Elizabeth Coggeshall.
On Amistà: Negotiating Friendship in Dante’s Italy.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023. 220 pp. $75.00.
In her insightful book on the theme of friendship in Dante’s writings, Elizabeth Coggeshall explains that during Dante’s times the concept of amistà, or amicizia, played a crucial role in promoting and disseminating one’s poetry. For the vernacular writers active in the late Duecento and early Trecento, the concept of amistà and the terminology related to it carried significant tensions. These tensions encompassed various aspects such as network building inclusivity or dyadic exclusivity, disinterestedness or personal advantage, hierarchical status or implied equality, and harmonious uniformity or distinctive multiplicity. These tensions had practical social consequences in the different literary environments of northern Italy between the Duecento and Trecento. For Dante, like for many contemporary writers, amicizia or amistà meant the main social framework for a poet’s growth and progress.
Coggeshall examines the strategic ways in which Dante, in conversation with his peers, employs the terminology of amicizia throughout his literary career. She considers the labels amico and amicizia along with their associated terms, which are found in four of Dante’s works: Vita nova, De vulgari eloquentia, Epistle to Cangrande, and Commedia. Furthermore, she situates the readings of these works in their proper contexts, conducting additional research on contemporary sources, both widely studied and lesser known. Through analyzing the sociohistorical circumstances in which each of these four works was created, Coggeshall demonstrates how Dante incorporated and strategically utilized conflicting concepts of friendship for various purposes across varied social settings. Dante is a particularly suitable author for this purpose: indeed, his corpus provides the most complete representation of a single individual’s evolving perspective on the strategic importance of friendship within specific social contexts. According to Coggeshall, Dante’s writings depict a portrayal of friendship that favors exclusivity, competition, self-interest, and hierarchy. Dante’s strategic depiction of such qualities in friendship provided the rationale for the addition of types of amicitia that writers in the Early Renaissance would claim and appropriate.
In chapter 1, Coggeshall argues that the concept of amistà, as articulated in Dante’s Vita nova and his pre-exilic lyric poems, foregrounds dynamics of anti-sociality, exclusivity, and hierarchy. Poets in the late thirteenth-century Italian comuni autonomously shaped their own networks, conferring recognition, honor, and fame upon their participants. Within this self-regulating system, poets relied on the language of friendship to expand their networks and solidify their reputations, referring indiscriminately to strangers, intimates, and rivals as amici. The terminology of friendship thus became a strategic tool for enhancing one’s centrality within the literary network, as poets recognized the value of se diversifying connections and cultivating productive modes of intellectual dispute. In the Vita Nova, Dante strategically excludes, differentiates, and elevates himself and Guido Cavalcanti—the primo amico—above the broader poetic community. More generally, Dante’s use of amistà among his peers in the Vita Nova serves not to promote expansive sociability, but rather to construct and maintain social boundaries.
Chapter 2 examines Dante’s repeated self-identification as amicus of the academically well-connected poet Cino da Pistoia in his De vulgari eloquentia (ca. 1304-1306). Dante asserts his status as Cino’s amicus in De vulgari eloquentia, enabling him to navigate between two conflicting interpretations of friendship. On the one hand, he aligns himself with Cicero’s conception of a selfless bond grounded in mutual comprehension and cooperation between individuals. On the other hand, Dante presents himself as an individual seeking recognition within a conservative and competitive domain, despite his vulnerable position. Within this domain, Cino plays a crucial role in the De vulgari eloquenta as the guardian of the Bolognese intellectual network.
Chapter 3 examines the hierarchical dynamics of friendship between a lord and a client. Coggeshall focuses on Dante’s innovative use of the term amicus in the first four paragraphs of his epistle to his patron, Cangrande della Scala. She contends that whereas friendship in communal and academic social spheres exhibited ambiguity, friendship between patron and client at the turn of the Trecento was marked by categorical contradictions. In the four brief opening paragraphs of the Epistle, Dante seeks to reconcile the presumed requirement of equality in medieval friendship theory with the realities of a rigidly hierarchical social structure. As Coggeshall demonstrates, the Epistle’s argument rests on two qualities fundamental to friendship yet seemingly at odds with patronage: equality and reciprocity. In contrast to traditional frameworks that emphasize insurmountable disparities in status between patron and client, the Epistle asserts that such inequalities may be mitigated through symbolic—yet nonetheless genuine—affinities of preferences, discernment, and honor. Coggeshall shows that these arguments inaugurate a theory of reciprocity grounded in mutual recognition of the obligations of patronage, encompassing both symbolic and economic dimensions. The Epistle’s resolution further serves to support the Commedia’s implicit claim regarding the potential of amicitia Dei, as a unique bond—one that is paradoxically both firmly hierarchical in structure and radically inclusive in scope.
In Chapter 4, Coggeshall turns to the Commedia to investigate the practices of friendship as they appear across the three realms of Dante’s afterlife. She builds on the predicaments explored in the preceding chapters to examine a new one: the interplay of difference and sameness. Dante, in fact, approaches friendship in the Commedia through the paradox of difference and identity. He draws on friendship’s unique blend of otherness and likeness to illustrate how individuals are ethically positioned in relation to each other within human society. Friendship thus becomes a model for navigating distinctions between people without effacing them, a framework that also reflects the divine community, at once diverse and unified. In Inferno, the deliberate actions of sinners prevent them from forming meaningful social bonds even with their closest neighbors and distance them from the exclusive, selective realm of God’s friendship. In Purgatorio—the so-called “canticle of friendship”—penitents employ the dyadic structure of friendship as a means to progress towards the radical inclusivity of carità: private, voluntary attachments become opportunities to align one’s will with the will of God. Friendship rituals are here are purposeful and strategic. In Paradiso, friendships—while still productive of joy and a source of beatitude—become unnecessary, eclipsed by the soul’s exclusive attachment to God, through which all other relationships are reflected and rendered intelligible. Private attachments persist, but in transmuted form, and the poet is careful not to conflate them with amistadi. Friendship among the souls in the heavenly court endures as a reflection of the vertical relationship between each individual soul and the Lord.
To conclude, Coggeshall’s book investigates the profound dimensions of friendship across four of Dante’s writings, while also exploring the historical, social, and literary contours of the Italian world between the Duecento and Trecento. Coggeshall advances innovative and consequential insights that prove valuable not only for specialists in Dante Studies, but also for scholars of medieval history and literature more broadly.
Massimiliano Lorenzon, University of Georgia