si sani sunt: in doloribus corporis non sunt, non torquentur, non carceris tenebris affliguntur: haec illis sola poena est, non esse in patria. Si amatur patria, magna poena: si autem non amatur patria, peior est cordis poena. Parvum malum est in hominis corde, qui societatem non quaerit sanctorum, qui non desiderat regnum coelorum? Si non desiderat, poena est de perversitate: si autem desiderat, poena est de fraudata caritate.” For the image of pilgrimage in Augustine see chapter 3 of this book. 41 Quoted in the 2007 document of the theological commission on Limbo. http://www.ewtn.com/library/CURIA/itclimbo.HTM: “Item placuit, ut si quis dicit, idea dixisse Dominion: ‘In domo Patris mei mansiones multae sunt’ (Io 14,2), ut intelligatur, quia in regno caelorum erit aliquis medius aut ullus alicubi locus, ubi beati vivant parvuli, qui sine baptismo ex hac vita migrarunt, sine quo in regno caelorum, quod est vita aeterna, intrare non possunt, anathema sit.” The document specifies that: “This canon is found in some manuscripts, but it is missing from others. The Indiculus did not take it up.” 42 In Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos 2, 5: “Pena tamen parvulorum, ut beatus dicit Augustinus, mitissima est, ita videlicet ut magis velint esse quam non esse, nec credo eos aliter esse quam patres sanctos ante adventum Domini, nisi quod isti spem habuerunt videndi Deum, illi vero non habebunt.”

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43 Sententiae 2, 33, 2: “pro eo nullam aliam ignis materialis vel conscientiae vermis poenam sensuri, nisi quod Dei visione carebunt in perpetuum.” 44 Sententiae 2, 30, 7: “Quod ergo originalem peccatum dicitur? Fomes peccati, scilicet concupiscientia vel concupiscibilitas, quae dicitur lex membrorum, sive languor naturae, sive tyrannus qui est in membris nostris, sive lex carnis; unde Aug. in lib de Baptismo parvulorum: est in nobis concupiscientia quae non est permittenda regnare, sunt et eius desideria, quae sunt actuales concupiscientiae, quae sunt arma diaboli, quae veniunt ex languore naturae. Languor autem iste, tyrannus est, qui movet mala desideria.” 45 Sententiae 2, 30, 14: “materialiter ac causaliter, non formaliter, dicitur fuisse in primo homine quod in humanis corporibus naturaliter est; descenditque a primo parente lege propagationis; et in se auctum et multiplicatum est, nulla exteriori substantia in id transeunte; et ipsum in futuro resurget. Fomentum quidem habet a cibis, sed non convertuntur cibi in humanam substantiam, quae scilicet per propagationem descendit ab Adam … Transmisit enim Adam modicum quid de substantia sua in corpora filiorum quando eos procreavit, id est aliquid modicum de massa substantiae eius divisum est et inde formatum corpus filii, suique multiplicatione, sine rei extrinsecae adiectione, auctum est, et de illo ita augmentato aliquid itidem separator, unde formantur posterorum corpora. Et ita progreditur procreationis ordo lege propagationis usque ad finem humani generis.” 46 Sententiae 2, 31, 4: “Caro enim peccato corrupta fuit in Adam, adeo ut, cum ante peccatum vir et mulier sine incentive libidinis et concupiscientiae fervore possent convenire, essetque, thorus immaculatus. Iam post peccatum non valeat fieri carnalis copula absque libidinosa concupiscientia, quae sempre vitium est, et etiam culpa, nisi excusetur per bona coniugii. In concupiscientia igitur et libidine concipitur caro formanda in corpus prolis. Unde caro ipsa, quae concipitur in vitiosa concupiscientia, polluitur et corrumpitur, ex cuis contactu anima, cum infunditur, maculam trahit qua polluitur et fit rea, id est vitium concupiscientiae, quod est originale peccatum.” 47 Innocent III, Letter to Humbert, archbishop of Arles, Maiores Ecclesiae Causas: “Poena originalis peccati est carentia visionis Dei, actualis vero poena peccati est gehennae perpetuae cruciatus.” http://www.ewtn.com/library/ CURIA/itclimbo.HTM. 48 Summa Theologiae 1a–2ae, q. 82, a. 3: “Unde ex aversione voluntatis a Deo, consecuta est inordinatio in omnibus aliis animae viribus. Sic ergo privatio originalis iustitiae, per quam voluntas subdebatur Deo, est formale in peccato originali, omnis autem alia inordinatio virium animae se habet in peccato originali sicut quiddam materiale. Inordinatio autem aliarum virium animae praecipue in hoc attenditur, quod inordinate convertuntur ad bonum commutabile, quae quidem inordinatio communi nomine potest dici concupiscentia. Et ita peccatum originale materialiter quidem est concupiscentia; formaliter vero, defectus originalis iustitiae.” Quoted by Bottagisio, Il Limbo dantesco, 30–1. 49 Super Sententiis 2, d. 33, q. 3, a. 2: “Dico ergo, quod omnis homo usum liberi

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arbitrii habens proportionatus est ad vitam aeternam consequendam, quia potest se ad gratiam praeparare, per quam vitam aeternam merebitur; et ideo si ab hoc deficiant, maximus erit dolor eis, quia amittunt illud quod suum esse possibile fuit. Pueri autem nunquam fuerunt proportionati ad hoc quod vitam aeternam haberent; quia nec eis debebatur ex principiis naturae, cum omnem facultatem naturae excedat, nec actus proprios habere potuerunt quibus tantum bonum consequerentur; et ideo nihil omnino dolebunt de carentia visionis divinae; immo magis gaudebunt de hoc quod participabunt multum de divina bonitate, et perfectionibus naturalibus. Nec potest dici, quod fuerunt proportionati ad vitam aeternam consequendam, quamvis non per actionem suam, tamen per actionem aliorum circa eos: quia potuerunt ab aliis baptizari, sicut et multi pueri ejusdem conditionis baptizati, vitam aeternam consecuti sunt: hoc enim est superexcedentis gratiae ut aliquis sine actu proprio praemietur; unde defectus talis gratiae non magis tristitiam causat in pueris decedentibus non baptizatis quam in sapientibus hoc quod eis multae gratiae non fiunt quae aliis similibus factae sunt.” Super Sententiis 2, d. 33, q. 2, a. 2 ad 5: “Ad quintum dicendum, quod quamvis pueri non baptizati sint separati a Deo quantum ad illam conjunctionem quae est per gloriam, non tamen ab eo penitus sunt separati, immo sibi conjunguntur per participationem naturalium bonorum; et ita etiam de ipso gaudere poterunt naturali cognitione et dilectione.” De malo 5, 3: “animae puerorum naturali quidem cognitione non carent, qualis debetur animae separatae secundum suam naturam, sed carent supernaturali cognitione, quae hic in nobis per fidem plantatur, eo quod nec hic fidem habuerunt in actu, nec sacramentum fidei susceperunt. Pertinet autem ad naturalem cognitionem quod anima sciat se propter beatitudinem creatam, et quod beatitudo consistit in adeptione perfecti boni; sed quod illud bonum perfectum, ad quod homo factus est, sit illa gloria quam sancti possident, est supra cognitionem naturalem. Unde apostolus dicit, I ad Cor. II, 9, quod nec oculus vidit, nec auris audivit, nec in cor hominis ascendit quae praeparavit Deus diligentibus se: et postea subdit: nobis autem revelavit Deus per spiritum suum: quae quidem revelatio ad fidem pertinet. Et ideo se privari tali bono, animae puerorum non cognoscunt, et propter hoc non dolent; sed hoc quod per naturam habent, absque dolore possident.” Commentaria in quatuor libros Sententiarum 2, d. 33, a. 3, q. 1 co: “quia vero in carne fuit foeditas, ideo ponuntur in loco vili, utpote infernali; sed quia non habuerunt in se actualem delectationem peccati, nec in spiritu nec in carne, ideo non sentiunt poenae ignis acerbitatem.” And see also a few lines later: “Unde caro non facit animam parvuli concupiscientem, sed concupiscibilem; et propter hoc nec ipsa nec anima in ipsa debet actuali combustioni ignis torqueri; sed sicut anima privatur visione dei, sic etiamo caro privatur stola sua et in loco vili et tenebroso ponitur, cum collocanda esset in caelo empyreo, si a talis foeditatis corruptione fuisset sanata per baptismi efficaciam.” Commentaria in quatuor libros Sententiarum 2, d. 33, a. 3, q. 2: “Decedentes

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enim insolo originali quasi medium tenent inter habentes gratiam et culpam actualem; et quoniam status retributionis debet respondere statui vitae presentis, in tali statu debent animae parvulorum poni, ut quasi medium teneant inter Beatos et aeternis ignibus cruciatos … Ideo cum Beatis communicant in hoc quod carent omni afflictione exteriori et interiori; cum damnatis in vero hoc quod privantur visione Dei et lucis corporalis. Parvuli igitur, sic divino iudicio iusto inter Beatos et simpliciter miseros quasi in medio constituti, hoc noverunt, et cum ex una parte consideratio generet desolationem, ex altera consolationem; ita aeque lance divino iudicio eorum cognitio et affectio libratur et in tali statu perpetuatur, ut nec tristitia deiiciat, nec leatitia reficiat.” Commentaria in quatuor libros Sententiarum 2, d. 33, a. 3, q. 2: “Ad illud quod obiicitur quod tristitia necessario sequitur, quando desiderium non impletur; dicendum quod verum est, quando nec impletur in se, nec fit recompensatio secundum aestimationem desiderantis. Quando vero secundum aestimationem desiderantis aliqua recompensatio fit, non necesse est tristari; sicut multi qui vellent esse in paradiso, bene consolantur de statu vitae presentis, quia contenti sunt eis quea habent, quamvis modicum habeant. Sic et in parvulis intelligendum est esse quod eis sufficiat status suus; nec elevant oculos ad opes, quas habere non possunt.” Translations of Bonaventure’s Commentary on the Sentences (by Alexis Bugnolo, 2007) are available through the following website: http://www. franciscan-archive.org/bonaventura/sent.html. Commentaria in quatuor libros Sententiarum 2, d. 33, a. 3, q. 2: “quod sicut in hac vita nec concupivit nec desideravit aliquid, quod non debuerit, sic etiam nec in futura vita; sed ipsi divina sententia collocati erunt inter fugam et appetitum, ita quod neutrum eis dominabitur; et ideo nec habebunt actuale gaudium nec actuale supplicium; unum enim reprimitur per alterum.” Lectura 2, d. 33: “Dico medio modo quod scient se esse ordinatos ad beatitudinem in generali, sed tamen non scient ad quam beatitudinem in speciali; et tamen habebunt scientiam de fine particulari, scilicet beatitudine naturali in Deo, cognoscendum ipse naturaliter ex creaturis. Sed dubitabunt de fine, utrum ordinate fuerint supernaturaliter ad finem; non tamen in errore erunt, sed in dubio; et ideo non tristabuntur de privatione.” For the theme of the Harrowing of Hell in medieval culture see J.A. MacCulloch, The Harrowing of Hell: A Comparative Study of an Early Christian Doctrine; K. Young The Drama of the Medieval Church; O.B. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama; K. Tamburr, The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England. For the theme of the Harrowing of Hell in Dante see Iannucci, “Limbo. The Emptiness of Time” and his “Dante e il Vangelo di Nicodemo: la discesa di Beatrice agl’Inferi.” On this line see F. Forti, Magnanimitade: Studi su un tema dantesco, 10–11. Another example of canto 4 indeterminateness is line 19, where Virgil mentions

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“l’angoscia delle genti / che son qua giù” as the cause of his sorrow. Does it refer only to Limbo (suggesting the existence of quite a lot of pain in there) or to the whole of hell? Compare to Aeneid 6, 306–8: “matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita / magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptaeque puellae, / impositique rogis iuvenes ante ora parentum.” Inferno 4, 25–8: “Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare, / non avea pianto mai che di sospiri / che l’aura etterna facevan tremare; / ciò avvenia di duol sanza martìri, / ch’avean le turbe, ch’eran molte e grandi, / d’infanti e di femmine e di viri.” The second line echoes e contrario the first acoustic impression of hell in the preceding canto: “Quivi sospiri, pianti ed alti guai / risonavan per l’aere sanza stelle” (3, 22–3). See also the description of Limbo in Purgatorio 7, 28– 30, where the darkness of the general circle is made explicit: “Loco è laggiù non tristo da martiri / ma di tenebre solo ove i lamenti / non suonan come guai ma son sospiri.” See Aeneid 6, 640–1: “largior hic campos aether et lumine vestit / purpureo, solemque suum, sua sidera norunt,” and 754–5: “et tumulum capit unde omnis longo ordine posset / adversos legere et venientum discere vultus.” For the crucial differences between Dante’s limbo and Virgil’s Elysian Fields, see L. Pertile “Il nobile castello, il paradiso terrestre e l’umanesimo dantesco.” Aquinas, Super Sententiis 4, d. 45, a. 2: “Ad secundam quaestionem dicendum, quod receptacula animarum post mortem dupliciter distingui possunt; aut secundum situm, aut secundum locorum qualitatem, prout scilicet in aliquibus locis poenas vel praemia recipiunt animae. Si ergo consideretur limbus patrum et infernus secundum locorum qualitatem praedictam, sic non est dubium quod distinguuntur: tum quia in inferno est poena sensibilis, quae in limbo patrum non erat: tum etiam quia in inferno est poena aeterna; sed in limbo patrum detinebantur sancti temporaliter tantum. Sed si considerentur quantum ad situm loci; sic probabile est quod idem locus, vel quasi continuus, sit infernus et limbus; ita tamen quod quaedam superior pars inferni limbus patrum dicatur. Existentes enim in inferno, secundum diversitatem culpae diversam sortiuntur et poenam; et ideo secundum quod gravioribus peccatis etiam irretiuntur damnati, secundum hoc obscuriorem et profundiorem locum obtinent in inferno; unde sancti patres, in quibus minimum erat de ratione culpae, supremum et minus tenebrosum locum habuerunt omnibus puniendis.” See Benvenuto da Imola (ddp ad Inferno 4, 84): “Hoc [the way the magnanimous souls look] potest intelligi dupliciter: uno modo quod non habebant nec spem nec penam; vel tangit habitus sapientis qui tenet medium virtutis in omnibus,” and Anonimo Fiorentino (ddp ad idem): “Proprio è atto di savio non si rallegrare troppo delle cose prospere.” Forti, Magnanimitade, 30. Compare Inferno 4, 112–14: “Genti v’eran con occhi tardi e gravi, / di grande autorità ne’ lor sembianti / parlavan rado, con voci soavi” with Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics: “et dicit

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[Aristoteles] quod motus magnanimi videtur esse gravis, et vox videtur esse gravis, et locutio eius esse stabilis et tarda.” A. Faulkner, “The Harrowing of Hell at Barking Abbey and in Modern Production,” quotation and translation on 150. Avicenna, Liber Canonis, f. 258, quoted by M.L. Ardizzone, Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages, 23. Ardizzone, Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages, 21–5 and 88–9. Rime 9, 1–4: “Io non pensava che lo cor giammai / avesse di sospir’ tormento tanto, / che dell’anima mia nascesse pianto / mostrando per lo viso agli occhi morte.” Translations are taken from The Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, translated by L. Nelson Jr. See for instance the conclusions of the two “twin sonnets” (Tanto gentile and Vede perfettamente) celebrating Beatrice’s healing and salvific power in Vita Nuova 26: “Mostrasi sì piacente a chi la mira, / che dà per li occhi una dolcezza al core, / che ’ntender no la può chi no la prova: / e par che de la sua labbia si mova / un spirito soave pien d’amore, / che va dicendo a l’anima: Sospira” (Vita Nuova 26, 7) and “Ed è ne li atti suoi tanto gentile, / che nessun la si può recare a mente, / che non sospiri in dolcezza d’amore” (Vita Nuova 26, 13). The sweetness of sighs is not unknown to Cavalcanti. See Rime 25: “Posso degli occhi miei novella dire, / la qual è tale che piace s’ al core / che di dolcezza ne sospir’ Amore.” I quote the text of the Convivio from the edition by F. Brambilla Ageno. Translations are taken from The Banquet, translated by R. Lansing. Both are available from the online Princeton Dante Project (http://etcweb.prince ton.edu/dante/). In the nineteenth century, in the context of the debate over the salvation of negative infidels, “sospesi” was interpreted as a post-resurrection suspension between heaven and hell on a newly beautified earth. The interpretation of sospesi as “librantur” was put forward by Mazzoni and has been accepted ever since. The interpretations of Mestica and Porena (ddp ad Inferno 2, 52) interestingly connect suspension to the concentration of the soul in desire. Aeneid 6, 739–44: “Ergo exercentur poenis, veterumque malorum / supplicia expendunt: aliae panduntur inanes / suspensae ad ventos; aliis sub gurgite vasto / infectum eluitur scelus, aut exuritur igni.” Summa Theologiae 1a–2ae, q. 11, a. 3: “non autem quiescit simpliciter nisi in ultimo, quia quandiu aliquid expectatur, motus voluntatis remanet in suspenso, licet iam ad aliquid pervenerit.” See also book 8 of Augustine’s Confessions, where the word “suspended” is employed to describe the hesitation and frustration connected to his failed attempts at conversion. The more Augustine moves toward the point at which he will change life, the bigger the fear that grips him. This sentiment, however, does not push him back from conversion – it “suspends” him: “Et item conabar et paulo minus ibi eram et paulo minus, iam iamque attingebam et tenebam; et non ibi eram

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nec attingebam nec tenebam, haesitans mori morti et vitae vivere, plusque in me valebat deterius inolitum, quam melius insolitum, punctumque ipsum temporis, quo aliud futurus eram, quanto propius admovebatur, tanto ampliorem incutiebat horrorem; sed non recutiebat retro nec avertebat, sed suspendebat.” Confessions 8, 11, 25, mentioned by Bottagisio, Il Limbo dantesco, 341. See for instance Purgatorio 20, 139–40: “No’ istavamo immobili e sospesi / come i pastor che pria udir quell canto”; Paradiso 31, 55–7: “e volgeami con voglia riaccesa / per domandar la mia donna di cose / di che la mente mia era sospesa”; and Purgatorio 13, 136–7: “Troppa è la paura ond’è sospesa / l’anima mia del tormento di sotto.” Bottagisio, Il Limbo dantesco, 212–41. Summa Theologiae 1–2ae, q. 40, a. 4 ad 3: “Ad tertium dicendum quod desperatio non importat solam privationem spei; sed importat quendam recessum a re desiderata, propter aestimatam impossibilitatem adipiscendi.” For the relation between Limbo and the Convivio see also A. Renaudet, Dante humaniste, esp. 105–46; and Padoan, “Il limbo dantesco,” 121–2. Convivio 3, xiv, 14–15: “Onde, sì come per lei molto di quello si vede per ragione, e per consequente si vede poter essere, che sanza lei pare maraviglia, così per lei si crede ogni miracolo in più alto intelletto pote[r] avere ragione, e per consequente pote[r] essere. Onde la nostra buona fede ha sua origine; dal[la] quale viene la speranza, ch’è ’l proveduto desiderare; e per quella nasce l’operazione della caritade. Per le quali tre virtudi si sale a filosofare a quelle Atene celestiali dove li Stoici e Peripatetici e Epicurî, per la luce della veritade etterna, in uno volere concordevolemente concorrono.” Convivio 3, xv, 7–8: “Veramente può qui alcuno forte dubitare come ciò sia, che la sapienza possa fare l’uomo beato, non potendo a lui perfettamente certe cose mostrare; con ciò sia cosa che ’l naturale desiderio sia [nel]l’uomo di sapere, e sanza compiere lo desiderio beato essere non possa. A ciò si può chiaramente rispondere che lo desiderio naturale in ciascuna cosa è misurato secondo la possibilitade della cosa desiderante: altrimenti anderebbe in contrario di se medesimo, che impossibile è; e la Natura l’averebbe fatto indarno, che è anche impossibile.” On this point see also Bottagisio, Il Limbo dantesco, 312–17. Bottagisio puts forth a second explanation for the absence of sighs, connecting it to a notion of political happiness as discussed in the Monarchia (Il Limbo dantesco, 317–21). Quoted by Iannucci, “Limbo the Emptiness of Time,” 71–2. Inferno 14, 43–72: “I’ cominciai: Maestro, tu che vinci / tutte le cose, fuor che ’demon duri / ch’a l’intrar de la porta incontra uscinci, / chi è quel grande che non par che curi / lo ’ncendio e giace dispettoso e torto, / sì che la pioggia non par che ’l marturi? / E quel medesmo, che si fu accorto / ch’io domandava il mio duca di lui, / gridò: Qual io fui vivo, tal son morto. / Se Giove stanchi ’l suo fabbro da cui / crucciato prese la folgore aguta /onde l’ultimo dì percosso fui; / o s’elli stanchi li altri a muta a muta / in Mongibello a la focina negra, /

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chiamando ‘Buon Vulcano, aiuta, aiuta!’ / sì com’ el fece a la pugna di Flegra, / e me saetti con tutta sua forza: / non ne potrebbe aver vendetta allegra. / Allora il duca mio parlò di forza / tanto, ch’i’ non l’avea sì forte udito: / O Capaneo, in ciò che non s’ammorza / la tua superbia, se’ tu più punito; / nullo martiro, fuor che la tua rabbia, / sarebbe al tuo furor dolor compito. Poi si rivolse a me con miglior labbia, / dicendo: Quei fu l’un d’i sette regi / ch’assiser Tebe; ed ebbe e par ch’elli abbia / Dio in disdegno, e poco par che ’l pregi; / ma, com’ io dissi lui, li suoi dispetti / sono al suo petto assai debiti fregi.” 86 M. Gragnolati, Experiencing the Afterlife: Body and Soul in Dante and Medieval Culture, 79–80 and 115–16. 87 L. Spitzer: “Speech and Language in Inferno xiii.” ch ap t e r t wo 1 J. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages, 7–8. 2 Pietro Alighieri, ddp ad Inferno 5, 39: “Post hoc auctor fingit in hoc secundo circulo Inferni puniri animas decedentium in peccato luxurie, summictendo rationem talento, idest appetitui. Unde Augustinus: Luxuria tota nostra ratio absorbetur. Quod fit in quolibet coitu, preterquam in uxorio, in fornicatione, que proprie commictitur in usu viduarum et concubinarum et meretricum; item in stupro, quod commictitur in virgine illicite deflorata; item in adulterio, quod commictitur in uxore aliena; item in incestu, qui commictitur in consanguineis; item in raptu, qui commictitur cum violenter puella abducta cognoscitur, secundum Gratianum in Decretis.” I wasn’t able to track down the reference to Augustine, but the phrase resonates almost literally in Aquinas, De malo, q. 15 a. 2 arg. 10, for which see note 32. For Gratian see note 47. 3 Francesco da Buti, ddp ad Inferno 5, 39: “Veduto il testo, ora è da vedere sopra questo, acciò che si mostri che l’autore à detto questo del peccato della lussuria, del quale qui si tratta, quello che è e le sue specie, e le sue compagnie che li vanno d’inanzi, di dietro e d’intorno, e le sue figliuole. E prima, lussuria presa generalmente è immoderato amore di diletto, secondo il tatto, e questa à sei specie; cioè soavità di vestimenti, e soavità di diletti, e soavità d’unguenti, soavità di bagni, soavità di toccamenti di membri che non sono atti a generazione, e soavità di toccamento di membri che sono atti a generazione, che si chiama coito; e questa ultima spezie strettamente si dice lussuria, et à sotto di sè queste specie; fornicazione, adulterio, stupro, sacrilegio, incesto, e peccato contro a natura. Fornicazione è congiunzione carnale di soluto con soluta; adulterio è d’ammogliato con maritata, o pur che l’uno sia legato a matrimonio; stupro è corrompimento di verginità; sacrilegio è di persone consacrate, o pur che l’una sia consecrata; incesto si commette tra’ parenti; peccato contro natura, per sè medesimo s’intende, e però non è da parlarne.” 4 Francesco da Buti, ddp ad Inferno 5, 39: “Ancora è da sapere che la lussuria si distingue in tre specie; cioè spiritual tanto, corporale tanto, spirituale e corporale; spirituale tanto è quella che si commette con la volontà solamente,

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et è vie peggio che la corporale tanto; corporal tanto è quando l’animo non consente, siccome fu Lucrezia che non consentì con l’animo; corporale, e spirituale è quella che si commette col corpo, consenziente l’animo. Ora è da sapere che questa lussuria mena sempre seco questa compagnia; ansietà, paura, penitenzia, puzza, vergogna, e bruttura. L’ansietà e la paura vanno innanzi all’atto carnale; l’altre seguitano nell’atto; la penitenzia seguita poi, sì come dice Boezio della prima e dell’ultima nel terzo della Filosofica Consolatione: Quid autem de corporis voluptatibus loquar, quarum appetentia plena est anxietatis, satietas vero poenitentiae? Onde Demostene filosofo, perchè sapeva che dopo l’atto carnale seguitava pentimento, quando andò a Taide, et ella li dimandò talenti cento per lo suo consentimento, elli ragguardò il cielo e disse quelle parole che in volgare suonano così: Io non compro tanto prezzo uno pentere. In grammatica disse: Non emo tanti unum poenitere; e lasciolla.” 5 Francesco da Buti, ddp ad Inferno 5, 39: “E questa sì fatta compagnia assai dimostra sì fatto peccato essere da schifare; ma ella à sue figliuole le quali vie più dimostrano cotal vizio essere da fuggire, e queste sono le pene che induce: chè ogni peccato induce pena, e questo è lo frutto del peccato; cioè la pena. E queste figliuole sono otto; cioè cechità di mente, inconsiderazione, incostanzia, precipitazione, amor di sè, odio di Dio, appetito del presente secolo, desperazione delle cose celestiali. Cechità di mente è quando la ragione superiore, che è da considerare le cose celestiali che ci inducano a sapienzia, sta sì occupata et attuffata per lo detto peccato, che delle cose di sopra non pensa niente, se non come animale bruto. Inconsiderazione è quando la ragione inferiore, la quale è da considerare le cose di quaggiù che ci inducono a scienzia, è sì occupata per lo detto peccato che l’uomo lascia andare male ogni cosa, e non si cura d’onore se non come uno animale. Niuno peccato abbatte tanto la ragione, quanto la lussuria, e fallo simile ad animale bruto: imperò che, quando l’uomo è a quello atto non si ricorda che sia uomo; ma seguita l’impeto della lussuria come bestia. Incostanzia è volubilità, a che la lussuria induce l’uomo. Precipitazione è cadimento nelli pericoli e vizi e peccati, nelli quali la lussuria strabocca l’uomo. Amor di sè si è, perchè lo lussurioso non ama, se non la carne sua. Odio di Dio è perchè lo lussurioso vede alcuna volta impedire i suoi diletti, e reputa che Dio lo impacci o possa impacciare; e però l’à in odio. Amore del presente secolo è quando lo lussurioso vorrebbe sempre vivere, per potere sempre lussuriare. L’ultimo è desperazione delle cose celestiali, quando il lussurioso desperando delle cose di sopra, si dà a queste terrene. E queste otto figliuole à mostrate l’autore nel testo, come mosterrò in quel che è detto esserne parte, et in quel che è a dire esserne l’altra parte.” 6 Francesco da Buti, ddp ad Inferno 5, 39: “Et è da notare che le pene che l’autore adatta a quelli dell’inferno litteralmente, secondo convenienzia del peccato, allegoricamente si deono intendere di quelli del mondo, et imperò, mostrato ch’io l’avrò nel testo, sia chiaro l’allegorico intelletto. E però dico che l’autore intese la prima figliuola; cioè cechità di mente, e la seconda; cioè

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inconsiderazione quando disse in questo canto di sopra: Io venni in luogo d’ogni luce muto. Il luogo de’ lussuriosi, mentre che sono nel mondo, è sanza luce, perchè ànno cechità di mente; e questa è la prima e seconda pena che finge essere a loro per convenienzia: chè chi è stato cieco nel mondo, degna cosa è che sia in cechità nell’inferno. La terza; cioè incostanzia intese quando disse: La bufera infernal ec. Li lussuriosi nel mondo sono menati dalla vanità del peccato, e volti, e percossi; e questa è la terza parte che finge essere a loro per convenienzia ancora: chè chi è stato nel mondo incostante, sia nell’inferno menato dal vento; e come nel mondo s’è girato di spezie in spezie di lussuria, così nell’inferno sia volto e percosso: e questo medesimo dimostra ancora quando dice: Di qua, di là ec. E perchè vento non può essere sanza aere, però finge che i lussuriosi sieno puniti dal vento nell’aere; dal vento, per mostrare la loro incostanzia e volubilità; nell’aere, per mostrare la loro debolezza, e fragilezza: chè agevolmente l’aere cede al vento et ad ogni cosa. La quarta; cioè precipitazione, intese quando disse: Quando giungon dinanzi alla ruina ec. Li lussuriosi nel mondo sono precipitati in molti altri vizi e pericoli; per quello però convenientemente finge che di là sieno precipitati. La quinta; cioè amore di sé stesso, intese quando disse: Quivi le strida, il compianto e il lamento. I lussuriosi nel mondo sono stati amatori della sua carne, e compiagnitori e lamentatori e gridatori, quando ànno cantato e composti sonetti e canzoni d’amore; e però per conveniente pena finge l’autore che di là; cioè nell’inferno, stridano, e compiangansi e lamentinsi, se di qua ànno cantato per amore disonesto, et amatosi troppo. La sesta; cioè odio di Dio, intese quando disse: Biasteman quivi la virtù divina. Li lussuriosi nel mondo ànno in odio Idio, et insurgono contra lui; e però degnamente finge l’autore che similmente sieno nell’inferno in sì fatta ostinazione. La settima; cioè appetito della presente vita, intese quando dirà di sotto: Et ella a me: Nessun maggior dolore. Li lussuriosi ànno grande amore al mondo; e però degnamente finge che per tormento abbino quel medesimo amore nell’inferno, acciò che l’assenzia della cosa amata faccia loro dolore. L’ottava; cioè desperazione, intese quando disse: Nulla speranza li conforta. Li lussuriosi si disperano in questa vita delle cose celestiali; e però convenientemente finge che questa desperazione abbino nell’inferno: Quia in inferno nulla est redemptio.” 7 Francesco da Buti, ddp ad Inferno 5, 39: “Niuno peccato abbatte tanto la ragione, quanto la lussuria, e fallo simile ad animale bruto: imperò che, quando l’uomo è a quello atto non si ricorda che sia uomo; ma seguita l’impeto della lussuria come bestia.” 8 Boccaccio, ddp ad Inferno 5 (esposizione allegorica): “E così miseramente nella lussuria, abominevole vizio, pervegnamo, la quale, scelleratamente seguita, ne trae della mente la notizia di Dio e contro all’amor del prossimo ne sospigne ad operare, togliendoci ancora di noi medesimi e delle nostre cose la debita sollicitudine, sì come colei il cui essercizio diminuisce il cerebro, evacua l’ossa, guasta lo stomaco, caccia la memoria, ingrossa lo ‘ngegno, debilita il vedere e ogni corporal forza quasi a niente riduce; ella è morte de’ giovani e amica delle femine, madre di bugie, nemica d’onestà, guastamento

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di fede, conforto di vizi, ostello di lordura, lusinghevole male, e abominazione e vituperio de’ vecchi.” 9 Boccaccio, ddp ad Inferno 5 (esposizione allegorica): “Commettesi adunque questo vizio carnale tra soluto e soluta, e questa spezie ha meno di colpa che alcuna altra, e chiamasi ‘fornicazione’; il qual nome ella trasse dal luogo dove il più si solea anticamente commettere, cioè nelle fornici. ‘Fornice’ è ogni volta murata, quantunque, a differenza di queste, si chiamino ‘testudini’ quelle de’ templi e de’ reali palagi; e ‘fornici’ eran chiamate propiamente quelle le quali eran fatte a sostentamento de’ gradi de’ teatri; a’ quali teatri per ciò che la moltitudine degli uomini anticamente si ragunava i dì solenni a vedere i giuochi, li quali in essi si faceano, prendevano in queste fornici le femine volgari loro stanza a dare opera al loro disonesto servigio con quegli a’ quali piaceva; e così da quello luogo questa spezie di colpa trasse questo nome, cioè ‘fornicazione.’ Commettesi ancora questo vizio tra soluto e soluta vergine, e questa spezie si chiama ‘stupro:’ ed ebbe questo vocabolo origine da ‘stupore,’ in quanto, quando prese l’uso, non solamente in vergine si commettea, ma in vergine vestale, le quali vergini Vestali furono sacratissime appo i Gentili e di precipua venerazione, e massimamente appo i Romani: e però pareva uno stupore che alcuno fosse di tanta presunzione che egli ardisse a violare una vergine vestale. Oggi è questo nome declinato a qualunque vergine, e ancora quando questo medesimo vizio tra persone per consanguinità o per affinità congiunte si commette, per ciò che non meno stupore genera negli uditori aver con questa turpitudine maculata l’onestà del parentado che l’avere viziata la verginità d’alcuna; quantunque viziare alcuna vergine sia gravissimo peccato, per ciò che le si toglie quello che mai rendere non le si può, di che ella riceve grandissimo danno; e quanto il danno è maggiore, tanto è maggiore la colpa, per la quale segue il danno. Commettesi ancora questo vizio tra obligato e soluta o tra obligato e obligata o tra soluto e obligata, e chiamasi questa spezie ‘adulterio’; e venne questo nome dall’effetto del vizio, cioè ‘adulterium: alterius ventrem terere’: cioè l’adulterio è il priemere l’altrui ventre, per ciò che in esso si prieme la possessione, la quale non è di colui che la prieme, né similemente di colei alla quale è premuto, ma del marito di lei. Commettesi ancora questo vizio tra uomo non sacro e femina sacra o tra uomo sacro e femina sacra o tra uomo sacro e femina non sacra: e deesi questo ‘sacro’ intendere quella persona essere la quale ha sopra sé ordine sacro, sì come sono i cherici e le monache; e chiamasi questa spezie ‘incesto,’ il qual nome nacque anticamente dalla cintura di Venere, la quale è da’ poeti chiamata ‘ceston.’ Alla qual cosa con più evidenzia dimostrare è da sapere che, tra gli altri più ornamenti che i poeti aggiungono a Venere, è una singular cintura, chiamata ‘ceston,’ della quale scrive così Omero nella sua Iliada: ‘Et a pectoribus solvit ceston cingulum varium, ubi sibi voluntaria omnia ordinata erant, ubi certe amicitia atque cupido atque facundia, blanditie que furate intellectum, studiose licet scientium’ etc. E vogliono i poeti, con ciò sia cosa che a Venere paia dovere apartenere ogni congiunzione generativa, che, quando alcuni ligittime e oneste noze celebrano, Venere vada a questa congiunzione cinta di

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questa sua cintura detta ‘ceston,’ a dimostrazione che quegli li quali per santa legge si congiungono sieno constretti e obligati l’uno all’altro da certe cose convenientisi al matrimonio, e massimamente alla perpetuità d’esso; e per ciò che Venere similemente va a’ non ligittimi congiugnimenti, dicono che, quando ella va a quelli così fatti, ella va scinta sanza portare questa sua cintura chiamata ‘ceston’: e quinci ogni congiunzion non ligittima chiamarono ‘incesto,’ cioè fatta sanza questo ‘ceston.’ Ma questa generalità è stata poi ristretta a questa sola spezie, per mostrare che, quantunque l’altre sieno gravi, questa sia gravissima e che in essa fieramente s’offenda Idio, con ciò sia cosa che le persone a lui sacrate di così vituperevole vizio maculate sieno. Alcuni a questa spezie aggiungono il commettere questo peccato tra congiunti, il quale di sopra fu nominato ‘stupro’; e per avventura non senza sentimento s’aggiugne, per ciò che questo pare male da non potere in alcun tempo con futuro matrimonio risarcire, per ciò che, come la monaca sacrata mai maritar più non si puote, così né tra congiunti può mai intervenire matrimonio, dove nell’altre spezie potrebbe intervenire. Commettesi ancora questo vizio, e nell’un sesso e nell’altro, contro alla natural legge essercitando, e questo è chiamato ‘sogdomia,’ da una città antica chiamata Sogdoma, li cittadini della quale in ciò dissolutissimamente viziati furono; ma, per ciò che questa spezie ha molto più di graveza e di offesa che alcuna delle predette, non dimostra l’autore che in questo cerchio si punisca, anzi si punisce troppo più giù, come si vedrà nel canto xv del presente libro.” Boccaccio, ddp ad Inferno 5 (esposizione allegorica): “Ma negli uomini non pose la natura questa legge, per ciò che gli conobbe animali razionali, e, per quello, dover conoscere quello e quando e quanto s’apartenesse di fare a dovere ben vivere. Ma mai non mi ricorda d’aver letto che appo coloro, li quali mondanamente vivono, alcuno quello che la ragione vuole in questo atto osservasse.” Guido da Pisa, ddp ad Inferno 5, 38–9: “Quantum ad primum: Luxuria est, ut ait beatus Augustinus in libro De Civitate Dei, libido que est in genitalibus. Vel aliter: Luxuria est de immundis cogitationibus et desideriis descendens lubrica et effrenata mentis prostitutio.” Guido da Pisa, ddp ad Inferno 5, 38–9: “Fornicatio est duplex: alia est enim spiritualis, alia corporalis. Spiritualis fornicatio, large sumpta, comprehendit omne peccatum mortale, ut in Psalmista: Perdidisti omnes qui fornicantur abs te. Stricte vero sumpta est ydolatria, ut ibi: Fornicati sunt cum diis alienis. Corporalis vero fornicatio, large sumpta, est omnis illicitus actus carnis; stricte vero sumpta, est peccatum quod committit cum soluta solutus. Et dicitur fornicatio, quasi ‘forme necatio.’ Necat enim animam, que est forma corporis, secundum Philosophum, vel necat formam, idest pulcritudinem corporis: formos enim Grece, Latine ‘pulcrum’; inde formosus, idest ‘valde pulcer.’ Unde sponsa in Canticis: Nigra sum, sed formosa. Vel dicitur ‘fornicatio’ a fornice, qui est ‘arcus triumphalis,’ et solet erigi in victoriis. Unde Salomon in Proverbiorum 28: Rex sapiens incurvat super impio fornicem.” Guido da Pisa, ddp ad Inferno 5, 38–9: “Tertio, tollit sensum et vires; luxuria

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enim, ut dicit beatus Ysidorus, carnem frangit, et fractam ducit celerius ad senectam. Dicunt enim medici quod id in quo maxima est delectatio est maxima nature consumptio. Et ratio huius est: In genitura enim, secundum Philosophum, fit decisio ex omnibus iuncturis et venis et musculis. Unde dicit quidam philosophus quod plus debilitat corpus unus coitus quam due minutiones; et ratio huius est quia cerebrum perturbat et minuit. Nam secundum naturales, semen est sanguis purissimus descendens a cerebro, qui per colationem venarum albescit. Unde illi qui immoderate luxurie deserviunt fatui fiunt, ut patet in Salomone, qui cum esset senex, stultus factus est, et depravatum est cor eius per mulieres ut sequeretur deos alienos.” For lust in the Middle Ages see P. Payer, The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Late Middle Ages; C. Casagrande and S. Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali. Storia dei peccati nel medioevo, 149–72; B. Kent, “On the Track of Lust: Luxuria, Ockham, and the Scientists.” For an overview on lust, see S. Blackburn, Lust. Payer, The Bridling of Desire, 48. For intemperantia see Kent, “On the Track of Lust,” 356–7. See, for instance, Augustine, De civitate Dei 14, 16: “Cum igitur sint multarum libidines rerum, tamen, cum libido dicitur neque cuius rei libido sit additur, non fere assolet animo occurrere nisi illa, qua obscenae partes corporis excitantur.” Fasciculus morum. A Fourteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, edited and translated by S. Wenzel, 648–733, quotation on 648–9; quoted by Kent, “On the Track of Lust,” 362. As Peter Dronke points out, this is a rephrasing of a common medieval topos on love, which is found, for instance, in John of Salisbury’s Polycraticus. See Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love Lyric, vol. 2, 488. Casagrande and Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali, 150–1. De civitate Dei 14, 16: “sed aliquando importunus est ille motus poscente nullo, aliquando autem destituit inhiantem, et cum in animo concupiscentia ferveat, friget in corpore; atque ita mirum in modum non solum generandi voluntati, verum etiam lasciviendi libidini libido non servit, et cum tota plerumque menti cohibenti adversetur, nonnumquam et adversus se ipsa dividitur commotoque animo in commovendo corpore se ipsa non sequitur.” C. Straw, Gregory the Great. Perfection in Imperfection, 117–18. Ibid., notes 67 and 69. Translations of the Moralia (by J. Bliss, 1844) are available on the following website: http://www.lectionarycentral.com/GregoryMoraliaIndex.html. The passage from Moralia 26, 17, 28 that I have omitted in the quotation expounds on the relation between intellectual pride and lust. The flesh brings to the level of beasts those whom a prideful knowledge had elevated to the flight of birds: “Homo quippe cum in honore esset, non intellexit, comparatus est iumentis insipientibus, et similis factus est illis. Quasi scientiae enim illos in altum penna subleuauerat, de quibus paulus hoc quod et superius protulimus dicebat: quia cum cognouissent deum, non sicut deum glorificauerunt, aut gratias egerunt, sed euanuerunt in cogitationibus suis.

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Quomodo autem in iumentorum, aut plusquam iumentorum uoluptate ceciderunt, subdidit dicens: tradidit illos deus in desideria cordis eorum, in immunditiam. Ecce caro mersit quos superba scientia subleuauit, et a uolatu uolucrum ultra appetitum lapsi sunt iumentorum, atque inde sub se prostrati sunt, unde super se ire uidebantur.” Moralia in Job 31, 89: “Sed cunctis liquet quod de ventris ingluvie luxuria nascitur, dum in ipsa distributione membrorum ventri genitalia subnexa videantur. Unde dum unum inordinate reficitur, aliud procul dubio ad contumelias excitatur.” Translation by D. Luscombe, Peter Abelard’s Ethics. On Abelard’s position on lust and sexuality see Casagrande and Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali, 18 and 26, and A. De Libera, Penser au moyen âge, especially 230–5. Ethica 1, 4: “Denique et Dominus, ciborum quoque creator sicut et corporum, extra culpam non esset, si tales eis sapores immitteret qui necessario ad peccatum sui delectatione vescentes cogerent.” The example of the chained cleric comes immediately after this statement and reads as follows: “Veluti siquis religiosum aliquem vinculis constrictum inter feminas iacere compellat, et illae molliciae lecti, et circumstantium feminarum contactu in delectationem, non in consensum trahatus, quis hanc delectacionem quam naturam fecit necessariam culpam appellare presumat?” (Ethica 1, 3). Summa Theologiae 2a–2ae, q. 154 a. 4 co: “Respondeo dicendum quod aliquid dicitur esse peccatum mortale dupliciter. Uno modo, secundum speciem suam. Et hoc modo osculum, amplexus vel tactus, secundum suam rationem non nominant peccatum mortale. Possunt enim haec absque libidine fieri, vel propter consuetudinem patriae, vel propter aliquam necessitatem aut rationabilem causam. Alio modo dicitur aliquid esse peccatum mortale ex sua causa, sicut ille qui dat eleemosynam ut aliquem inducat ad haeresim, mortaliter peccat propter intentionem corruptam. Dictum est autem supra quod consensus in delectationem peccati mortalis est peccatum mortale, et non solum consensus in actum. Et ideo, cum fornicatio sit peccatum mortale, et multo magis aliae luxuriae species, consequens est quod consensus in delectationem talis peccati sit peccatum mortale, et non solum consensus in actum. Et ideo, cum oscula et amplexus et huiusmodi propter delectationem huiusmodi fiant, consequens est quod sint peccata mortalia. Et sic solum dicuntur libidinosa. Unde huiusmodi, secundum quod libidinosa sunt, sunt peccata mortalia.” Summa Theologiae 2a–2ae, q. 153, a. 2 co: “Respondeo dicendum quod peccatum in humanis actibus est quod est contra ordinem rationis. Habet autem hoc rationis ordo, ut quaelibet convenienter ordinet in suum finem. Et ideo non est peccatum si per rationem homo utatur rebus aliquibus ad finem ad quem sunt, modo et ordine convenienti, dummodo ille finis sit aliquod vere bonum. Sicut autem est vere bonum quod conservetur corporalis natura unius individui, ita etiam est quoddam bonum excellens quod conservetur natura speciei humanae. Sicut autem ad conservationem vitae unius hominis

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ordinatur usus ciborum, ita etiam ad conservationem totius humani generis usus venereorum, unde Augustinus dicit, in libro de bono Coniug., quod est cibus ad salutem hominis, hoc est concubitus ad salutem generis. Et ideo, sicut usus ciborum potest esse absque peccato, si fiat debito modo et ordine, secundum quod competit saluti corporis; ita etiam et usus venereorum potest esse absque omni peccato, si fiat debito modo et ordine, secundum quod est conveniens ad finem generationis humanae.” Summa Theologiae 2a–2ae, q. 153, a. 2 co: “Respondeo dicendum quod quanto aliquid est magis necessarium, tanto magis oportet ut circa illud rationis ordo servetur. Unde per consequens magis est vitiosum si ordo rationis praetermittatur. Usus autem venereorum, sicut dictum est, est valde necessarius ad bonum commune, quod est conservatio humani generis. Et ideo circa hoc maxime attendi debet rationis ordo. Et per consequens, si quid circa hoc fiat praeter id quod ordo rationis habet, vitiosum erit. Hoc autem pertinet ad rationem luxuriae, ut ordinem et modum rationis excedat circa venerea. Et ideo absque dubio luxuria est peccatum.” Summa Theologiae 2a–2ae, q. 153, a. 5 co: “Respondeo dicendum quod quando inferiores potentiae vehementer afficiuntur ad sua obiecta, consequens est quod superiores vires impediantur et deordinentur in suis actibus. Per vitium autem luxuriae maxime appetitus inferior, scilicet concupiscibilis, vehementer intendit suo obiecto, scilicet delectabili, propter vehementiam delectationis. Et ideo consequens est quod per luxuriam maxime superiores vires deordinentur, scilicet ratio et voluntas.” De malo, q. 15 a. 2 arg. 10: “Praeterea, quando ratio absorbetur, non imputatur aliquid homini ad peccatum mortale. Sed in actu luxuriae tota ratio absorbetur, quia i Cor., vi, 18, super illud: qui fornicatur in corpus suum peccat, dicit Glossa: hic proprie servit anima corpori in tantum ut nihil aliud in ipso momento et experimento tam magni flagitii cogitare homini liceat aut intendere, quia mentem captivam subdit ipsa submersio et absorptio libidinis. Ergo videtur quod actus luxuriae non sit peccatum mortale.” Summa Theologiae 1a–2ae, q. 33, art. 3 co: “Respondeo dicendum quod, sicut dicitur in x Ethic., delectationes propriae adaugent operationes, extraneae vero impediunt. Est ergo quaedam delectatio quae habetur de ipso actu rationis, sicut cum aliquis delectatur in contemplando vel ratiocinando. Et talis delectatio non impedit usum rationis, sed ipsum adiuvat, quia illud attentius operamur in quo delectamur; attentio autem adiuvat operationem. Sed delectationes corporales impediunt usum rationis triplici ratione. Primo quidem, ratione distractionis. Quia, sicut iam dictum est, ad ea in quibus delectamur, multum attendimus, cum autem attentio fortiter inhaeserit alicui rei, debilitatur circa alias res, vel totaliter ab eis revocatur. Et secundum hoc, si delectatio corporalis fuerit magna, vel totaliter impediet usum rationis, ad se intentionem animi attrahendo; vel multum impediet. Secundo, ratione contrarietatis. Quaedam enim delectationes, maxime superexcedentes, sunt contra ordinem rationis. Et per hunc modum philosophus dicit, in vi Ethic., quod delectationes corporales corrumpunt existimationem prudentiae, non

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autem existimationem speculativam, cui non contrariantur, puta quod triangulus habet tres angulos aequales duobus rectis. Secundum autem primum modum, utramque impedit. Tertio modo, secundum quandam ligationem, inquantum scilicet ad delectationem corporalem sequitur quaedam transmutatio corporalis, maior etiam quam in aliis passionibus, quanto vehementius afficitur appetitus ad rem praesentem quam ad rem absentem. Huiusmodi autem corporales perturbationes impediunt usum rationis, sicut patet in vinolentis, qui habent usum rationis ligatum vel impeditum.” Summa Theologiae 1a–2ae, q. 34, art 1. ad 1: “Ad primum ergo dicendum quod, sicut supra dictum est, delectationes quae sunt de actu rationis, non impediunt rationem, neque corrumpunt prudentiam; sed delectationes extraneae, cuiusmodi sunt delectationes corporales. Quae quidem rationis usum impediunt, sicut supra dictum est, et per contrarietatem appetitus, qui quiescit in eo quod repugnat rationi, et ex hoc habet delectatio quod sit moraliter mala, vel secundum quandam ligationem rationis, sicut in concubitu coniugali delectatio, quamvis sit in eo quod convenit rationi, tamen impedit rationis usum, propter corporalem transmutationem adiunctam. Sed ex hoc non consequitur malitiam moralem, sicut nec somnus quo ligatur usus rationis, moraliter est malus, si sit secundum rationem receptus, nam et ipsa ratio hoc habet, ut quandoque rationis usus intercipiatur. Dicimus tamen quod huiusmodi ligamentum rationis ex delectatione in actu coniugali, etsi non habeat malitiam moralem, quia non est peccatum mortale nec veniale; provenit tamen ex quadam morali malitia, scilicet ex peccato primi parentis, nam hoc in statu innocentiae non erat, ut patet ex his quae in primo dicta sunt.” On the 1277 condemnation and thesis 172 see De Libera, Penser au moyen âge, 235; R. Hissette, Enquête sur les 219 articles condamnés à Paris le 7 mars 1277; and A. Denomy, “The De Amore of Andreas Capellanus and the Condemnation of 1277.” For love, desire, and lust in the monastic environment see Leclercq, Monks and Love in Twelfth Century France and Casagrande and Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali, 157–63. Casagrande and Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali, 152–3. T. Barolini, “Dante and Guido Cavalcanti,” 31–2. For the representation of lust in popular visions of Hell see E. Gardiner, Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante, 169–70 and 230–1. Y. Carré, Le baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Age. Rites, symboles, mentalités, à travers les textes et les images, XIe–XVe siècles, 76–85; and M. Camille, “Gothic Signs and the Surplus: The Kiss on the Cathedral,” especially 151–8. J. Baschet, “I peccati capitali e le loro punizioni dell’iconografia medievale,” 236. Casagrande and Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali, 152–7. D. Jacquart and C. Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, especially 116–38; M. Ciavolella, La malattia d’amore dall’antichità al Medioevo and “L’amore e la medicina medievale.”

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43 Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, 64–6 and 135–7. 44 Ibid., 135–65. 45 It is worth recalling, however, that the Rose’s chaste behaviour is not seen as typical of women throughout the Roman de la Rose. In the episode of the Jealous Husband (8425–9390), for instance, women are repeatedly characterized as lustful. 46 For the legal aspect of lust see J. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in the Middle Ages. 47 Gratian, Decretum 2, 36, 1.2: “Sed non omnis illicitus coitus, nec cuiuslibet illicita defloration raptus appellatur. Aliud enim est fornicatio, aliud stuprum, aliud adulterium, aliud incestus, aliud raptus. Fornicatio, licet uideatur esse genus cuiuslibet illiciti coitus, qui fit extra uxorem legitimam, tamen specialiter intelligitur in usu uiduarum, uel meretricum, uel concubinarum. Stuprum autem est proprie uirginum illicita defloratio, quando uidelicet non precedente coniugali pactione utriusque uoluntate uirgo corrumpitur, patre iniuriam ad animum statim post cognitionem non reuocante. Adulterium uero est alieni thori uiolatio. Unde adulterium dicitur quasi ad alterius thorum accessio. Incestus est consanguinearum uel affinium abusus. Unde incestuosi dicuntur qui consanguineis uel affinibus suis abutuntur. Raptus admittitur, cum puella a domo patris uiolenter ducitur ut corrupta in uxorem habeatur, siue puellae solummodo, siue parentibus tantum, siue utrisque uis illata constiterit; hic morte mulctatur.” 48 Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in the Middle Ages, 374–7. See also 370: “Where medieval canonical records have been published and analyzed, they show with monotonous regularity that a major part of the routine business of the canonical courts consisted in routine prosecutions of fornicators and adulterers, many of them recidivist, interspersed with occasional actions against perpetrators of other sexual offences.” For the civil and political effects of lust see also E. Lombardi, “‘Che libido fe’ licito in sua legge’: Lust and Law, Reason and Passion in Dante.” 49 Sententiae 2, 31, 5: “Unde in Sententiolis Sexti Pythagorici legitur: ‘Omnis ardentior amator propriae uxori adulter est.’ Item Hieronymus: ‘Sapiens iudicio amat coniugem, non affectu. Non regnat in eo impetu voluptatis, nec praeceps fertur ad coitum. Nihil est foedius quam uxorem amare quasi adulteram. Qui dicunt se causa humanis generis uxoribus iungi, imitentur saltem pecudes, et postquam venter uxoris intumuerit, non perdant filios; nec amatoris se uxoribus exhibeant, sed maritos.’ Item: ‘In matrimonio opera liberorum concessa sunt; voluptates autem quae de meretricum amplexibus capiantur, in uxore damnatae.’” Quoted by G. Vinay, “Il De Amore di Andrea Cappellano nel quadro della letteratura amorosa e della rinascita del secolo XII,” 246. 50 For this point see J. Schultz, Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality. 51 De Amore 1, 1: “Amor est passio quedam innata procedens ex visione et immoderata cogitatione formae alterius sexus, ob quam aliquis super omnia

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cupit alterius potiri amplexibus et omnia de utriusque voluntate in ipsius amplexu amoris praecepta compleri.” The mystical hypothesis is proposed by, among many, R. Bezzola, Les origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en occident, vol. 2. As seen in the Introduction to this book, the incompatibility between Christian theories of love and courtly love was most vehemently articulated by E. Gilson, The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard. The Cathar theory was put forth by D. De Rougemont, L’Amour et l’Occident. For a detailed review of the scholarly positions until the 1970s see R. Boase, The Origins and Meaning of Courtly Love, 5–130. S. Kay, “The Contradictions of Courtly Love and the Origins of Courtly Poetry: The Evidence of the Lauzengiers,” 231. Translations of the De Amore are taken from The Art of Courtly Love, translated by J.J. Parry. De Amore 1, 6: “Dicimus enim et stabilito tenore firmamus amorem non posse suas inter duos iugales extendere vires. Nam amantes sibi invicem gratis omnia largiuntur nullius necessitatis ratione cogente. Iugales vero mutuis tenentur ex debito voluntatibus obedire et in nullo se ipsos sibi invicem denegare. Praeterea quid iugalis crescit honori, si sui coniugalis amantium more fruatur amplexu, quum neutrius inde possit probitas augmentari, et nihil amplius [augmento] videantur habere nisi quod primitus iure suo tenebant? Sed et alia istud ratione asserimus, quia praeceptum tradit amoris quod nulla etiam coniugata regis poterit amoris praemio coronari nisi extra coniugii foedera ipsius amoris militiae cernatur adiuncta. Alia vero regula docet amoris neminem posse duorum sauciari amore. Merito ergo inter coniugatos sua non poterit amor iura cognoscere. Sed et alia quidem ratio eis obstare videtur, quia vera inter eos zelotypia inveniri non potest, sine qua verus amor esse non valet, ipsius amoris norma testante quae dicit: qui non zelat amare non potest.” See de Libera, Penser au moyen âge, 188–9. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, Letter 2 (Heloise to Abelard): “Nichil umquam – Deus scit! – in te nisi te requisivi: te pure, non tua concupiscens. Non matrimonii federa, non dotes aliquas expectavi, non denique meas voluptates aut voluntates, sed tuas, sicut ipse nosti, adimplere studui. Et si uxoris nomen sanctius ac validius videretur, dulcius mihi semper extitit amice vocabulum aut – si non indigneris – concubine vel scorti; ut, quo me videlicet pro te amplius humiliarem, ampliorem apud te consequerer gratiam, et sic etiam excellentie tue gloriam minus lederem. Quod et tu ipse tui gratia oblitus penitus non fuisti in ea quam supra memini ad amicum epistola pro consolatione directa, ubi et rationes nonnullas quibus te a coniugio nostro et infaustis thalamis revocare conabar exponere non es dedignatus, sed plerisque tacitis quibus amorem coniugio, libertatem vinculo preferebam. Deum testem invoco, si me Augustus universo presidens mundo matrimonii honore dignaretur, totumque mihi orbem confirmaret in perpetuo possidendum, karius mihi et dignius videretur tua dici meretrix quam illius imperatrix. Non enim quo quisque ditior sive potentior, ideo et melior: Fortune illud est, hoc virtutis. Nec se minime venalem estimet esse que libentius

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ditiori quam pauperi nubit et plus in marito sua quam ipsum concupiscit. Certe quamcunque ad nuptias hec concupiscentia ducit, merces ei potius quam gratia debetur. Certum quippe est eam res ipsas non hominem sequi, et se si posset velle prostituere ditiori, sicut inductio illa Aspasie philosophe apud Socraticum Eschinem cum Xenofonte et uxore eius habita manifeste convincit; quam quidem induction em cum predict a philosopha ad reconciliandos invicem illos proposuisset, tali fine ipsam conclusit: ‘Quare nisi hoc peregeritis, ut neque vir melior, neque femina in terris lectior sit, profecto semper id quod optimum putabitis esse multo maxime requiretis, ut et tu maritus sis quam optime, et hec quam optimo viro nuptasit.’ Sancta profecto hec et plusquam philosophica est sententia ipsius potius sophie quam philosophie dicenda; sanctus hic error, et beata fallatia in coniugatis, ut perfect a dilectio illesa custodiat matrimonii federa non tam corporum continentia quam animorum pudicitia. At quod error ceteris, veritas mihi manifesta contulerat, cum quod ille videlicet de suis estimarent maritis, hoc ego de te, hoc mundus universus non tam crederet quam sciret, ut tanto verior in te, meus amor existeret quanto ab errore longius absisteret.” Text from Lettres d’Abélard et Héloïse, E. Hicks and T. Moreau eds. Translations from The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, translated by B. Radice, revised by M.T. Clanchy. For the significance of the new sciences in early Italian poetry see M.L. Ardizzone, Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages and E. Lombardi, “Traduzione e riscrittura: da Folchetto al Notaio.” G. Boccaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante: “Tra cotanta virtù, tra cotanta scienzia, quanta dimostrato è di sopra essere stata in questo mirifico poeta, trovò ampissimo luogo la lussuria, e non solamente ne’ giovani anni, ma ancora ne’ maturi. Il quale vizio, come che naturale e comune e quasi necessario sia, nel vero non che commendare, ma scusare non si può degnamente. Ma chi sarà tra’ mortali giusto giudice a condennarlo? Non io.” With Cleopatra, who was briefly married to her brother, Dante might add also another faint hint to the theme of incest, although her being “lustful” seems to point rather to her affairs with the Roman leaders. For Pasiphae see M. Gragnolati, “Inferno v.” In the commentary tradition (ddp ad Purgatorio 26, 83) only Benvenuto da Imola and Robert Hollander contemplate this possibility. Paradiso 9, 32–6: “Cunizza fui chiamata, e qui rifulgo / perché mi vinse il lume d’esta stella; / ma lietamente a me medesma indulgo / la cagion di mia sorte, e non mi noia; / che parria forse forte al vostro vulgo”; and Paradiso 9, 103–5: “Non però qui si pente, ma si ride, / non de la colpa, ch’a mente non torna, / ma del valor ch’ordinò e provide.” For the heaven of Venus, see T. Kay, “Dualism and Integration: Poetry and Desire from the Convivio to the Commedia.” Boccaccio, ddp ad Inferno 5, 39: “Intesi ch’a così fatto tormento: Qui, poi che l’autore ha posta la qualità del tormento, dichiara quali sieno i peccatori a’ quali questo tormento è dato, e dice che intese, da Virgilio si dee credere, che a così fatto tormento, come disegnato è, Eran dannati i peccator carnali,

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Che la ragion sommettono al talento, cioè alla volontà. E come che questo si possa d’ogni peccatore intendere, per ciò che alcun peccatore non è che non sottometta, peccando, la ragione alla volontà, vuol nondimeno l’autore che per quel vocabolo carnali s’intenda singularmente per li lussuriosi.” The commentaries in ddp quote as Dante’s “sources” the following texts: Cicero, De officiis 1, 29: “nam qui appetitus longius evagantur et tamquam exultantes sive cupiendo sive fugiendo non satis a ratione retinentur, ii sine dubio finem et modum transeunt”; Virgil, Aeneid 4, 414: “animos submittere amori” (Padoan); Tavola rotonda 75: “io non voglio sottomettere la ragione alla volontà”; Brunetto Latini, Tresor 2, 20, 6: “car ki se laisse vaincre, la raisons remaint sous le desirier”; Meo Abbracciavacca, sonnet 5: “e qual sommette a voglia operazione”; and Folgore da San Gimignano, sonnet 60: “Ma ben se po’ coralmente dolere / chi sommette rason a volontade / e segue senza freno suo volere.” T. Barolini, “Dante and Guido Cavalcanti,” 42. De officiis 1, 28–9: “Duplex est enim vis animorum atque natura; una pars in appetitu posita est, quae est orme Graece, quae hominem huc et illuc rapit, altera in ratione, quae docet et explanat, quid faciendum fugiendumque sit. Ita fit, ut ratio praesit, appetitus obtemperet. Omnis autem actio vacare debet temeritate et neglegentia nec vero agere quicquam, cuius non possit causam probabilem reddere; haec est enim fere discriptio officii. Efficiendum autem est, ut appetitus rationi oboediant eamque neque praecurrant nec propter pigritiam aut ignaviam deserant sintque tranquilli atque omni animi perturbatione careant; ex quo elucebit omnis constantia omnisque moderatio. nam qui appetitus longius evagantur et tamquam exultantes sive cupiendo sive fugiendo non satis a ratione retinentur, ii sine dubio finem et modum transeunt; relinquunt enim et abiciunt oboedientiam nec rationi parent, cui sunt subiecti lege naturae; a quibus non modo animi perturbantur, sed etiam corpora. licet ora ipsa cernere iratorum aut eorum, qui aut libidine aliqua aut metu commoti sunt aut voluptate nimia gestiunt; quorum omnium vultus, voces, motus statusque mutantur.” Translations are taken from the De officiis, translated by W. Miller. Li livres du Tresor 2, 20, 5 and 7: “Dont celui est chastes ki tient le mi entre delit, c’est ki trop ne se delite quant il les a, et ki ne se courouce trop quant avoir ne les puet, ançois se delite tempreement selonc ce ke souffissable est a bone vie de home … Par quoi on se doit estudiier que raison soit sor la concupiscence, en tel maniere que l’un et l’autre desirent de bien fere.” Compare Brunettos’s reflections on chastity to Nicomachean Ethics 3, ix, 6: “The profligate therefore desires all pleasures, or those that are the most pleasant, and is lead by his desire to pursue this in preference to anything else. He consequently feels pain not only when he fails to get them, but also from his desire for them, since desire is accompanied by pain; paradoxical though it seems that pain should be caused by pleasure.” Translation by H. Rackham Roman de la Rose, 4377–88: “Amours, se bien sui apensee, / c’est maladie de pensee / entre deus persones annexes, / franches entr’eus, de divers sexe, /

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venanz a genz par ardeur nee / par avision desordonee, / por eus acoler et pour besier, / et pour eus charnelment aisier. / Amors autre chose n’entant, / ains s’art et se delite et entent; / de fruit avoir ne fet il force, / en deliter sans plus s’efforce.” Edition by D. Poiron. Translations are taken from The Romance of the Rose, translated by F. Horgan. S. Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry, 176. For an interpretation of Reason as deriving from philosophical and theological sources, see J. Fleming, Reason and the Lover. See the text of the lai in Les Dits d’Henri d’Andeli, edited by A. Corbellari, 73–90. For the authorship of the lai, see A. Corbellari and F. Zufferey, “Un problème de paternité: le cas de Henri d’Andeli” and A. Corbellari, La voix de clercs. Littérature et savoir universitaire autour des dits du XIIIe siècle, 10. I am indebted to one of the anonymous readers of this manuscript for the update on the authorship of the lai. D. Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, 325–39. On Boccaccio see M. Papio, “Editor’s notes” Helitropia 2 (2004), http://www.brown.edu/Departments/ Italian_Studies/heliotropia/ A. De Libera, Penser au moyen âge, 181–245. Ibid., 220–7. For spiritual friendship in Abelard and Heloise, see E. Gilson, Heloise and Abelard and C.J. Mews, “Cicero and the Boundaries of Friendship in the Twelfth Century.” Aelred, De spirituali amicitia: “Porro osculum spiritale proprie amicorum est, qui sub una amicitiae lege tenentur. Non enim fit oris attactu, sed mentis affectu; non coniunctione labiorum, sed commixtione spirituum, castificante omnia Dei Spiritu, et ex sui participatione coelestem immittente saporem.” Aelred’s text is quote from pl 195. Translations are taken from Spiritual Friendship, translated by M.E. Laker. Aelred, De spirituali amicitia: “Ita natura mentibus humanis, ab ipso exordio amicitiae et caritatis impressit affectum, quem interior mox sensus amandi quodam gustu suavitatis adauxit. At post lapsum primi hominis, cum refrigescente caritate cupiditas subintrasset, fecisset que bono communi privata praeponi amicitiae caritatis que splendorem avaritia invidia que corrupit; contentiones, aemulationes, odia, suspiciones corruptis hominum moribus invehens.” Not surprisingly, for Aelred, “carnal friendship” is removed from reason and a true form of raging madness: “Haec itaque amicitia nec deliberatione suscipitur, nec iudicio probatur, nec regitur ratione; sed secundum impetum affectionis per diversa raptatur; non modum servans, non honesta procurans, non commoda incommoda vel prospiciens; sed ad omnia inconsiderate, indiscrete, leviter, immoderate que progrediens. Idcirco vel quasi quibusdam furiis agitata a semetipsa consumitur vel eadem levitate resolvitur qua contrahitur.” See J. Leclercq, “L’amitié dans les lettres au Moyen Age”; and F.C. Gardiner, The Pilgrimage of Desire: A Study of Theme and Genre in Medieval

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Literature, 55–85. Gardiner (59) quotes the following passage from Anselm’s letters, which shows quite clearly the appropriation of erotic rhetoric for the purposes of spiritual friendship: “Concupiscunt iam, dilectissimi mei, concupiscunt oculi mei vultus vestros, extendunt se brachia mea in amplexus vestros. Anhelat ad oscula vestra os meum, desiderat conversationem vestram quidquid restat de vita mea, ut in pleno gaudio futurae vitae vobis cum gaudeat anima mea” (pl 158, 1180a). Guido delle Colonne, Amor che lungiamente m’hai menato, 48–55: “Forza di senno è quella che soverchia / ardir di core, asconde ed incoverchia. / Ben è gran senno, chi lo pote fare, / saver celare – ed essere segnore / de lo suo core quand’este ’n errore. / Amor fa disviare li più saggi, / e chi più ama a pena à in sè misura; / più folle è quello che più si ’nnamura.” On Guittone and on the ways Dante relates to him see T. Kay, “Redefining the ‘matera amorosa’: Dante’s Vita nova and Guittone’s (anti-)courtly ‘canzoniere.’” The text of the Vita Nuova follows the edition by M. Barbi. Translations by M. Musa. Both texts are available through the online Princeton Dante Project. D. De Robertis, Il libro della Vita Nuova, 35–8. Vita Nuova 4, 2: “Ed io, accorgendomi del malvagio domandare che mi faceano, per la volontade d’Amore, lo quale mi comandava secondo lo consiglio de la ragione, rispondea loro che Amore era quelli che così m’avea governato. Dicea d’Amore, però che io portava nel viso tante de le sue insegne, che questo non si potea ricovrire.” Vita Nuova 9, 6: “Ma tuttavia, di queste parole ch’io t’ho ragionate se alcuna cosa ne dicessi, dille nel modo che per loro non si discernesse lo simulato amore che tu hai mostrato a questa e che ti converrà mostrare ad altri.” Vita Nuova 12, 6: “e però cominciai a ragionare.” Vita Nuova 16, 8: “ne la prima dico quello che Amore, consigliato da la ragione, mi dice quando le sono presso.” Here Dante is referring to lines 3–4 of the sonnet “Ciò che m’incontra ne la mente muore”: “i’ sento Amore / che dice: Fuggi se il perir t’è noia.” As it is common in the Vita Nuova, the emphasis on reason takes place in the prose rather than in the poems. For this sonnet see also chapter 4 of this book. Vita Nuova 39, 1–2: “Contra questo avversario de la ragione si levoe un die, quasi ne l’ora de la nona, una forte imaginazione in me, che mi parve vedere questa gloriosa Beatrice con quelle vestimenta sanguigne co le quali apparve prima a li occhi miei; e pareami giovane in simile etade in quale io prima la vidi. Allora cominciai a pensare di lei; e ricordandomi di lei secondo l’ordine del tempo passato, lo mio cuore cominciò dolorosamente a pentere de lo desiderio a cui sì vilmente s’avea lasciato possedere alquanti die contra la costanzia de la ragione: e discacciato questo cotale malvagio desiderio, sì si rivolsero tutti li miei pensamenti a la loro gentilissima Beatrice.” Vita Nuova 18, 4: “Allora dissi queste parole loro: Madonne, lo fine del mio amore fue già lo saluto di questa donna, forse di cui voi intendete, e in quello dimorava la beatitudine, ché era fine di tutti li miei desiderii. Ma poi che le

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piacque di negarlo a me, lo mio segnore Amore, la sua merzede, ha posto tutta la mia beatitudine in quello che non mi puote venire meno.” Convivio 1, i, 16–17: “E se nella presente opera, la quale è Convivio nominata e vo’ che sia, più virilmente si trattasse che nella Vita Nova, non intendo però a quella in parte alcuna derogare, ma maggiormente giovare per questa quella; veggendo sì come ragionevolemente quella fervida e passionata, questa temperata e virile essere conviene. Ché altro si conviene e dire e operare ad una etade che ad altra; per che certi costumi sono idonei e laudabili ad una etade che sono sconci e biasimevoli ad altra, sì come di sotto, nel quarto trattato di questo libro, sarà propia ragione mostrata. E io in quella dinanzi, all’entrata della mia gioventute parlai, e in questa dipoi, quella già trapassata.” Convivio 4, vii, 11: “Sì come dice Aristotile nel secondo dell’Anima, ‘vivere è l’essere delli viventi’; e per ciò che vivere è per molti modi (sì come nelle piante vegetare, nelli animali vegetare e sentire e muovere, nelli uomini vegetare, sentire, muovere e ragionare o vero intelligere), e le cose si deono denominare dalla più nobile parte, manifesto è che vivere nelli animali è sentire – animali, dico, bruti –, vivere nell’uomo è ragione usare.” Convivio 3, iii, 1–5: “Onde è da sapere che ciascuna cosa, come detto è di sopra, per la ragione di sopra mostrata ha ’l suo speziale amore. Ché le corpora simplici hanno amore naturato in sé allo luogo propio, e però la terra sempre discende al centro; lo fuoco ha [amore a]lla circunferenza di sopra, lungo lo cielo della luna, e però sempre sale a quella. Le corpora composte prima, sì come sono le minere, hanno amore allo luogo là dove la loro generazione è ordinata, e in quello crescono e [d]a quello [ricevono] vigore e potenza: onde vedemo la calamita sempre dalla parte della sua generazione ricevere vertù. Le piante, che sono prima animate, hanno amore a certo luogo più manifestamente, secondo che la complessione richiede; e però vedemo certe piante lungo l’acque quasi cansarsi, e certe sopra li gioghi delle montagne, e certe nelle piagge e da piè de’ monti: le quali se si transmutano, o muoiono del tutto o vivono quasi triste, sì come cose disgiunte dal loro amico. Li animali bruti hanno più manifesto amore non solamente alli luoghi, ma l’uno l’altro vedemo amare. Li uomini hanno loro propio amore alle perfette ed oneste cose. E però che l’uomo, avegna che una sola sustanza sia, tutta fia[ta la] forma, per la sua nobilitade, ha in sé [e] la natura d’ognuna [di] queste cose, tutti questi amori puote avere e tutti li ha.” On the thorny interpretation of the theme of reason and natural desire in Convivio 4 see E. Gilson, Dante et la philosophie, 138–9; B. Nardi, Nel mondo di Dante, 295–305; the commentary to book 4 by C. Vasoli, Convivio in Opere minori; and P. Falzone, “Desiderio naturale di sapere, nobiltà dell’anima e grazia divina nel iv trattato del Convivio.” Convivio 4, xxi, 13: “Ove è da sapere che ’l primo e lo più nobile rampollo che germogli di questo seme, per essere fruttifero, si è l’appetito dell’animo, lo quale in greco è chiamato ‘hormén.’ E se questo non è bene culto e sostenuto diritto per buona consuetudine, poco vale la sementa, e meglio sarebbe non

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essere seminato.” Convivio 4, xxii, 4–5: “Sì come detto è di sopra, della divina bontade, in noi seminata e infusa dal principio della nostra generazione, nasce uno rampollo che li Greci chiamano ‘hormén,’ cioè appetito d’animo naturale. E sì come nelle biade che, quando nascono, dal principio hanno quasi una similitudine nell’erba essendo, e poi si vengono per processo [di tempo] dissimigliando; così questo naturale appetito, che [de]lla divina grazia surge, dal principio quasi si mostra non dissimile a quello che pur da natura nudamente viene, ma con esso, sì come l’erbate quasi di diversi biadi, si simiglia. E non pur [nel]li uomini, ma e nelli uomini e nelle bestie ha similitudine; e questo [in questo] appare, che ogni animale, sì come elli è nato, sì razionale come bruto, se medesimo ama, e teme e fugge quelle cose che a lui sono contrarie, e quelle odia.” Convivio 4, xxii, 7–10: “Dico adunque che dal principio se stesso ama, avegna che indistintamente; poi viene distinguendo quelle cose che a lui sono più amabili e meno, e più odibili [e meno], e séguita e fugge, e più e meno, secondo [che] la conoscenza distingue, non solamente nell’altre cose, che secondamente ama, ma eziandio distingue in sé, che ama principalmente. E conoscendo in sé diverse parti, quelle che in lui sono più nobili, più ama quelle; e con ciò sia cosa che più [nobile] parte dell’uomo sia l’animo che ’l corpo, quello più ama. E così, amando sé principalmente, e per sé l’altre cose, e amando di sé la migliore parte più, manifesto è che più ama l’animo che ’l corpo o che altra cosa: lo quale animo naturalmente più che altra cosa dee amare.” Convivio 4, xxii, 10: “E non dicesse alcuno che ogni appetito sia animo; ché qui s’intende animo solamente quello che spetta alla parte razionale, cioè la volontade e lo ’ntelletto. Sì che se volesse chiamare animo l’appetito sensitivo, qui non ha luogo, né instanza puote avere; ché nullo dubita che l’appetito razionale non sia più nobile ’l sensuale, e però più amabile: e così è questo di che ora si parla. Veramente l’uso del nostro animo è doppio, cioè pratico e speculativo (pratico è tanto quanto operativo), l’uno e l’altro dilett[os]issimo, avegna che quello del contemplare sia più, sì come di sopra è narrato.” Convivio 4, xxvi, 5: “Qui adunque è da reducere a mente quello che di sopra, nel ventiduesimo capitolo di questo trattato, si ragiona dello appetito che in noi dal nostro principio nasce. Questo appetito mai altro non fa che cacciare e fuggire; e qualunque ora esso caccia quello che e quanto si conviene, e fugge quello che e quanto si conviene, l’uomo è nelli termini della sua perfezione.” Convivio 4, xxvi, 5: “Lo freno usa quando elli caccia, e chiamasi quello freno Temperanza, la quale mostra lo termine infino a[l] quale è da cacciare; lo sprone usa quando fugge, per lui tornare allo loco onde fuggire vuole, e questo sprone si chiama Fortezza o vero Magnanimitate, la quale vertute mostra lo loco dove è da fermarsi e da pungare.” Purgatorio 17, 127–9: “Ciascun confusamente un bene apprende / nel qual si queti l’animo, e disira; / per che di giugner lui ciascun contende.” Purgatorio 17, 97–105: “Mentre ch’elli è nel primo ben diretto, / e ne’ secondi sé stesso misura, / esser non può cagion di mal diletto; / ma quando al mal si

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torce, o con più cura / o con men che non dee corre nel bene, / contra ’l fattore adovra sua fattura. / Quinci comprender puoi ch’esser convene / amor sementa in voi d’ogne virtute.” Purgatorio 18, 19–27: “L’animo, ch’è creato ad amar presto, / ad ogne cosa è mobile che piace, / tosto che dal piacere in atto è desto. / Vostra apprensiva da esser verace / tragge intenzione, e dentro a voi la spiega, / sì che l’animo ad essa volger face; / e se, rivolto, inver’ di lei si piega, / quel piegare è amor, quell’è natura / che per piacer di novo in voi si lega.” For love as binding in Augustine see E. Lombardi, The Syntax of Desire: Language and Love in Augustine, the Modistae, Dante, 22–76. Incidentally, the binding operation of love is described in this passage with words (“spiega,” “lega”) that are also employed in Paradiso 2 to describe the operation of Divine virtue and the union of body and soul: “E come l’alma dentro a vostra polve / per differenti membra e conformate / a diverse potenze si risolve, / così l’intelligenza sua bontate / multiplicata per le stelle spiega, / girando sé sovra sua unitate. / Virtù diversa fa diversa lega / col prezïoso corpo ch’ella avviva, / nel qual, sì come vita in voi, si lega” (Paradiso 2, 133–41). Summa Theologiae 1a–2ae, q. 26, a. 2: “Respondeo dicendum quod passio est effectus agentis in patiente. Agens autem naturale duplicem effectum inducit in patiens, nam primo quidem dat formam, secundo autem dat motum consequentem formam; sicut generans dat corpori gravitatem, et motum consequentem ipsam. Et ipsa gravitas, quae est principium motus ad locum connaturalem propter gravitatem, potest quodammodo dici amor naturalis. Sic etiam ipsum appetibile dat appetitui, primo quidem, quandam coaptationem ad ipsum, quae est complacentia appetibilis; ex qua sequitur motus ad appetibile. Nam appetitivus motus circulo agitur, ut dicitur in iii de anima, appetibile enim movet appetitum, faciens se quodammodo in eius intentione; et appetitus tendit in appetibile realiter consequendum, ut sit ibi finis motus, ubi fuit principium. Prima ergo immutatio appetitus ab appetibili vocatur amor, qui nihil est aliud quam complacentia appetibilis; et ex hac complacentia sequitur motus in appetibile, qui est desiderium; et ultimo quies, quae est gaudium. Sic ergo, cum amor consistat in quadam immutatione appetitus ab appetibili, manifestum est quod amor et passio, proprie quidem, secundum quod est in concupiscibili; communiter autem, et extenso nomine, secundum quod est in voluntate.” Purgatorio 18, 34–9: “Or ti puote apparer quant’ è nascosa / la veritate a la gente ch’avvera / ciascun amore in sé laudabil cosa; / però che forse appar la sua matera / sempre esser buona, ma non ciascun segno / è buono, ancor che buona sia la cera.” Purgatorio 18, 50–5: “Ogne forma sustanzïal, che setta / è da matera ed è con lei unita, / specifica vertute ha in sé colletta, / la qual sanza operar non è sentita, / né si dimostra mai che per effetto, / come per verdi fronde in pianta vita.” Purgatorio 18, 61–3: “Or perché a questa ogn’ altra si raccoglia, / innata v’è la virtù che consiglia, / e de l’assenso de’ tener la soglia.”

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108 Nardi, Nel mondo di Dante, 295–305. 109 Purgatorio 6, 46–8: “Non so se ’ntendi: io dico di Beatrice; / tu la vedrai di sopra, in su la vetta / di questo monte, ridere e felice.” Purgatorio 15, 76–8: “E se la mia ragion non ti disfama, / vedrai Beatrice, ed ella pienamente / ti torrà questa e ciascun’ altra brama.” Purgatorio 18, 46–8: “Ed elli a me: Quanto ragion qui vede, / dir ti poss’ io; da indi in là t’aspetta / pur a Beatrice, ch’è opra di fede” and 73–5: “La nobile virtù Beatrice intende / per lo libero arbitrio, e però guarda / che l’abbi a mente, s’a parlar ten prende.” 110 See Chiavacci Leonardi, ddp ad Purgatorio 18, 33 and Bosco Reggio ad idem. 111 L. Pertile, “Paradiso: A Drama of Desire.” ch apt e r t hre e 1 For the notion of philosophical metaphor see M. Johnson and G. Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. 2 See R. Dragonetti, “L’épisode de Francesca dans le cadre de la convention courtoise,” 98, and L. Caretti, “Il canto v dell’Inferno,” 119. Francesco da Buti emphasizes the greater buffeting of Paolo and Francesca, ddp ad Inferno 5, 75: “Questo è per convenienzia di quello ch’à detto di sopra che sono menati dal vento in giro; e questi più che li altri, e però dice più di costoro che delli altri: però che doveano avere più fermezza nel mondo, perchè furono cognati, come si dirà di sotto.” But see already Boccaccio, ddp ad Inferno 5, 75: “E che paiono sì al vento esser leggieri, cioè con minor fatica volanti.” 3 Francesco da Buti, ddp ad Inferno 5, 78: “et notantemente finge che Virgilio l’insegni che li prieghi per l’amore che li mena: però che quella medesima affezione dura nelli dannati, nella quale sono morti, secondo Virgilio nel sesto dell’Eneida; ma secondo la sacra Teologia tra li dannati est summum odium, come tra li beati è somma carità. Ma finge l’autore per mostrare che sono ostinati nel peccato, et allegoricamente per quelli del mondo.” 4 Poletto, ddp ad Inferno 5, 78, quotes Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2a–2ae, 13, 4: “diligunt ea pro quibus puniuntur, et vellent eis uti, si possent.” For the notion of punishment as a perverted repetition of the act that gave pleasure in life see M. Coagan, “Delight, Punishment, and the Justice of God in the Divina Commedia.” 5 Eclogues 2, 64–8: “torva leaena lupum sequitur, lupus ipse capellam, / florentem cytisum sequitur lasciva capella, / te Corydon, o Alexi: trahit sua quemque voluptas. / aspice, aratra iugo referunt suspensa iuvenci /et sol crescentis decedens duplicat umbras.”And compare to Lucretius, De rerum natura 2, 251–60: “Denique si semper motu conectitur omnis / et vetere exoritur novus ordine certo /nec declinando faciunt primordia motus / principium quoddam, quod fati foedera rumpat, / ex infinito ne causam causa sequatur, / libera per terras unde haec animantibus exstat, / unde est haec, inquam, fatis avolsa voluntas, / per quam progredimur quo ducit quemque voluptas, / declinamus item motus nec tempore certo / nec regione

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loci certa, sed ubi ipsa tulit mens?” For the epicurean context of “trahit sua quemque voluptas” see A. Traina, “Si numquam fallit imago. Riflessioni sulle Bucoliche e l’Epicureismo.” M. Picone, “Canto v,” 9, has traced the connection between this “menare” and the notion of wandering and adventure in the French romance, where the knights stray under the impulse of a capricious and inordinate desire. I. Baldelli, Dante e Francesca, 49, connects “menare” to the etymology “minari” (to threaten) underlining the negative connotation of the verb. For “mal perverso” see Pertile, La punta del disio, 53–6. R.A. Shoaf, “Dante’s colombi and the Figuralism of Hope in the Divine Comedy”; and L. Ryan, “Stornei, Gru, Colombe: The Bird Images in Inferno v.” Quoted by Shoaf, “Dante’s colombi and the Figuralism of Hope in the Divine Comedy,” 40. A. Pagliaro, “Il canto di Francesca,” 133–4 has suggested to insert a comma after “aere” and to read the doves as the subject of “called by desire” and Paolo and Francesca as the subject of “carried by the will.” This solution is interesting syntactically but does not eliminate the problem of interpretation. As Lino Pertile shows (La punta del disio, 20–3), desire often coincides with “voglia,” but rarely with “voler,” which is usually connected to the notion of will (“volontà”). For the threefold image and the qualities of each bird, see L. Ryan, “Stornei, Gru, Colombe: The Bird Images in Inferno v.” For the significance of the cranes in Dante and medieval culture see G. Gorni, “‘Gru’ di Dante. Lettura di Purgatorio xxvi.” G. Barberi Squarotti, Canto V dell’Inferno, Lectura Dantis Neapolitana, 12. For the negative reading of the bird metaphors, see also Caretti, “Il canto v dell’Inferno,” 121. The irregularity of the starling’s flight and its connection to the storm is pointed out by Benevenuto da Imola (ddp, ad Inferno 5, 40) and by almost all modern commentators after Lombardi (ddp ad idem). As Boccaccio and many other commentators after him recall, “lai” is a French term for “love poetry”: see Boccaccio, ddp ad Inferno 5, 46: “Ed è questo vocabolo preso, cioè lai, dal parlar francesco, nel quale si chiamano ‘lai’ certi versi in forma di lamentazione nel lor volgare composti.” According to the commentary tradition, the term “lai” was already used by the Provençal poets to indicate the laments of the birds (in a poetic mode), and around the time of Dante (or after Dante) it is employed in the Italian vernacular to mean “lament.” The word “lai” remains, however, a powerful poetic indicator of the relation between the episode of Francesca and the French romance that generates it. Importantly, the rhyme “lai”/“guai” recurs in another story of lust, love, and birds, that of Procne, Philomela, and Thereus, which Dante recounts at the beginning of Purgatorio 9 (13–15): “Ne l’ora che comincia i tristi lai / la rondinella presso a la mattina, / forse a memoria de’ suo’ primi guai.” See the definition of the syntactic stage of “congruitas” in the Compendium modorum significandi a Vincentio Heremito compositum, J. Pinborg ed.,

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15–16: “Unde gramatici dicunt, quod ‘congruitas’ a gruibus traxit originem; grues enim aves sunt talis nature, quod una volant cum alie volant ad eius similitudinem vel convenientiam, et ita dictione ingrediente constructione aliquid iam debet sequi ad eius similitudinem seu convenientiam aliquorum existentium in constructibilibus.” Bestiaries also report the idea that cranes draw letters in the sky, which suggests an interpretation of cranes as the souls of Paradiso 18, 73–8: “E come augelli surti di rivera, / quasi congratulando a lor pasture, / fanno di sé or tonda or altra schiera, / sì dentro ai lumi sante creature / volitando cantavano, e faciensi / or D, or I, or L in sue figure.” See in particular Gorni, “‘Gru’ di Dante,” 29. Purgatorio 24, 64–9: “Come li augei che vernan lungo ’l Nilo, / alcuna volta in aere fanno schiera, / poi volan più a fretta e vanno in filo, / così tutta la gente che lì era, / volgendo ’l viso, raffrettò suo passo, / e per magrezza e per voler leggera.” Purgatorio 26, 43–8: “Poi, come grue ch’a le montagne Rife / volasser parte, e parte inver’ l’arene, / queste del gel, quelle del sole schife, / l’una gente sen va, l’altra sen vene; / e tornan, lagrimando, a’ primi canti / e al gridar che più lor si convene.” Shoaf (“Dante’s colombi and the Figuralism of Hope in the Divine Comedy,” 32) quotes a commentary on Hosea 7:11 (for which see later), where the dove is said not to mourn the loss of her chicks: “sola columba ablatos pullos non dolet, non requirit.” On the contrary, Ryan (“Stornei, Gru, Colombe: The Bird Images in Inferno v,” 39) quotes the De bestiis et aliis rebus, where the doves are said to care for two chicks, metaphorically the love of god and of the neighbour (“geminos nutrit pullos, idest amorem dei et amorem proximi”). G. Ledda, “‘Quali colombe dal disio chiamate’: A Bestiary of Desire in Dante’s Commedia” points to some texts that emphasize the connection between lust and nest. See for instance Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, 12 7, 61: “Columbe dictae, quod earum colla ad singulas conversiones colores mutent. Aves mansuetae et in hominum multitudine conversantes, ac sine felle; quas antiqui Venerias nuncupabant, eo quod nidos frequentant, et osculo amorem concipiant.” The fact that lust, the very incentive to reproduction, threatens the continuation of the species is somewhat counterintuitive and appears applicable only to the sins of “lust against nature.” However, Aquinas discusses at length the fact that children can be properly taken care of only within marriage and grieves for the destiny of children born outside of wedlock. See Summa Theologiae 2a–2ae, q. 154, a. 1 co: “Et sic, inquantum impeditur generatio prolis, est vitium contra naturam, quod est in omni actu venereo ex quo generatio sequi non potest. Inquantum autem impeditur debita educatio et promotio prolis natae, est fornicatio simplex, quae est soluti cum soluta”; and q. 154, a. 8 co: “Respondeo dicendum quod adulterium, sicut ipsum nomen sonat, est accessus ad alienum torum. In quo quidem dupliciter contra castitatem et humanae generationis bonum aliquis delinquit, primo quidem, inquantum accedit ad mulierem non sibi matrimonio copulatam, quod requiritur ad

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bonum prolis propriae educandae; alio modo, quia accedit ad mulierem alteri per matrimonium copulatam, et sic impedit bonum prolis alienae. Eadem ratio est de muliere coniugata quae per adulterium corrumpitur. Unde dicitur Eccli. xxiii, omnis mulier relinquens virum suum, peccabit, primo enim, in lege altissimi incredibilis fuit, in qua scilicet praecipitur, non moechaberis; et secundo, virum suum derelinquit, in quo facit contra certitudinem prolis eius; tertio, in adulterio fornicata est, et ex alio viro filios statuit sibi, quod est contra bonum propriae prolis. Sed primum est commune in omnibus peccatis mortalibus, alia vero duo specialiter pertinent ad deformitatem adulterii. Unde manifestum est quod adulterium est determinata species luxuriae, utpote specialem deformitatem habens circa actus venereos.” ddp ad Inferno 5, 78 and 86. For the former position see for instance Dal Lungo, Grabher, Pietrobono; for the latter, Poletto. According to Servius (Georgicon 1, 414) crows are said to have little interest in their offspring: “Plinius in naturalis historia hoc dicit, eos esse obliviosos et plerumque minime ad nidos suos reverti.” Interestingly, doves too were said to be negligent of their progeny (see note 18 of this chapter). Georgics 1, 415–23: “haud equidem credo, quia sit divinitus illis / ingenium aut rerum fato prudentia maior; / verum ubi tempestas et caeli mobilis umor / mutavere vias et Iuppiter uvidus Austris / denset erant quae rara modo, et quae densa relaxat, / vertuntur species animorum, et pectora motus / nunc alios, alios dum nubila ventus agebat, / concipiunt: hinc ille avium concentus in agris / et laetae pecudes et ovantes gutture corvi.” Aeneid 6, 190–204: “geminae cum forte columbae / ipsa sub ora viri caelo venere volantes, / et viridi sedere solo. Tum maximus heros / maternas agnoscit aves, laetusque precatur: / ‘Este duces, si qua via est, cursumque per auras / dirigite in lucos, ubi pinguem dives opacat / ramus humum. Tuque, dubiis ne defice rebus, / diva parens.’ Sic effatus vestigia pressit, / observans quae signa ferant, quo tendere pergant. / Pascentes illae tantum prodire volando, / quantum acie possent oculi servare sequentum. / Inde ubi venere ad fauces grave olentis Averni, / tollunt se celeres, liquidumque per aera lapsae / sedibus optatis geminae super arbore sidunt, / discolor unde auri per ramos aura refulsit.” J. Freccero, “Casella’s Song,” 191. N.J. Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane: An Interpretative History of Kiss Symbolism and Related Religio-Erotic Themes, 253–59. Canticum canticorum 1, 14: “ecce tu pulchra es amica mea ecce tu pulchra oculi tui columbarum”; 2, 14: “columba mea in foraminibus petrae in caverna maceriae ostende mihi faciem tuam sonet vox tua in auribus meis vox enim tua dulcis et facies tua decora”; 4, 1: “quam pulchra es amica mea quam pulchra es oculi tui columbarum absque eo quod intrinsecus latet capilli tui sicut greges caprarum quae ascenderunt de monte Galaad”; 5, 2: “ego dormio et cor meum vigilat vox dilecti mei pulsantis aperi mihi soror mea amica mea columba mea inmaculata mea quia caput meum plenum est rore et cincinni

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mei guttis noctium”; 5, 12: “oculi eius sicut columbae super rivulos aquarum quae lacte sunt lotae et resident iuxta fluenta plenissima”; and 6, 8: “una est columba mea perfecta mea una est matris suae electa genetrici suae viderunt illam filiae et beatissimam praedicaverunt reginae et concubinae et laudaverunt eam.” 27 See, for instance, Bernard, Sermo 62: “Si adhuc dubitas, audi ipsam Petram: Qui operantur, inquit, in me, non peccabunt. Quis dabit mihi pennas sicut columbae, et volabo, et requiescam? Ibi requiem invenit mansuetus et simplex, ubi dolosus opprimitur, vel clatus, et cupidus inanis gloriae. Ecclesia columba est, et ideo requiescit. Columba, quia innocens, quia gemens. Columba, inquam, quia in mansuetudine suscipit insitum verbum. Et requiescit in Verbo, hoc est in petra: nam petra est Verbum.” 28 One minor grammatical gender issue and ornithological question is still pending with regard to the doves of Inferno 5. In modern Italian the feminine colomba identifies the white dove, and the masculine colombo the common pigeon (or rock dove in English). The gender distinction was known to Dante, who employed the masculine colombi in two other famous instances of the Comedy: Purgatorio 2, 124–33, as a simile for the spirits scared away by Cato, and Paradiso 25, 19–24 to illustrate the “kiss” between Peter and James. For the links between the three episodes see Shoaf, “Dante’s colombi and the Figuralism of Hope in the Divine Comedy.” The grammatical gender difference between the three episodes is pointed out also by S. Sarteschi, “Francesca e il suo poeta: Osservazioni su Inferno v,” 23. In the second book of the Convivio, Dante discusses the image of the dove from the Song of Songs, as both feminine (“colomba”) and symbolizing purity (“senza macula”). Convivio 2, xiv, 20: “Di costei dice Salomone: ‘Sessanta sono le regine, e ottanta l’amiche concubine; e delle ancille adolescenti non è numero: una è la colomba mia e la perfetta mia.’ Tutte scienze chiama regine e drude e ancille; e questa chiama colomba, perché è sanza macula di lite, e questa chiama perfetta perché perfettamente ne fa il vero vedere nel quale si cheta l’anima nostra.” 29 It is also worth recalling a rewriting of the image of the birds following the call and the lure in Purgatory, where the pilgrim is in the position of the birds and God of the falconer, with a noticeable recall of the “grido” and the “desio” of Inferno 5. Purgatorio 19, 64–9: “Quale ’l falcon, che prima a’ pié si mira, / indi si volge al grido e si protende / per lo disio del pasto che là il tira, / tal mi fec’ io; e tal, quanto si fende / la roccia per dar via a chi va suso, / n’andai infin dove ’l cerchiar si prende.” On this image see T. Barolini, “Guittone’s ‘Ora parrà,’ Dante’s ‘Doglia mi reca,’ and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire,” 46. It is, finally, worth noticing that the doves image of Purgatorio 2 is in certain respects closer to the Virgilian source of Inferno 5, in that the doves of Purgatory are initially scared away from the food and subsequently start flying (in a secure fashion toward purgation and their final goal, as the reader is led to think) like the Virgilian dove is scared out of the nest and afterward flies in a secure way.

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30 For Augustine’s theory of desire see I. Bochet, Saint Augustin et le désir de Dieu; R. Bodei, Ordo amoris. Conflitti terreni e felicità celeste; and E. Lombardi The Syntax of Desire, 22–76. 31 Translations are taken from Tractates on the Gospel of John, translated by J.W. Rettig. 32 Confessions 13, 9, 10: “Corpus pondere suo nititur ad locum suum. Pondus non ad ima tantum est, sed ad locum suum. Ignis sursum tendit, deorsum lapis. Ponderibus suis aguntur, loca sua petunt. Oleum infra aquam fusum super aquam attollitur, aqua supra oleum fusa, infra oleum demergitur; ponderibus suis aguntur, loca sua petunt. Minus ordinata inquieta sunt: ordinantur et quiescunt. Pondus meum amor meus; eo feror quocumque feror.” 33 De doctrina christiana 1, 3–4: “Res ergo aliae sunt quibus fruendum est, aliae quibus utendum, aliae quae fruuntur et utuntur. Illae quibus fruendum est, nos beatos faciunt; istis quibus utendum est tendentes ad beatitudinem adiuvamur et quasi adminiculamur, ut ad illas, quae nos beatos faciunt, pervenire atque his inhaerere possimus … Frui est enim amore inhaerere alicui rei propter se ipsam. Uti autem, quod in usum venerit, ad id quod amas obtinendum referre, si tamen amandum est. Nam usus inlicitus abusus potius vel abusio nominandus est. Quomodo ergo, si essemus peregrini, qui beate vivere nisi in patria non possemus, eaque peregrinatione utique miseri et miseriam finire cupientes in patriam redire vellemus, opus esse vel terrestribus vel marinis vehiculis quibus utendum esset ut ad patriam, qua fruendum erat, pervenire valeremus; quod si amoenitates itineris et ipsa gestatio vehiculorum nos delectaret, conversi ad fruendum his, quibus uti debuimus, nollemus cito via finire et perversa suavitate implicati alienaremur a patria, cuius suavitas faceret beatos, sic in huius mortalitatis vita peregrinantes a Domino, si redire in patria volumus, ubi beati esse possimus, utendum est hoc mundo, non fruendum, ut invisibilia Dei per ea, quae facta sunt, intellecta conspiciantur, hoc est, ut de corporalibus temporalibusque rebus aeterna et spiritalia capiamus.” 34 For a general introduction to the complex theme of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages, see L.K. Davidson and M. Dunn-Wood, Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages: A Research Guide; G.B. Ladner, “Homo Viator: Mediaeval Ideas on Alienation and Order”; V. Turner and E. Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture; J. Chélini and H. Branthomme, Les chemins de dieu. Histoire des pèlerinages chrétiens, des origines à nos jours; J. Kristeva, Stranger to Ourselves, 77–93. The University of York’s project on “pilgrims and pilgrimage” is a source of useful information on this topic. It can be consulted on the following website: http://www.york.ac.uk/projects/pilgrimage/. 35 On this theme see A. Grabois, “Les pèlerins occidentaux en Terre Sainte au Moyen Age. Une minorité étrangère dans sa patrie spirituelle.” 36 Hebrews 11, 13–16: “Juxta fidem defuncti sunt omnes isti, non acceptis repromissionibus, sed a longe eas aspicientes, et salutantes, et confitentes quia peregrini et hospites sunt super terram. Qui enim haec dicunt, significant se patriam inquirere. Et si quidem ipsius meminissent de qua exierunt, habebant

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utique tempus revertendi: nunc autem meliorem appetunt, id est, cælestem. Ideo non confunditur Deus vocari Deus eorum: paravit enim illis civitatem.” For the peregrinatio pro amore Dei see W.J. Moore, The Saxon Pilgrim to Rome and the Schola Saxonum and S.I. Sobecki, The Sea and Medieval English Literature. For the reading of The Seafarer in terms of the peregrinatio pro amore dei, see D. Whitelock, “The Interpretation of The Seafarer” and Sobecki, “The Interpretation of The Seafarer: A Re-examination of the Pilgrimage Theory.” Moralia in Job 18, 48: “Quis autem in hoc mundo peregrinatur populus, nisi qui ad sortem electorum currens, habere se patriam nouit in caelestibus; et tanto magis illic sperat inuenire se propria, quanto hic cuncta quae praetereunt esse a se deputat aliena? Peregrinus itaque est populus, omnium numerus electorum, qui hanc uitam quoddam sibi exsilium deputantes, ad supernam patriam tota cordis intentione suspirant; de quibus Paulus dicit: confitentes quia peregrini et hospites sunt super terram. Qui enim haec dicunt, significant se patriam inquirere. Hanc peregrinationem isdem quoque apostolus tolerabat, cum diceret: dum sumus in corpore, peregrinamur a domino. Per fidem enim ambulamus et non per speciem. Huius peregrinationis aerumnas satagebat euadere, cum dicebat: desiderium habens dissolui et cum christo esse. Et rursum: mihi uiuere christus est et mori lucrum. Huius peregrinationis pondus graue sentiebat psalmista, cum diceret: heu me! Quia incolatus meus prolongatus est: habitaui cum habitantibus cedar, multum incola fuit anima mea. Ab hac eripi quantocius anhelabat, cum supernis desideriis flagrans diceret: sitiuit anima mea ad deum uiuum; quando ueniam et apparebo ante faciem dei? Sed hoc desiderium nesciunt qui cor in terrenis uoluptatibus defigunt. Dum enim sola quae sunt uisibilia diligunt, profecto inuisibilia, uel si credunt esse, non diligunt, quia dum nimis se exterius sequuntur, etiam mente carnales fiunt. Simul enim in hac uita uterque populus currit, sed non simul ad perpetuam peruenit, quia: lapidem caliginis et umbram mortis diuidit torrens a populo peregrinante. Ac si aperte dicat: eos quos modo uel infidelitas excaecat, uel crudelitas obdurat, flammarum fluuius a conspectu aeterni iudicis exiens, ab electorum tunc populo separat, ut tunc a bonis ignis districti examinis diuidat quos nunc in suis concupiscentiis tenebrae uitiorum caecant.” For the ambivalence of Gregory’s position with regard to the body see C. Straw, Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection, 107–46. See the whole passage from Sermo 30 (the Pentecost sermon): “Vnde et Iohannes dicit: Deus caritas est. Qui ergo mente integra Deum desiderat, profecto iam habet quem amat. Neque enim quisquam posset Deum diligere, si eum quem diligit non haberet. Sed ecce si unusquisque uestrum requiritur an diligat Deum, tota fiducia et secura mente respondet: Diligo. In ipso autem lectionis exordio audistis quod Veritas dixit: Si quis diligit me sermonem meum seruabit. Probatio ergo dilectionis exhibitio est operis. Hinc in epistola sua idem Iohannes dicit: Qui dicit quia diligo Deum et mandata eius non custodit mendax est. Vere enim diligimus si ad mandata eius a nostris nos

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uoluptatibus coartamus. Nam qui adhuc per illicita desideria diffluit, profecto Deum non amat, quia ei in sua uoluptate contradicit.” According to Gregory, the words from the Scriptures and of the preachers powerfully instigate supernal desire: “Ex audito quippe sermone inardescit animus, torporis frigus recedit, fit mens in superno desiderio anxia, a concupiscentiis terrenis aliena. Amor uerus qui hanc repleuerit, in fletibus cruciat, sed dum tali ardore cruciatur, ipsis suis cruciatibus pascitur. Audire ei libet praecepta caelestia, et quot mandatis instruitur, quasi tot facibus inflammatur, et quae torpebat prius per desideria, ardet postmodum per uerba.” Translations of the Enarrationes in Psalmos are available through the following website: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1801.htm M. Picone, “Peregrinus Amoris. La metafora finale.” See also R. Dragonetti, Dante pèlerin de la Sainte Face. Vita Nuova 40, 6: “dissi ‘peregrini’ secondo la larga significazione del vocabulo; ché peregrini si possono intendere in due modi, in uno largo e in uno stretto: in largo, in quanto è peregrino chiunque è fuori de la sua patria; in modo stretto non s’intende peregrino se non chi va verso la casa di sa’ Iacopo o riede”; and Vita Nuova 41, 5: “Ne la terza dico quello che vide, cioè una donna onorata là suso; e chiamolo allora ‘spirito peregrino,’ acciò che spiritualmente va là suso, e sì come peregrino lo quale è fuori de la sua patria, vi stae.” Convivio 4, xii, 17: “Per che vedere si può che l’uno desiderabile sta dinanzi all’altro alli occhi della nostra anima per modo quasi piramidale, che ’l minimo li cuopre prima tutti, ed è quasi punta dell’ultimo desiderabile, che è Dio, quasi base di tutti. Sì che, quanto dalla punta ver la base più si procede, maggiori apariscono li desiderabili; e questa è la ragione per che, acquistando, li desiderii umani si fanno più ampii, l’uno appresso dell’altro.” T. Barolini, “Purgatory as Paradigm: Traveling the New and Never-BeforeTraveled Path of This Life/Poem,” 100. For the piercing, wounding nature of desire in the Middle Ages and Dante see L. Pertile, “‘La punta del disio’: storia di una metafora dantesca.” On this theme see Lombardi, The Syntax of Desire, and “Augustine and Dante.” The pilgrim and the sailor from Purgatorio 8 are often compared to the pensive pilgrims of Vita Nuova 40. Toward the end of the libello Dante describes pilgrims in transit in the city of Florence soon after Beatrice’s death. They are “pensosi” and Dante relates their pensiveness to the sweet and nostalgic thought of their home friends. Vita Nuova 40, 2–4: “Li quali peregrini andavano, secondo che mi parve, molto pensosi; ond’io, pensando a loro, dissi fra me medesimo: ‘Questi peregrini mi paiono di lontana parte, e non credo che anche udissero parlare di questa donna, e non ne sanno neente; anzi li loro penseri sono d’altre cose che di queste qui, ché forse pensano de li loro amici lontani, li quali noi non conoscemo.’ Poi dicea fra me medesimo: ‘Io so che s’elli fossero di propinquo paese, in alcuna vista parrebbero turbati passando per lo mezzo de la dolorosa cittade.’ Poi dicea fra me medesimo: ‘Se io li potesse

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tenere alquanto, io li pur farei piangere anzi ch’elli uscissero di questa cittade, però che io direi parole le quali farebbero piangere chiunque le intendesse.’” See A.M. Chiavacci Leonardi, ed., Purgatorio, introduction to canto 8. On this point see U. Bosco, Dante vicino, 304–5: “Dante è come il pellegrino che, raggiunta la meta, è teso tutto nel desiderio di tornare, desiderio istintivo che esiste anche senza l’intervento della coscienza. Il pellegrino, dice Dante, che tornar vuole; non che torna. Rapidità, anzi quasi istantaneità incoercibile, naturale, con cui un movimento spirituale subentra ad altro sentimento di opposta direzione.” These three lines may be taken as a gloss for the “perverse ill” (“mal perverso”) of Inferno 5, 93. The perverted, according to the Convivio, are precisely those who bend away from proper order (“chi fuori da debito ordine è piegato” 3, xv, 14). Desire, which in Purgatorio 18 is expressly likened to fire, is featured in its perverted mode in these lines of Paradiso 1 (133–5). Nichomachean Ethics 10, v, 6–7: “But the pleasures involved in activities are more proper to them than the desires; for the latter are separated both in time and in nature, while the former are close to the activities, and so hard to distinguish from them that it admits of dispute whether the activity is not the same as the pleasure.” The translation of the Nichomachean Ethics by D.W. Ross (1908) is available online: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen. 10.x.html Nicomachean Ethics 10, iv, 8: “Pleasure completes the activity not as the corresponding permanent state does, by its immanence, but as an end which supervenes as the bloom of youth does on those in the flower of their age. So long, then, as both the intelligible or sensible object and the discriminating or contemplative faculty are as they should be, the pleasure will be involved in the activity; for when both the passive and the active factor are unchanged and are related to each other in the same way, the same result naturally follows. How, then, is it that no one is continuously pleased? Is it that we grow weary? Certainly all human beings are incapable of continuous activity. Therefore pleasure also is not continuous; for it accompanies activity. Some things delight us when they are new, but later do so less, for the same reason; for at first the mind is in a state of stimulation and intensely active about them, as people are with respect to their vision when they look hard at a thing, but afterwards our activity is not of this kind, but has grown relaxed; for which reason the pleasure also is dulled.” Although Aquinas singles out the intellectual desire for seeing God as the sole object of his discussion and the most worthy trait of the human being, in the beatific vision every desire is brought fully to rest. Summa Theologiae 3a, q. 63: “Est enim quoddam desiderium hominis inquantum intellectualis est, de cognitione veritatis: quod quidem desiderium homines prosequuntur per studium contemplativae vitae. Et hoc quidem manifeste in illa visione consummabitur, quando, per visionem primae veritatis, omnia quae intellectus naturaliter scire desiderat, ei innotescent, ut ex supra dictis apparet. Est etiam

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quoddam hominis desiderium secundum quod habet rationem, qua inferiora disponere potest: quod prosequuntur homines per studium activae et civilis vitae. Quod quidem desiderium principaliter ad hoc est, ut tota hominis vita secundum rationem disponatur, quod est vivere secundum virtutem: cuiuslibet enim virtuosi finis in operando est propriae virtutis bonum, sicut fortis ut fortiter agat. Hoc autem desiderium tunc omnino complebitur: quia ratio in summo vigore erit, divino lumine illustrata, ne a recto deficere possit. Consequuntur etiam civilem vitam quaedam bona quibus homo indiget ad civiles operationes. Sicut honoris sublimitas: quam homines inordinate appetentes, superbi et ambitiosi fiunt. Ad summam autem honoris altitudinem per illam visionem homines sublimantur, inquantum Deo quodam modo uniuntur, ut supra ostensum est. Et propter hoc, sicut ipse Deus rex saeculorum est, ita et beati ei coniuncti reges dicuntur, Apoc. 20–6: regnabunt cum Christo. Consequitur etiam civilem vitam aliud appetibile, quod est famae celebritas: per cuius inordinatum appetitum homines inanis gloriae cupidi dicuntur. Beati autem per illam visionem redduntur celebres, non secundum hominum, qui et decipi et decipere possunt, opinionem sed secundum verissimam cognitionem et Dei et omnium beatorum. Et ideo illa beatitudo in sacra Scriptura frequentissime gloria nominatur: sicut in Psalmo dicitur: exultabunt sancti in gloria. Est etiam et aliud in civili vita appetibile, scilicet divitiae: per cuius inordinatum appetitum et amorem homines illiberales et iniusti fiunt. In illa autem beatitudine est bonorum omnium sufficientia: inquantum beati perfruuntur illo qui comprehendit omnium bonorum perfectionem. Propter quod dicitur Sap. 7–11: venerunt mihi omnia bona pariter cum illa. Unde et in Psalmo dicitur: gloria et divitiae in domo eius. Est etiam tertium hominis desiderium, quod est sibi et aliis animalibus commune, ut delectationibus perfruatur: quod homines maxime prosequuntur secundum vitam voluptuosam; et per eius immoderantiam homines intemperati et incontinentes fiunt. In illa vero felicitate est delectatio perfectissima: tanto quidem perfectior ea quae secundum sensus est, qua etiam bruta animalia perfrui possunt, quanto intellectus est altior sensu; quanto etiam illud bonum in quo delectabimur, maius est omni sensibili bono, et magis intimum, et magis continue delectans; quanto etiam illa delectatio est magis pura ab omni permixtione contristantis, aut sollicitudinis alicuius molestantis; de qua dicitur in Psalmo: inebriabuntur ab ubertate domus tuae, et torrente voluptatis tuae potabis eos. Est etiam et naturale desiderium, omnibus rebus commune, per quod conservationem sui desiderant, secundum quod possibile est: per cuius immoderantiam homines timidi redduntur, et nimis a laboribus sibi parcentes. Quod quidem desiderium tunc omnino complebitur, quando beati perfectam sempiternitatem consequentur, ab omni nocumento securi: secundum illud Isaiae 49–10 et Apoc. 21: non esurient neque sitient amplius, neque cadet super illos sol neque ullus aestus. Sic igitur patet quod per visionem divinam consequuntur intellectuales substantiae veram felicitatem, in qua omnino desideria quietantur, et in qua est plena sufficientia omnium bonorum, quae,

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secundum Aristotelem, ad felicitatem requiritur. Unde et Boetius dicit quod beatitudo est status omnium bonorum congregatione perfectus.” C. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, 250. Summa contra gentiles 3, 25: “Corpus, quod naturali appetitu tendit in suum ubi, tanto vehementius et velocius movetur, quanto magis appropinquat fini: unde probat Aristoteles in i de caelo, quod motus naturalis rectus non potest esse ad infinitum, quia non magis moveretur postea quam prius. Quod igitur vehementius in aliquid tendit post quam prius, non movetur ad infinitum, sed ad aliquid determinatum tendit. Hoc autem invenimus in desiderio sciendi: quanto enim aliquis plura scit, tanto maiori desiderio affectat scire. Tendit igitur desiderium naturale hominis in sciendo ad aliquem determinatum finem. Hoc autem non potest esse aliud quam nobilissimum scibile, quod Deus est. Est igitur cognitio divina finis ultimus hominis.” See also the description of the acceleration of the desire of the separated substances in Summa contra gentiles 3, 50: “Quanto aliquid est fini propinquius, tanto maiori desiderio tendit ad finem: unde videmus quod motus naturalis corporum in fine intenditur. Intellectus autem substantiarum separatarum propinquiores sunt divinae cognitioni quam noster intellectus. Intensius igitur desiderant Dei cognitionem quam nos. Nos autem, quantumcumque sciamus Deum esse, et alia quae supra dicta sunt, non quiescimus desiderio, sed adhuc desideramus eum per essentiam suam cognoscere. Multo igitur magis substantiae separatae hoc naturaliter desiderant.” Translations are taken from On the Psalms, translated by S. Hebgin and F. Corrigan (Psalms 1–37). De Trinitate 15, 28, 51: “Cum ergo pervenerimus ad te, cessabunt multa ista quae dicimus, et non pervenimus; et manebis unus omnia in omnibus: et sine fine dicemus unum laudantes te in unum, et in te facti etiam nos unum.” Translations of Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs are available through the following website: http://www.pathsoflove.com/bernard/songofsongs/ contents.html. Translations are taken from Richard of Saint Victor, Selected Writings on Contemplation, translated by C. Kirchberger. De quatuor gradibus violentae charitatis (pl196, 1213): “In hoc statu amor saepe quasi in insaniam vertitur, nisi mira prudentia parique constantia ejus impetus refrenetur. In hoc statu inter amantes saepe irae surgunt, saepe rixas committunt, et cum verae inimicitiarum causae non suppetunt, falsas, et saepe nec verisimiles fingunt. In hoc statu amor saepe in odium transit, dum mutuo desiderio nihil satisfacere possit. Hinc fit illud quod saepe in quibusdam vidimus, ut quo se prius ardentius diligere videbantur, eo se postmodum vehementiori odio persequerentur; imo, quod magis mirum est, saepe sub uno eodemque tempore sic odiunt, ut tamen per desiderium aestuare non desinant, et sic diligunt, ut tamen velut ex odio persequi non desistant. Diligendo itaque odiunt, et odiendo diligunt, et modo mirabili, imo miserabili crescit ex

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desiderio odium, et ex odio desiderium. Et ignis et grando mista pariter feruntur, dum nec aestus desiderii odii gelu possit dissolvere, nec detestationis grando concupiscentiae ardentis ignem possit exstinguere. Supra modum autem, imo supra naturam ignis convalescit in aqua, quia amoris incendium magis exaestuat ex alterutra contradictione, quam invalescere posset ex mutua pace.” De quatuor gradibus violentae charitatis (pl 196, 1224): “In primo itaque grado … aniumus redit ad se ipsum, ad secundum ascendit in Deum, in tertio transit in Deum, in quarto descendit sub semetipsum. In primo et secundo elevatus, in tertio et quarto transfiguratus. In primo ad semetipsum ascendit, in secundo semetipsum transcendit, in tertio configuratur claritate dei, in quarto configuratur humilitati Christi. Vel in primo reducitur, in secundo transit, in tertio transfiguratur, in quarto resuscitatur.” De quatuor gradibus violentae charitatis (pl 196, 1221–2): “Quemadmodum igitur in liquidis vel in liquefactis nihil duritiae, nil firmitatis videmus inesse, sed duris omnibus ac rigidis sine difficultate cedere, et quemadmodum in languidis videmus nil proprii vigoris, nil nativae virtutis habere; sed totum quod juvat ex alieno arbitrio pendere, sic qui ad hunc tertium amoris gradum profecerunt, nil jam propria voluntate agunt: nihil omnino suo arbitrio relinquunt, sed divinae dispositioni omnia committunt. Omne eorum votum, omne desiderium ad divinum pendet nutum, ad divinum spectat arbitrium. Et, sicut primus gradus affectum sauciat, et sicut secundus cogitationem ligat, sic tertius actionem implicat, ut omnino circa aliquid occupari non possit, nisi quo eum divinae voluntatis virtus trahit, vel impellit. Cum igitur anima in hunc modum divino fuerit igne decocta, medullitus emollita, penitusque liquefacta, quid jam supererit nisi ut ei proponatur quae sit voluntas Dei bona, beneplacens atque perfecta, quasi quaedam ad quam informetur consummatae virtutis, formula.” De diligendo deo 11, 33: “Hinc illa satietas sine fastidio: hinc insatiabilis illa sine inquietudine curiositas: hinc aeternum illud atque inexplicabile desiderium, nesciens egestatem: hinc denique sobria illa ebrietas, vero, non mero ingurgitans, non madens vino, sed ardens Deo. Ex hoc jam quartus ille amoris gradus perpetuo possidetur, cum summe, et solus diligitur Deus: quia nec nos ipsos jam nisi propter ipsum diligimus, ut sit ipse praemium amantium se, praemium aeternum amantium in aeternum.” Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, 339. Pertile, “Paradiso: a Drama of Desire,” 154–5. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, 305. See also Paradiso 24, 130–2, “Io credo in uno Dio / solo ed etterno, che tutto ’l ciel move / non moto, con amore e con disio.” See also Paradiso 32, 61–6: “Lo rege per cui questo regno pausa / in tanto amore e in tanto diletto, / che nulla volontà è di più ausa, / le menti tutte nel suo lieto aspetto / creando, a suo piacer di grazia dota /diversamente; e qui basti l’effetto” Pertile, “Paradiso: a Drama of Desire,” 161. See also 165: “Poetically too,

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Dante’s doubts have the same retardatory and ambivalent effects as desire, in that each answer, albeit perfect and perfectly satisfying in itself, reveals now uncharted territories that the mind can never hope or presume to possess in advance of a revelation that is persistently deferred.” See for instance Paradiso 1, 97–9: “già contento requievi / di grande ammirazion; ma ora ammiro / com’io trascenda questi corpi lievi,” where the latin verb requievi alludes to the pacification of desire as quies. And see Paradiso 4, 124–35: “Io veggio ben che già mai non si sazia / nostro intelletto, se ’l ver non lo illustra / di fuor dal qual nessun vero si spazia. / Posasi in esso, come fera in lustra, / tosto che giunto l’ha; e giugner puollo: / se non, ciascun disio sarebbe frustra. / Nasce per quello, a guisa di rampollo, / a piè del vero il dubbio; ed è natura / ch’al sommo pinge noi di collo in collo. / Questo m’invita, questo m’assicura / con reverenza, donna, a dimandarvi / d’un’altra verità che m’è oscura.” Ancient commentators, often quoting Thomas, understand “finii” as the pilgrim having reached beatitude, his desires finally at rest. See for instance Jacopo della Lana, ddp ad Paradiso 33, 48: “cioè io autore appropinquai al fine del desiderio, cioè a quella ultima salute, dove sono tutti li desiderii quetati; e però soggiunge che l’autore del desiderio in sè finìe per la predetta visione.” Modern commentators agree instead that this is the culmination of the pilgrim’s desire. See for instance Singleton, ddp ad Paradiso 33, 48: “The meaning of the verb in this verse is much debated, but one aspect of that meaning seems beyond discussion: ‘finii’ cannot be here in a normal signification of ‘bringing to an end.’ Indeed, the context requires that the meaning be the exact opposite, i.e., ‘I brought the ardor of my desire to the highest intensity.’ Bernard is urging the wayfarer on precisely in this sense, and the importance of the wayfarer’s cooperation in the final act is thus stressed and continues to be stressed.” On the way the Vita Nuova prose interprets and even creates new meanings to the poems see M. Gragnolati, “Authorship and Performance in Dante’s Vita Nuova.”. C. Singleton, Dante Studies 2, Journey to Beatrice.

ch apt e r f o ur 1 For the “corner of Paradise” see Mattalia, ddp ad Inferno 5, 105; for the defeat of the lovers see L. Pertile, “Mal d’amore.” The commentaries in ddp ad Inferno 5, 100–8 record all the nuances between the two positions. 2 Boccaccio (ddp ad Inferno 5, 97) describes Francesca as “giovane e bella” and Paolo as “bello e piacevole uomo e costumato molto.” 3 Although the words “amor” and “amore” recur frequently in the Comedy, with an expectedly heightened pitch in the Paradiso, this particular construction, with love as subject at the beginning of the line followed by a relative clause, singles out some specific occurences in the poem, specifically Inferno 2, 72 (“Amor mi mosse che mi fa parlare”), the anaphora in Inferno 5, and the self-quotation in Purgatorio 2, 112: “Amor, che ne la mente mi ragiona.” In

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Purgatorio 22, 10–11 Dante famously “mocks” Francesca’s speech in Statius’: “quando Virgilio incominciò: Amore, / acceso di virtù, sempre altro accese, / pur che la fiamma sua paresse fore.” In the very last line of the Comedy, the article specifies that the subject is God-as-Love: “L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” (Paradiso 33, 133). G. Contini, “Dante come personaggio-poeta della Commedia.” For the relation between the Guinizzelli and Dante see V. Moleta, Guinizzelli in Dante, and P. Boitani, “In Gentil Hertes Ay Redy to Repair: Dante’s Francesca and Chaucer’s Troilus.” Contini, “Dante come personaggio-poeta della Commedia,” 44. Vita Nuova 20, 1: “Appresso che questa canzone fue alquanto divolgata tra le genti, con ciò fosse cosa che alcuno amico l’udisse, volontade lo mosse a pregare me che io li dovesse dire che è Amore, avendo forse per l’udite parole speranza di me oltre che degna. Onde io pensando che appresso di cotale trattato, bello era trattare alquanto d’Amore, e pensando che l’amico era da servire, propuosi di dire parole ne le quali io trattassi d’Amore; e allora dissi questo sonetto, lo qual comincia: Amore e ’l cor gentil.” On woman’s agency in Dante, see T. Barolini “Beyond Courtly Dualism.” For the relation between the sonnet and Inferno 5 see M. Santagata, “Cognati e amanti. Francesca e Paolo nel v dell’Inferno.” F. Torraca, “Il canto v dell’Inferno,” esp. 407 and 421. For the notion of duration in the sonnet, see also Malato, “Amor cortese e amor cristiano da Andrea Cappellano a Dante.” In the explanation of Negl’occhi porta la mia donna amore, the sonnet that follows Amor e il cor gentil and which constitutes a diptych with it, Dante describes Beatrice’s miraculous operation as creating the potentiality of Love and then actualizing it. See Vita Nuova 21, 6 (“dico sì come virtuosamente fae gentile tutto ciò che vede, e questo è tanto a dire quanto inducere Amore in potenzia là ove non è”). As G. Gorni points out in his commentary to Vita Nova, 110, to create without pre-existing potentiality is a divine prerogative. See A. Niccoli, “persona” in Enciclopedia Dantesca 4, 435–7 and Dragonetti, “L’épisode de Francesca dans le cadre de la convention courtoise,” 102. Throughout the Comedy the word “persona” mostly means quite generically “person.” In some passages, however, the emphasis is on the embodied aspect of the person (and, thus, “body”). See, for instance Inferno 6, 36: “sovra lor vanità che par persona”; Inferno 21, 97: “I’ m’accostai con tutta la persona”; and Purgatorio 3, 118: “Poscia ch’io ebbi rotta la persona.” For the Trinitarian definition see Paradiso 13, 26–7: “ma tre persone in divina natura, /e in una persona essa e l’umana.” See also the remark in the De vulgari eloquentia 2, vii, 4, quoted by Dragonetti (“L’épisode de Francesca dans le cadre de la convention courtoise,” 102, n. 3): “nec urbana lubrica et reburra, ut femina et corpo, ullo modo poteris conlocare.” Since, according to the treatise on language, the word “corpo” has no place in tragic poetry written in the illustrious vernacular, one may take Francesca’s “persona” as a merely stylistic instance.

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12 See also Paradiso 31, 88–90: “La tua magnificenza in me custodi, / sì che l’anima mia, che fatt’ hai sana, / piacente a te dal corpo si disnodi.” 13 Pertile, “Mal d’amore,” 57. 14 Contini, “Dante come personaggio-poeta della Commedia,” 45. 15 See M. Barbi, Con Dante e coi suoi interpreti. Saggi per un nuovo commento della Divina Commedia, 124. See also Boccaccio, ddp ad Inferno 5, 104: “generalmente si sforza a ciascun che ama di piacere alla cosa amata.” For the interpretation of “piacer” as Paolo’s love see in particular Caretti, “Inferno v,” 125. Boccaccio’s and Benvenuto’s interpretation has been recently re-proposed by G. Paparelli, “Ethos e pathos nell’episodio di Francesca da Rimini,” 160–9. See also Malato, Amor cortese e amor cristiano, 101–3, who proposes reading it as “pleasure” and suggests some sexual undertones in the comparison with Convivio 4, xxvi, 8: “E così infrenato mostra Virgilio, lo maggiore nostro poeta, che fosse Enea, nella parte dello Eneida ove questa etade si figura: la qual parte comprende lo quarto, lo quinto e lo sesto libro dello Eneida. E quanto raffrenare fu quello, quando, avendo ricevuto da Dido tanto di piacere quanto di sotto nel settimo trattato si dicerà, e usando con essa tanto di dilettazione, elli si partio, per seguire onesta e laudabile via e fruttuosa, come nel quarto dell’Eneida scritto è.” However, “dilettazione” and not “piacere” appear to translate in this passage delectatio, the “technical” Latin term for sexual pleasure. 16 U. Vignuzzi, “piacere” in Enciclopedia Dantesca 4, 468–70. For Inferno 5 Vignuzzi gives the traditional interpretation (Paolo’s physical beauty) but notices that the sensual connotations it implies are hapax in Dante’s usage. 17 Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 126, 1–3: “Chiare, fresche et dolci acque / ove le belle membra / pose colei che sola a me par donna.” For the significance of this quote see E. Lombardi, “‘I desire therefore I am.’ Petrarch’s Canzoniere between the medieval and modern notion of desire.” 18 See for instance Francesco da Buti, quoted in chapter 3, note 3, and Boccaccio, ddp ad Inferno 5, 104: “Secondo la catolica verità questo non si dee credere, per ciò che la divina giustizia non permette che in alcuna guisa alcun dannato abbia o possa avere cosa che al suo disiderio si conformi o gli porga consolazione o piacere alcuno: alla quale assai manifestamente sarebbe contro, se questa donna, come vuol mostrare nelle sue parole, a se medesima compiacesse dello stare in compagnia del suo amante.” See also the Anonimo Fiorentino, ddp ad Inferno 5, 104: “Questo non è vero, chè l’anime dannate non pigliono veruno piacere nè veruno diletto; ma vuolsi tòrre come parlare poetico.” 19 For an overview of the constricting hold of love in early Italian poetry, see S. Sarteschi, “Francesca e il suo poeta,” 32–3. 20 The influence of Dido is outlined by C. Villa, “Tra affetto e pietà. Per Inferno 5,” For Cavalcanti see Barolini, “Dante and Guido Cavalcanti.” On the unity of the lovers Contini (“Dante come personaggio-poeta della Commedia,” 46) quotes Cappellanus, Aimeric de Peguilhan, Dante’s Doglia mi reca, and Guittone d’Arezzo.

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21 On this vexata quaestio see G. Gorni, “Francesca e Paolo. La voce di lui.” 22 Precisely the fact that the reader was not acquainted to the novelty of Caina has led some commentators to read this line as “Cain’attende” (Cain waits), referring more generically to the biblical character than to the zone of Hell. See V. Russo, “‘Caina’ o ‘Cain’ attende?” 23 De vera religione 32, 59–60: “Sed multis finis est humana delectatio, nec volunt tendere ad superiora, ut iudicent cur ista visibilia placeant. Itaque si quaeram ab artifice, uno arcu constructo, cur alterum parem contra in altera parte moliatur; respondebit, credo, ut paria paribus aedificii membra respondeant. Porro si pergam quaerere, idipsum cur eligat; dicet hoc decere, hoc esse pulchrum, hoc delectare cernentes: nihil audebit amplius. Inclinatus enim recumbit oculis, et unde pendeat non intellegit. At ego virum intrinsecus oculatum, et invisibiliter videntem non desinam commonere cur ista placeant, ut iudex esse audeat ipsius delectationis humanae. Ita enim superfertur illi, nec ab ea tenetur, dum non secundum ipsam, sed ipsam iudicat. Et prius quaeram utrum ideo pulchra sint, quia delectant; an ideo delectent, quia pulchra sunt. Hic mihi sine dubitatione respondebitur, ideo delectare quia pulchra sunt. Quaeram ergo deinceps, quare sint pulchra; et si titubabitur, subiciam, utrum ideo quia similes sibi partes sunt, et aliqua copulatione ad unam convenientiam rediguntur. Quod cum ita esse compererit, interrogabo utrum hanc ipsam unitatem, quam convincuntur appetere, summe impleant, an longe infra iaceant, et eam quodammodo mentiantur. Quod si ita est (nam quis non admonitus videat, neque ullam speciem, neque ullum omnino esse corpus quod non habeat unitatis qualecumque vestigium; neque quantumvis pulcherrimum corpus, cum intervallis locorum necessario aliud alibi habeat, posse assequi eam quam sequitur unitatem?): quare si hoc ita est, flagitabo ut respondeat, ubi videat ipse unitatem hanc, aut unde videat: quam si non videret, unde cognosceret et quid imitaretur corporum species, et quid implere non posset? Nunc vero cum dicit corporibus: Vos quidem nisi aliqua unitas contineret, nihil essetis, sed rursus si vos essetis ipsa unitas, corpora non essetis; recte illi dicitur: Unde istam nosti unitatem, secundum quam iudicas corpora, quam nisi videres, iudicare non posses quod eam non impleant: si autem his corporeis oculis eam videres, non vere diceres, quamquam eius vestigio teneantur, longe tamen ab ea distare? nam istis oculis non nisi corporalia vides: mente igitur eam videmus. Sed ubi videmus? Si hoc loco esset ubi corpus nostrum est, non eam videret qui hoc modo in Oriente de corporibus iudicat. Non ergo ista continetur loco; et cum adest ubicumque iudicanti, nusquam est per spatia locorum, et per potentiam nusquam non est.” 24 Confessions 13, 28, 43: “hoc dicunt etiam quaeque pulchra corpora, quia longe multo pulchrius est corpus, quod ex membris pulchris omnibus constat, quam ipsa membra singula, quorum ordinatissimo conventu completur universum, quamvis et illa etiam singillatim pulchra sint.” For a survey of Augustine’s reflection on beauty see M. Bettetini (ed.), Ordine Musica Bellezza and R. Piccolomini (ed.), Sant’Agostino. La bellezza. 25 See E. Lombardi, The Syntax of Desire, 22–76.

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26 De musica 6, 13, 38: “M. – Haec igitur pulchra numero placent, in quo iam ostendimus aequalitatem appeti. Non enim hoc tantum in ea pulchritudine quae ad aures pertinet, atque in motu corporum est, invenitur, sed in ipsis etiam visibilibus formis, in quibus iam usitatius dicitur pulchritudo. An aliud quam aequalitatem numerosam esse arbitraris, cum paria paribus bina membra respondent: quae autem singula sunt, medium locum tenent, ut ad ea de utraque parte paria intervalla serventur? D– Non aliter puto. M. – Quid in ipsa luce visibili quae omnium colorum habet principatum, nam et color nos delectat in corporum formis; quid ergo aliud in luce et coloribus, nisi quod nostris oculis congruit, appetimus? Etenim a nimio fulgore aversamur, et nimis obscura nolumus cernere, sicut etiam in sonis et a nimium sonantibus abhorremus, et quasi susurrantia non amamus. Quod non in temporum intervallis est, sed in ipso sono, qui quasi lux est talium numerorum, cui sic est contrarium silentium, ut coloribus tenebrae. In his ergo cum appetimus convenientia pro naturae nostrae modo, et inconvenientia respuimus, quae aliis tamen animalibus convenire sentimus, nonne hic etiam quodam aequalitatis iure laetamur, cum occultioribus modis paria paribus tributa esse cognoscimus? Hoc in odoribus et in saporibus, et in tangendi sensu animadvertere licet, quae longum est enucleatius persequi, sed explorare facillimum: nihil enim est horum sensibilium, quod nobis non aequalitate aut similitudine placeat. Ubi autem aequalitas aut similitudo, ibi numerositas; nihil est quippe tam aequale aut simile quam unum et unum: nisi quid habes ad haec.” 27 For medieval aesthetics see E. De Bruyne, Études d’esthétique médiévale, 3 vols.; H. Pouillon, “La Beauté, propriété transcendentale chez les scholastiques”; U. Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages and The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas; W. Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, vol. 2: Medieval Aesthetics. 28 For beauty and medieval musical theory see De Bruyne, Études d’esthétique médiévale; L. Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony; and B. Holsinger, Music, Body and Desire in Medieval Culture. 29 Itinerarium 2, 2: “Notandum igitur, quod iste mundus, qui dicitur macrocosmus, intrat ad animam nostram, quae dicitur minor mundus, per portas quinque sensuum, secundum ipsorum sensibilium apprehensionem, oblectationem et diiudicationem.” 30 Itinerarium 2, 5: “Ad hanc apprehensionem, si sit rei convenientis, sequitur oblectatio. Delectatur autem sensus in obiecto per similitudinem abstractam percepto vel ratione speciositatis, sicut in visu, vel ratione suavitatis, sicut in odoratu et auditu, vel ratione salubritatis, sicut in gustu et tactu, appropriate loquendo. Omnis autem delectatio est ratione proportionalitatis.” 31 Itinerarium 2, 8: “Secundum hunc modum species delectans ut speciosa, suavis et salubris insinuat, quod in illa prima specie est prima speciositas, suavitas et salubritas, in qua est summa proportionalitas et aequitas ad generantem; in qua est virtus, non per phantasma, sed per veritatem apprehensionis illabens: in qua est impressio salvans et sufficientes et omnem apprehendentis indigentiam expellens. Si ergo ‘delectatio est coniunctio convenientis cum

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convenienti’; et solius Dei similitudo tenet rationem summe speciosi, suavis et salubris; et unitur secundum veritatem et secundum intimitatem et secundum plenitudinem replentem omnem capacitatem: manifeste videri potest, quod in solo Deo est fontalis et vera delectatio, et quod ad ipsam ex omnibus delectationibus manuducimur requirendam.” On the theory of pleasure in Bonaventure see De Bruyne, Études 3, 191–9. Itinerarium 2, 4: “Sed quoniam species [oblectatio] tenet rationem formae, virtutis et operationis, secundum quod habet respectum ad principium, a quo manat, ad medium, per quod transit, et ad terminum, in quem agit: ideo proportionalitas aut attenditur in similitudine, secundum quod tenet rationem speciei seu formae, et sic dicitur speciositas, quia pulcritudo nihil aliud est quam ‘aequalitas numerosa,’ seu ‘quidam par partium situs cum coloris suavitate.’ Aut attenditur proportionalitas, in quantum tenet rationem potentiae seu virtutis, et sic dicitur suavitas, cum virtus agens non improportionaliter excedit recipientem; quia sensus tristatur in extremis et in mediis delectatur. Aut attenditur, in quantum tenet rationem efficaciae et impressionis, quae tunc est proportionalis, quando agens imprimendo replet indigentiam patientis, et hoc est salvare et nutrire ipsum, quod maxime apparet in gustu et tactu, Et sic per oblectationem delectabilia exteriora secundum triplicem rationem delectandi per similitudinem intrat in animam.” Itinerarium 2, 6: “Post hanc apprehensionem et oblectationem fit diiudicatio, qua non solum diiudicatur, utrum hoc sit album, vel nigrum, quia hoc pertinet ad sensum particularem; non solum, utrum sit salubre, vel nocivum, quia hoc pertinet ad sensum interiorem; verum etiam, quia diiudicatur et ratio redditur, quare hoc delectat; et in hoc actu inquiritur de ratione delectationis, quae in sensu percipitur ab obiecto. Hoc est autem, cum quaeritur ratio pulcri, suavis et salubris: et invenitur quod haec est proportio aequalitatis.” Itinerarium 2, 10: “Cum igitur omnia sint pulcra et quodam modo delectabilia; et pulcritudo et delectatio non sint absque proportione; et proportio primo sit in numeris: necesse est, omnia esse numerosa; ac per hoc ‘numerus est praecipuum in animo Conditoris exemplar’ et in rebus praecipuum vestigium ducens in Sapientiam. Quod cum sit omnibus evidentissimum et Deo propinquissimum, propinquissime quasi per septem differentias ducit in Deum et facit, eum cognosci in cunctis corporalibus et sensibilibus, dum numerosa apprehendimus, in numerosis proportionibus delectamur et per numerosarum proportionum leges irrefragabiliter iudicamus.” On the medieval theory of vision see D.C. Lindenberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler; S. Gilson, Medieval Optics and Theories of Light in the Works of Dante; D. Stewart, The Arrow of Love: Optics, Gender, and Subjectivity in Medieval Love Poetry. Summa Theologiae 1a, q. 5, a. 4 ad 1: “Ad primum ergo dicendum quod pulchrum et bonum in subiecto quidem sunt idem, quia super eandem rem fundantur, scilicet super formam, et propter hoc, bonum laudatur ut pulchrum. Sed ratione differunt. Nam bonum proprie respicit appetitum, est enim bonum quod omnia appetunt. Et ideo habet rationem finis, nam appetitus est quasi

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quidam motus ad rem.” And see also the distinction between the good and the beautiful in Alexander of Hales’s Summa Theologica, which speaks of two different pleasures related to goodness and beauty: “Nam pulcrum dicit dispositionem boni secundum quod est placitum apprehensioni, bonum vero respicit dispositionem secundum quod delectat affectionem.” See the whole passage in Summa Theologiae 1a-2ae, q. 27, a. 1 ad 3: “Ad tertium dicendum quod pulchrum est idem bono, sola ratione differens. Cum enim bonum sit quod omnia appetunt, de ratione boni est quod in eo quietetur appetitus, sed ad rationem pulchri pertinet quod in eius aspectu seu cognitione quietetur appetitus. Unde et illi sensus praecipue respiciunt pulchrum, qui maxime cognoscitivi sunt, scilicet visus et auditus rationi deservientes, dicimus enim pulchra visibilia et pulchros sonos. In sensibilibus autem aliorum sensuum, non utimur nomine pulchritudinis, non enim dicimus pulchros sapores aut odores. Et sic patet quod pulchrum addit supra bonum, quendam ordinem ad vim cognoscitivam, ita quod bonum dicatur id quod simpliciter complacet appetitui; pulchrum autem dicatur id cuius ipsa apprehensio placet.” De Bruyne, Études 3, 167. According to Aquinas and the theological tradition the resurrected body’s clarity is the overflowing of the beauty of the soul onto the body. See, for instance Summa Theologiae 3a, q. 45, a. 2 co: “Nam ad corpus glorificatum redundat claritas ab anima sicut quaedam qualitas permanens corpus afficiens. Unde fulgere corporaliter non est miraculosum in corpore glorioso.” In his Paradiso, Dante does something quite radical with the notion of the resurrected body’s clarity, making it a function of the body itself: “Ma sì come carbon che fiamma rende, / e per vivo candor quella soverchia, / sì che la sua parvenza si difende; / così questo folgór che già ne cerchia/ fia vinto in apparenza da la carne / che tutto dì la terra ricoperchia; / né potrà tanta luce affaticarne / ché li organi del corpo saran forti / a tutto ciò che potrà dilettarne” (Paradiso 14, 52–60). De Bruyne, Études 3, 309 and 313. Witness the comparison of the two beauties in Summa Theologiae 2a–2ae, q. 145, a. 2 co: “Respondeo dicendum quod, sicut accipi potest ex verbis Dionysii, iv cap. de Div. Nom., ad rationem pulchri, sive decori, concurrit et claritas et debita proportio, dicit enim quod Deus dicitur pulcher sicut universorum consonantiae et claritatis causa. Unde pulchritudo corporis in hoc consistit quod homo habeat membra corporis bene proportionata, cum quadam debiti coloris claritate. Et similiter pulchritudo spiritualis in hoc consistit quod conversatio hominis, sive actio eius, sit bene proportionata secundum spiritualem rationis claritatem. Hoc autem pertinet ad rationem honesti, quod diximus idem esse virtuti, quae secundum rationem moderatur omnes res humanas. Et ideo honestum est idem spirituali decori. Unde Augustinus dicit, in libro octogintatrium quaest., honestatem voco intelligibilem pulchritudinem, quam spiritualem nos proprie dicimus. Et postea subdit quod sunt multa pulchra visibilia, quae minus proprie honesta appellantur.”

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41 Summa Theologiae 2a-2ae, q. 142, a. 4 co: “Est igitur intemperantia maxime exprobrabilis, propter duo. Primo quidem, quia maxime repugnat excellentiae hominis, est enim circa delectationes communes nobis et brutis, ut supra habitum est. Unde et in Psalmo dicitur, homo, cum in honore esset, non intellexit, comparatus est iumentis insipientibus, et similis factus est illis. Secundo, quia maxime repugnat eius claritati vel pulchritudini, inquantum scilicet in delectationibus circa quas est intemperantia, minus apparet de lumine rationis, ex qua est tota claritas et pulchritudo virtutis. Unde et huiusmodi delectationes dicuntur maxime serviles.” 42 U. Eco in The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 119 states that “Clarity is the fundamental communicability of form, which is made actual in relation to someone’s looking at or seeing of the object.” 43 For the Liber de intelligentiis see de Bruyne, Études 3, 239–43 and Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, 68. 44 See Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes 4, 13: “Et ut corporis est quaedam apta figura membrorum cum coloris quadam suavitate eaque dicitur pulchritudo, sic in animo opinionum iudiciorumque aequabilitas et constantia cum firmitate quadam et stabilitate virtutem subsequens aut virtutis vim ipsam continens pulchritudo vocatur”; and Augustine, Letters 3, 4: “Quid est corporis pulchritudo? Congruentia partium cum quadam coloris suavitate”; quoted by Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, 28. See also Dante, Convivio 4, xxv, 12: “E quando elli è bene ordinato e disposto, allora è bello per tutto e per le parti; ché l’ordine debito delle nostre membra rende uno piacere non so di che armonia mirabile, e la buona disposizione, cioè la sanitate, getta sopra quelle uno colore dolce a riguardare.” 45 On the relation between interior and exterior beauty see Bernard on the cheeks of the bride: “Pulchrae sunt genae tuae sicut turturis. Vide autem ne carnaliter cogites coloratam carnis putredinem, et purulentiam flavi sanguineive humoris, vitreae cutis superficiem summatim atque aequaliter suffendentem e quibus sibi invicem moderate permistis, ad venustandam genarum effigiem rubor subpallidus in efficientiam corporeae pulchritudinis temperatur. Alioquin incorporea illa animae invisibilisque substantia, nec corporeis distincta membris, nec visibilibus exstat fucata coloribus. Tu vero spiritualem essentiam spirituali, si potes, attinge intuitu, et ad coaptandum propositae similitudinis schema cogita animae faciem, mentis intentionem; ex qua nimirum rectitudo operis, sicut ex facie pulchritudo corporis, aestimatur. Porro verecundiam intellige, tanquam colorem in facie, quod haec potissimum virtus et venustatem ingerat, et augeat gratiam” (Sermo 40, 1). 46 Consolatio Philosophiae 3, 15: “Quodsi, ut Aristoteles ait, Lyncei oculis homines uterentur, ut eorum visus obstantia penetraret, nonne introspectibus visceribus illud Alcibiadis superficie pulcherrimum corpus turpissimum videretur? Igitur te pulchrum videri non tua natura, sed oculorum spectantium reddit infirmitas.” Quoted by De Bruyne, Études 1, 7. 47 Quoted by J. Dalarun, “The Clerical Gaze,” 20.

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48 See the entry “beauty” in Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopaedia, M. Schaus ed., 64–6. 49 Dante brings compactly together Mary and Eve at the end of the Paradiso: “La piaga che Maria richiuse e unse, / quella ch’è tanto bella da’ suoi piedi / è colei che l’aperse e che la punse” (Paradiso 32, 4–6). 50 See for instance the following passage from the Commentary on the Song of Songs by Philip of Harveng (twelfth century), mentioned by L. Gambero, Mary in the Middle Ages. The Blessed Virgin Mary in the Thought of Medieval Latin Theologians, 182–3: “Quod illa Virgo quam sibi ab aeterno in matrem Dei Filius praelegit, in qua tempore congruo sumens carnem membris contractioribus se coegit, de qua nasci voluit sepe carnis novo genere non abrupta, cujus factus est filius ante partum et post partum castitate penitus incorrupta: quod illa, inquam, virgo inter caeteras, hoc est prae ceteris mulieribus fuerit speciosa, existimo dignum credi, nec est fides hujusmodi vitiosa. Neque enim est credibile ut Deus, Dei Filius, matrem elegerit fuscam, luscam, struma notabilem vel gibbosam: et non magis vultu niveo, colore roseo, gratis oculis, pleno corpore speciosam, ut quae ad officium dignius prae ceteris mulieribus est electa, esset non solum quavis turpitudine non infecta: sed et specie corporali cunctis pulchrior et perfecta. Quamvis quod pulchra inter mulieres dicitur, non tam congruat gratiae vultus, corporis venustati, quam perfectis moribus et admirandae illius sanctitati, que teste angelo gratia plena, quod de altera nusquam muliere perhibetur, sola solius Christi mater fieri promeretur” (pl 203, 247). 51 See C. Thomasset, “The Nature of Woman.” 52 P. L’Hermite-Leclercq, “The Feudal Order,” especially 224–6. 53 See De Sanctis, Grahber, and Provenzal, ddp ad Inferno 5, 101. 54 Purgatorio 18, 34–9: “Or ti puote apparer quant’ è nascosa / la veritate a la gente ch’avvera / ciascun amore in sé laudabil cosa; / però che forse appar la sua matera / sempre esser buona, ma non ciascun segno / è buono, ancor che buona sia la cera.” 55 For some similar remarks on vision in the dream of the Siren, see O. Holmes, Dante’s Two Beloveds: Ethics and Erotics in the Divine Comedy, 60. 56 Purgatorio 19, 25–33: “Ancor non era sua bocca richiusa, / quand’ una donna apparve santa e presta / lunghesso me per far colei confusa. O Virgilio, Virgilio, chi è questa? / fieramente dicea; ed el venìa / con li occhi fitti pur in quella onesta. / L’altra prendea, e dinanzi l’apria / fendendo i drappi, e mostravami ’l ventre; / quel mi svegliò col puzzo che n’uscia.” 57 Purgatorio 19, 58–60: “Vedesti, disse, quell’antica strega / che sola sovr’ a noi omai si piagne; / vedesti come l’uom da lei si slega.” 58 B. Nardi, “Filosofia dell’amore nei rimatori italiani del Duecento e in Dante,” especially 1–23. 59 Nichomachean Ethics 9, 5, 3: a “η δ␫α ␶ης οψεως ηδονη” (“ea quae per visum delectatio”). The context of this quotation is highly interesting. In discussing goodwill in relation to friendship, Aristotle draws a parallel between

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goodwill and beauty, friendship and love. Just as goodwill is not sufficient to seal friendship, so the attraction of beauty needs to be powered by desire in order to turn itself into love: “Goodwill seems, then, to be a beginning of friendship, as the pleasure of the eye is the beginning of love. For no one loves if he has not first been delighted by the form of the beloved, but he who delights in the form of another does not, for all that, love him, but only does so when he also longs for him when absent and craves for his presence; so too it is not possible for people to be friends if they have not come to feel goodwill for each other, but those who feel goodwill are not for all that friends; for they only wish well to those for whom they feel goodwill, and would not do anything with them nor take trouble for them. And so one might by an extension of the term friendship say that goodwill is inactive friendship, though when it is prolonged and reaches the point of intimacy it becomes friendship – not the friendship based on utility nor that based on pleasure; for goodwill too does not arise on those terms.” See De Bruyne, Études 3, 278–98 and Summa Theologiae 2a–2ae, q.141, a. 5 co: “Respondeo dicendum quod, sicut dictum est, temperantia consistit circa praecipuas delectationes, quae maxime pertinent ad conservationem humanae vitae, vel in specie vel in individuo. In quibus aliquid consideratur principaliter, aliquid autem secundario. Principaliter quidem ipse usus rei necessariae, puta vel feminae, quae est necessaria ad conservationem speciei; vel cibi vel potus, quae sunt necessaria ad conservationem individui. Et ipse usus horum necessariorum habet quandam essentialem delectationem adiunctam. Secundario autem consideratur circa utrumque usum aliquid quod facit ad hoc quod usus sit magis delectabilis, sicut pulchritudo et ornatus feminae, et sapor delectabilis in cibo, et etiam odor. Et ideo principaliter temperantia est circa delectationem tactus, quae per se consequitur ipsum usum rerum necessariarum, quarum omnis usus est in tangendo.” See for instance a poem by Raoul de Soisson quoted by De Bruyne, Études 3, 16: “Quant je vois vostre cler vis / et je puis avoir vos ris / De vos biaus euz esmerez / sachez que moi est avis / que d’un roi de paradis / soit mon cors enluminez … Cheveus plus biaus que dorez, / biau front, nes droit, bien assis, / color de rose et de lis, / bouche vermeille et souez, / col blanc qui n’est pas hallez, / gorge qui de blanchor raie; / plesant, avenant et gaie, / la fist nostre Sire Dieus / plus bele et plus sage assez / qu’en ma chançon n’en retraie.” “I vogl’ del ver la mia donna laudare / ed assemblarli la rosa e lo giglio: / più che stella diana splende e pare, / e ciò ch’ è lassù bello a lei somiglio. / Verde river’ a lei rasembro e l’âre / tutti color di fior’, giano e vermiglio, oro ed azzurro e ricche gioi per dare: / medesmo Amor per lei rafina meglio.” For the nature of love and knowledge in Cavalcanti see E. Lombardi, “The Grammar of Vision in Guido Cavalcanti.” B. Nardi, “Filosofia dell’amore nei rimatori italiani del duecento e Dante” and D.S. Avalle, Ai luoghi di delizia pieni. Saggio sulla lirica italiana del XIII secolo, 57–86. Both Nardi and Avalle argue that all these basic features of love are contained in Andreas Cappellanus’s definition of love in De Amore 1, 1:

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“Amor est passio quaedam innata procedens ex visione et immoderata cogitatione formae alterius sexus, ob quam aliquis super omnia cupit alterius potiri amplexibus et omnia de utriusque voluntate in ipsius amplexu amoris praecepta compleri … Quod autem illa passio sit innata, manifesta tibi ratione ostendo, quia passio illa ex nulla oritur actione subtiliter veritate inspecta; sed ex sola cogitatione quam concipit animus ex eo quod vidit passio illa procedit. Nam quum aliquis videt aliquam aptam amori et suo formatam arbitrio, statim eam incipit concupiscere corde; postea vero quotiens de ipsa cogitat, totiens eius magis ardescit amore, quousque ad cogitationem devenerit pleniorem.” See the sonnet in the context of the tenzone on love with Iacopo Mostacci and Pier delle Vigne in I poeti della scuola siciliana vol. 1, R. Antonelli ed. On the workings of the heart in connection to the process of love, see H. Webb, The Medieval Heart, 50–82. Nardi, “Filosofia dell’amore nei rimatori italiani del duecento e Dante,” 16. Two more texts quoted by Nardi and Avalle are worth recalling in this context. The anonymous poem Dal cor si move un spirito in vedere, which testifies to reciprocity in the process of love and vision: “Dal cor si move un spirito, in vedere / d’in occhi in occhi, di femina e d’omo, / per lo qual si concria uno piaciere, / lo qual piaciere mo’ vi dico como: / e’ nasciene uno benivolo volere, / lo qual Amore chiamato è per nomo; / dentro dal cor si pone a sedere, / ca non poria im più sicuro domo. / Nascie di sangue netto pur c’à ’l core, / che l’animo de l’om ten ’n alegranza / e segnoregia ciscun altro amore, / e falla stare in quella desianza; / quello può dire om che sia Amore: / amore è cosa di gran dubitanza.” The second is the song Con gran disio, attributed to Guinizzelli, but probably written by Bonagiunta Orbicciani, in which the excess of pleasure is located in the heart and not in the object: “E’ par che da verace piacimento / lo fino amor discenda / guardando quel ch’al cor torni piacente; / ché poi ch’om guarda cosa di talento, / al cor pensieri abenda, / e cresce con disio immantenente; / e poi dirittamente / fiorisce e mena frutto” (Nardi, “Filosofia dell’amore,” 16–18; Avalle, Ai luoghi di delizia pieni, 62). Donna me prega (Rime 27), 43–8: “L’essere è quando – lo voler è tanto / ch’oltra misura – di natura – torna, / poi non s’adorna – di riposo mai. / Move, cangiando – color, riso in pianto, / e la figura – con paura – storna; / poco soggiorna; – ancor di lui vedrai / che ’n gente di valor lo più si trova.” Interestingly, in several poems, including Chi è questa che ven quoted above, Cavalcanti describes woman’s beauty as beyond nature, thus prominently linking beauty and desire. See for instance: Fresca rosa novella (Rime 1), 19–31: “Angelica sembranza / in voi, donna, riposa: / Dio, quanto aventurosa / fue la mia disïanza! / Vostra cera gioiosa, / poi che passa e avanza / natura e costumanza, / ben è mirabil cosa. / Fra lor le donne dea / vi chiaman, come sète; / tanto adorna parete, / ch’eo non saccio contare; / e chi poria pensare – oltra natura?” And see also Veggio negli occhi de la donna mia (Rime 26), 5– 10: “Cosa m’aven, quand’i’ le son presente, / ch’io no la posso a lo ’ntelletto dire: / veder mi par de la sua labbia uscire / una sì bella donna, che la mente / comprender no la può, che ‘mmantenente / ne nasce un’altra di bellezza nova.”

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69 When discussing complexion in his Canon, Avicenna describes it as the result of four elements (cold, hot, humid, and dry) and interestingly underlines its individuality, and the difficulty of finding similarity: “Debes autem scire quod omne individuum debet habere complexionem sibi solummodo propriam, in qua alium ei associare vel communicare raro contingit, aut est impossibile.” For the role of the Canon in early Italian poetry see F. Anichini, Voices of the Body: Liminal Grammar in Guido Cavalcanti’s Rime. 70 On this point see the commentary by D. De Robertis in G. Cavalcanti, Rime 105. 71 See also the Chiose Vernon, ddp ad Inferno 5, 53–142: “Dicho che chapitando a Ravenna un buffone e veggiendo questa giovane tanto bella disse alla madre di questa fanciulla che aveva cierchato la corte di quatro signori nè mai avea veduto più bella giovane di questa nè di giovani avea veduto più bello giovane che Paolo de’ Malatesti e che se queste due bellezze si potessino acchozzare insieme a matrimonio mai non si vide più bella choppia.” 72 Pseudo-Guinizzelli, Con gran disio (16–27): “e cresce con disio immantenente; / e poi dirittamente / fiorisce e mena frutto; / però mi sento isdutto, / l’amor crescendo fiori e foglie ha messe / e vèn la messe – e ’l frutto non ricoglio. / Di ciò prender dolore deve e pianto / lo core inamorato, / e lamentar di gran disaventura, / però che nulla cosa a l’omo è tanto / gravoso riputato, / che sostenere affanno e gran tortura, / servendo per calura / d’essere meritato.” Cavalcanti, Tu m’hai sì piena di dolor la mente (Rime 7) 5–8: “Amor, che lo tuo grande valor sente, / dice: ‘E’ mi duol che ti convien morire / per questa fiera donna, che nïente / par che pietate di te voglia udire.’” Dante, Amor che movi tua virtù da cielo, 55–60: “Falle sentire, Amor, per tua dolcezza, / lo gran disio ch’i’ ho di veder lei, / non soffrir che costei / per giovanezza mi conduca a morte; / ché non s’accorge ancor com’ella piace / né com’io l’amo forte, / né che negli occhi porta la mia pace.” I find this text (one of the vagrant doctrinal texts from the Rime) very much in the grain of Inferno 5 and Purgatorio 18, for its connections between desire, pleasure, death, and peace. 73 For love as “death sentence” in Inferno 5, see L. Pertile, La punta del disio, 47, and the Introduction to this book. 74 Cino da Pistoia, Rime 37: “Amore è uno spirito ch’ancide, / che nasce di piacere e vèn per sguardo / e fere ’l cor sì come face un dardo, / che l’altre membra distrugge e conquide; / da le qua’ vita e valor divide / non avendo di pietà riguardo, / sì com’ mi dice la mente ov’io ardo / e l’anima smarrita che lo vide, / quando s’assicurãr li occhi miei tanto, / che sguardaro una donna ch’i’ scontrai, / che mi ferìo ’l core in ogni canto. / Or foss’io morto quando la mirai! / ch’io non èi poi se non dolore e pianto, / e certo son che non avrò giammai.” 75 For romance in Inferno 5, see R. Poggioli, “Tragedy or Romance? A Reading of the Paolo and Francesca Episode in Dante’s Inferno”; M. Picone, “Canto v” and “Poetic Discourse and Courtly Love: An Intertextual Analysis of Inferno 5”; C. Kleinhenz, “Dante as Reader and Critic of Courtly Literature.” 76 For suggestions on the relevance of Jaufré Rudel within canto 5 see Dra-

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gonetti, “L’épisode de Francesca dans le cadre de la convention courtoise,” 106–9. For Tristan see Picone, “Canto v.” S. Gaunt, Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature: Martyrs to Love, 113 and 110. See also M.N. Toury, Mort et fin’amor dans la poésie d’oc et d’oil au XIIe et XIIIe siècles. The text is taken from Le Roman de Tristan par Thomas, F. Lecoy ed. Gaunt, Love and Death, 113. Tristan de Thomas, 3107–13: “Quant a tens venire n’i poi / e jo l’aventure ne soy, / e venue sui a la mort / de meisme le bevre avrai confort. / Pur mei avez perdu la vie, / e jo frai cum veraie amie: / pur vos voil murir ensement.” See the whole text in Tristano Panciatichiano 534–6: “Quand’elli à così parlato a re Marco, elli si torna inverso la reina e disse: ‘Dama, io mi muoio. Venuta è l’ora e ’l ch’io non posso più andare inançi. Certo, tanto mi sono combactuto incontro ala morte, quanto più ò potuto, mia cara dama. Et quando io mi morò, che farete voi? Come direte voi presso di me? Dama, come potrebbe ciò essere che Ysotta viva sença Tristano? Ciò serà grande meraviglia, altresì grande come pesce vivere sença acqua, e come del corpo vivere sença l’anima mia. Cara dama, come farete voi quando io morrò? Non morrete voi con meco? Si anderà nostra e vostra anima insieme. Amica mia bella, dolce dama, la quale io ò più di me amata, fate ciò che io credo: che voi moriate con meco siché noi moriamo insieme. Per Dio, guardate che questo facto non sia altrementi.’ La reina Ysotta, che tanto à duolo che quasi lo cuore le scoppia, non sa ch’ella si debbia fare né rispondere. ‘Amico,’ disse ella, ‘se m’aiuti Idio, e’ non è ora al mondo nulla ch’io sì tosto volesse, come di morire ora con voi, e come di fare a voi compagnia a questa morte. Ma io non so com’ io lo possa fare. Se voi lo sapete, si me lo insegnate e io lo farò tostamente. Se per avere dolore e angoscia potesse morire nulla dama, se m’aiuti Idio, io sere’ morta più volte poiché io venni qua dentro, ché io non credo che nulla dama unqua mai fusse tanto dolente, che io non sia assai più, e s’elli fusse a mia volontà, io morrei ora indiritto.’ ‘Mia dolce dama’ disse Tristano ‘vorreste voi morire con meco?’ ‘Amico,’ disse ella ‘se m’aiuti Idio, unqua cosa nulla mai tanto desiderai.’ ‘Or’ disse elli ‘or sono io troppo lieto. Dunqua averrà elli, se Dio piace, et certo sicondo mio aviso; che sarebbe vergogna […] uno core e una anima. E poi ch’ella è in tale maniera, mia dolce dama, che voi meco volete morire, elli è mistieri, se Dio m’aiuti, che noi moriamo anbendue insieme. Ora v’acordate, se vi piace, che mia fine s’apressima molto. Io sono Tristano che sono venuto al chino.’ … ‘Ahi Ysotta. Ora m’abracciate, sich’io finischa in vostre braccia; si finerò ad agio, ciò m’è aviso.’ Ysotta si china sopra Tristano. E quando ella intende queste parole, ella s’abassa sopra suo pecto, e Tristano la prende in sue braccia. E quando elli la tiene in tale maniera sopra suo pecto elli disse sì alto che tucti quelli di là ent[r]o lo ’ntesero bene e disse: ‘Ora mai non mi caglia quandunque io morrò, dapoiché io abbo mia dolce dama meco.’ E allora si stende la reina supra lo suo pecto, e elli sì strinse [a] sé di tanta força com’elli avea, sich’elli le fece lo cuore partire. Et elli medesimo morie a quello punto; siché a braccia a braccia

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et a boccha a boccha morirono li due patienti amanti. E dimorarono in tale maniera abracciati, tanto che tucti quelli di là entro che credeano che fussero tramortiti ambendue per amore. Altro riconforto non v’hae. In tale maniera morìo lo bello e lo pro’ [cavaliere Tristano] per amore di madama Ysotta. In tale maniera e in tal dolore e in tale angoscia morì Tristano, com’ io v’oe contato, per lo colpo che lo re Marco li donò allora per la reina Ysotta. E la reina d’altra parte morìo per amore di Tristano; e così morirono ambendue insieme. [Ysotta morì] per amore di Tristano, che a quello tempo era lo migliore cavaliere, fuori messer Galas, lo figliuolo di monsignor Lancialot di Lac. Tristano morì per amore di Ysotta c[he] a quello tempo era la più bella dama del mondo, fuori de la reina G[ien]evera et la figli[a] de re Pelles, la madre di Galead. La reina Ysotta morì per amore di Tristano, e così finirono ambendue.” Text and translation taken from Tristano Panciatichiano, G. Allaire editor and translator. For the ambiguous nature of Jaufré’s poetry see L. Lazzerini, Letteratura medievale in lingua d’oc, 54–66. For the questions raised by the vida see M.L. Meneghetti, “Una vida pericolosa; la ‘mediazione’ biografica e l’interpretazione della poesia di Jaufré Rudel.” Jaufré’s vida reads as follows: “Jaufre Rudels de Blaia si fo mout gentils hom, princes de Blaia. Et enamoret se de la comtessa de Tripol, ses vezer, per lo ben qu’el n’auzi dire als pelerins que venguen d’Antiocha. E fez de leis mains vers ab bons sons, ab paubres motz. E per voluntat de leis vezer, el se croset e se mes en mar, e pres lo malautia en la nau, e fo condug a Tripol, en un alberc, per mort. E fo fait saber a la comtessa et ella venc ad el, al son leit, e pres lo antre sos bratz. E saup qu’ela era la comtessa, e mantenent recobret l’auzir e l flairar, e lauzet Dieu, que l’avia la vida sostenguda tro qu’el l’agues vista; et enaissi el mori entre sos braz. Et ella lo fez a gran honor sepellir en la maison del Temple; e pois, en aquel dia, ella se rendet morga, per la dolor qu’ella n’ac de la mort de lui. ” Gaunt, Love and Death, 164. For the symbolism of white and red see C. Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, 90–106. Moevs elegantly ties the episodes of Paolo and Francesca and that of the meeting of Dante and Beatrice in earthly Paradise through the tale of Phyramus and Thisbe (Purgatorio 27), showing the polysemic nature of the image of the mulberry tree, whose fruits turned from white to red after the Ovidian lovers’ death. This metamorphosis, Moevs explains, can be taken to represent both the corruption of lust and an image for Christ. Canticum canticorum 6, 4: “pulchra es amica mea suavis et decora sicut Hierusalem terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata / averte oculos tuos a me quia ipsi me avolare fecerunt capilli tui sicut grex caprarum quae apparuerunt de Galaad.” L. Pertile, “‘La punta del disio.’” See for instance the following sonnet by Guido Guinizzelli, where the wounding gaze of the heart is compared to a military operation against a tower (1–9): “Lo vostro bel saluto e ’l gentil sguardo / che fate quando

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v’encontro, m’ancide: / Amor m’assale e già non ha reguardo / s’elli face peccato over merzede, / ché per mezzo lo cor me lanciò un dardo / ched oltre ’n parte lo taglia e divide; / parlar non posso, ché ’n pene io ardo / sì come quelli che sua morte vede / Per li occhi passa come fa lo trono, /che fer’ per la finestra de la torre / e ciò che dentro trova spezza e fende.” The theme of the heart wounded through the eyes is particularly developed in the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti. Guido’s poetry is constructed around the clash of two gazes: the woman’s gaze (“la qual de li occhi suoi venne a ferire,” 9, 12), a wounding, active gaze and the man’s gaze (“li mie’ foll’occhi, che prima guardaro,” 5, 1), a passive gaze which receives the wound. The clash of the two gazes initiates both the process of the formation of the internal image and a deadly battle of the spirits. The lover’s heart is wounded by gaze, beauty, and humility (“ha ferite / di sguardo, di piacere e di umiltate,” 6, 5–6), the woman’s claritas wounds through the heart (“per gli occhi fere la sua claritate,” 9, 23). The wounds of the heart signify the death of the lover (“e porti ne lo core una ferita / che sia, com’egli è morto, aperto segno,” 9, 13–14) or signal the pleasures of beauty desire and joy: “La prima [feruta] dà piacere e disconforta / e la seconda disia la vertute / della gran gioia che la terza porta.” For connections between the finale of the Song of Songs and Inferno 5 see Pertile, La punta del disio, 39. Quoted by N. Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane, 67. Text from Iacopone da Todi, Laude, F. Mancini ed. Translation taken from Iacopone da Todi, The Lauds, translated by S. and E. Hughes. On this point see Gaunt, Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature, 116: “The lovers see their union in death as an end in itself, abstracted from any notion of life after death. Worldly love has been so elevated in its spiritual and ethical value that it no longer needs the religious imagery and vocabulary that hauled it out of the mundane in the first place.” P. Boitani, “In Gentil Hertes Ay Redy to Repair: Dante’s Francesca and Chaucer’s Troilus,” 39. See the most “idolatrous” section of the song Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore (15–28): “Angelo clama in divino intelletto / e dice: ‘Sire, nel mondo si vede / maraviglia ne l’atto che procede / d’un’anima che ’nfin quassù risplende.’ / Lo cielo, che non have altro difetto / che d’aver lei, al suo segnor la chiede, / e ciascun santo ne grida merzede. / Sola Pietà nostra parte difende, / ché parla Dio, che di madonna intende: ‘Diletti miei, or sofferite in pace / che vostra spene sia quanto me piace / là ov’ è alcun che perder lei s’attende, / e che dirà ne lo inferno: ‘O malnati, / io vidi la speranza de’ beati.’” For the connections between the Song of Songs and the Vita Nuova, see P. Nasti, Favole d’amore e “saver profondo.” La tradizione salomonica in Dante, 43–85.

ch ap t e r f i ve 1 See L. Onder, “dolce,” “dolcemente” and “dolcezza” in Enciclopedia Dantesca 2, 533–5. It is worth recalling here the nostalgic gaze to the world

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above of two other damned souls: for Ciacco and Cavalcanti, the world above is “dolce mondo” (Inferno 6, 88 and 10, 82). For a concise overview of the complex question of the sweet new style, see Hollander, ddp ad Purgatorio 24, 57. For the notion of sweetness as cosmic harmony see N. Fosca (ad idem). See Boccaccio, ddp ad Inferno 5, 118: “Chiamagli dubbiosi i disideri degli amanti, per ciò che, quantunque per molti atti apaia che l’uno ami l’altro e l’altro l’uno, tuttavia suspicano non sia così come a lor pare, insino a tanto che del tutto discoperti e conosciuti sono.” Francesco da Buti, ddp ad Inferno 5, 118: “Che conosceste i dubbiosi disiri; cioè che veniste a tanto, che l’uno conobbe il desiderio dell’altro; cioè che l’uno avea dubbio di manifestare all’altro? Molti innamorati trarrebbono a fine il loro desiderio, se conoscessono piacere alla femmina quello che piace all’uomo, et è converso; ma la dubitanza fa molti non avere ardimento, pensando: Forse non piace all’altra parte quello che piace a me: chè se l’uno sapesse dell’altro, ciascuno porrebbe giù la vergogna, se vedesse essere concordia nelli pensieri: imperò che quando l’uomo ama, benchè si vegghi amare, porta dubbio se l’amore è nella persona amante, con quel desiderio che è in lui; ma quando si manifestano li desidèri, allora si conoscono.” For doubt as desire in heaven, see Pertile, “Paradiso: a Drama of Desire,” 161. See also 165: “Poetically too, Dante’s doubts have the same retardatory and ambivalent effects as desire, in that each answer, albeit perfect and perfectly satisfying in itself, reveals now uncharted territories that the mind can never hope or presume to possess in advance of a revelation that is persistently deferred.” Translations are taken from The Consolation of Philosophy, translated by V. Watts. See Benvenuto da Imola, ddp ad Inferno 5, 123: “e ciò sa il tuo dottore, idest Virgilius. Et hoc exponitur multipliciter uno modo, quia Virgilius in vita spoliatus est bonis suis ab Augusto, sicut et alii Mantuani, ut sepe patet in libro Buccolicorum, et sic expertus fuerat istum casum mutationis fortunae; vel etiam quia vixerat in mundo in tanta gloria et gratia incliti principis Augusti; nunc vero post mortem erat damnatus in indignatione summi Imperatoris eterni; vel hoc dixit allegorice, quia Virgilius, idest ratio Dantis sciebat hoc quia relegatus in exilium; sed quicquid dicatur credo quod autor solummodo vult confirmare istam sententiam autoritate Virgilii; ideo dicit: e ciò sa il tuo dottore, quia scilicet Virgilius ponit similem modum loquendi quem facit Eneas Didoni narraturus excidium Trojae.” See the whole passage in Aeneid 2, 3–13: “Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem, / Troianas ut opes et lamentabile regnum / eruerint Danai, quaeque ipse miserrima vidi / et quorum pars magna fui. quis talia fando / Myrmidonum Dolopumve aut duri miles Ulixi / temperet a lacrimis? et iam nox umida caelo / praecipitat suadentque cadentia sidera somnos. / Sed si tantus amor casus cognoscere nostros /et breviter Troiae supremum audire laborem, / quamquam

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animus meminisse horret luctuque refugit, / incipiam”). For these lines see R. Hollander, Allegory in Dante’s “Commedia,” 110–11. The souls in the campi lugentes, among which is the soul of Dido, are said to be still preoccupied by life’s cares: “curae non ipsa in morte relinquunt” (Aeneid 6, 444), and those in the Elysian Fields still go back to the joys of arms and battle: “quae gratia currum / armorumque fuit vivis, quae cura nitentis / pascere equos, eadem sequitur tellure reposto ” (Aeneid 6, 653–5). See for instance Consolatio Philosophiae 2, poem 4: “Quisquis volet perennem / cautus ponere sedem / stabilisque nec sonori / sterni flatibus Euri / et fluctibus minantem / curat spernere pontum, / montis cacumen alti, / bibulas vitet harenas. / Illud protervus Auster / totis viribus urguet, / hae pendulum solutae / pondus ferre recusant. / Fugiens periculosam / sortem sedis amoenae / humili domum memento / certus figere saxo. / Quamvis tonet ruinis / miscens aequora ventus, / tu conditus quieti / felix robore valli, / duces serenus aevum / ridens aetheris iras.” Consolatio Philosophiae 2, poem 8: “Quod mundus stabili fide / concordes variat vices, / quod pugnantia semina / foedus perpetuum tenent, / quod Phoebus roseum diem / curru provehit aureo, / ut, quas duxerit Hesperos / Phoebe noctibus imperet, / ut fluctus avidum mare / certo fine coerceat, / ne terris liceat vagis / latos tendere terminos, / hanc rerum seriem ligat / terras ac pelagus regens / et caelo imperitans amor. / Hic si frena remiserit, / quidquid nunc amat invicem, / bellum continuo geret, / et quam nunc socia fide / pulchris motibus incitant, / certent solvere machinam. / Hic sancto populos quoque / iunctos foedere continet, / hic et coniugii sacrum / castis nectit amoribus, / hic fidis etiam sua / dictat iura sodalibus. / O felix hominum genus, / si vestros animos amor, / quo caelum regitur, regat!” Dante celebrates Boethius in the tenth canto of Paradiso: “Per vedere ogne ben dentro vi gode / l’anima santa che ’l mondo fallace / fa manifesto a chi di lei ben ode. / Lo corpo ond’ ella fu cacciata giace / giuso in Cieldauro; ed essa da martiro / e da essilio venne a questa pace” (10, 124–9). For the influence of Boethius on Dante see F. Tateo, “Boezio” in Enciclopedia Dantesca 1, 654–8. S. Carrai, Dante elegiaco. Una chiave di lettura per la Vita Nuova, emphasizes the influence of Boethius in the Vita Nuova, which he reads as a “elegiac” work, noting that in the Middle Ages, elegy (of which the Consolation of Philosophy was considered one of the foremost examples) was not connected to form but rather to content: Dante himself defines it “stylus miserorum” (De vulgari eloquentia 2, iv, 5–6). Francesca, phrasing the Boethian reference as misery (“miseria”), might bring into canto 5 also this further stylistic/ moral dimension. Convivio 2, xii, 2–6: “Tuttavia, dopo alquanto tempo, la mia mente, che si argomentava di sanare, provide, poi che né ’l mio né l’altrui consolare valea, ritornare al modo che alcuno sconsolato avea tenuto a consolarsi; e misimi a leggere quello non conosciuto da molti libro di Boezio, nel quale, cattivo e discacciato, consolato s’avea. E udendo ancora che Tulio scritto avea un altro

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libro, nel quale, trattando dell’Amistade, avea toccate parole della consolazione di Lelio, uomo eccellentissimo, nella morte di Scipione amico suo, misimi a leggere quello. E avegna che duro mi fosse nella prima entrare nella loro sentenza, finalmente v’entrai tanto entro, quanto l’arte di gramatica ch’io avea e un poco di mio ingegno potea fare; per lo quale ingegno molte cose, quasi come sognando, già vedea, sì come nella Vita Nova si può vedere. E sì come essere suole che l’uomo va cercando argento e fuori della ’ntenzione truova oro, lo quale occulta cagione presenta; non forse sanza divino imperio, io, che cercava di consolar me, trovai non solamente alle mie lagrime rimedio, ma vocabuli d’autori e di scienze e di libri: li quali considerando, giudicava bene che la filosofia, che era donna di questi autori, di queste scienze e di questi libri, fosse somma cosa. Ed imaginava lei fatta come una donna gentile, e non la poteva imaginare in atto alcuno se non misericordioso; per che sì volentieri lo senso di vero la mirava, che appena lo potea volgere da quella.” For the Boethian subtext of Purgatorio 2 see J. Freccero, “Casella’s Song.” Dante is here quoting Thomas Aquinas, Sententia libri Ethicorum 1, x, 130 and Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics 1, 6, 12–18. See Poletto, Steiner, Scartezzini-Vandelli, Fallani, Singleton, and Fosca in ddp ad Inferno 5, 121. Summa Theologiae 1a–2ae, q. 32, a. 2 co: “ad delectationem tria requiruntur, scilicet duo quorum est coniunctio delectabilis; et tertium, quod est cognitio huius coniunctionis.” Summa Theologiae 1a–2ae, q. 32, a. 2 co: “Naturalis autem habitudo in quadam mensura consistit. Et ideo quando continuata praesentia delectabilis superexcedit mensuram naturalis habitudinis, efficitur remotio eius delectabilis. Ex parte vero ipsius cognitionis, quia homo desiderat cognoscere aliquod totum et perfectum. Cum ergo aliqua non poterunt apprehendi tota simul, delectat in his transmutatio, ut unum transeat et alterum succedat, et sic totum sentiatur. Unde Augustinus dicit, in iv Confess., non vis utique stare syllabam, sed transvolare, ut aliae veniant, et totum audias. Ita semper omnia ex quibus unum aliquid constat, et non sunt omnia simul, plus delectant omnia quam singula, si possint sentiri omnia.” Summa Theologiae 1a–2ae, q. 32, a. 3 co: “Et quia maior est coniunctio secundum rem quam secundum similitudinem, quae est coniunctio cognitionis; itemque maior est coniunctio rei in actu quam in potentia, ideo maxima est delectatio quae fit per sensum, qui requirit praesentiam rei sensibilis. Secundum autem gradum tenet delectatio spei, in qua non solum est delectabilis coniunctio secundum apprehensionem, sed etiam secundum facultatem vel potestatem adipiscendi bonum quod delectat. Tertium autem gradum tenet delectatio memoriae, quae habet solam coniunctionem apprehensionis.” Summa Theologiae 1a–2ae, q. 32, a. 3 ad 3: “etiam amor et concupiscentia delectationem causant. Omne enim amatum fit delectabile amanti, eo quod amor est quaedam unio vel connaturalitas amantis ad amatum. Similiter etiam omne concupitum est delectabile concupiscenti, cum concupiscentia sit praecipue appetitus delectationis. Sed tamen spes, inquantum importat

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quandam certitudinem realis praesentiae boni delectantis, quam non importat nec amor nec concupiscentia, magis ponitur causa delectationis quam illa. Et similiter magis quam memoria, quae est de eo quod iam transit.” Summa Theologiae 1a–2ae, q. 32, a. 4 co: “Respondeo dicendum quod tristitia potest dupliciter considerari, uno modo, secundum quod est in actu; alio modo, secundum quod est in memoria. Et utroque modo tristitia potest esse delectationis causa. Tristitia siquidem in actu existens est causa delectationis, inquantum facit memoriam rei dilectae, de cuius absentia aliquis tristatur, et tamen de sola eius apprehensione delectatur. Memoria autem tristitiae fit causa delectationis, propter subsequentem evasionem. Nam carere malo accipitur in ratione boni, unde secundum quod homo apprehendit se evasisse ab aliquibus tristibus et dolorosis, accrescit ei gaudii materia.” See also the following reply to the third objection, where we find the same wording as Summa Theologiae 2a–2ae 36 on envy: “tristia memorata, inquantum sunt tristia et delectabilibus contraria, non causant delectationem, sed inquantum ab eis homo liberatur. Et similiter memoria delectabilium, ex eo quod sunt amissa, potest causare tristitiam.” Francesco da Buti, ddp ad Inferno 5, 129: “Soli eravamo. Qui è da notare che donne et uomini non istanno mai bene soli, quantunque vi sia parentado, perchè il parentado cessa lo sospetto, et allora si fanno le cose più a sicurtà; e però aggiugne: e sanza alcun sospetto; altrimente si può intendere che non aveano sospetto d’essere il di’ compresi da alcuno, altrimenti non aveano sospetto l’uno dell’altro di tale amore: chè benchè s’amassono, non v’era sospetto di disordinato amore, non aveva ancora veduto alcuno segno, perchè sospicasse che fosse nell’altro.” Modern commentators tend to embrace the “positive” reading, see for instance Sapegno, ddp ad idem. For the tradition of the Lancelot and its reflections in Italy and in Dante see P. Toynbee, “Dante and the Lancelot Romance”; V. Crescini, L’episodio di Francesca and “II bacio di Ginevra e il bacio di Paolo”; D. Delcorno Branca, Tristano e Lancillotto in Italia. Studi di letteratura arturiana; D. Maddox, “The Arthurian Intertexts of Inferno v”; L. Renzi, Le conseguenze di un bacio, 31–51. “Dame fait il, je vingt devant vous quant je oi pris congié de mon signour le roi tous armés fors de mon chief et de mes mains, si vous commandai a Diu et dis que je estoie vostre chevaliers en quelque lieu que je fuisse; et vous desistes que vostres chevaliers et vos amis voliés vous que je fuisse. Et je vous dis: ‘A Dieu, dame!’ Et vous desistes: ‘Alés, a Diu biaus dous amis,’ ne onque puis del cuer ne me pot issir. Ce fu li mos qui prodome me fera, ne onques puis ne ving a si gran meschief que de cel mot ne me souvenist. Cis mos me conforte en tous anuis. Cis mos m’a de tous mals garanti et gari de tous perils. Cis mos me saoule en tous me fains. Cis mos me fait riche en toutes mes povertés.” The Lancelot is quoted from Le livre du Graal, vol. 2, D. Poiron ed., quotation on 577–8. In the actual scene at the beginning of the text, the mention of friendship is followed by a thrilling touch of the queen’s hand: “A Diu, fait ele, biaus dous amis.’ Et il respont entre ses dens: ‘Grans mercis, dame, quant il

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vous plaist que je le soie.’ Atant l’en lieve la roïne par la main sus, et il en est moult a aise dedens son cuer” (289). Renzi, Le conseguenze di un bacio, 34–7. The text of Lancelot emphasizes the contractual aspect of the kiss: “Dame, fait Galehols, grans mercis. Et je vous proi que vous li donnés vostre amour, et que vous le prendés a vostre chevalier a tous jors, et devenés sa loial dame a tous les jours de vostre vie: et puis si l’avrés fait plus riche que se vous li aviés donné tout le monde. – Ensi, fait ele, l’otroi je, que il soit tous miens et je toute soie, et que par vous soient amendé tout li mesfaits et li trespas de couvenans. – Dame, fait Galehols, grans mercis. Mais ore couvient conmencement de seürté. – Vous n’en deviserés ja chose, fait la roïne, que je n’en face. – Dame, dont le baisiés devant moi pour conmencement d’amour vraie” (Lancelot, 581–2). On medieval companionship see R. Hyatte, The Arts of Friendship: the Idealization of Friendship in Medieval and Renaissance Europe; S. Kay, The Chanson de Geste in the Age of Romance, 145–72; and M.J. Ailes, “The Medieval Male Couple and the Language of Homosociality.” For these two positions see in particolar Renzi, Le conseguenze di una bacio and Maddox, “The Arthurian Intertexts of Inferno v.” Renzi, Le conseguenze di un bacio, 37. See the whole text in the Tristano Panciatichiano, 121: “E stando uno giorno, e giucando a scacchi Tristano et madonna Ysotta la bronda, e nnon pensava l’uno inverso l’altro altro che tutto honore, et loro cuore non pensava alcuna follia di folle amore. Avendo giucato giuochi due eterano sopra lo terço et era grande caldo. Et Tristano disse a Governale, ‘Elli mi fa grande sete.’ Allora andò Governale a Branguina per dare loro bere, et preseno li fiaschi dov’era lo beraggio amoroso non conoscendo che fusse desso. Allora lavò Governale una coppa, e Branguina mescette ne la coppa. Et Governale diere prima bere a Tristano et Tristano la beve piena perciò ch’elli avea grande sete. L’altra coppa diede a madonna Ysotta, ed ella iscoloe la coppa interra e la grande sete ch’ella avea. Adesso cambiò Tristano il suo coraggio e non fu piue in quello senno ch’era di prima et madonna Ysotta lo somigliante. Et incominciarono a pensare et a guardare l’un l’altro et chiascheuno si sforça di compiere quel giuoco. Et ançi ch’elli compieseno quello g[i]uoco, si si partirono e andarone di sotto in una camera, et incominciano a fare quel giuoco insieme che in tutta lor vita non ebbe fine et sempre vi g[i]ucarono volentieri.” S. Gaunt, Love and Death, 104–28. Maddox, “The Arthurian Intertexts of Inferno v,” 118. On the theme of Romanesque behaviour see M. Stanesco, Jeux d’errance du chevalier médiéval. C. Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, 140–46, quotation on 141. Moevs (143, 158) sees this point as the radical opposite of Paolo and Francesca’s “punto” – the heavenly point being an instance of “self-sacrificial” love and the point in the book to “sensual love.” See also Moevs, “‘Il punto che mi vinse’: Incarnation, Revelation, and Self-Knowledge in Dante’s Commedia.” Hollander, ddp ad Paradiso 30, 11.

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35 As Amilcare Iannucci points out (“Dante autore televisivo,” 116–18), this notion of fastidium is put sharply into relief in T. Phillips and P. Greenaway’s TV Dante through the triple repetition of the anaphora lines, the last of which is filmed in black and white and pronounced with a flat and bored tone. 36 The peremptoriness of the “never” uttered by Francesca also possibly contains the first veiled allusion in the Comedy to the theme of the resurrection of the body – that of two bodies indeed linked together for eternity. The first actual mention of the theme of resurrection takes place in the following canto, Inferno 6, 94–111. 37 M. Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie, 383 quoted by W. Frijhoff in “The Kiss Sacred and Profane: Reflections on a Cross-Cultural Confrontation,” 223. Several disciplines are implicated in the study of the act of kissing, including anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, history, art history, literary studies, and media studies. For an introduction to the anthropological/historical aspect of the question see W. Frijhoff, “The Kiss Sacred and Profane,” and N.J. Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane, 1–11. For a concise psychoanalytical perspective see A. Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, 99–107. For some historical perspectives on the kiss see The Kiss in History, K. Harvey ed. For the kiss in the Middle Ages see in particular: N.J. Perrella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane; Y. Carré, Le baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Age; M. Camille, “Gothic Signs and the Surplus: The Kiss on the Cathedral”; and K. Petkov, The Kiss of Peace: Ritual, Self, and Society in the High and Late Medieval West. 38 Carré, Le baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Age, 19. 39 J. Le Goff, “The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage,” 255. 40 Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane, 63–83. 41 Carré, Le baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Age, 312. 42 De Amore 1, 6, 470–1: “Et purus quidem amor est, qui omnimoda dilectionis affectione duorum amantium corda coniungit. Hic autem in mentis contemplatione cordisque consistit affectu; procedit autem usque ad oris osculum lacertique amplexum et verecundum amantis nudae contactum, extremo praetermisso solatio; nam illud pure amare volentibus exercere non licet.” Cappellanus enlists the kiss as the second of four degrees of love: hope, kiss, touches, and intercourse: “Ab antiquo quatuor sunt gradus in amore constituti distincti. Primus in spei datione consistit, secundus in osculi exhibitione, tertius in amplexus fruitione, quartus in totius personae concessione finitur.” Carré (Le baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Age, 62–3) notices that traditionally in medieval culture, and notably in the poetry of the Goliards, the steps of love life are five: sight, encounter, touch, kiss, and intercourse. 43 Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane, 123. 44 Carré, Le baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Age, 71. 45 On this point see in particular Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane, 100–4. 46 Carré, Le baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Age, 323–36. 47 Purgatorio 32, 148–53: “Sicura, quasi rocca in alto monte, / seder sovresso una puttana sciolta / m’apparve con le ciglia intorno pronte; / e come perché

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non li fosse tolta, / vidi di costa a lei dritto un gigante; / e basciavansi insieme alcuna volta.” The whore is later described as lustful, indeed lusting after Dante: “Ma perché l’occhio cupido e vagante / a me rivolse, quel feroce drudo / la flagellò dal capo infin le piante” (Purgatorio 32, 154–6). For this passage, see E. Lombardi, “‘Che libido fe’ licito in sua legge.’ Lust and Law, Reason and Passion in Dante.” Paradiso 25, 19–24: “Sì come quando il colombo si pone / presso al compagno, l’uno a l’altro pande, / girando e mormorando, l’affezione; / così vid’ ïo l’un da l’altro grande / principe glorïoso essere accolto, / laudando il cibo che là sù li prande.” On the affective nature of this simile and on its classical antecedents see A. Roncaglia, Il canto XXVI del ‘Purgatorio,’ 11–12. Sermo 2, 1: “Ardorem desiderii Patrum suspirantium Christi a carne praesentiam frequentissime cogitans, compungor et confundor in memetipso; et nunc vix contineo lacrymas, ita pudet teporis torporisque miserabilium temporum horum. Cui namque nostrum tantum ingerat gaudium gratiae hujus exhibitio, quantum sanctis veteribus accenderat desiderium promissio? Ecce enim quam multi in hac ejus, quae proxime celebranda est, Nativitate gaudebunt! sed utinam de nativitate, non de vanitate! Illorum ergo desiderium flagrans et piae exspectationis affectum spirat mihi vox ista: Osculetur me osculo oris sui. Senserat nimirum in spiritu, quisquis tunc spiritualis esse poterat, quanta foret gratia diffusa in labiis illis. Propterea loquens in desiderio animae aiebat, Osculetur me osculo oris sui; nimirum omnimodis cupiens tantae suavitatis participio non fraudari.” Sermo 2, 3: “Sit os osculans, Verbum assumens; osculatum, caro quae assumitur: osculum vero, quod pariter ab osculante et osculato conficitur, persona ipsa scilicet ex utroque compacta, mediator Dei et hominum homo Christus Jesus. Hac ergo ratione sanctorum nemo dicere praesumebat, Osculetur me ore suo; sed tantum, Osculo oris sui: ipsi sane servantes praerogativam istam, cui singulariter semelque os Verbi impressum tunc est, cum ei se corporaliter plenitudo omnis divinitatis indulsit. Felix osculum, ac stupenda dignatione mirabile, in quo non os ori imprimitur, sed Deus homini unitur. Et ibi quidem contactus labiorum complexum significat animorum: hic autem confoederatio naturarum divinis humana componit, quae in terra sunt, et quae in coelis pacificans.” Sermo 3, 1: “Ego arbitror neminem vel scire posse quid sit, nisi qui accipit: est quippe manna absconditum; et solus qui edit, adhuc esuriet. Est fons signatus, cui non communicat alienus; sed solus qui bibit, adhuc sitiet. Audi expertum, quomodo requirit. Redde mihi, inquit, laetitiam salutaris tui.” Sermo 4, 1: “Puto enim, facies ipsa eloquii facile admonet et ista requirere. Mirum vero si non et vos advertitis, oportere revera esse aliud, sive alia oscula, a quibus illud oris distinguere voluit qui dixit: Osculetur me osculo oris sui. Cur enim, cum sufficere poterat dixisse simpliciter, osculetur me; praeter morem tamen usumque loquendi, distincte et signanter adjecit, osculo oris sui, nisi ut ostenderet ipsum, quod petebat osculum, summum esse, non

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solum? Nonne denique ita invicem loquimur: Osculare me; vel: Da mihi osculum: et nemo sequitur ut dicat Ore tuo, sive, Osculo oris tui? Quid? alterutrum osculari parantes, tuum versus invicem ora tendimus, quae tamen ab invicem non requirimus nominatim?” Sermo 7, 2: “Osculetur, inquit, me osculo oris sui. Quis dicit? Sponsa. Quaenam ipsa? Anima sitiens Deum. Sed pono diversas affectiones, ut ea quae proprie sponsae congruit, distinctius elucescat. Si servus est, timet a facie Domini; si mercenarius, sperat de manu Domini; si discipulus, aurem parat magistro; si filius, honorat patrem; quae vero osculum postulat, amat. Excellit in naturae donis affectio haec amoris, praesertim cum ad suum recurrit principium, quod est Deus. Nec sunt inventa aeque dulcia nomina, quibus Verbi, animaeque dulces ad invicem exprimerentur affectus, quemadmodum sponsus et sponsa: quippe quibus omnia communia sunt, nil proprium, nil a se divisum habentibus … Amat autem quae osculum petit. Non petit libertatem, non mercedem, non haereditatem, non denique vel doctrinam, sed osculum; more plane castissimae sponsae ac sacrum spirantis amorem, nec omnino valentis flammam dissimulare quam patitur. Vide enim quale praeripiat sermonis exordium. Magnum quid a magno petitura, nullo tamen, ut assolet, utitur blanditiarum fuco; nullis circumvolutionibus ad id quod desiderat ambit. Non facit prooemium, non captat benevolentiam; sed ex abundantia cordis repente prorumpens, nude frontoseque satis: Osculetur me, ait, osculo oris sui.” Sermo 8, 8: “Et ut apertius alterutrum distinguamus, qui plenitudinem capit, osculum de ore sumit; qui vero de plenitudine, osculum de osculo recipit. Magnus quidem Paulus: sed quantumlibet sursum porrigat os, etiamsi se usque ad tertium coelum extendat, citra os Altissimi tamen necesse est ut remaneat, et modo suo contentus in se subsistat; et cum pertingere ad vultum gloriae non valebit, condescendi sibi, et ex alto transmitti osculum humiliter petat. Qui vero non rapinam arbitratur esse se aequalem Deo, ita ut audeat dicere: Ego et Pater unum sumus; quia ex aequo conjungitur, ex aeque complectitur, non osculum de loco inferiori mendicat, sed pari celsitudine os ori conjungit, et singulari praerogativa osculum de ore sumit. Christo igitur osculum est plenitudo, Paulo participatio; ut cum ille de ore, iste tantum de osculo osculatum se glorietur.” Interestingly, Bernard concludes his cycle of sermons on the kiss by comparing the desiring state of the bride to that of his brothers in their process of acquiring understanding and knowledge. Sermo 9, 3: “Plerique vestrum mihi quoque, ut memini, in privatis confessionibus suis conqueri solent super hujuscemodi animi arentis languore atque hebetudine stolidae mentis, quod Dei scilicet alta atque subtilia penetrare nequeant, quod de suavitate spiritus aut nil, aut parum sentiant. Quid isti, nisi ad osculum suspirant? Suspirant plane, et inhiant spiritui sapientiae et intellectus: intellectus utique quo pertingant; sapientiae, quia gustent quod intellectu apprehenderint.” Sermo 7, 4: “Verecunde tamen non ad ipsum sponsum sermonem dirigit, sed ad alios, tanquam de absente: Osculetur me, inquiens, osculo oris sui. Grandis quippe res petitur, et opus est verecundia comitari precem, commendari

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petentem. Itaque per domesticos et intimos, accessus ad intima quaeritur, ambitur ad desideratum. Quinam illi? Credimus angelos sanctos astare orantibus, offerre Deo preces et vota hominum: ubi tamen sine ira et disceptatione levari puras manus perspexerint.” Renzi, Le conseguenze di un bacio, 25–8. Renzi quotes also one line from the Mare amoroso, the mysterious Tuscan “encyclopaedia” of love from the time of Dante. Here, however, the author is describing a hypothetical rather than an actual kiss on the mouth, located within the description of the beauty of a woman: “la bocca, piccioletta e colorita, / vermiglia come rosa di giardino, / piagente ed amorosa per basciare” (98–100). The most obvious pastourelle is Cavalcanti’s (Rime 46): “In un boschetto trova’ pasturella / più che la stella – bella, al mi’ parere. / Cavelli avea biondetti e ricciutelli, / e gli occhi pien’ d’amor, cera rosata; / con sua verghetta pasturav’ agnelli; / [di]scalza, di rugiada era bagnata; / cantava come fosse ’namorata: / er’ adornata – di tutto piacere. / D’amor la saluta’ mantenente / e domandai s’avesse compagnia; / ed ella mi rispose dolzemente / che sola sola per lo bosco gia, / e disse: – Sacci, quando l’augel pia, / allor disïa – ‘l me’ cor drudo avere / Po’ che mi disse di sua condizione /e per lo bosco augelli audìo cantare, / fra me stesso diss’ I’: – Or è stagione / di questa pasturella gio’ pigliare. / Merzé le chiesi sol che di basciare / ed abracciar, – se le fosse ’n volere. / Per man mi prese, d’amorosa voglia, / e disse che donato m’avea ’l core; / menòmmi sott’ una freschetta foglia, / là dov’i’ vidi fior’ d’ogni colore; / e tanto vi sentìo gioia e dolzore, che ’l dio d’amore – mi parea vedere.” Da Maiano’s poem describes a dream or vision, and it is connected to the genre of the pastourelle for the vague spring-time setting and the explicit sexual intention: “Provedi, saggio, ad esta visione, / e per mercé ne trai vera sentenza. / Dico: una donna di bella fazone, / di cu’ el meo cor gradir molto s’agenza, / mi fé d’una ghirlanda donagione, / verde, fronzuta, con bella accoglienza: / appresso mi trovai per vestigione / camicia di suo dosso, a mia parvenza. / Allor di tanto, amico, mi francai, / che dolcemente presila abbracciare: / non sì contese, ma ridea la bella. / Così ridendo, molto la baciai: / del più non dico, ché mi fè giurare. / E morta, ch’è mia madre, era con ella” (text from Dante’s Rime, 49). It is worth recalling here Dante’s response to Da Maiano’s vision, which does not tackle the sexual aspect of the friend’s poem: (Rime, 50) “Savete giudicar vostra ragione, / o om che pregio di saver portate; / per che, vitando aver con voi quistion, / com so rispondo a le parole ornate. / Disio verace, u’ rado fin si pone, / che mosse di valore o di bieltate, / imagina l’amica oppinïone / significasse il don che pria narrate. / Lo vestimento, aggiate vera spene / che fia, da lei cui desiate, amore; / e ’n ciò provide vostro spirto bene: / dico, pensando l’ovra sua d’allore. / La figura che già morta sorvene / è la fermezza ch’averà nel core.” For the pastourelle see M. Zink, La pastourelle. Poésie et folklore au Moyen Age; W. Jackson, “The Pastourelle as a Satirical Genre”; J. Ferrante, “Male

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Fantasy and Female Reality in Courtly Literature”; K. Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law. De Amore 1, 11: “Si vero et illarum te feminarum amor forte attraxerit, eas pluribus laudibus efferre memento, et, si locum inveneris opportunum, non differas assumere quod petebas et violento potiri amplexu. Vix enim ipsarum in tantum exterius poteris mitigare rigorem, quod quietos fateantur se tibi concessuras amplexus vel optata patiantur te habere solatia, nisi modicae saltem coactionis medela praecedat ipsarum opportuna pudoris. Haec autem dicimus non quasi rusticanarum mulierum tibi suadere volentes amorem, sed ut, si minus provide ad illas provoceris amandum, brevi possis doctrina cognoscere quis tibi sit processus habendus.” Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens, 119. J. Leclercq, Monks and Love, 122. The fur has quite obvious sexual connotation as it suggests by transposition the female organ. Gravdal (Ravishing Maidens, 109) quotes a pastourelle in which “fur” is explicitly connected to the female organ and to rape: “Desous soi la ploie / et trois fois la besa; / desceint li sa corroie / et puis dit li a: ‘J’abaterai la croie / du peliçon Maroie.’” See R. Poggioli, “Tragedy or Romance? A Reading of the Paolo and Francesca Episode in Dante’s Inferno.” Torraca, “Il canto v dell’Inferno,” 411–12. Although the town of Gradara has made of its Malatesta castle a tourist attraction in the name of Paolo and Francesca, the location of the affair is rather unknown, as are many other aspects of the historical “reality” of the two lovers. Contini, “Dante come personaggio-poeta della Commedia,” 42. M. Stanesco, “Le chevalier dans la ville: le modèle Romanesque et ses métamorphoses bourgeoises.” The theme of the inevitability of love is displayed in particular within the dialogue between a commoner and a noble lady (De Amore 1, 6, B), and the theme of gentleness in the dialogue between a commoner and a woman of the higher nobility (De Amore 1, 6, C). See Contini, “Dante come personaggio-poeta della Commedia”; Sanguineti, “Il realismo di Dante,” 288; and R. Girard, “The Mimetic Desire of Paolo and Francesca.” Text and translations taken from The Romance of Flamenca, edited and translated by E.D. Blodgett. Interestingly, in this second instance of kissing of the book, while Flamenca is represented kissing the book with her mouth again (“de sa bella boca ’l baia,” 3203), Guillem dives into the book, touching it with all the parts of his face (forehead, eye, and chin) except the mouth. Flamenca, 3189–92: “Quan Guillems lo sauteri tenc / totz le cors de joi li revenc / et son capion si rescont / et ab lo libre tocha.l front / los uilz e.l mento e la cara.” M. Amsler, “Affective Literacy: Gestures of Reading in the Later Middle

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Ages.” See especially 98: “When a reader kisses Christ’s face on the page, the semiotic gesture remotivates the reading lips as a complex site of oral/aural textual production, the locus of pious, erotic desire, and an embodiment of the ingestion metaphor linking the Eucharist and reading.” Among the several kisses of the Fiore, Renzi singles out the kiss in 20, 13, in which the lover kisses the flower “with great trembling,” which recalls Paolo’s “all trembling.” The context is, however, fairly different: “E disse: Vien avanti e bascia ’l fiore; / Ma guarda di far cosa che mi spiaccia, / Ché·ttu ne perderesti ogne mio amore / Sì ch’i’ alor feci croce de le braccia, / E sì ’l basciai con molto gran tremore, / Sì forte ridottava suo minaccia” (20, 9–14). I also find quite interesting the kiss on the mouth between the lover and Love, which marks their loyalty at the end of sonnet 2 (11–13): “E quelli allor mi puose, in veritate, / La sua boc[c]a a la mia, sanz’ altro aresto, / E disse: Pensa di farmi lealtate.” For the question of the mouth in Dante and the refractions in and from Vita Nuova and Convivio see P. Valesio, “Inferno v: The Fierce Dove,” especially 15–18. Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore, 51–6: “De li occhi suoi, come ch’ella li mova, / escono spirti d’amore inflammati, / che fèron li occhi a qual che allor la guati, / e passan sì che ’l cor ciascun retrova: / voi le vedete Amor pinto nel viso, / là ’ve non pote alcun mirarla fiso.” The point is restated in Vita Nuova 22, in the commentary to Negli occhi porta la mia donna Amore, where the operations of the mouth are described solely as speech and smile: “Poscia quando dico: Ogne dolcezza, dico quello medesimo che detto è ne la prima parte, secondo due atti de la sua bocca; l’uno de li quali è lo suo dolcissimo parlare, e l’altro lo suo mirabile riso; salvo che non dico di questo ultimo come adopera ne li cuori altrui, però che la memoria non puote ritenere lui né sua operazione.” Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona, 56–7: “Cose appariscon ne lo suo aspetto / che mostran de’ piacer di Paradiso, / dico ne li occhi e nel suo dolce riso.” The text is glossed in Convivio 3, viii, 6–12: “E però che potrebbe alcuno avere domandato dove questo mirabile piacere appare in costei, distinguo nella sua persona due parti, nelle quali l’umana piacenza e dispiacenza più appare. Onde è da sapere che in qualunque parte l’anima più adopera del suo officio, che quella più fissamente intende ad adornare, e più sottilmente quivi adopera. Onde vedemo che nella faccia dell’uomo, là dove fa più del suo officio che in alcuna parte di fuori, tanto sottilmente intende, che, per sottigliarsi quivi tanto quanto nella sua materia puote, nullo viso ad altro viso è simile: perché l’ultima potenza della materia, la quale [è] in tutti quasi dissimile, quivi si riduce in atto. E però che nella faccia massimamente in due luoghi opera l’anima – però che in quelli due luoghi quasi tutte e tre le nature dell’anima hanno giurisdizione – cioè nelli occhi e nella bocca quelli massimamente adorna e quivi pone lo ’ntento tutto a fare bello, se puote. E in questi due luoghi dico io che appariscono questi piaceri dicendo: ‘nelli occhi e nel suo dolce riso.’ Li quali due luoghi, per bella similitudine, si possono

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appellare balconi della donna che nel dificio del corpo abita, cioè l’anima: però che quivi, avegna che quasi velata, spesse volte si dimostra. Dimostrasi nelli occhi tanto manifesta, che conoscer si può la sua presente passione, chi bene là mira. Onde, con ciò sia cosa che sei passioni siano propie dell’anima umana, delle quali fa menzione lo Filosofo nella sua Rettorica, cioè grazia, zelo, misericordia, invidia, [amore] e vergogna, di nulla di queste puote l’anima essere passionata che alla finestra delli occhi non vegna la sembianza, se per grande vertù dentro non si chiude. Onde alcuno già si trasse li occhi, perché la vergogna [di] dentro non paresse di fuori: sì come dice Stazio poeta del tebano Edipo, quando dice che ’con etterna notte solvette lo suo dannato pudore.’ Dimostrasi nella bocca quasi come colore dopo vetro. E che è ridere se non una corruscazione della dilettazione dell’anima, cioè uno lume apparente di fuori secondo sta dentro? E però si conviene all’uomo, a dimostrare la sua anima nell’alegrezza moderata, moderatamente ridere, con onesta severitade e con poco movimento della sua faccia; sì che [la] donna che allora si dimostra, come detto è, paia modesta e non dissoluta. Onde ciò fare ne comanda lo Libro delle quattro vertù cardinali: ‘Lo tuo riso sia sanza cachinno,’ cioè sanza schiamazzare come gallina. Ahi mirabile riso della mia donna, di cu’ io parlo, che mai non si sentia se non dell’occhio!” Convivio 3, xv, 2: “Dice adunque lo testo ‘che ne la faccia di costei appariscono cose che mostrano de’ piaceri di Paradiso; e distingue lo loco dove ciò appare, cioè ne li occhi e ne lo riso. E qui si conviene sapere che li occhi de la Sapienza sono le sue demonstrazioni, con le quali si vede la veritade certissimamente; e lo suo riso sono le sue persuasioni, ne le quali si dimostra la luce interiore de la Sapienza sotto alcuno velamento: e in queste due cose si sente quel piacere altissimo di beatitudine, lo quale è massimo bene in Paradiso.” Paradiso 3, 10–15: “Quali per vetri trasparenti e tersi, / o ver per acque nitide e tranquille, / non sì profonde che i fondi sien persi, / tornan d’i nostri visi le postille / debili sì, che perla in bianca fronte / non vien men forte a le nostre pupille.” Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane, 125 points out a section in the Flamenca (6658 ff.) that is dedicated to the “discussion of the relative merits and roles of the eyes and the mouth in love.” Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane, 156 identifies a parallel between Paolo and Francesca and Dante and Beatrice, in the latter couple’s encounter at the top of the Purgatory (Purgatorio 31, 136–8: “Per grazia fa noi grazia che disvele / a lui la bocca tua, sì che discerna / la seconda bellezza che tu cele”). However, this mouth, which is often connected with the passage from Convivio 3 quoted above, is mostly taken to mean Beatrice’s smile. Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, 99.

ch apt e r s i x 1 For reading in the middle ages see E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 302–407; B. Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written

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Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries; Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge and the Ethics of Interpretation; and After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text; A. Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written Culture; D.H. Green, Medieval Listening and Reading: The Primary Reception of German Literature 800–1300 and Women Readers in the Middle Ages; M.J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture; P. Saenger, The Space Between Words:The Origins of Silent Reading; A. Classen (ed.), The Book and the Magic of Reading in the Middle Ages; J.A. Szirmai, The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding; M. Amsler, “Affective Literacy: Gestures of Reading in the Later Middle Ages”; K. Busby, Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript. Green, Women Readers in the Middle Ages, passim. Ibid., 6. For the devotional aspect see M. Amsler, “Affective Literacy: Gestures of Reading in the Later Middle Ages.” G.B. Conte, Memoria dei poeti e sistema letterario. Confessions 13, 18: “Laudent nomen tuum, laudent te supercaelestes populi angelorum tuorum, qui non opus habent suspicere firmamentum hoc et legendo cognoscere verbum tuum. Vident enim faciem tuam semper, et ibi legunt sine syllabis temporum, quid velit aeterna voluntas tua. Legunt, eligunt et diligunt; semper legunt et numquam praeterit quod legunt. Eligendo enim et diligendo legunt ipsam inconmutabilitatem consilii tui. Non clauditur codex eorum nec plicatur liber eorum.” Translations are taken from The Confessions, transl. by J.G. Pilkington, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol 1. Vita Nuova 1, i: “In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova. Sotto la quale rubrica io trovo scritte le parole le quali è mio intendimento d’assemplare in questo libello; e se non tutte, almeno la loro sentenzia.” For the reading on the human face, see Purgatorio 23, 31–3: “Parean le occhiaie anella sanza gemme: / chi nel viso de li uomini legge omo / ben avria quivi conosciuta l’emme.” The moon is featured as book in Paradiso 2, 77–8: “così questo / nel suo volume cangerebbe carte.” The contingency of the material world is figured as a quire in Paradiso 17, 37–9: “La contingenza, che fuor del quaderno / de la vostra matera non si stende, / tutta è dipinta nel cospetto etterno.” The apocalyptic (and true) book of history in which “the Persians” will read the wrongdoings of the Christian kings is mentioned in Paradiso 19, 112–14: “Che poran dir li Perse a’ vostri regi, / come vedranno quel volume aperto / nel qual si scrivon tutti suoi dispregi?” The Franciscan order is described as a volume in Paradiso 12, 121–3: “Ben dico, chi cercasse a foglio a foglio / nostro volume, ancor troveria carta / u’ leggerebbe ‘I’ mi son quel ch’i’ soglio’.” The notion of reading is applied to God in Purgatorio 3, 124–6: “Se ’l pastor di Cosenza, che a la caccia / di me fu messo per

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Clemente allora, / avesse in Dio ben letta questa faccia”; in Paradiso 15, 49– 51: “E seguì: Grato e lontano digiuno, / tratto leggendo del magno volume / du’ non si muta mai bianco né bruno”; and in Paradiso 26, 16–18: “Lo ben che fa contenta questa corte, / Alfa e O è di quanta scrittura / mi legge Amore o lievemente o forte.” In this last passage “legge” has the technical meaning of “to teach.” For Francesca as a reader see in particular A. Hatcher and M. Musa, “The Kiss: Inferno v and the Old French Prose Lancelot”; S. Noakes “The Double Misreading of Paolo and Francesca”; M. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 185–8; C. Kleinhenz, “Dante as Reader and Critic of Courtly Literature”; M. Balfour, “Francesca da Rimini and Dante’s Women Readers.” Purgatorio 22, 37–42: “E se non fosse ch’io drizzai mia cura, / quand’ io intesi là dove tu chiame, / crucciato quasi a l’umana natura: / Per che non reggi tu, o sacra fame / de l’oro, l’appetito de’ mortali? / voltando sentirei le giostre grame.” For Statius see Balfour, “Francesca da Rimini and Dante’s Women Readers,” 71, and S. Marchesi, Dante and Augustine. Purgatorio 22, 67–72: “Facesti come quei che va di notte, / che porta il lume dietro e sé non giova, / ma dopo sé fa le persone dotte, / quando dicesti: Secol si rinova; / torna giustizia e primo tempo umano, / e progenïe scende da ciel nova.” I am grateful to one of the anonymous readers of my manuscript for this reference. Balfour, “Francesca da Rimini and Dante’s Women Readers,” 74. On the illustrations on the kiss from the Lancelot, see A. Stones,“Images of Temptation, Seduction and Discovery in the Prose Lancelot: A Preliminary Note.” Green, Medieval Listening and Reading, 306. On this plate see H. Salowsky, “Ein Hinweis auf das Lanzelet–Epos Ulrichs von Zazikhoven in der Manessischen Liederhandschrift. Zum Bilde Alrams von Gresten” and M. Meuwese, “Roses, Ruse and Romance: Iconographic Relationships between the Roman de la Rose and Arthurian literature,” especially 113–15. I intend to explore the relations between Inferno 5 and the Manesse manuscript in an article that is currently in preparation. The fact that Francesca is reading in the vernacular but not in her mother tongue appears to have escaped Balfour’s analysis of Francesca as female/ vernacular reader (“Francesca da Rimini and Dante’s Women Readers,” 79–83). Green, Women Readers in the Middle Ages, 20. For women and reading see R. Copeland, “Why Women Can’t Read: Medieval Hermeneutics, Statutory Laws and the Lollard Heresy Trials.” Copeland’s argument on the literality of female reading follows that of C. Dynshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 204–05. For women readers, especially Christine de Pizan, see also S. Schibanoff, “Taking the Gold out of Egypt: The Art of Reading as a Woman”; and Green, Women Readers, 72–4.

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20 Green, Women Readers in the Middle Ages, 71–3. 21 Le débat sur le Roman de la Rose, 127. Translation from La querelle de la Rose: Letters and Documents, 126. 22 Ibid., 73. 23 Lancelot, A. Micha ed., vol 8, liia, 115. Tanslation is taken from The Lancelot Grail Reader, N.J. Lacy ed., S. Rosenberg translator. 24 Paradiso 16, 13–15: “onde Beatrice, ch’era un poco scevra, / ridendo, parve quella che tossio / al primo fallo scritto di Ginevra.” Notice that in this instance Dante, mentioning “the first fault that is written of Guinevere,” underlines the written nature of the text he is mentioning here, almost to alert his reader that this is the same “book” involved in the episode of Paolo and Francesca. 25 Critical interpretation of this change in the direction of the kiss vary. A. Hatcher and M. Musa (“The Kiss: Inferno 5 and the Old French Prose Lancelot”) exploit this detail to prove that Francesca is a deceiver: while “in reality” she indeed kissed Paolo, in the text, out of some kind of deceiving prudery she stages herself as being kissed. Such an interpretation testifies to the unflinching critical belief in Dante’s realism, which is the best compliment that can be paid to the author of the Comedy. At the other end of the spectrum we have the radically philological position of those who claim that Dante was reading a version of the Lancelot where the man kisses the woman. Pio Rajna found in Florence a manuscript in which the end of the sentence appears to read “la dame de Malehaut sot quil la besoit,” which led some to think that Dante must have had under his eyes such a manuscript when writing the story of Inferno 5. However, as Renzi points out (Le conseguenze di un bacio, 39–40), the inverted kiss (which could also be attributed to a scribe’s mistake) takes place only at the end of the sentence, and does not change the fact that the agency rests within Guinevere. On this point see also D. Delcorno Branca, Tristano e Lancillotto in Italia, 146. 26 Le livre du Graal, vol. 2, par. 598. 27 Boccaccio was the first to exploit the theme of reticentia and modesty: “Assai aconciamente mostra di volere che, senza dirlo essa, i lettor comprendano quello che dell’essere stata basciata da Polo seguitasse” (ddp ad Inferno 5, 138). Benvenuto, being quite reticent himself, compares two kinds of readings, one on the page and the other on the body (?): “quia illa die non redierunt amplius ad lecturam incoatam, quia intenderunt ad aliam lecturam quae fecit oblivisci illius lecturae primae” (ad idem). The double plan of “reading” in Benvenuto’s commentary reminds me of the double plan of “playing a game” in the love-potion scene of the Tristano Riccardiano, for which see chapter 5. Landino underlines the “honesty” of Dante’s phrasing (ad idem): “quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante: quasi dica: fummo occupati in altro, et chon honestissime parole accenna quello che sanza rossore non si può dire apertamente.” The image of the veil appears to have been used for the first time in Giusti quoted in Poletto (ad idem) and is often employed thereafter. 28 The theme of reticence is present in both Cavalcanti’s pastorella and Da

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Maiano’s vision quoted in chapter 5. Cavalcanti describes the sexual intercourse as “seeing flowers of all colors”: “per man mi prese, d’amorosa voglia, / e disse che donato m’avea ’l core; / menòmmi sott’ una freschetta foglia, / là dov’i’ vidi fior’ d’ogni colore; / e tanto vi sentìo gioia e dolzore, che ’l dio d’amore – mi parea vedere.” Da Maiano attributes his reticentia to the woman’s injunction: “così ridendo, molto la baciai: / del più non dico, ché mi fè giurare.” D. Jacquart and C. Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, 4–5. Jacquart and Thomasset point out that the Western versions of arabic scientific literature about sexuality, often going under titles such as Secretum Secretorum, became more and more esoteric, pretending to convey a highly secret knowledge. The authors quote (127–8) a very interesting passage from the tradition of the Secretum Secretorum in which the writer, when discussing coitus, suddenly stops his explanation to compare his teaching to a text written in small characters on poor paper, which could easily be destroyed: “and philosophers say that you must only write in small, fine, slender characters that are hard to decipher, and on poor quality parchment that is difficult to read and does not last long, in sentences whose meaning is hidden, because a knowledge freely transmitted and made public is of little value, whereas, if it is discovered with difficulty, it is rich in meaning and precious.” Inferno 8, 94–96: “Pensa, lettor, se io mi sconfortai / nel suon de le parole maladette, / ché non credetti ritornarci mai.” Inferno 9, 61–3: “O voi ch’avete li ‘ntelletti sani, / mirate la dottrina che s’asconde / sotto ‘l velame de li versi strani.” See M. Camille, “Gothic Signs and the Surplus. The Kiss on the Cathedral.” J. Freccero, “Bestial Sign and Bread of Angels: Inferno 32 and 33.”. T.K. Swing, The Fragile Leaves of the Sibyl, 299 and R. Hollander, Allegory in Dante’s “Commedia,” 112–13. See also Hollander ddp ad Inferno 5, 138 and Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, 158. For the conversional pattern in Inferno 5 see Hollander ddp ad Inferno 5, 8 and 118–20. I am following here the argument of my The Syntax of Desire, 45–7. Confessions 8, 12, 29: “Et ecce audio vocem de vicina domo cum canto dicentis et crebro repetentis quasi pueri an puellae, nescio: ‘Tolle lege, Tolle lege.’ Statimque mutato vultu intentissimus cogitare coepi, utrumnam solerent pueri in aliquo genere ludendi cantitare tale aliquid, nec occurrebat omnino audisse me uspiam repressoque impetu lacrimarum surrexi nihil aliud interpretans divinitus mihi iuberi, nisi ut aperirem codicem et legerem quod primum caput invenissem.” E. Lombardi, The Syntax of Desire, 45–6. Confessions 8, 12, 29: “Audieram enim de Antonio quod ex evangelica lectione, cui forte supervenerat, admonitus fuerit, tamquam sibi diceretur quod legebatur: ‘Vade vende omnia quae habes, da pauperibus et habebis thesaurum in caelis; et veni, sequere me’ et tali oraculo confestim ad te esse conversum.”

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39 Confessions 8, 12, 29: “Itaque concitus redii in eum locum, ubi sedebat Alypius; ibi enim posueram codicem Apostoli, cum inde surrexeram. Arripui, aperui et legi in silentio capitulum, quo primum coniecti sunt oculi mei: ‘Non in comessationibus et ebrietatibus, non in cubilibus et inpudicitiis, non in contentione et aemulatione, sed induite Dominum Iesum Christum et carnis providentiam ne feceritis in concupiscientiis.” 40 For the iconography of the annunciation see G. Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, vol. 1, 33–55. For the role played by the book therein see D. Linton, “Reading the Virgin Reader.” John Freccero, “The Portait of Francesca. Inferno 5,” points out similarities between the medieval iconography of the Annunciation and some later pictorial representation of the story of Paolo and Francesca. 41 Luca 1: 28–38: “Et ingressus angelus ad eam dixit: Ave gratia plena: Dominus tecum: benedicta tu in mulieribus. Quæ cum audisset, turbata est in sermone ejus, et cogitabat qualis esset ista salutatio. Et ait angelus ei: Ne timeas, Maria: invenisti enim gratiam apud Deum. Ecce concipies in utero, et paries filium, et vocabis nomen ejus Jesum: hic erit magnus, et Filius Altissimi vocabitur, et dabit illi Dominus Deus sedem David patris ejus: et regnabit in domo Jacob in æternum, et regni ejus non erit finis. Dixit autem Maria ad angelum: Quomodo fiet istud, quoniam virum non cognosco? Et respondens angelus dixit ei: Spiritus Sanctus superveniet in te, et virtus Altissimi obumbrabit tibi. Ideoque et quod nascetur ex te sanctum, vocabitur Filius Dei. Et ecce Elisabeth cognata tua, et ipsa concepit filium in senectute sua: et hic mensis sextus est illi, quæ vocatur sterilis: quia non erit impossibile apud Deum omne verbum. Dixit autem Maria: Ecce ancilla Domini: fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum. Et discessit ab illa angelus.” 42 Green, Women Readers, 87–8. 43 For the image of the baby Jesus on the rib of the book see M. Amsler, “Affective Literacy: Gestures of Reading in the Later Middle Ages,” 94 and 108. For the crucifiction in the spine of the book see S. Hout, “Polytextual Reading: the Meditative Reading of Real and Metaphoric books.” For Christ as a book, see Green, Reading in the Middle Ages, 45–6. 44 Linton, “Reading the Virgin Reader.” 45 Pietro Alighieri, ddp ad Inferno 5, 137: “Ysidorus in libro Sententiarum dicens: Ideo prohibetur Christianus legere figmenta poetarum et aliorum scriptorum similium, quia per oblectionem fabularum nimium mentem excitat ad incentiva libidinum, fingit nunc hoc duos cognatos amatores effectos ita ex illa lectura fingente Lancelothum, inductu Galeocti, in quodam viridario secrete semel osculatum esse reginam Genevram. Et sicut dictus Galeoctus, ita tractando, fuit mediator et leno quodammodo predictorum, ita ille liber istorum duorum cognatorum et sic etiam scriptor dicti libri, ut dicit textus hic.” Benvenuto da Imola (ad idem): “Jeronimus prohibet clericis ne legant carmina amatoria poetarum.” Boccaccio (ad idem): “Scrivesi ne’ predetti romanzi che un prencipe Galeotto, il quale dicono che fu di spezie di gigante, sì era grande e grosso, sentì primo che alcuno altro l’occulto amor di

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Lancialotto e della reina Ginevra; il quale non essendo più avanti proceduto che per soli riguardi, ad istanzia di Lancialotto, il quale egli amava maravigliosamente, tratta un dì in una sala a ragionamento seco la reina Ginevra, e a quello chiamato Lancialotto, ad aprire questo amore con alcuno effetto fu il mezzano: e, quasi occupando con la persona il poter questi due esser veduti da alcuno altro della sala che da lui, fece che essi si basciarono insieme. E così vuol questa donna dire che quello libro, il quale leggevano Polo ed ella, quello officio adoperasse tra lor due che adoperò Galeotto tra Lancialotto e la reina Ginevra; e quel medesimo dice essere stato colui che lo scrisse, per ciò che, se scritto non l’avesse, non ne potrebbe esser seguito quello che ne seguì.” See also Guiniforto delli Bargigi (ad idem): “utilmente dobbiamo notare quanto pericoloso sia legger in libri, nei quali si contengon cose lascive, e disoneste, e quanto male faccia chi scrive di tai fatti disonesti, e questo sente Francesca, quando dice, che il libro nel qual leggevano, e non solamente il libro, ma eziandio colui che lo scrisse fu mezzano tra lei, e Paolo, come Galeotto lo era stato tra la regina Ginevra e Lancilotto.” Iacopo dalla Lana (ad idem) blames both the reading and the solitary place: “Poi e lie e altrove si favelonno per altro modo. Circa la qual cosa è da notare che si dee schifare quelle lezioni, le quali disordinano li animi delle persone e perducenli a vizio: ancora si deve schifare li luoghi li quali possano generare sospizione overo segurtade di mala operazione, che forse se non fosseno stati soli non sarebbe avvenuto quello principio che li condusse poi a violenta morte.” D. Jacquart and C. Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, 123–6. I quote the anecdote from Jacquart’s and Thomasset’s paraphrase in Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, 126. G. Mazzotta, Dante Poet of the Desert, 166–70. Mazzotta points out some remarkable textual similarities between the passage in the Confessions and Inferno 5. O’Donnel’s commentary to the Confessions is now available online: http://www.stoa.org/hippo/ M. Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid, 78. Confessions 1, 13: “Nam utique meliores, quia certiores, erant primae illae litterae, quibus fiebat in me et factum est et habeo illud, ut et legam, si quid scriptum invenio, et scribam ipse, si quid volo, quam illae, quibus tenere cogebar Aeneae nescio cuius errores oblitus errorum meorum et plorare Didonem mortuam, quia se occidit ab amore, cum interea me ipsum in his a te morientem Deus, vita mea, siccis oculis ferrem miserrimus. Quid enim miserius misero non miserante se ipsum et flente Didonis mortem, quae fiebat amando Aenean, non flente autem mortem suam, quae fiebat non amando te, Deus, lumen cordis mei et panis oris intus animae meae et virtus maritans mentem meam et sinum cogitationis meae? Non te amabam et fornicabar abs te et fornicanti sonabat undique: Euge, euge. Amicitia enim mundi huius fornicatio est abs te et Euge, euge dicitur, ut pudeat, si non ita homo sit. Et haec non flebam et flebam Didonem exstinctam ferroque extrema secutam,

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sequens ipse extrema condita tua relicto te et terra iens in terram; et si prohiberer ea legere, dolerem, quia non legerem quod dolerem. Talis dementia honestiores et uberiores litterae putantur quam illae, quibus legere et scribere didici.” 52 Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes 1, 26, 65: “fingebat haec Homerus et humana ad deos transferebat: divina mallem ad nos.” As O’Donnel observes: “Here the authority of the line is implicit, to be recognized or not by one reader or another; contrast civ. 4.26, ‘sed fingebat haec Homerus, ait Tullius, et humana ad deos transferebat: divina mallem ad nos.’” 53 Confessions 1, 17: “Sine me, Deus meus, dicere aliquid et de ingenio meo, munere tuo, in quibus a me deliramentis atterebatur. Proponebatur enim mihi negotium animae meae satis inquietum praemio laudis et dedecoris vel plagarum metu, ut dicerem verba Iunonis irascentis et dolentis, quod non posset Italia Teucrorum avertere regem, quae numquam Iunonem dixisse audieram. Sed figmentorum poeticorum vestigia errantes sequi cogebamur et tale aliquid dicere solutis verbis, quale poeta dixisset versibus; et ille dicebat laudabilius, in quo pro dignitate adumbratae personae irae ac doloris similior affectus eminebat verbis sententias congruenter vestientibus. Ut quid mihi illud, o vera vita, Deus meus, quod mihi recitanti acclamabatur prae multis coaetaneis et collectoribus meis? Nonne ecce illa omnia fumus et ventus? Itane aliud non erat, ubi exerceretur ingenium et lingua mea? Laudes tuae, Domine, laudes tuae per Scripturas tuas suspenderent palmitem cordis mei, et non raperetur per inania nugarum turpis praeda volatilibus. Non enim uno modo sacrificatur transgressoribus angelis.” The quote is from Aeneid 1, 37–8; the references are to Aeneid 1, 8–11 and 67–8. Confessions 1, 19: “Horum ego puer morum in limine iacebam miser, et huius harenae palaestra erat illa, ubi magis timebam barbarismum facere quam cavebam, si facerem, non facientibus invidere. Dico haec et confiteor tibi, Deus meus, in quibus laudabar ab eis, quibus placere tunc mihi erat honeste vivere. Non enim videbam voraginem turpitudinis, in quam proiectus eram ab oculis tuis. Nam in illis iam quid me foedius fuit, ubi etiam talibus displicebam fallendo innumerabilibus mendaciis et paedagogum et magistros et parentes amore ludendi, studio spectandi nugatoria et imitandi ludicra inquietudine? Furta etiam faciebam de cellario parentum et de mensa vel gula imperitante vel ut haberem quod darem pueris, ludum suum mihi, quo pariter utique delectabantur, tamen vendentibus. In quo etiam ludo fraudulentas victorias ipse vana excellentiae cupiditate victus saepe aucupabar. Quid autem tam nolebam pati atque atrociter, si deprehenderem, arguebam, quam id quod aliis faciebam? Et, si deprehensus arguerer, saevire magis quam cedere libebat. Istane est innocentia puerilis? Non est, Domine, non est, oro te, Deus meus. Nam haec ipsa sunt, quae a paedagogis et magistris, a nucibus et pilulis et passeribus, ad praefectos et reges, aurum, praedia, mancipia, haec ipsa omnino succedentibus maioribus aetatibus transeunt, sicuti ferulis maiora supplicia succedunt. Humilitatis ergo signum in statura pueritiae, rex noster, probasti, cum aisti: Talium est regnum caelorum.”

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54 For both Francesca and Augustine, the consequence of bad reading is, interestingly, the “elegiac” notion of misery. Compare Confessions 1, 16, 20: “Quid enim miserius misero non miserante se ipsum et flente Didonis mortem, quae fiebat amando Aenean, non flente autem mortem suam, quae fiebat non amando te, Deus, lumen cordis mei et panis oris intus animae meae et virtus maritans mentem meam et sinum cogitationis meae?” and Inferno 5, 121–3 “nessun maggior dolore / che ricordarsi del tempo felice / ne la miseria.” For “misery” as an expression related to elegy see Carrai, Dante elegiaco. 55 De vita sua, sive Monodiae, 17: “ Interea cum versificandi studio ultra omnem modum meum animum immersissem, ita ut universa divinae paginae seria pro tam ridicula vanitate seponerem, ad hoc ipsum, duce mea levitate, jam veneram, ut ovidiana et bucolicorum dicta praesumerem, et lepores amatorios in specierum distributionibus epistolisque nexilibus affectarem. Oblita igitur mens debiti rigoris, et professionis monasticae pudore rejecto, talibus virulentae hujus licentiae lenociniis laetabatur, hoc solum trutinans, si poetae cuipiam comportari poterat quod curialiter dicebatur, nullatenus vero pensitans quantopere sacri ordinis, de ea quae desiderabatur industria, propositum ledebatur. Nimirum utrobique raptabar, dum non solum verborum dulcium, quae a poetis acceperam, sed et quae ego profuderam lasciviis irretirer, verum etiam per horum et his similium revolutiones immodica aliquotiens carnis meae titillatione tenerer. Quoniam haec terebat volubilis et totius severitatis infrequens animus, alius profecto non poterat, quam quem cogitatio suggesserat, e labiis procedere sonus. Inde accidit, ut, effervescente interiori rabie, ad obscaenula quaedam verba devolverer, et aliquas literulas minus pensi ac moderati habentes, immo totius honestatis nescias dictitarem. Quae cum ad magistri praedicti notitiam pervenissent et ipse aegerrime ferret, in illius exacerbatione fastidii eum contigit obdormisse. Quo soporato, talis ei se ingessit visio: senior caniciei pulcherrimae, imo is ipse, si dicere audeam, qui in initio me ad eundem perduxerat, et amorem ejus mihi semper affuturum spoponderat, ei apparuit, severissimeque intulit: ‘Volo,’ inquit, ‘ut de literis quae factae sunt mihi rationem reddas verum manus quae literas ipsas scripsit non est sua ipsius quae scripsit.’ Quod cum a magistro mihi relatum fuisset, ego et ipse pariter super tenore somnii non dissimilem conjecturam habuimus: laeti enim ingemuimus sub spe tua, Domine, inde animadversionem tuam in tam paterna correctione videntes, hinc cujusdam piae alterationis fiduciam meis levitatibus eventuram ex visionis intentione putantes. Ubi manus quae literas scripserat non ejus esse qui scripserat dicitur, plane non permansura in illa ignominiosa sua actione indubie denotatur. Mea enim fuit, et non est sicuti legitur: ‘verte impios, et non erunt,’ dum ea, quae in usu vicii mea fuit, virtutis studio applicita, omnem efficientiam indignissimae illius proprietatis amisit. Et tu nosti tamen, Domine, et ego confiteor, quia tunc temporis nec tuo timore, nec meo pudore, nec sacrae hujus visionis honore castigatiora peregerim et nempe irreverentia, quia interius me habebam, et scriptorum nugantium nequaquam scurrilitatibus temperabam. Latenter quippe cum eadem carmina cuderem, et nemini aut vix omnini meis consimilibus illa prodere auderem, saepius tamen

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mentito auctore, ipsa quibus poteram recitabam, et laetabar ea a voti mei consortibus collaudari. Quae mea fore rebar prorsus inconveniens profiteri, et quod ad fructum ullius auctori suo non proderat laudis, solo restabat fructu, immo turpitudine gaudere peccati. Sed haec, Pater, punisti quando voluisti. Emergentibus enim contra me super tali opera infortuniis, et multa animum evagantem adversitate cinxisti, et corporis infirmitate pressisti. Pervenit ergo tunc gladius usque ad animan, dum vexatio attigit intelligentiam.” Text is quoted from Guibert de Nogent, Autobiographie, Edmond-René Labande ed., and translation by P.J. Archambault, A Monk’s Confession: the Memoirs of Guibert of Nogent. Very differently, later in the poem, it will be Dante who bends in desire toward the already established characters of Ulysses and Diomedes (“vedi che dal disio ver lei mi piego,” Inferno 26, 69). Inferno 32, 1–12: “S’ïo avessi le rime aspre e chiocce, / come si converrebbe al tristo buco / sovra ‘l qual pontan tutte l’altre rocce, / io premerei di mio concetto il suco / più pienamente; ma perch’ io non l’abbo, / non sanza tema a dicer mi conduco; / ché non è impresa da pigliare a gabbo / discriver fondo a tutto l’universo, / né da lingua che chiami mamma o babbo. / Ma quelle donne aiutino il mio verso / ch’aiutaro Anfïone a chiuder Tebe, / sì che dal fatto il dir non sia diverso.” On this last point see for instance Boccaccio, ddp ad Inferno 5, 72: “In queste parole intende l’autore d’ammaestrarne che noi non dobbiamo con la meditazione semplicemente visitar le pene de’ dannati; ma, visitandole e conoscendole, e conoscendo noi di quelle medesime per le nostre colpe esser degni, non di loro, che dalla divina giustizia son puniti, ma di noi medesimi dobbiamo aver pietà e temere di non dovere in quella dannazione pervenire e compugnerci ed affliggerci, acciò che tal meditazione ci sospinga a quelle cose adoperare, le quali di tal pericolo ne traghino e dirizinci in via di salute. E usa l’autore di mostrare di sentire alcuna passione, quando maggiore e quando minore, in ciascun luogo: e quasi dove alcun peccato si punisce, del quale esso conosca se medesimo peccatore.” Inferno 5, 140–1: “sì che di pietade / io venni men così com’io morisse” and Inferno 6, 1–2: “Al tornar de la mente, che si chiuse / dinanzi a la pietà d’i due cognati.” Indeed Francesca connects piety with lust, thanking Dante for his having “pity on our perverse ill” (Inferno 5, 93). The meta-literary prosopopeia is not frequent in Dante’s work, but it appears, for instance, in Rime 99: “Messer Brunetto, questa pulzelletta / con esso voi si ven la pasqua a fare: / non intendete pasqua di mangiare, / ch’ella non mangia, anzi vuol esser letta. / La sua sentenzia non richiede fretta, / né luogo di romor né da giullare; / anzi si vuol più volte lusingare / prima che ‘n intelletto altrui si metta. / Se voi non la intendete in questa guisa, / in vostra gente ha molti frati Alberti / da intender ciò ch’è posto loro in mano. / Con lor vi restringete sanza risa; / e se li altri de’ dubbi non son certi, / ricorrete a la fine a messer Giano.”

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62 There is some critical debate about whether the old men/animals stand for the books or their authors. Without entering into details, it appears to me that Dante’s characterization works as follows: the twenty four elders at the beginning are clearly books, as shown, for instance, by the fact that books written by the same author count as numbers and not as one (for example, as Chiavacci Leonardi points out, in ddp ad Purgatorio 29, 83, the Pentateuch counts as five books, although written by the same author). The four animals stand for both the text and their authors, as was the common interpretation in Jerome and the Christian tradition. Of the elders who follow the chariot, Luke’s Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s Epistles appear to bear the characteristics of their authors, whereas the four Epistles of Peter, John, James and Jude are characterized according to their “minor” status as texts. Like the Gospels, John’s Apocalypse resembles both its author and its content. 63 Purgatorio 29, 97–105: “A descriver lor forme più non spargo / rime, lettor; ch’altra spesa mi strigne, / tanto ch’a questa non posso esser largo; / ma leggi Ezechïel, che li dipigne / come li vide da la fredda parte / venir con vento e con nube e con igne; / e quali i troverai ne le sue carte, / tali eran quivi, salvo ch’a le penne / Giovanni è meco e da lui si diparte.” 64 Mazzoni, ddp ad Inferno 5, 118–37, has made this point in reference to Inferno 5. 65 Convivio 2, xiii, 14: “E lo cielo di Venere si può comparare alla Rettorica per due propietadi: l’una si è la chiarezza del suo aspetto, ché è soavissima a vedere più che altra stella; l’altra si è la sua apparenza or da mane or da sera. E queste due propietadi sono nella Rettorica: ché la Rettorica è soavissima di tutte l’altre scienze, però che a ciò principalmente intende; [e] appare da mane quando dinanzi dal viso dell’uditore lo rettorico parla; appare da sera, cioè retro, quando da lettera, per la parte remota, si parla per lo rettorico.” 66 Paradiso 9, 106–8: “Qui si rimira nell’arte ch’addorna / cotanto affetto, e discernesi ‘l bene / per che ‘l mondo di sù quel di giù torna.” For a reading of Paradiso 9 in connection with the problem of lust/love and poetry see T. Kay, “Dualism and Integration: Poetry and Desire from the Convivio to the Commedia.” 67 On the deceptive nature of rhetoric as beauty/ornatus see A. Richlin “Rhetoric and Gender”; and M. Malamoud, “Writing Original Sin.” 68 Convivio 1, x, 12–13: “Ché per questo comento la gran bontade del volgare di sì [si vedrà]; però che si vedrà la sua vertù, sì com’è per esso altissimi e novissimi concetti convenevolemente, sufficientemente e aconciamente, quasi come per esso latino, manifestare; [la quale non si potea bene manifestare] nelle cose rimate per le accidentali adornezze che quivi sono connesse, cioè la rima e lo tempo e lo numero regolato: sì come non si può bene manifestare la bellezza d’una donna, quando li adornamenti dell’azzimare e delle vestimenta la fanno più ammirare che essa medesima. Onde chi vuole bene giudicare d’una donna, guardi quella quando solo sua naturale bellezza si sta con lei, da tutto accidentale adornamento discompagnata: sì come sarà questo comento,

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70

71

72

73

74 75 76 77

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nel quale si vedrà l’agevolezza delle sue sillabe, le propietadi delle sue costruzioni e le soavi orazioni che di lui si fanno; le quali chi bene aguarderà, vedrà essere piene di dolcissima e d’amabilissima bellezza.” De vulgari eloquentia 2, i, 2: “Queramus igitur prius utrum omnes versificantes vulgariter debeant illud uti; et superficietenus videtur quod sic; quia omnis qui versificatur suos versus exornare debet in quantum potest; quare, cum nullum sit tam grandis exornationis quam vulgare illustre, videtur quod quisque versificator debeat ipsum uti.” De vulgari eloquentia 2, i, 10: “Ad illud ubi dicitur quod superiora inferioribus admixta profectum adducunt, dicimus verum esse quando cesset discretio: puta si aurum cum argento conflemus; sed si discretio remanet, inferiora vilescunt: puta cum formose mulieres deformibus admiscentur. Unde, cum sententia versificantium semper verbis discretive mixta remaneat, si non fuerit optima, optimo sociata vulgari, non melior, sed deterior apparebit, quemadmodum turpis mulier si auro vel serico vestiatur.” De vulgari eloquentia 2, ii, 8: “Sed disserendum est, que maxima sint. Et primo in eo quod est utile: in quo, si callide consideremus intentum omnium querentium utilitatem, nil aliud quam salutem inveniemus. Secundo, in eo quod est delectabile: in quo dicimus illud esse maxime delectabile quod per preciosissimum obiectum appetitus delectat: hoc autem venus est. Tertio, in eo quod est honestum; in quo nemo dubitat esse virtutem. Quare hec tria, Salus videlicet, Venus et Virtus, apparent esse illa magnalia que sint maxime pertractanda, hoc est ea que maxime sunt ad ista, ut armorum probitas, amoris accensio, et directio voluntatis.” Convivio 2, xi, 9: “Che non voglio in ciò altro dire, secondo che è detto di sopra, se non: O uomini, che vedere non potete la sentenza di questa canzone, non la rifiutate però; ma ponete mente la sua bellezza, che è grande sì per [la] construzione, la quale si pertiene alli gramatici, sì per l’ordine del sermone, che si pertiene alli rettorici, sì per lo numero delle sue parti, che si pertiene alli musici. Le quali cose in essa si possono belle vedere, per chi ben guarda.” Convivio 2, xi, 4–5: “E però dico al presente che la bontade e la bellezza di ciascuno sermone sono intra loro partite e diverse; ché la bontade è nella sentenza, e la bellezza è nell’ornamento delle parole; e l’una e l’altraè con diletto, avegna che la bontade sia massimamente dilettosa. Onde, con ciò sia cosa che la bontade di questa canzone fosse malagevole a sentire per le diverse persone che in essa s’inducono a parlare, dove si richeggiono molte distinzioni, e la bellezza fosse agevole a vedere, parvemi mestiero alla canzone che per li altri si ponesse più mente alla bellezza che alla bontade. E questo è quello che dico in questa parte.” T. Barolini, “Ulysses, Geryon, and the Aeronautics of Narrative Transition,” 66–7. On Arachne see Barolini, Undivine Comedy, 130–2. For Geryon’s colours as rhetorical colours see N. Fosca, ddp ad Inferno 17, 16. The superior beauty of eastern textiles was much celebrated in the Middle Ages, for instance in Marco Polo’s Milione. Commentators of these lines are

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79

80

81

82 83

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divided on whether Dante means here textiles (hence: warp and weft), embroidery (hence: groundwork and weaving) or a mix of both (an already complex textile onto which an embroidery is applied). Guido da Pisa claims that the “sommesse” is related to weaving and “sovraposte” to either painting or embroidery: “Color submissus fit arte textoria; color autem superpositus fit arte pictoria vel arte acus, que vocatur racamare” (ddp ad Inferno 17, 16). On these lines see P. Toynbee, “Dante’s References to Tartar Cloths.” Barolini (The Undivine Comedy, 63) interprets the cord as erotic poetry/ language when knotted and as epic poetry when handed to Virgil, concluding: “the knotty skein of an exclusively erotic textuality … calls forth the even knottier, supremely embellished emblem of a new and larger textuality.” For the connection between fraud and desire see Anonimo Selmiano, ddp ad Inferno 16, 106: “Questa corda sì si prende con essa la froda, con che Dante già pensò con essa ingannare le femmine e lusingare, e forse il fece. E pollo quì, che la froda (ha) suo principio nel desiderio della cosa, e scuopresi nel modo d’acquistare quella cosa, e perciò dice, che pensò con quella corda ch’avia intorno cinta provare la lonza, cioè la volontà de la lussuria; e poi mostra la borsa de l’usuriere, e sopravviene la froda.” P. Pizzorno, “Matelda’s Dance and the Smile of the Poets,” in particular 122– 3. For Matelda and the metapoetic nature of earthly paradise, which stretches to include Ovid, the Roman de la Rose, and Cavalcanti’s poetry, see also W. Wetherbee, The Ancient Flame. Dante and the Poets, 203–26; and O. Holmes, Dante’s Two Beloveds, 77–84. Paradiso 2, 1–18: “O voi che siete in piccioletta barca, / desiderosi d’ascoltar, seguiti / dietro al mio legno che cantando varca, / tornate a riveder li vostri liti: / non vi mettete in pelago, ché forse, / perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti. / L’acqua ch’io prendo già mai non si corse; / Minerva spira, e conducemi Appollo, / e nove Muse mi dimostran l’Orse. / Voialtri pochi che drizzaste il collo / per tempo al pan de li angeli, del quale / vivesi qui ma non sen vien satollo, / metter potete ben per l’alto sale / vostro navigio, servando mio solco / dinanzi a l’acqua che ritorna equale. / Que’ gloriosi che passaro al Colco / non s’ammiraron come voi farete / quando Iasón vider fatto bifolco.” In a short turn of verses, Dante accommodates both Apollo (poetic inspiration) and Minerva (wisdom). Moreover, although commonly understood as poetic technique, the nine (nove) Muses have been convincingly interpreted as “new” (nove) Muses, required by the novelty of the realm, indeed the nine sciences. On the notions of binding and syntax and their connection to divine operation see my The Syntax of Desire, passim. Convivio 4, vi, 3–4: “È dunque da sapere che ‘autoritade’ non è altro che ‘atto d’autore.’ Questo vocabulo, cioè ‘autore,’ sanza quella terza lettera C, può discendere da due principii: l’uno si è uno verbo molto lasciato dall’uso in gramatica, che significa tanto quanto ‘legare parole,’ cioè ‘auieo.’ E chi ben guarda lui, nella sua prima voce apertamente vedrà che elli stesso lo dimostra, ché solo di legame di parole è fatto, cioè di sole cinque vocali, che sono anima e legame d’ogni parole, e composto d’esse per modo volubile, a figurare

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imagine di legame. Ché, cominciando dall’A, nell’U quindi si rivolve, e viene diritto per I nell’E, quindi si rivolve e torna nell’O: sì che veramente imagina questa figura: a, e, i, o, u, la quale è figura di legame. E in quanto ‘autore’ viene e discende da questo verbo, si prende solo per li poeti, che coll’arte musaica le loro parole hanno legate; e di questa significazione al presente non s’intende.” For “auieo” see A. Ascoli, “The Vowels of Authority”; and Lombardi, The Syntax of Desire, 139–40.

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index

Abelard, Peter, 36, 56, 62, 70, 279n25, 283n56, 286n75 Adam, 35–6, 49, 267n45 and 46 Aelred, 70–1, 286n76, 77 and 78 Aeneas, 23, 28–9, 33, 71, 79, 94, 95, 163, 178–80, 223, 229 Aeneid, 4, 23, 26–30, 35, 40, 44, 93– 5, 140, 173, 178–9, 215, 222, 229, 232, 237, 262n18 and 19, 263n22 and 25, 270n61and 63, 271n75, 285n64, 294n23, 318n8, 319n9, 336n53 Albertus Magnus, 76, 147 Alighieri, Pietro, 51, 273n2, 334n45 Amsler, Mark, 207, 327n75, 329– 30n1, 330n4, 334n45 Annunciation, 95, 226–8, 334n40 Anonimo Selmiano, 44, 161–2, 341n79 Aquinas, Thomas, 36, 37–9, 40, 41, 44, 46, 48, 52, 57, 65, 68, 69, 70, 76, 81–2, 111–12, 122, 136, 145–7, 154, 181, 182–3; De malo, 37, 57, 269n51, 273n2, 280n32; On the Gospel of Matthew, 111; Summa Contra Gentiles, 111, 301n55; Summa Theologiae, 52, 57, 68, 69, 81, 111, 136, 145–6, 182–3,

262n16, 267n48, 271n76, 272n79, 279n28 and 29, 280n30, 31, and 33, 281n34, 290n104, 291n4, 293n19, 299n53, 308n36, 309n37, 39, and 40, 310n41, 312n60, 320n17, 18, 19, and 20, 321n21 Ardizzone, Maria Luisa, 42, 271n68 and 69, 284n57 Aristotle, 34, 41 45, 48, 53, 67–70, 74, 76, 83, 111, 144, 150, 154, 158, 181, 270n66, 299n51 and 52, 311n59, 320n15 Arnaut Daniel, 64, 244 Augustine, 12, 35, 36, 53, 54, 76, 97, 98, 100, 102–4, 113, 114, 129, 142– 3, 149, 181, 212, 213, 214, 218, 223–5, 229–32, 233, 234, 236, 266n39 and 40, 271n76, 273n2, 278n17, 290n103, 296n30, 306n24, 310n44, 337n54; Commentary on the Gospel of John, 97; Confessions, 54, 113, 214, 225, 229–32, 276n76, 296n32, 306n24, 330n6, 333n36 and 38, 334n39, 335n48, 49, and 51, 336n53, 337n54; Contra Iulianum, 265–6n39; De civitate Dei, 54, 98, 277n11, 278n21; De Trinitate, 12, 114, 129, 259n8,

362

301n57; De vera religione, 142, 306n23; Enchiridion, 265n39; On the Psalms, 102, 113–14; Sermones, 266n40 Avalle, D’Arco Silvio, 157, 312n64, 313n67 Avicenna, 42, 271n68, 314n69 Barberi Squarotti, Giorgio, 91 Barbi, Michele, 138 Barolini, Teodolinda, 6, 10, 21, 58, 65, 66 71, 103, 240, 244, 295n29, 304n8, 305n20, 340n75, 341n78 Baschet, Jérôme, 59 Beatrice, 7, 14, 21, 23–6, 33, 39, 40, 62, 72–4, 79, 82–4, 106–10, 125, 128–30, 137, 156, 172–4, 180, 190– 1, 196, 204, 208, 210–11, 218, 232, 237, 244–6, 259n25, 287n89, 291n109, 298n47, 304n9, 316n84, 329n83, 332n24 Benvenuto da Imola, 24, 35, 44, 66, 87, 138, 261n11, 263n27, 265n37, 270n75, 284n61, 305n15, 318n7, 332n27, 334n45 Bernard of Clairvaux, 14, 17, 18, 54, 115, 116, 121, 130, 149, 150, 168, 196–200, 201, 295n27, 303n71, 310n45, 325n56, 271n72; De diligendo deo, 121, 302n63; Sermons on the Song of Songs, 14, 17, 18, 116, 150, 168, 196–200, 295n27, 310n45, 324n50, 51, 52, and 53, 325n54, 55, 56, and 57 Boethius, Severinus, 67, 143, 150, 177–80, 218, 319n12 Bonaventura de Bagnoregio, 36, 38–9, 41, 44, 48, 114, 143 Boccaccio, 7, 8, 35, 52, 63, 65, 69, 162, 258n8, 265n37, 275n8, 276n9, 277n10, 284n58 and 63, 286n72, 291n2, 292n14, 303n2, 205n15 and 18, 318n3, 332n27, 334n45, 338n58

index

Bottagisio, Tito, 44, 267n48, 271– 2n76, 272n83 Bynum, Caroline, 112, 122 Cadden, Joan, 41, 282n43 Camille, Michael, 59, 333n31 Capaneus, 48–9 Cappellanus, Andreas, 9, 58, 61, 62, 71, 137, 138, 194, 195, 201, 204, 305n20, 312n64, 323n42 Carré, Yannick, 59, 193–5, 323n42 Carruthers, Mary, 213, 215 Casagrande, Carla, 54, 58, 279n25 Cavalcanti Guido, 9, 10, 42, 43, 66, 72–4, 80, 128, 135, 141, 155–7, 159–61, 163, 174, 176, 200, 221, 239, 245, 261n10, 271n72, 305n20, 312n62, 313n68, 314n72, 316– 17n87, 317–8n1, 326n60, 332n28, 341n80 Chiavacci Leonardi, Anna Maria, 84, 260n1, 299n48, 399n62 Christine de Pizan, 15–16, 219, 331n19 Cicero, 65–6, 68, 70, 77, 180, 230, 260–1n9, 263n25, 264n35, 285n64, 310n44, 336n52 Cino da Pistoia, 163, 314n74 claritas, 18, 19, 42, 143, 145–7, 149, 154–7, 160, 238, 309n39 and 40, 310n41, 42 and 43, 317n87 Cleopatra, 5, 11, 63 Conte, Gianbiagio, 214 Contini, Gianfranco, 9, 66, 134, 135, 137, 203, 205, 305n20 Copeland, Rita, 218 cupiditas, 17, 21, 53, 65, 83, 95, 151, 154, 221, 224, 232, 244 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 13 Dante da Maiano, 200, 326n60, 332– 3n28 De Amore. See Cappellanus, Andreas

i nd e x

De Bruyne, Edgard, 147, 154, 310n43 and 46, 312n, 312n61 Deleuze, Gilles, 32 De Libera, Alain, 69–70, 283n55 Della Terza, Dante, 23 De Robertis, Domenico, 73, 135 De Sanctis, Francesco, 9 desiderium continuum, 115, 122, 131 desiderium supernum, 100, 166, 197 Desmond, Marilynn, 229 Dido, 4, 5, 9, 11, 28, 63, 71, 79, 90, 140, 141, 163, 173, 178–80, 229, 233, 234, 236, 305n15 and 20, 318n7, 319n9, 335n50 and 51, 337n54 Dionysius the Areopagite, 143 Dragonetti, Roger, 136, 304n11, 314n76 Dronke, Peter, 13, 14, 278n19 Duns Scotus, 39, 269n57 Eclogues, 88, 178, 201, 215, 291n5 Eve, 151, 311n49 Fasciculus Morum, 53–4, 278n18 Flamenca, 196, 205–7, 211, 216, 327n74, 329n82 Forti, Fiorenzo, 41, 269n60 Foscolo, Ugo, 9, 258n9 Francesco da Buti, 44, 52, 57, 62, 65, 176, 184, 261n11, 273n3 and 4, 274n5 and 6, 275n7, 291n2 and 3, 318n4, 305n18, 321n22 Freccero, John, 21, 95, 222, 260n3 and 5, 262n15, 320n14, 334n40 Freud, Sigmund, 31 Galehault, 185–9, 185, 219–20, 228, 232, 234, 236, 247 Gardiner, F.C., 100, 286n79 Gaunt, Simon, 164, 167, 188, 317n90 Georgics, 94, 294n22 Geryon, 25, 240–3, 244, 340n7

363

Giacomo da Lentini, 158 Gilman, Sander, 33 Gilson, Étienne, 12–13 Girard, René, 205, 247, 259n20 Gragnolati, Manuele, 48, 263n21 and 26, 284n59, 303n72 Gravdal, Kathrin, 201, 327n65 Gratian, 51, 52, 60, 63, 273n2, 282n47 Green, D.H., 213, 217, 218, 226, 332n20 Gregorius Magnus, 54–6, 100–1, 120, 128, 278n23, 297n39, 297–8n40; Moralia in Job, 55–6, 120–1, 278n23, 279n24, 297n38 Grosseteste, Robert, 53, 59 Guibert of Nogent, 90, 233–4, 337– 8n55 Guido delle Colonne, 66, 71, 287n80 Guinevere, 7, 8, 11, 163, 184–90, 195, 203, 204, 207, 219, 200, 229, 332n24 and 25 Guinizzelli, Guido, 14, 15, 64–5, 72–4, 96, 134–5, 136, 155, 160, 163, 171– 2, 200, 202–3, 244, 304n5, 313n67, 316n87 Guittone d’Arezzo, 66, 72, 305n20 Hadewijch, 13, 14 Harrowing of Hell, 35, 39, 41, 47, 48, 269n58 and 59 Hatcher, Anna, 9, 332n25 Helen of Troy, 4, 11, 63, 259n21, 283n52, 286n75, 288n94 Heloise, 62, 70, 286n75 Hollander, Robert, 190, 223, 284n61, 318n2 Hugh of Saint Victor, 213 Iacopone da Todi, 170–1, 317n89 Iannucci, Amilcare, 8, 39, 269n59, 272n84, 323n35 Iseult, 4, 7, 8, 11, 141, 163–6, 171, 172, 174, 187–89, 221, 229

364

Jacquart, Danielle, 221, 228, 333n29, 335n47 Jerome, 60, 228, 237, 339n62

index

Ovid, 4, 15, 71, 205, 321, 233, 316n84, 337n55, 341n80 Ovide moralisé, 15, 233 Ottimo Commento, 133, 221

Kay, Sarah, 61, 67 Lai d’Aristote, 69 Lancelot (character), 8, 63, 163, 184– 90, 195, 203, 204, 207, 217–21, 234, 247, 255, 334n45 Lancelot (romance), 7, 184–90, 215, 217–21, 228, 247, 321n23 and 24, 322n26, 331n14, 332n23 and 25 Latini, Brunetto, 63, 66–7, 285n64 Lazar, Moshe, 13, 17 L’Hermite-Leclercq, Paulette, 152 Leclercq, Jean, 13, 100, 201, 281n36 Liber de intelligentiis, 148, 310n43 Linton, David, 227 Lombard, Peter, 36, 60, 114; Sententiae, 267n43, 44, 45, 46, 282n49 and 50 Maddox, Donald, 189 Manesse manuscript, 217, 331n16 Mary, 25, 34, 61, 151, 154, 156, 215, 226–8, 311n49 Matelda, 242–5, 341n80 Mauss, Marcel, 193 Mazzoni, Francesco, 25, 66, 84, 261n12, 271n74, 339n64 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 25, 229, 335n48 Meuwese, Martine, 217 Minos, 4 Moevs, Christian, 190, 316n84, 322n33 Musa, Mark, 9, 332n25 Nardi, Bruno, 83, 154, 157, 159, 312n64, 313n67 Odo of Cluny, 151 O’Donnel, James, 229, 335n49, 336n52

Padoan, Giorgio, 138 Pertile, Lino, 10, 84, 122, 125, 137, 169, 270n63, 292n7 and 11, 298n46, 314n73, 317n88, 318n5 Perella, Nicholas, 95–6, 194–5, 317n89, 329n82 and 83 Petrarca, Francesco, 62 139, 305n17 Piccarda Donati, 22, 65, 123–4 Picone, Michelangelo, 102, 292n6, 314n76 Pizzorno, Patrizia, 243 Phillips, Adam, 210 Pilgrimage, 3, 96–106, 110, 130–1, 166, 167, 177, 196, 266n40, 296n34 Plato, 34, 45, 48, 142, 143, 148 Poggioli, Renato, 203 poena damni, 3, 35–40, 43, 45, 264n34 and 36 Renzi, Lorenzo, 185–7, 200, 215, 257n7, 258n9, 11, and 13, 322n280, 326n59, 328n76, 332n25 Richard of Saint Victor, 13, 117, 124, 126; De quatuor gradibus violentae charitatis, 117–19, 126, 301n60, 302n61 and 62 Rodin, Auguste, 9, 140 Roman de la Rose, 14, 15, 16, 60, 67– 8, 208, 217, 219, 259n28, 282n45, 285n69, 341n80 Romanesque behaviour, 189, 203, 225 Rudel, Jaufré, 17, 18, 61, 166–7, 171, 173, 174, 260n34, 314n76, 316n81 and 82 Rupert of Deutz, 194 Ryan, Lawrence, 90–1, 95, 293n18 Salowsky, Hellmutt, 217 Sanguineti, Edoardo, 9, 205, 247

i nd e x

Semiramis, 5, 11, 63, 212 Shoaf, R. Allen, 90, 95, 293n18, 295n28 Sigier of Brabant, 69–70 Singleton, Charles, 21, 65, 81, 93, 128, 303n71, 320n16 Siren, 152–4, 242–5, 331n55 Song of Songs, 15, 18, 96, 152, 155, 164, 167–70, 172, 173, 193, 196, 205, 211, 219, 220, 237, 294n26, 316n85 spiritual friendship, 70–1, 74, 286n65, 286–7n79 Spitzer, Leo, 50 Stanesco, Michel 203, 322n32 stilnovo, 4, 12, 14, 17, 23–5, 43, 62, 64, 72, 73, 79, 132, 133, 135, 137, 140, 161, 181, 188, 202, 204, 209, 223, 232, 243, 260n7 Straw, Carole, 54–5, 297n39

365

Thomasset, Claude, 221, 228, 333n29, 335n47 Tristan (character), 8, 63, 141, 163–6, 171, 172, 174, 187–9, 217, 221, 315n76 Tristan (romance), 164–6, 187–8, 315n78 and 79 Tristano (romance), 165–6, 315n80, 322n30 Torraca, Francesco, 66, 136 Turner, Denys, 18 Ugolino, 183, 222–3 Ulysses, 25, 45, 48–9, 50, 105, 153, 241, 244, 245, 247, 338n56 Vecchio, Silvana, 54, 58, 279n25 Zumthor, Paul, 13