Introduction Dante’s Commedia (or Divine Comedy)1 purports to recount a visionary journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, a journey which happened in the year 1300, around Easter. Precise information about the date is eventually given by the devil Malacoda, who describes the severe earthquake damage which happened almost exactly 1266 years before, at the time of Christ’s crucifixion (Inferno 21.112–14). Virgil, Dante’s companion and guide, had already mentioned this earthquake (In- ferno 4.54), and that it immediately preceded Christ’s arrival in Limbo to liberate Adam, Eve, and the other believers of Old Testament times – the action tradition- ally called the Harrowing of Hell.2 Though Malacoda soon proves himself a de- ceiver, Dante’s early commentators recognized that this talented fraudster was putting forward a truth already known to his interlocutors (the actual date) in order to gain credence for false information on another subject (the condition of infernal bridges within the Eighth Circle of Hell). Hence, they recognized that Dante, through Malacoda, was revealing the date of his vision, and using tradi- tional information – that Christ, whose birth marked the first year of a new era, was crucified at age thirty-three – to indicate the year 1300.3 The perspective of 1300 and of Holy Week4 is maintained throughout Dante’s Commedia. Thus, from 1 The Comedy (La Commedia) is the title Dante gave his masterpiece. It fits, as he explains in his letter to Can Grande, Epistole 13.28 (sec. 10), because the work begins in adversity and ends in happiness. But Dante’s three-part epic needed a more distinctive title, so admirers soon called it The Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia); see Toynbee, “Commedia,” Dante Dictionary,pp. 171–72. Here Toynbee points out that the poem was called La Divina Comedia in “some of the oldest [manuscripts]” as well as in Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante. 2 The clearest biblical reference is Matthew 27:51–53: “[A]nd the earth did quake, and the rocks rent, and graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints that slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city and appeared unto many” (KJV). 3 Jacopo Alighieri, Jacopo della Lana, and Pietro Alighieri (1, 2, 3) all supply this date, glossing Inferno 21.112–14 (DDP). Anonimo Selmiano hesitates between 1299 and 1300 because he can- not decide whether Christ was crucified at thirty-two years and three months or thirty-three years and three months. 4 Malacoda’s words indicate that the previous day was the anniversary of the crucifixion. Dante and his contemporaries accepted a tradition, mentioned by Augustine of Hippo in On The Trinity, p. 118 (bk 4, chap. 11), that Jesus was both conceived and crucified on March 25. Florentines would remember this date because they began their New Year on March 25, a tradition continued by Florentine notaries and chroniclers until around 1749; see Santagata, Dante, p. 405 n22. Many scholars assume, however, that Dante meant, not the anniversary, but the movable feast, Good Friday, which was April 8 in 1300; see Grandgent, DDP, on Inferno 21.0 (proem). For most pur- poses, the difference between these dates matters little. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513725-001 2 Introduction the start to the end, anyone who addresses Dante, whether suffering soul, demon, angel, or saint in Heaven, speaks as though it were 1300. Allusions to later events take the form of prophecies, except when Dante occasionally addresses his readers as the retrospective narrator of his vision.5 Given Dante’s intense interest in later events, he might have been tempted to end the original dream and begin another, as Langland does with Piers Plowman, the better to address contemporary condi- tions. Yet even the last thirteen cantos of the Paradiso, which were not discovered until after Dante’s death on September 14, 1321,6 were written from the perspective of 1300. Dante’s son Jacopo (in Boccaccio’s account) only discovered the where- abouts of these last cantos, which Dante had presumably kept back for polishing, when the poet himself appeared in a dream to reveal it to him.7 This allowed Ja- copo to assemble the completed Commedia around 1322, adding his own commen- tary on the Inferno.8 With a poem so emphatically structured as a vision, written when dreams were widely accepted as conveyors of hidden truths, we might expect early commentators to focus on the Commedia’s visionary qualities. But prophetic dreams carry risks, both for those who dream them and those who accept and heed them.9 Early commentators were cautious, and Dante himself gives a care- fully mixed message in his famous letter, of uncertain date, to his patron, Can Grande della Scala. After thanking Can Grande for his recent generosity, Dante explains that he has decided to dedicate his unfinished Paradiso to him. (Appar- ently Inferno and Purgatorio were disseminated by that time.) Dante then offers the beginning of a commentary on Paradiso. This poem, he asserts, is indeed upon a marvelous (admirabilis) subject, because its author “will expound those 5 For example, in Inferno 26.4–9, rebuking his city of Florence for its five citizens among the thieves in Circle 8, bolgia 7, Dante as narrator alludes to a recent prescient dream about some action soon to be taken by the town of Prato against Florence. This is not the dream of 1300. 6 Boccaccio, Esposizioni, DDP, on Inferno 1.1–3. Giovanni del Virgilio and Menghino Mezzano specify September 13 in their epitaphs, but Toynbee, Dante Alighieri, pp. 103–5, suggests that their reasons are “metrical.” Santagata, Dante, pp. 338–39, accepts September 13, evening, as a compromise date for Dante’s death. 7 Boccaccio, Life of Dante, trans. Nichols, p. 65 (chap. 14). 8 Barański, “Textual Transmission,” p. 512; “Early Reception,” p. 521. 9 Around 1320, a certain Cardinal Beltrando investigated the Visconti rulers of Milan for a sup- posed plot to kill Pope John XXII by sorcery, an enterprise for which they allegedly considered recruiting Dante, though nothing indicates that they contacted him. This record does, however, suggest that Dante’s Commedia made some attribute sorcerous knowledge to him. After Dante’s death, Cardinal Beltrando was with difficulty dissuaded from exhuming and burning Dante’s body. He did burn Dante’s Latin treatise, De Monarchia (On the Monarchy). See Boccaccio, Life of Dante, trans. Nichols, p. 70 (chap. 16) and Santagata, Dante, pp. 314–15, 453–54 and n20. Introduction 3 things which he saw in the First Heaven and was able to retain in his mind.”10 Is this premise fictional? “Fictive” (fictivus) does appear second among many adjec- tives which Dante applies to the work’s “form or manner” (forma sive modus). It is preceded by “poetic” (poeticus) and followed by “descriptive, digressive, and figurative; . analytical, probative, refutative, and exemplificative” (descriptivus, digressivus, transumptivus, diffinitivus, divisivus, probativus, improbativus, et exem- plorum positivus).11 Though “fictive” (fictivus) can mean “fictional,” it can also mean “composed” and does not clearly denote untruth. However, some early com- mentators, including Dante’s son Pietro, do discuss the Commedia as a fictitious vision, often using the formula “he feigns” (fingit).12 Dante’s careful words about the author’s memory are meant to indicate the poem’s range; he soon explains why those who visit the heavens have trouble remembering it: For . the human intellect in this life, by reason of its connaturality and affinity to the separate intellectual substance, when in exaltation, reaches such a height of exaltation that after its return to itself memory fails, since it has transcended the range of human faculty.13 He illustrates this point with scriptural examples: the transfiguration of Christ (Matthew 17:1–8), which was never afterwards clearly described by Peter, John, and James, the disciples who witnessed it; also, the Apostle Paul, who was “caught up” (raptum), he says, to the “third heaven,” where he heard things mortals cannot repeat.14 For Dante, Paul’s Third Heaven was the heaven of God’s presence, the highest or tenth heaven of Dante’s Paradiso but the “First Heaven” of the letter to Can Grande. Perhaps because numerology was important 10 Epistola 13.50 (sec. 19); my translation here of “se dicturum ea que vidit in primo celo et retinere mente potuit.” 11 PDP Epistola 13.27 (sec. 9) and Toynbee’s translation there (p. 176, Letter 10, in Toynbee’s edition). 12 Pietro Alighieri (1), DDP, on Inferno 1.1–3. 13 PDP Epistola 13.78 (sec. 28) and Toynbee’s translation there (p. 208–9, Letter 10, in Toyn- bee’s edition). By the “separated substance” with which the human intellect is “connatural,” Dante apparently means the angelic intelligence; see Toynbee, ed., Epistolae, p. 190 n2. The concept is that angels have some role in conveying to mortals their own vision of God, but this does not remain in human memory once the vision ends. See Dante, Convivio 3.4.9; also, Aqui- nas, Summa Pt 1.1, q86, art. 4; pp. 589–91: “Whether our intellect can know the future?” and Pt 1.1, q94, art. 2; p. 639: “Whether Adam in the state of innocence saw the angels through their essence?” 14 2 Corinthians 12:2, KJV and Vulgate. 4 Introduction to Dante, he knew that there was more than one way to apply numbers.15 As for the exalted experience itself, Dante declares that if any detractors questioned whether such an unworthy author could be granted it, they should read the prophet Daniel, where “even Nebuchadnezzar by divine permission beheld certain things as a warning to sinners, and straightway forgot them” (et Nabuchodonosor invenient contra peccatores aliqua vidisse divinitus, oblivionique mandasse).16 Dante specified that the poem should be interpreted by a fourfold method of exegesis,17 which, however, had hitherto been reserved for sacred Scripture, and which, moreover, implies a narrative with a literal aspect, from which allegory can then be extracted.