Dante Alighieri.
Epistola a Cangrande.
Luca Azzetta, ed.
Rome-Padua: Antenore, 2023. 480 pp. €19.00.

Luca Azzetta’s new edition of the Epistola a Cangrande adds to the Dantean canon by making this work accessible to a wider audience than just scholars. Until now, the Epistola has been difficult to find in a single volume (Ricklin 1993 and Cecchini 1995). Azzetta, who has already edited the Epistola in the 2016 NECOD edition (Salerno Editrice), not only integrates the latest bibliography of the last seven years but also advances new hypotheses regarding the preservation of the autograph as well as the relationship between the Epistola and the Commedia, particularly its final cantos in Paradiso. He highlights how the Epistola suggests an (authorial) interpretation of the final experience in the Empyrean, linking Dante’s vision to biblical ones.

Azzetta carefully examines the arguments that have been made since 1819 regarding the inauthenticity of the Epistola (in the United States, Teodolinda Barolini and Lino Pertile have supported its authenticity, while Zygmunt Barański and Albert Russell Ascoli have rejected it). Rather than simply refuting these claims, Azzetta demonstrates how they can actually serve as evidence supporting authenticity. One crucial aspect is the rhetorical structure. Azzetta shows that far from being inconsistent, structure is essential to the architectural coherence of the Epistola. Moreover, his stylistic and lexical analysis dispels the hypothesis of a forger working only a few years after Dante’s death. This conclusion is further supported by the editor’s recognition that a hypothetical forger would have to have known rarely circulated Dantean works. Furthermore, Azzetta shows how the Epistola was known by some of the earliest commentators of the Commedia – not coincidentally those who were familiar with other rarely circulated Dantean works such as the Convivio. This makes it highly unlikely that the Epistola was the work of one or more actors other than Dante himself, given the time constraints necessary for such a fabrication. Ultimately, Azzetta suggests that defining this work as simply an ‘epistola’ is reductive and may have been misleading.

The volume’s most innovative section, even compared to the 2016 edition, is the part dedicated to the expositio textus (Introduzione § 7, pp. 52-64; and Epistola §§ 77-84, pp. 284-307). Before proceeding to such an exposition, Azzetta points out that the identification of the literal subject of the poem with the state of the souls after death (par. 24) is consistent with what Dante had affirmed in the incipits of Purgatorio (1.4-6) and Paradiso (1.10-12). The case of Inferno 2.3–6 is different, however, as Azzetta argues that a shift in Dante’s poetic consciousness had taken place in the period between the composition of the canticles: an interesting issue that certainly deserves further study. It is also interesting to note how Azzetta shows that the statement regarding the literal subject cannot be dismissed as reductive, but must be understood as bold, since it goes against both the authority of what St. Thomas had prescribed in his commentary to Aristotle’s Ethics, and that of the Inquisitor Bernardo Gui, who, as Apostolic Nunzio in Verona, stated in his Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis that anyone who claimed to have knowledge of the state of souls after death should be watched (Introduzione pp. 51-52; and commentary on §24).

Azzetta also shows how Dante’s reference to Psalm 113 (In exitu Israel) to clarify the polysemic nature of the Commedia was a destabilizing choice, as evidenced by its reception in the early exegesis of the poem, which leads us to question the relationship Dante intended to establish between his “sacred poem” and the Scriptures. Along this line of interpretation, Azzetta’s exegesis is particularly insightful in analyzing Dante’s use of the term agens, an unconventional choice compared to the more canonical auctor. This distinction indicates a deliberate intention in the way Dante chose to present his poem to his first readers. In fact, in the expositio textus, the Epistola ascribes to the cantos of the Empyrean – and only to those – the characteristics of three different types of visionary experiences described in the Sacred Scriptures (2 Cor., 12.2-4; Mt., 17.6; Ezek., 2.1), which medieval exegesis classified as divine visions received directly from God. In the last cantos, Dante introduces a paradigm shift: in this new light, the final section of Paradiso becomes the transcription of a mystical experience granted to Dante by God. From Par. 30.58, what he perceives no longer corresponds to an existing reality, as before, but rather to an inner visionary revelation (visio imaginaria or spiritualis, as in Ezek., 2.1), and, at the very end of the poem, when his mind got struck by a flashing light, he received a visio intellectualis that allowed him to see the mystery of the Incarnation (2 Cor., 12.2-4). This is a radical interpretation of the final vision of the Empyrean, which was in fact rejected by the early exegetes who sought to neutralize its implications, as they did with other elements of Dante’s work.

In conclusion, this edition succeeds on several levels. It expands the canon of Dantean works available to the general public, while providing a clear synthesis of the critical debate surrounding the Epistola. The evidence for Dante’s authorship is compelling. This evidence establishes a necessary foundation for any future challenge to Dante’s authorship: the burden of proof now shifts from those who seek to prove the Epistola’s authenticity to those engaged in disproving it. Moreover, Azzetta’s analysis of the Epistola offers a new interpretation of the final cantos of the Commedia, shedding new light on the nature of the work and the self-awareness of its author as a prophet.

Emanuele Ciarrocchi, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München