Simon Gilson.
Reading Dante in Renaissance Italy. Florence, Venice and the “Divine Poet.”
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. XIV + 434 pp. $120.

Leggere Dante a Firenze. Da Boccaccio a Cristoforo Landino (1350-1481).
Ed. Anna Pegoretti. Trans. Giulia Gaimari.
Frecce, 286. Rome: Carocci, 2019. 333 pp. €28.

Fifteen years ago, Simon Gilson gave new freshness to studies on Dante’s reception in the early modern age with his Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). In that dense and harmonious volume, Gilson analyzed Dante’s fortune between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries through studying how several generations of educated Florentine citizens had absorbed and re-used the figure of the poet in the city’s cultural context. Italian readers will therefore be delighted to see the first Italian translation of this classic of contemporary Dante criticism finally published. The book released by Carocci does not only contain the translated text of the 2005 volume. The pages of this elegant book from the bright red cover contain an updated version of the work, superbly edited by Anna Pegoretti, which takes into account the most recent publications on the reception of Dante’s work. This element makes Gilson’s work even more precious, especially if one considers the extraordinary development in recent years of studies on Dante’s reception in the early modern age.

Shortly before the release of the Italian edition of Dante and Renaissance Florence, Gilson provided his audience with another fundamental text on Dante’s fortune—a work that is not only the ideal complement to his previous volume, but also the most complete historical tool on the intricate reception of Dante’s works in the “Century of Petrarch.” Reading Dante in Renaissance Italy represents an indispensable compass for navigating the tricky waters of Dante’s sixteenth-century fortunes in Italy. The geographical focus of the work consists of the two most important cultural and commercial centers of Renaissance Italy: Florence and Venice. Gilson’s analysis focuses on the critical responses and publishing initiatives that developed in the cultural circles of the peninsula between the publication of Cristoforo Landino’s Comento sopra la Commedia (Florence, 1481) and the realization of the monumental editions of Dante’s works edited by the great sixteenth-century Italian polygraphs, such as Francesco Sansovino and Lodovico Dolce. The path through which the author leads us is probed through the leitmotif of the centuries-old relationship between res et verba (“words” and “things”), that is between the formal properties and the philosophical content of Dante’s texts. These elements, according to Gilson, have historically constituted the pivots on which the literary debate about Dante’s work was focused in the century of Bembo and Manuzio and which caused the decline of the poet’s fortune between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 

One of the most outstanding achievements of this book is dealing with the reading and dissemination of Dante’s work through the cultural perspective of producers, educated readers and scholars of sixteenth-century Italy. The contextualization recreated by Gilson is exemplary. Each chapter provides a rigorous and careful historical reconstruction of cultural environments and circles of dissemination of Dante’s texts, giving back to the modern reader the experience of Renaissance reading and debate about the greatest Tuscan poet. Florence and Venice are the undisputed protagonists of the study and analytical development of the book. The first two chapters lead the reader into the dimension of Dante’s Renaissance publishing. In chapter one Gilson illustrates the extraordinary perspective transformations in the reception of the Commedia developed since the publication of the first Venetian editions of Landino’s Comento. The large folio editions designed by skilled printers such as Ottaviano Scoto and Bernardino Benali constituted the book model through which the dissemination of the Commedia was canonized—a model that was not replaced even after the enormous commercial success of the enchiridia printed by Aldo Manuzio, edited by Pietro Bembo. However, the text of the 1502 Aldine edition was the one that every sixteenth-century Italian printer associated with Landino’s commentary; this, despite the exegetical work, presented many discordances with the text edited by Bembo. Gilson develops an equally accurate analysis of paratextual features in the following chapter, dedicated to De vulgari eloquentia and Convivio. This section shows how the reception of Dante’s “minor works” was guided by various factors such as the problema della lingua in the 1520s or the critical practice of reading Dante’s masterpiece through the poet’s other works. Chapters three and four lead the reader into the circles of Florentine academies, introducing them to the lively debate about Dante and his work in the second half of the sixteenth century in the poet’s homeland. The final chapters of the book take us back to the commercial capital of Renaissance Italy. In these pages Gilson impeccably recreates the literary and publishing genesis of the major sixteenth-century Italian commentaries on the Commedia—the Esposizioni by Alessandro Vellutello (1544) and Bernardino Daniello (1565). Simultaneously he explores Venetian printed culture by leading the reader into the workshops of the late-sixteenth-century polygraphs and exploring their relationship with Dante’s universe.

By carefully examining the many cultural, social, and economic contexts in which Dante was circulated, and the different characteristics of the readers for whom those editions were created and designed, Gilson offers his readers a work of the highest historical value. However, Reading Dante in Renaissance Italy is not only an exceptional text of contemporary Dante criticism. It is indeed an indispensable research tool and a fundamental model for future investigations on the history of the material reception of literary texts in the Italian Renaissance. There is no doubt that it will be read and consulted by many specialists, students, and non-academic readers in the years to come.

Natale Vacalebre, University of Pennsylvania