John Took.
Dante.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. 582 pp. $35

Dante by John Took contributes a thorough biography that both centers Dante’s works and the historical context they are embedded in. Took begins his text by reflecting on T.S. Eliot’s reading of Dante and the limits and possibilities of interpreting his biography and writing. Took agrees with Eliot and notes that reading Dante’s contemporaries’ after reading his own work is next reasonable step in interpreting a figure as monumental as Dante but expands Eliot’s view by noting that something must be said or interpreted, because Dante himself invites the lettore to speak on his or her own account (XXI).

The book first delves into the historical context, the political background and struggle between Florentine power blocs, partisanship and alignment, and civic disorder. “Historical Considerations”, which covers the periods of 1251-1313, is dedicated to outlining this historical backdrop before explicitly inserting Dante to the events. Took outlines Florentine power struggles through distinctive phases. He begins with Buondelmonte to characterize Florence’s political past then details the struggle for power between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, describing the period as one of genuine political creativity. This then leads to his discussion of the subsequent early years of the fourteenth century and the inner struggle among Black and White Guelphs. After the first chapter, Took situates Dante within this larger conflict between factions. Chapter 2, “Biographical Considerations”, begins with a biographical constellation of Dante’s lineage, starting from Cacciaguida and his mention in Paradiso, to Dante’s birth in 1265. Along with drawing out Dante’s later relationship with Guido Cavalcanti and Brunetto Latini, Took underlines how Dante’s turn to philosophy and the philosophical schools in Florence was set in motion by the death of Beatrice in 1290. The “Biographical Considerations” chapter is divided into three phases, “Susceptibility and the Significant Encounter (1265-1293)”; “Care, Conflict and Catastrophe (1293-1302)”; and lastly “Far-Wandering and the Agony of Exile (1302-1321).”

After these introductory chapters, Took analyses Dante’s biography through a chronological examination of his literary works and letters. Although each section is ordered in a chronological manner, Took references post-exile works to analyze Dante’s development as political thinker, poet, and philosopher. Through the reading of Vita Nova, Dante’s notion of love as a principle of disposition, as opposed to acquisition, surfaces within Took’s inquiry as he also notes how Vita Nova functions as a preliminary essay in the dialectic of hell, purgatory, and paradise “as a matter of self-confrontation, self-reconfiguration and self-transcendence” (77). In a continuation of his detailed exploration of Vita Nova, Took divides his third chapter, “Literary Apprenticeship and a Coming of Age” into “Dante Guittoniano” and “Dante Cavalcantiano.” He elaborates on Dante’s Guittonian phase, which was marked by a heightened sense of moral and salvific substance of love in both his Rime and Vita Nova. In his “Dante Cavalcantiano” section, Took describes this phase in Dante’s biography as a lyric poet as one characterized by “restiveness” in his development of “love-understanding” and “love-expression” while also putting into question Dante’s Cavalcantianism, noting that his is “just a pale reflection of the real thing, a living out of the Cavalcantian drama under the aspect less of its substance than of its symptomology” (133). In other words, Took notes that within Dante’s Cavalcantian phase, love is never “in and for itself as a principle of undoing on the plane of properly human being—of confusion, consternation and near-impossibility, to be sure, but never, in and for itself and properly understood, of anything other than new life” (133). In the following sections, Took continues to touch on Dante’s different influences during his development as a lyric poet in both his subsections “Dante and the Rose” and “Dante Guinizzelliano” and concludes with summarizing the affective-philosophical aspect of the Vita Nova as well as the principle of “properly human being and becoming”, meaning, the finality of one’s human presence. Took notes in the final section of Part II that Dante’s activity as a lyric poet and as a philosopher of love is expressed through the literary-aesthetic facet of Vita Nova which had the same underpinnings as Dante’s later Convivio and Divine Comedy.

Part II of Took’s book explores the Rime, the Convivio, the De vulgari eloquentia and the Post-Exilic Rime. It is noted that in most of the works detailed in this biography that the discussion of the principle of “being and becoming” is an undercurrent in Dante’s writing. One of the most striking moments it is investigated in is within Dante’s treatise on language and rhetoric and the “becoming” of the vulgare illustre which aligns itself with the concept of self-affirmation and recognition. It is made clear that the vulare illustre is a matter of rejoicing but also a diasporic force which Took characterizes as forlorn even while superimposing the matter of being and becoming on the theme of language. Took notes that Dante’s three canzoni written early in his exile echo his meditations on exile and grief in the Divine Comedy

In the final section of his book, delineating the Commedia, De Monarchia, the Eclogues, and the Quaestio de aqua et terra, Took expands on the theme of the self as meditated on by Dante and the world surrounding the self. In one of his final sections titled “The Dialectics of Being: A Difficult Dimensionality” Took analyzes Dante’s sense of temporality in relation to both Paradiso and the Convivio. He writes that for Dante, time is conceptualized as a before and after especially in the reconstruction of the self, “the intentional reconstruction both of self and of the world beyond self, is always temporally conditioned. It is always a matter of its successive moments” (389). Time is thus described as a means of self-perspectivization but also as an entity that speaks in the imperative for Dante.

Took’s chapters are brimming with both contextual information and analysis of Dante’s biography and life works; the book provides a full view into the background in which Dante is writing while bringing to light themes of existence, exile, language, temporality, and love through its meticulous selection of sources. It becomes clear through every chapter and analysis that the lettore mentioned in the preface, is necessarily part of this biography.

Lourdes Contreras, University of Pennsylvania