Elena Lombardi.
Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 304 pp. $80.

In the Palazzo Comunale of San Gimignano, there is a fresco depicting a man and a woman reading a large volume; the man is holding the text, while the woman is right behind him, clenching his shoulder from her posterior position. The fresco is unfortunately damaged and therefore it is not possible to identify the two individuals, nor do we fully understand the relationship between them. It is from this fresco and the spatial relationship of the figures that Elena Lombardi departs on her ambitious project of depicting women engaged with reading. Her intention and the limits of such research are expressed from the very beginning: the author is imagining what a female reader might look like, and what her approach to literature would be, with a focus on lyric poetry. The scholar aims not at identifying precise names or identities, but rather at describing how these readers were imagined by poets of the Italian tradition, such as Dante, Boccaccio, and Cavalcanti. The vernacular production of these artists is justified in many instances—it suffices to think of the Decameron—as the will of the artists in pleasing their female readers. Therefore, what starts to appear more regularly are women as addressees; it is with this intentional yet imaginary audience that the male writers interact.

It is along these lines that Lombardi structures her book, devoting the first chapter, a thorough introduction, to describe the main features of female literacy in the Late Middle Ages, starting with the issue of numbers: were women trained in writing and reading, and in what proportion? The historian Giovanni Villani, for instance, to show the power of Florence, speaks of at least ten thousand boys and girls learning how to read; these numbers immediately appear to be extremely generous—even more so if one considers that he talks of people of both sexes. Yet, some sort of teaching was surely perpetrated. Ample space is then necessary to discuss what women could have read, including questions of what kinds of books and what sorts of materials they had available. The second chapter, by contrast, goes deeper into the goals of the book, namely trying to ascertain who were the women imagined by these male writers and poets as their audience. One example of this relationship is represented by Dante. He acknowledged the necessity for a poet of communicating with women, something that must happen in vernacular because they largely cannot read Latin. The issue, though, runs deeper, and Lombardi sheds light on other instances in which a female voice—or at least an imaginary female voice—could be identified. One such example is Cavalcanti’s “Donna me prega,” in which a male poet is speaking only because he becomes the addressee of a request. The evolution of this position shows itself again with Dante, who in the Vita Nova establishes a rather broader conversation with some women. First, Dante moves from a general “woman,” celebrated in many of his poems, to Beatrice, an identifiable and living character. Second, the Vita Nova features women to whom Dante illustrates his new life, and who are the only ones who could fully understand his intentions. Dante praises these women as being gifted with knowledge and intellect to understand the complexity of the new path of his life: women, thus, that the poet deems capable of a deep and equal relationship, far from the distortions of the donne schermo. Dante reveals the evolution of his reading of the female role in the Vita Nova is also further complicated by his exchanges, direct and indirect, with other members of the lyric love tradition.

Lombardi’s third chapter follows these lines and discusses the association between poems and the bodily image of the woman, which must be dressed—or undressed, if it is cloaked under an allegory or with complex language—to be revealed to a male reader. This is an ancient trope that through centuries was associated with gendered elements such as ornaments and makeup, generating the direct contrast between the bombastic and insincere female disguise and the naked and direct word. Lombardi analyzes the phenomenon of the personification of texts—each one seems to have specific elements, such as the young and less adorned ballata, or the noble matron with whom the canzone is identified. In this very stimulating journey through poems and poets and between personified texts and allegedly real women—including the Dantean Matelda as the symbol of what lies in between—the discussion could not but peak with Beatrice herself, the ultimate interlocutor in Dante’s path. Beatrice, for Dante, represents the union of different aspects and goals: she is the loved woman, the allegory of a higher purpose, both a character and a real woman, whose shape in the Commedia is difficult to trace. It is from this point that Lombardi investigates how the character of Beatrice came to be, her voice, and her agency. It is through her presence at the top of the Purgatory mountain and her skim-reading of the Vita Nova —as Lombardi poises it—that Dante can reassess his previous poetical life in view of the Commedia. In the poet’s creation, therefore, Beatrice is a reader capable of judging and even emending what she “read” first in the young work, then in the Purgatorio, and finally as a teacher and guide in the Paradiso—especially in the first canti. Although unique and with an importance that has no equal in his whole production, Beatrice is not the only woman with a specific role in the Commedia, and Lombardi emphasizes the literary ambiguity of Francesca’s story in Canto 5 of Inferno, another form—although possibly corrupted—of an in-between literary existence and reality.

There is much more in this very well-thought-out book, and Lombardi does try to encompass the various and multifaced themes of women reading, from different perspectives. The result is a text that is rich in all of its parts, that does not limit the study to one single tradition but tries to tie the connections between what was a shared cultural space. Imagining the woman reader is therefore an ally for all those scholars and enthusiasts interested in the complexity of a dense yet necessary discourse on entangled genders.

Mario Sassi, University of Pennsylvania