Interpreting Dante: Essays on the Traditions of Dante Commentary (The William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature) - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Paola Nasti is associate professor in Italian Studies at the University of Reading.

Claudia Rossignoli is lecturer in Italian at the University of St. Andrews.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

While we may agree that “one of the basic functions of allegory is to make literary documents relevant,” we can also see that another of its functions is, at times, to render them partly irrelevant, at least with regard to their literal meaning.1 This essay follows from the paper I originally delivered at the conference in Manchester, which examined some of the responses of Dante’s early commentators when their author appears to make a mistake. Although notionally limited to Trecento commentaries, that paper included a comment by Filippo Villani on Inf. 1.70, in which he had recourse to allegorical interpretation of a quite specific statement by Dante in order to avoid the problem of a factual error at the literal level. Among the Trecento commentators’ explanations of this verse, Villani’s was the most direct example of switching to an allegorical mode of reading in order to resolve a problem at the literal level. Here I consider some allegorical readings proposed by some of the early commentators on the Comedy which seem to be for the purpose of avoiding problematic literal readings and consider their treatment of the literal sense. First,I would like to touch on some relevant points in the history of allegory.

Avoidance of the literal meaning is found as a motive for allegorical interpretation at the very origins of its history. A well-known explanation of the actual term ἀλληγορία is given in Plutarch’s Moralia (19E), where he explains that the practice of such interpretation, or “distortion” as he puts it, previously went by the name ὑπόνοια. As Plutarch attests, the basic concept is older than the term used by his time and which continues into the present. The earlier term ὑπόνοια, which can mean “under meanings” or “hidden meanings,” is used by Plato, who is critical of some of the allegorical interpretations of Homer offered by teachers often characterized as Sophists. The opening words of a much later response to Plato by Heraclitus (ca. 100) have a very familiar ring for readers of Pietro Alighieri’s commentary on Dante: “If he meant nothing allegorically, he was impious through and through, and sacrilegious fables, loaded with blasphemous folly, run riot through both epics.”

(excerpted from Chapter 2)