Dante and Beatrice and Dante through Beatrice: The Journey(s) of an Author

In this dissertation, “Dante and Beatrice and Dante through Beatrice: The Journey(s) of an Author,” I reconstruct the history of Dante’s decades-long literary career through the character of Beatrice. I investigate Dante’s literary and intellectual trajectory from a Beatrice-centered perspective. I identify four stages of Dante’s literary evolution, which I treat in four chapters. In the first chapter, I go back to the origin of the dynamic Dante-Beatrice relationship by looking at the figure of Beatrice in Dante’s youthful literary production. After defining the methodological boundaries for this study and recognizing a four-poem “micro-canone beatriciano” (Lo doloroso amor, E m’incresce di me, Deh pellegrini, and Oltra la spera), I show that this grouping of rime giovanili provides scholars with a unique vantage point to assess the first decades of Dante’s pre-Vita nova writing. The second chapter focuses on the five-year period 1292-1296 during which the book of the Vita nova was likely composed. Building on the scholarship of leading Dantisti who have recently promoted a reconsideration of the differences between the Vita nova’s prose and poetry, I argue that there are two Beatrices in the libello, two irreconcilable figures that from the beginning to the end of the book coexist side-by-side: the “Beatrice of the poems” and the “Beatrice of the prose.” By investigating the discrepancies between these two figures, I demonstrate that the leap between the Beatrices of the libello mirrors the great divide that, in turn, separates the “Dante of the poems” from the “Dante of the prose.” The third chapter explores the Dante-Beatrice literary relationship in the works Dante wrote between the first half of the 1290s to circa 1307/08. Beatrice’s marginal presence in the works dating to this time period is a deliberate choice on Dante’s part, who seems to be more than willing to openly distance both his persona and his literary production from the shadow of Beatrice. A close analysis of Dante’s sonnet exchanges with Cino and book 2 of the Convivio confirms this assessment, for it illuminates a Dante who appears primarily interested in either minimizing or dismissing any association with the “gentilissima."