‘Dante and the Transnational Turn’, in Transnational Italian Studies, ed. by Charles Burdett, Loredana Polezzi, and Marco Santello (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), pp. 291-307

Transnational Italian Studies edited by Charles Burdett and Loredana Polezzi Transnational Italian Studies LIVERPOOL U NIVERSITY PRESS This document was generated by CloudPublish for University of Bristol at 82.46.59.236 on 2020-11-16, 10:26:03 1605522363GMTC 15 Dante and the Transnational Turn Tristan Kay Dante and the Transnational Turn In the context of literary and cultural studies, the transnational turn has challenged what Paul Jay terms the ‘nationalist paradigm’:1 the ways in which teaching and research have been shaped, rather narrowly and restrictively, by modern nation states and their associated languages. While convenient on a practical and administrative level, such a model can easily imply that national cultures and identities, whether English or French, German or Italian, are sealed and self-contained entities which fit neatly within territorial boundaries. The traditional separation of modern languages into discrete departments and disciplines (French studies, Hispanic studies, Italian studies, German studies) risks overstating the importance of the nation state in shaping cultural realities and overlooking the ways in which different national traditions intersect and cross-fertilize one another. Critics have paid particular attention to the inadequacy of this model in the context of modern-day globalization: the transnational movement of people, capital, commodities, languages and cultural products that has rendered national boundaries ever more porous in social, cultural, political and economic terms. Scholars have attempted to show how different facets of globalization have impacted so decisively upon cultural production that the very notion of ‘national’ cultures and canons, as once understood, no longer holds. Thus, at the heart of transnationalism is an attempt to move beyond a nineteenth-century notion of the monolingual nation state, one which still implicitly shapes the organizational and pedagogical structures of many modern languages departments, and to forge instead a critical 1 Paul Jay, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 1. 291 This document was generated by CloudPublish for University of Bristol at 82.46.59.236 on 2020-11-16, 10:26:03 1605522363GMTC 292 Tristan Kay methodology that can respond to the transnational realities and complexities of the modern world. By contrast, few figures in world literature are more strongly associated with the nation and literary nationalism than Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). Dante is often cited as the ‘father’ of the Italian language and, along with Petrarch and Boccaccio, as one of the ‘three crowns’: the pioneering originators of Italian literary culture. During the Risorgimento, Dante was evoked as a model patriot and a prophet of Italian unification. Later, Italian fascists were drawn to him as a source of fervent national pride and identified intimations of the coming of Mussolini in the Commedia’s foretelling of the advent of a strong imperial ruler. A vast monument in Rome called the Danteum, drawing connections between the poet, his endorsement of Empire and the fascist state, was approved by Mussolini but never built. Dante remains a cornerstone of the Italian school curriculum and, despite his stern criticisms of the medieval Church, has at times been co-opted by the Vatican. Hundreds of institutions around the world associated with the promotion of the culture and language of the Italian nation bear the poet’s name. In Italian cities, his poetry is still recited and dissected in public lectures or lecturae – a format dating back to fourteenth-century Florence. Dante retains, moreover, a strong presence in departments of Italian studies throughout the world, with the Commedia regarded as the national classic par excellence and the unquestioned core of a traditional Italian studies curriculum. The Florentine is, in other words, a poet of unparalleled national canonicity, whose work has been at the heart of different phases and forms of Italian nation-building. What, then, could such a poet have to do with the transnational turn in cultural and literary studies? On first inspection, the study of Dante appears antithetical to this critical and methodological tendency. While a transnationalizing approach seeks to examine how cultural products are understood more profitably in the ways they reflect mobility and exchange across different languages and cultures, and thus question the value of the nation state as a category of understanding and inquiry, Dante as a cultural and historical figure has often been used to reassert the importance of the nation. While the transnational turn has tended to draw attention to the non-canonical and to more marginal texts, voices and genres, which resist conventional ‘national’ categorization, Dante’s Commedia is as canonical and privileged as any text in the Western world. Where the transnational turn is associated by Jay with a shift in academic attention from ‘sameness’ to ‘difference’, inspired not only by the processes of globalization but also by a number of liberalizing social movements associated with the 1960s,2 the European, Christian, white, 2 See Jay, Global Matters, p. 17. This document was generated by CloudPublish for University of Bristol at 82.46.59.236 on 2020-11-16, 10:26:03 1605522363GMTC Dante and the Transnational Turn 293 male, hyper-canonical Dante might easily be seen as the very incarnation of the hegemonic and normative discourses that transnationalizing scholarship seeks to call into question. In this essay, however, I shall attempt to problematize the image of Dante as a monumental figure of national literary culture and consider how the transnational paradigm can in fact resonate in intriguing ways with several aspects of his work, his cultural context and his later reception.3 I shall begin by reflecting upon the very applicability of the term ‘transnational’ to a poet whose work predates the modern nation state. I shall then focus upon three points of interest: (1) the multilingualism and the different forms of cultural and literary translation associated with Dante and his cultural milieu; (2) the question of mobility and citizenship in late medieval Europe and the porous and dynamic qualities of a medieval city state such as Florence; and (3) the transnational dimension of Dante’s modern reception. The Transnational and the Pre-National As noted above, transnationalism often associates a ‘nationalist paradigm’ that frequently remains implicit in literary studies with what is an increasingly anachronistic notion of the nation state. If identities today are increasingly hybrid, with movement across international borders commonplace and cultural contact often instantaneous, the model of the strongly demarcated nation state that flourished throughout western Europe in the nineteenth century placed great emphasis upon the inalienable association of national territory, language, culture and populace. As explored by Yasemin Yildiz, this conception of the nation state is fundamentally a monolingual one, aimed at shaping nations as homogenous social and cultural entities and based on a ‘reified conception of language’.4 According to Yildiz, this persistent notion of the nation state has ‘obscured multilingual practices across history’.5 With the advent of the monolingual paradigm, she writes, ‘the notion of 3 As Emma Bond notes, there has generally been little inclination to ‘perform a temporal stretching out of the existing Italian cultural canon, and to re-evaluate past writers in Italian, both canonical and “ex-centric” alike, in trans-national terms […] And yet such figures, whose own biographical trajectories conceivably took them outside their own cultural and linguistic contexts, but whose writings crucially also continue to inspire further transnational narratives, are not uncommon within the canon’. ‘Towards a Trans-national Turn in Italian Studies?’, Italian Studies, 69 (2014), 415–24 (p. 418). 4 Yasmin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), p. 7. 5 Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue, p. 2. This document was generated by CloudPublish for University of Bristol at 82.46.59.236 on 2020-11-16, 10:26:03 1605522363GMTC 294 Tristan Kay monolingualism rapidly displaced previously unquestioned practices of living and writing in multiple languages’.6 Across Western Europe, this understanding of the nation and its relationship to language and national culture has played a key role in shaping schooling, universities and cultural canons. The intellectual roots of more traditional French, German and Italian departments, as clearly delimited and essentially monolingual entities, can be located in the nineteenth century, their literary curricula shaped by the historical, ideological and political proclivities of that particular era.7 One of the first objectives of the unifiers of Italy in the nineteenth century was to establish a national language in what was a linguistically and politically fragmented peninsula. What we today call Italian is, of course, a language based upon the literary Tuscan of the ‘three crowns’, as standardized by Pietro Bembo in the sixteenth century. The value of this language for the nationalists was clear: firstly, it would serve to instil a greater sense of coherence and fraternity among the Italian populace, of whom only some 2.5 percent spoke Italian in 1861;8 secondly, it would help instil in ‘Italians’ a strong association of nation, language and cultural patrimony, each clearly defined and demarcated. At times, Dante’s own writing can be seen to foreshadow the modern European nation state, and especially Italy, in a manner that has proved suggestive for his modern readers. In Canto VI of his Purgatorio, for example, the poet offers a famous invective on ‘serva Italia’,9 decrying the peninsula’s political turbulence and subordination and its lack of strong imperial governance. In his linguistic and poetic treatise, the De vulgari eloquentia, meanwhile, Dante divides Europe into linguistic and geographical territories which anticipate some of the states and languages of modern Europe. Having first delineated the Greek and Germanic languages, he then speaks of the tripartite Romance vernacular, comprising the languages of oc (Occitan), oïl (French) and sì (Italian), the latter spoken by the ‘Latini’ in the region known today as Italy.10 However, for all Dante’s modern association with the Italian nation and different forms of cultural nationalism, the very notion of ‘Italy’ 6 Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue, p. 6. See Jay, Global Matters, pp. 24–25, citing Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 8 See Tullio De Mauro, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita (Bari: Laterza, 1963), pp. 33–34. 9 Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio VI, 76. Citations from the Commedia are taken from Dante Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata (Florence: Le Lettere, 1994). 10 Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia I, viii. Citations from the De vulgari eloquentia are taken from Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. by Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 7 This document was generated by CloudPublish for University of Bristol at 82.46.59.236 on 2020-11-16, 10:26:03 1605522363GMTC Dante and the Transnational Turn 295 at the turn of the fourteenth century requires immediate interrogation. It is well known that the peninsula at this point in history, many centuries before unification in 1861, was defined not by homogeneity and cohesion but by social, political and linguistic fragmentation. Unlike the centralized kingdom of France, the Italian territory comprised a significant number of autonomous city states or communes, variously falling under the competing jurisdictions of the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, and there was considerable volatility both within and between these political entities. Thus, as well as occasionally prefiguring national states and identities, Dante’s writing more often reminds us that the poet is the product of a radically different, ‘pre-national’ reality, one that diverges from the modern world both in its more universalist and its more localist tendencies. As witnessed continually in his Commedia, Dante as a medieval Christian conceives of all humans as beings created in God’s image, their regional and political forms of identification seen as wholly contingent from the perspective of eternity. Dante engages continually with worldly realities in his masterpiece, but views them through the prisms of Christian cosmology and eschatology. Such universalism also extends into the realm of politics. In his Monarchia and Convivio, as well as his Commedia, Dante defends what he regards as the divinely willed authority of a Roman emperor to rule over all of Christendom, in light of humanity’s common political purpose. (The Holy Roman Empire was in a period of interregnum at the turn of the fourteenth century, and those who claimed to occupy the position of emperor, located in Germany, were not accepted as legitimate by the papacy.) By the time Dante writes his Commedia, he regards narrower forms of political allegiance, such as an overbearing attachment to city, lineage or political party, as foolish and destructive. In the De vulgari, meanwhile, as well as first mapping the history of language from a universal, Christian perspective, it is intriguing that Dante describes the three Romance vernaculars referenced above not as entirely distinctive linguistic entities but as three branches of an inclusive, supra-regional Romance language. As well as anticipating modern nation states, the work thus implies a fraternity of Romance languages and cultures, notwithstanding political tensions between them, that transcends modern national contours. Dante thus offers examples of affiliation and identification of far broader application than those associated with the modern nation state. Yet, on the other hand, his Commedia also presents us with countless examples of the intense hostility and sharply divergent identities that existed between Italian communes, some of them, such as Florence and Fiesole, only several miles apart. Furthermore, Dante describes in the De vulgari the extreme fragmentation that exists within the Italian language, an idiom that can be divided This document was generated by CloudPublish for University of Bristol at 82.46.59.236 on 2020-11-16, 10:26:03 1605522363GMTC 296 Tristan Kay into ‘at least fourteen vernaculars’.11 These universalist and localist impulses in Dante’s thinking and in his wider culture are encapsulated in the two forms of language in which he writes and which he theorizes with great acuity. Latin was understood to be an immutable form of language, subject to grammatical laws and common to peoples across space and time. It was the language of cultural authority, associated with texts considered to be of universal and unchanging importance. The vernacular, meanwhile, was understood to be a ‘natural’ form of language, particular to a given community and shaped by the vagaries of usage, place and time. Dante’s oeuvre thus offers examples of, on the one hand, forms of allegiance and identity that transcend modern borders and territories and, on the other, evidence of the many social, political and linguistic fault lines that existed within a terrain that we now conceive of as a single nation state. One can be struck, simultaneously, by both the vastness and the smallness of the late medieval experience and understanding of reality. In this context, we may only speak of ‘Italy’, the nation with which Dante is today so intimately associated, in the most cautious of terms. John Larner, in his history of the peninsula in the age of Dante and Petrarch, traces the use of the ancient word ‘Italia’ in the later Middle Ages, such as in political leaders’ appeals for ‘Italian’ unity against invading forces from the north. Yet this was a word, he reminds us, entirely unfamiliar to most citizens; one used only occasionally by a literate elite. Larner ultimately remarks that ‘Italy was nothing more than a sentiment […] or a literary idea. The reality was not unity, but a mass of divided cities, lordships, and towns, dominated by particularist sentiments and local interests’.12 In short, if there was a loosely bound cultural, linguistic and geographical entity known as ‘Italia’ in the later Middle Ages, its coherence was faint and subordinate to many other forms of political, territorial, civic, cultural, linguistic and religious identification and organization. As such, we must assert that the term ‘transnational’, dependent upon the idea of the modern nation state, is unsuited to late medieval culture. Dante’s was a pre-national culture, one that occasionally foreshadows but fundamentally predates the existence of modern nations. Nonetheless, it is often through the monolingual prism of the modern nation state that undergraduates first access Dante and late medieval Italian culture. By approaching the poet within the context of an ‘Italian studies’ degree (or else, especially in the United States, as a representative of ‘Italy’ within a course on the classics of 11 Dante, De vulgari eloquentia I, x, 9. John Larner, Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch (London: Longman, 1980), p. 3. 12 This document was generated by CloudPublish for University of Bristol at 82.46.59.236 on 2020-11-16, 10:26:03 1605522363GMTC Dante and the Transnational Turn 297 ‘world’ literature), students are often given an impression of a national solidity (especially in the case of a poet whose ‘national’ connotations are now so numerous) that is every bit as inadequate in the context of medieval or early modern culture as it is in the study of the modern globalized world. In both cases, the notion of a container culture can lead us to an unwelcome levelling of the complexity of a culture and its particular political, social and linguistic realities. Thus, while the term ‘transnational’ sits uneasily, at best, with the study of Dante and the culture of the late medieval Italian peninsula, I would argue that many of the critical and methodological insights associated with the transnational turn are nevertheless important and suggestive. Critical endeavours that highlight the mobility and interaction of languages, cultures and traditions, that explore how these interactions shaped subjectivities, and that consider how critical approaches have often been constrained by the confines of the modern nation state, are as valuable in the context of the study of medieval as of modern cultures. A striking example of how the insights associated with transnationalism can be brought to bear on the study of medieval culture comes in the recent Europe: A Literary History, 1348–1418, edited by David Wallace.13 Wallace’s magisterial two-volume history departs from many existing histories of European literatures, which have overwhelmingly been national histories, by offering a literary history which emphatically disavows the nation state as a category of inquiry. As Wallace puts it in his introduction: The notion of national literary history that still, remarkably, predominates today owes little to medieval understandings of natio and much to nineteenth-century historiography – where the literary product of a particular place, such as Palermo, Toledo or Toulouse, is declared constitutive of a larger entity known, or later known, as Italy, Spain or France.14 Thus, rather than containing chapters on Italian, Spanish or French literature from the period in question, Wallace focuses upon cities, grouped together into ‘sequences’ by itineraries (reflecting routes of trade, pilgrimage, language, cultural exchange and more), which frequently cross the borders between modern nations. Sequence V, for instance, runs from Avignon to Naples, and ‘reminds us that much of the literature flowing down the spine of Italy was, 13 See David Wallace, ed., Europe: A Literary History, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 14 Wallace, ‘Introduction’, in Europe: A Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), I, p. xxviii. This document was generated by CloudPublish for University of Bristol at 82.46.59.236 on 2020-11-16, 10:26:03 1605522363GMTC 298 Tristan Kay like much of the artwork, French-inspired’.15 Sequence VI, meanwhile, begins with Palermo and connects the Sicilian city to Muslim and Jewish communities in the Iberian peninsula and in North Africa. By underlining how the cities of the Italian peninsula were shaped by contact with other sites, cultures and languages, the work powerfully underlines the inadequacy of critical approaches to medieval Europe that are implicitly shaped by the borders of the modern nation state. While Wallace does not use the term ‘transnational’, the methodology that underpins his volumes, and his concern with re-evaluating the boundaries that are often understood to shape and delimit national cultures, resonate powerfully with the critical paradigms associated with recent critical work in this field. Medieval Multilingualism If one of the key thrusts of transnationalizing criticism has been to critique a perceived overdetermination of the nation state as a lens through which to examine and understand different forms of cultural production, another has been to explore the ways in which languages are not confined to given territories but move, adapt and respond to social, cultural and political pressures. As noted above, the powerful linking of language and nation state is a development largely associated with the nineteenth century. Prior to this privileging of monolingualism, linguistic practices were often much more fluid and dynamic,16 and few medieval authors offer richer meditations on language than Dante.17 Indeed, the poet’s modern identification as ‘father’ of the Italian language, invoked to reinforce the relationship between language and nation state, can mask the breadth of his thinking on a number of languages and their interrelation. While later appropriated as a totem of monolingualism, Dante’s literary production and his cultural and linguistic formation were in fact fundamentally multilingual. They are multilingual, firstly, insofar as Dante, like any late medieval Italian intellectual, had to negotiate the diglossia of Latin and the vernacular. At the time when Dante 15 Wallace, ‘Introduction’, I, p. xxviii. ‘Exclusive first language allegiance […] was not the most desired of linguistic identities or imagined communities in the late medieval period’. Mary Davidson, Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), p. 137. Cited in Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue, p. 6. 17 Mirko Tavoni describes how the De vulgari reveals an ‘acute and lucid level of cultural awareness and understanding of the salient structural aspects of his contemporary linguistic reality’. ‘Linguistic Italy’, in Dante in Context, ed. by Zygmunt G. Barański and Lino Pertile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 243–59 (p. 258). 16 This document was generated by CloudPublish for University of Bristol at 82.46.59.236 on 2020-11-16, 10:26:03 1605522363GMTC Dante and the Transnational Turn 299 wrote his Commedia, Latin remained the dominant and prestigious written language of the learned elite. As well as forming the bedrock of medieval education, it was the language of public record, of law, of the Church, of intellectual discourse, and was the required lingua franca in many established and emerging mercantile and diplomatic professions. In contrast with Latin stood the unstandardized vernacular, the everyday spoken language of the people, acquired not through formal instruction but through everyday use. Dante produced works in both Latin and the vernacular and, in a move of decisive importance for the development of European literary culture, would come to challenge the assumed cultural primacy of Latin, not least by writing his magnum opus, the Commedia, in his Florentine mother tongue. Yet Dante’s culture and intellectual formation was also multilingual insofar as he was shaped not only by the language and literary culture of Florence, or even by the many Italian vernaculars, but by the three principal branches of the Romance vernacular he set out in the De vulgari – what we today would term Italian, Occitan and French – and their associated cultural traditions. While this unfinished Latin treatise in part seeks to locate and codify an ‘illustrious’ supra-regional Italian vernacular (an endeavour Dante ultimately abandons, seemingly cognizant of the inherently mutable quality of all vernaculars), it is striking that the examples he gives of different poetic genres and forms are drawn from Occitan and Old French authors as well as from Italians. Thus, the treatise presupposes that its reader (and the vernacular poet of Dante’s time) is capable of operating not only in Latin and his or her local Italian vernacular, but also in the vernaculars of oc and oïl. Indeed, while Dante seeks to promote the Italian vernacular as a serious literary language, Occitan and Old French, which predated it as prestigious literary vernaculars, are presented not as ‘foreign languages’, but as pre-eminent Romance languages to be deployed in different literary genres, accessible to citizens of ‘Italy’ and ‘France’ alike. A number of prose writers from the Italian peninsula did, in fact, choose to write important works in Old French, while some Italian lyric poets chose to write in Occitan. The Italian lyric tradition, born in the cultural melting pot of Frederick II’s imperial court in thirteenth-century Sicily,18 was in effect a transplantation of the Occitan poetry of the troubadours, which flourished a century prior. Dante himself wrote a trilingual lyric entitled ‘Ai faux ris’, whose verses alternate between Latin, Italian and Old French. In the Commedia, meanwhile, he not only encounters a series of French poets in the afterlife, but also allows the 18 On the multilingual and multicultural character of twelfth- and thirteenthcentury Sicily, see Karla Malette, The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100–1250 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). This document was generated by CloudPublish for University of Bristol at 82.46.59.236 on 2020-11-16, 10:26:03 1605522363GMTC 300 Tristan Kay troubadour Arnaut Daniel to speak in Occitan. Multilingualism, then, and an understanding of languages that transcends territorial considerations and confines, is a topic every bit as pertinent in ‘pre-monolingual’ late medieval culture as it is in Yildiz’s ‘post-monolingual’ globalized world. Dante’s writings not only encompass numerous languages but also engage continually with cultural traditions and genres associated with locations beyond the Italian peninsula, and especially with the territory today known as France. Thus, as well as in classical and medieval Latin works, his cultural formation has roots in a number of vernacular languages and cultures which he skilfully negotiates and synthesizes in an oeuvre which constantly seeks innovative and hybrid forms of expression.19 Dante’s cultural environment was, moreover, one where translation – a key category of enquiry in transnational studies – was widespread. A key form of literary production in the Italian peninsula from the thirteenth century was vernacularization.20 With a view to disseminating knowledge to a broader public, writers (usually anonymous) would transfer authoritative religious and secular texts of different genres from Latin to the local vernacular. In Dante’s immediate milieu, for example, Brunetto Latini translated works and speeches by Cicero into the vernacular, while Taddeo Alderotti, a Florentine who taught medicine and logic at the University of Bologna in the late Duecento, translated into Italian a Latin version of Aristotle’s Ethics. Indeed, the broader rediscovery of Aristotle in the West was an eminently transcultural operation, mediated across languages, cultures and territories, in both the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds. As well as the vernacularization of important Latin and Greek authors, Dante’s world hosted the translation or adaptation of texts into Italian from other vernaculars. These ranged from Italian rewritings of French romances to a widely circulated Italian version of Brunetto’s French encyclopaedia the Trésor, sometimes attributed to Bono 19 On the experimental and syncretic quality of Dante’s writing, see for example: Zygmunt G. Barański, ‘Dante Alighieri: Experimentation and (Self-)exegesis’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume II: The Middle Ages, ed. by Alistair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 561–82. Syncretism and hybridism are terms frequently deployed by critics in relation to Dante’s innovative handling of genre. Compare Vertovec on the ‘fluidity of constructed styles and everyday practices’ typical of transnational forms of cultural production: ‘These are often described in terms of syncretism, creolization, bricolage, cultural translation and hybridity’. Transnationalism (Aldershot: Routledge, 2009), p. 7. 20 On the culture of vernacularization in Dante’s Italy, see especially Alison Cornish, Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterate Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). This document was generated by CloudPublish for University of Bristol at 82.46.59.236 on 2020-11-16, 10:26:03 1605522363GMTC Dante and the Transnational Turn 301 Giamboni. The first works attributed to Dante himself, the Fiore and Detto d’Amore, are Tuscan appropriations of the thirteenth-century French text the Roman de la Rose, whose narrative was adapted not only into the poet’s literary vernacular but also into the Italian poetic form of the sonnet sequence. As well as a highly fluid and dextrous approach to different languages, then, Dante’s culture hosted a rich and sophisticated culture of translation, with authors adopting different strategies and imaginatively adapting source texts to the cultural and generic norms of the target language. Mobility and Citizenship Contemporary perspectives on transnationalism foreground the radically increased mobility associated with the globalized world which, along with novel modes of communication, has created new and hybrid forms of identification and expression. A walled Italian city state, such as Dante’s Florence, by contrast, may ostensibly suggest a small and enclosed world, but its compact dimensions can distract us from the many kinds of mobility and cultural exchange, across significant distances and linguistic borders, which it experienced and facilitated. As well as its local artisanal economy, Florence was a major financial and mercantile hub in the later Middle Ages, with links to many parts of Europe through both trade and banking. Wealthy foreign clients, for instance, entrusted Florentine bankers with significant sums of money and asked them to generate profits. As such, Florence was at the heart of a circulation of wealth across different political jurisdictions – a ‘transnational’ flow of capital avant la lettre. Moreover, the city traded in commodities from across Europe and the Mediterranean, from England to North Africa. As John Najemy writes: ‘If it sometimes seems that Florence had two different economies – an international economy of traders, bankers, and merchants who were more often than not in London, Avignon, Naples, or the Levant, and a local economy of cloth manufacturers, artisans, shopkeepers, and labourers – they were nonetheless intimately linked’.21 Florence’s place in an extensive economic network reflects the dynamics of politics in this period. Just as Vertovec writes of the ‘multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-states’ associated with the globalized contemporary world,22 medieval historian William Caferro uses the example of the French-born ruler Charles of Valois, whose political interests and family connections ran from Aragon and Valencia to Sicily and 21 22 John Najemy, A History of Florence: 1200–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 117. Vertovec, Transnationalism, p. 3. This document was generated by CloudPublish for University of Bristol at 82.46.59.236 on 2020-11-16, 10:26:03 1605522363GMTC 302 Tristan Kay Constantinople, to illustrate ‘the international nature of politics’ in the late medieval period.23 Medieval politics and economics, like medieval literary culture, thus continually unfolded across multiple territories and kingdoms, whose own boundaries were often nebulous and mutable. Another important form of mobility experienced by many medieval Italians was pilgrimage, a venture which impacted strongly upon imagery and expression in literary works and the visual arts alike. Christians from different parts of society embarked upon pilgrimages, especially to the Holy Land, Rome and Santiago de Compostela, as a demonstration of religious devotion and a retreat from day-to-day worldly preoccupations. Florence itself was on the pilgrimage route to Rome from the north in Dante’s time, and so the city hosted numerous visitors around the turn of the fourteenth century. In his collection of early love poems, the Vita nova, Dante describes speaking of his love for Beatrice with two pilgrims who find themselves in the city en route to Rome, and uses the etymology of peregrino to reflect upon the spiritual and historical implications of the word, whose classical etymology suggests strangeness and foreignness.24 Indeed, the metaphor of pilgrimage – widely exploited in medieval religious literature – underpins the entire Commedia, with Dante’s journey figured as a spiritual quest from the earthly to the heavenly city, an adventure from the familiar into a land that is new and other. Conquest is another form of transcultural experience exploited by Dante. In one of the climactic cantos of the Paradiso, for example, he evokes a paradigmatic cross-cultural encounter in comparing his sensation upon reaching the Empyrean to that of the conquering barbarians arriving in the city of Rome, stupefied by the magnificence of its monuments.25 Mobility was enforced as well as sought by many citizens of medieval Italian communes. Such was the volatility of the politics of the peninsula at this time that power in many cities was wrested back and forth between rival factions. The two main factions in this period were the Guelph and Ghibelline parties, who defended the political interests of the papacy and empire respectively. Such political instability meant that exile was a common feature of life in medieval Italian cities, especially for figures of cultural and intellectual importance, such as Dante, who were often also embroiled in civic affairs. Exile was fraught with dangers: the Florentine poet Guido 23 William Caferro, ‘Empire, Italy, and Florence’, in Dante in Context, ed. by Zygmunt G. Barański and Lino Pertile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 9–29 (p. 13). 24 Dante Alighieri, Vita nova XL, in Vita nuova, ed. by Domenico De Robertis, in Opere minori, 2 vols (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1979), I, i, 1–247. 25 Dante, Paradiso XXXI, 31–51. This document was generated by CloudPublish for University of Bristol at 82.46.59.236 on 2020-11-16, 10:26:03 1605522363GMTC Dante and the Transnational Turn 303 Cavalcanti, for instance, died of malaria in the Tuscan Maremma in 1300, shortly after his banishment. However, exile also allowed for different forms of intercultural contact. Guelph politician and intellectual luminary Brunetto Latini, for example, travelled to Paris, having been exiled from Florence during the period of Ghibelline rule that followed the 1260 Battle of Montaperti. This sojourn not only acquainted Brunetto with Paris’s rich intellectual culture but also inspired him to write his Trésor in Old French. Brunetto’s return to Florence in 1269 saw him resume his political career as well as his role as cultural figurehead in the city, where he played an important role in mediating French, as well as Ciceronian, language and culture into the city. In Dante’s own case, his exile from Florence in 1302 (under accusation of political corruption, following a coup by a rival Guelph faction) led to two decades of peregrinations within the Italian peninsula. His experience of its different regions and dialects fertilized his fascination with language and informed not only his insightful discussion of Italian vernaculars in the De vulgari but also the broad lexical range of the ‘plurilingual’ Commedia, notable for its boldly inclusive approach to language and register. All three of Italy’s ‘crowns’, in fact, experienced considerable mobility. Giovanni Boccaccio spent some 13 years in Naples, initially sent by his father to study law, and took his first steps as a writer in the context of the city’s vibrant Angevin court. Petrarch, meanwhile, was shaped more decisively by the ‘cosmopolitan culture’ of the French city of Avignon, ‘where the most powerful, influential, and learned men of Europe gathered’,26 than by any single location in the Italian peninsula. In her recent book on Petrarch and the literary culture of nineteenth-century France, Jennifer Rushworth explores the complex forms of appropriation of the poet by the Avignonese and, in ruminating on the poet’s transnational credentials, is prompted to ask the provocative question: ‘Was Petrarch French?’27 Late medieval Italian culture thus presents us with many interesting examples of the movement of individuals, commodities, monies, languages and cultural traditions between regions which, from the vantage point of modernity, we can too easily think of as sealed and discrete container cultures. The mercantile commune of Florence, in particular, was a site of continual comings and goings. As Kenneth Clarke puts it, the city was ‘in constant negotiation by those who were both in the here of the city and in the there of absence, whether 26 K. P. Clarke, ‘Florence’, in Europe: A Literary History, 2 vols, ed. by David Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), vol. I, 687–707 (p. 690). 27 Jennifer Rushworth, Petrarch and the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2017), p. 233. This document was generated by CloudPublish for University of Bristol at 82.46.59.236 on 2020-11-16, 10:26:03 1605522363GMTC 304 Tristan Kay it be because of exile, trade, diplomacy, or pilgrimage’.28 Clarke’s words here resonate suggestively with the language of transnationalism. Steven Vertovec, for example, speaks of the emergence of the ‘dual or multiple identifications’ associated with ‘diaspora consciousness’ in a globalized world: the sense of being ‘home away from home’ or ‘here and there’.29 Such terms could just as easily apply to the medieval exile. Doris Sommer, meanwhile, suggestively writes that ‘By now strangeness is the norm in big cities worldwide, where urban life is recovering the heterogeneousness and dynamic qualities that once defined the medieval metropolis’.30 One must appreciate, in other words, that the small unit of political administration, the medieval city state, finds itself located within and shaped by a much larger political, economic, religious and cultural ecosystem that stretched from England and Germany to North Africa and Constantinople. Far from being sealed and homogenous, the late medieval Italian peninsula was porous and dynamic – ‘a diverse and heterogeneous entity, with a variety of cultural and ethnic influences’.31 As such, it is easy to appreciate Vertovec’s contention that ‘transnationalism […] certainly preceded the nation’.32 As Sommer’s words above suggest, the qualities associated with transnationalism attest to a recovery of the ‘heterogeneousness and dynamic qualities’ of the pre-modern, pre-national urban world. Transnational Reception My essay has so far reflected upon some of the ways in which forms of mobility, multilingualism and intercultural exchange associated with transnationalism can also be identified in the vibrant culture of late medieval Italy, a world where modern assumptions concerning monolingualism and nation states as container cultures are not yet established. In this final section, I shall reflect briefly upon the transnational elements of Dante’s modern reception. There is, naturally, a rich history of cultural engagement with Dante’s work within the Italian peninsula, but the poet’s reception over the last two centuries, in particular, has been truly global in scope. The sheer breadth of Dante’s modern reception can be witnessed, for instance, in the 20 essays found in the 2011 volume Metamorphosing Dante: 28 Clarke, ‘Florence’, p. 687. Vertovec, Transnationalism, p. 6. 30 Doris Sommer, ‘Language, Culture, and Society’, in Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. by David G. Nicholls (New York: MLA, 2007), pp. 3–19 (p. 3); emphasis mine. Cited in Jay, Global Matters, p. 16. 31 Caferro, ‘Empire, Italy, and Florence’, p. 13. 32 Vertovec, Transnationalism, p. 3. 29 This document was generated by CloudPublish for University of Bristol at 82.46.59.236 on 2020-11-16, 10:26:03 1605522363GMTC Dante and the Transnational Turn 305 Appropriations, Manipulations, Rewritings.33 These studies highlight the productive reception of Dante’s work in an array of modern contexts – that is, the way in which Dante’s Commedia is not passively ‘received’ by modern communities but serves as a spark for new creative operations and allows for the transposition of the medieval poem’s tensions onto contemporary realities. One is immediately struck by the transnational scope of this collection, which moves from the use of Dante in twentieth-century English, German and Irish literature to the appropriation of the poet in twentiethcentury American gay poetry. Furthermore, the collection contains a number of studies of intermedial responses to the poet, from the queer cinema of Derek Jarman to the transfer drawings of Robert Rauschenberg. Similarly, a recent conference at the University of Leeds, ‘L’ombra sua torna: Dante, the Twentieth Century, and Beyond’ (2017), hosted a range of interventions on modern cultural responses to the poet’s work, from the powerful postcolonial rewriting by Aimé Cesaire in And the Dogs Were Silent to Roland Barthes’s sophisticated but neglected engagement with the poet and modern Persian translations of the Commedia and their negotiation of the Inferno’s representation of Muhammad. Two important and original in-depth studies from recent years that bring to light the transnational dimension of Dante’s reception through the centuries are Nick Havely’s Dante’s British Public: Readers and Texts, from the Fourteenth Century to the Present and Dennis Looney’s Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the ‘Divine Comedy’.34 Havely’s monograph takes a long view of the British reception and appropriation of Dante, addressing a plethora of case studies, many of them previously unexamined, to showcase different forms of Anglo-Italian cultural contact and the broadening appeal of the poet’s work through the centuries. A striking aspect of Havely’s study, especially pertinent to the idea of transnationalism, is that it not only uses Dante to explore the contact between two nation states but also focuses on itinerant British readers, collectors and translators, in locations such as Mumbai, Cape Town and Berlin, to highlight the complex ways in which British readers have accessed and disseminated the poet’s work. Havely also explores the intersection of imperial 33 Fabio Camilletti, Manuele Gragnolati and Fabian Lampart, eds, Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, Rewritings (Vienna: Turia and Kant, 2011). The volume followed a 2009 conference at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. 34 Nick Havely, Dante’s British Public: Readers and Texts, from the Fourteenth Century to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Dennis Looney, Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the ‘Divine Comedy’ (South Bend: Notre Dame University Press, 2011). This document was generated by CloudPublish for University of Bristol at 82.46.59.236 on 2020-11-16, 10:26:03 1605522363GMTC 306 Tristan Kay history and Dante reception, considering the peregrinations of valuable Dante manuscripts that accompanied British colonialists around the world to signal the cultural prestige of the Empire. Looney’s work, meanwhile, explores how African-American authors have read and responded to Dante’s work, from the 1820s to the present day, encompassing Romantic, modernist, novelistic and filmic appropriations. Most compellingly, Looney reveals how these rewritings of the Commedia have reimagined the poem as a slave narrative that raises questions of segregation and migration and highlights how certain African-American authors have taken inspiration from Dante’s refinement of a new kind of poetic vernacular in formulating their own forms of expression. Confronting such a rich multiplicity of modern responses to Dante is of interest not only in allowing us to trace and catalogue textual influences and residues of the poet’s writing in the modern world. It is also important to note how staggeringly variegated the poet’s reception is, and how his writing has been refracted through different locations, realities and subjectivities. Far from being a stifling monument to cultural nationalism or Christian orthodoxy, Dante’s Commedia, translated into new languages in every corner of the globe, has served as an infinitely flexible text through which to interrogate a gamut of social, cultural and historical questions. As the editors of Metamorphosing Dante put it in the introduction to their volume, the continual engagement with Dante in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries attests to ‘Dante’s ability to help the contemporary world understand itself’. 35 In some cases, the totalizing scope of the theocentric Commedia, and its unqualified notions of truth, justice and salvation, are invoked as unattainable concepts in modern, secular authors’ more fragmented realities. In other cases, however, Dante offers a more productive model for writers and artists around the world in confronting and articulating aspects of modernity. Conclusion It is quite understandable that a pre-modern, extensively studied author such as Dante has not been the focus of transnationalizing scholarship within the field of Italian studies. Other texts and genres, especially from recent decades, respond in more explicit ways to questions of transnationalism, globalization, cultural translation and mobility. Indeed, I began this essay by drawing attention to the ways in which Dante might easily be regarded as a totem of precisely the kind of cultural nationalism and canonicity that such 35 Camilletti, Gragnolati and Lampart, ‘Metamorphosing Dante’, in Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, Rewritings (Vienna: Turia and Kant, 2011), pp. 9–18 (p. 11). This document was generated by CloudPublish for University of Bristol at 82.46.59.236 on 2020-11-16, 10:26:03 1605522363GMTC Dante and the Transnational Turn 307 scholarship seeks to resist and move beyond. Nonetheless, future research and teaching within the field would benefit from a greater attentiveness to the ways in which the framework of transnationalism can be germane even to the most canonical of authors. By limiting Dante (and, indeed, his fellow corone, Petrarch and Boccaccio) to an association with a national container culture, we can obscure the intercultural complexities of his writing. I hope to have highlighted in this essay how his poetry is the product of a heterogeneous and multilingual cultural reality, and how its reception has seen a monument of Italian literary culture endlessly transformed, reapproriated and reimagined across territorial and linguistic borders. Given this complex picture, and the inadequacy of the nation state as a prism through which fully to understand Dante, there also remains work to be done on how the poet has been used and abused in shaping different forms of Italian national identity, 36 within and beyond the peninsula, and the processes through which this pre-national author became the anointed poet of the nation. I would suggest, then, in conclusion, that Dante’s poetry and its reception not only offer us numerous insights into diverse strands of medieval culture, history and society but, alongside more contemporary forms of cultural production, can contribute to a broader reflection on questions of nationalism and transnationalism, and the ways in which cultures do not represent hermetic entities but rather interact and cross-fertilize one another across space and time. 36 For ideas of ‘use’ and ‘abuse’ of Dante in the context of fascism, see Stefano Albertini, ‘Dante in camicia nera: uso e abuso del divino poeta nell’Italia fascista’, The Italianist, 16.1 (1996), 117–42. This document was generated by CloudPublish for University of Bristol at 82.46.59.236 on 2020-11-16, 10:26:03 1605522363GMTC