Dante Alighieri

1265-1321

Dante alluded to Arthurian romance no more than some half-dozen times, yet no student of medieval literature can fail to wonder about the relationship between the greatest body of medieval secular literature and the man who was arguably the greatest secular poet of the age. Dante is known for his insistence that morally and intellectually serious literature could be written in the vernacular and for his realization in the Divine Comedy of this notion, still controversial in the early fourteenth century. Did he see Arthurian literature as an illustrious example of what he wished vernacular literature to do, or instead as a dangerous countermodel?

An attempt to answer this perennial question must be based on a survey of Dante's allusions to Arthurian literature. Three are rather minor. In Inferno, Canto 5, l. 67, he pairs Tristan with Paris, to end the parade of those damned through love. He alludes Mordred and names Arthur in a periphrasis (Inferno, Canto 32, ll. 61-62), affirming that two damned souls encountered deep in the infernal realm of treachery called "Caina" were even more worthy to be there than Mordred. In a different vein, in a lyric poem addressed to his "first friend", Guido Cavalcanti, Dante expresses the wish that the two of them, with their friend Lapo Gianni, might by enchantment be put together in a marvelous boat ("Guido, i' vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io´/ fossimo presi per incantamento/ e messi in un vasel...") and that "il buono incantatore" would then send certain ladies to join´in their fantastic journey; it is entirely possible that the setting Dante evokes is derived from Arthurian romance and that the "good enchanter" is Merlin.

More suggestive of Dante's view of the Arthurian corpus than these minor allusions are a key of reference in the treatise on the vernacular known as the Vulgari Eloquentia and a cluster of allusions (in Inferno, Paradiso, and Convivo) to the Lancelot romance. Dante probably first grappled with the problem that his linguistic treatise tries to resolve under the influence of Brunetto Latini, the learned Florentine writer and public servant whom Dante (Inferno, Canto 15, ll. 82-85) mentions as having taught him much; for Brunetto, an exile in France from 1260 to about the time of Dante's birth (1265), wrote his famous encyclopedic work, the Livre dou Tresor, in French, affirming that language's superiority for didactic purposes to his native Tuscan. By implication, it might seem that Dante came to disagree with his "master", if the Comedy, in Italian, is taken be didactic, even encyclopedic, in character - though his explicit disagreement with Brunetto in matters of language has to do not with Brunetto's championing of French but instead (Vulgari Eloquentia, Book 13) with his decision to write (probably another work, the didactic poem entitled Il Tesoretto) in a merely municipal, Florentine, dialect.

In any case, Brunetto raised the question of the adequacy of the Romance vernaculars to specific literary genres, and Dante makes a preliminary attempt to answer it early in the Vulgari Eloquentia (Book 9, Chapter 2), stating that Italian, Provençal, and French each might be legitimately seen as the best vernacular for different reasons: Italian because it is the closest to (Latin) grammar and therefore the most logical; Provençal because it was the language of the foremost love poets, both didactic and narrative. It is in this context that Dante cites (together with instances of the matière d'antiquité) Arthurian romance ("Arturi regis ambages pulcerrimae"). This allusion (tangentially suggesting, not surprisingly, that Dante did not know the verse texts of the Arthurian cycle, including the work of Chrétien) indicates that Dante thought Arthurian prose literature a very important achievement indeed, establishing French as a major language by revealing, together with other prose works, a narrative capacity in the langue d'oil comparable in quality to the rigorous grammaticality of the language of the Italian peninsula.

In this context, Dante's most famous allusion to Arthurian romance, in the Paolo and Francesca episode of Inferno, Canto 5, has puzzled many who have taken Dante, through the voice of Francesca, to be condemning the Lancelot romance and its author for an immorality that has led her to eternal damnantion: "Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse" ("A Galehaut was the book and the one who wrote it"). Dante, however, is here by no means condemning Arthurian literature but rather a pair of its readers: he puts Paolo and Francesca in hell, not the Lancelot author. The Paolo and Francesca episode is related to and illuminated by two other Dantesque allusions to the Lancelot cycle. In Paradiso, Canto 16, ll. 14-15, Dante compares Beatrice's laugh to the Lady of Malohaut's cough at the moment of Guenevere's "first mistake" ("primo fallo"); however this comparison is to be interpreted, it suggests Dante's awareness that characters within the story are alert to Guenevere's "mistake", implying that readers are not obliged to adopt the viewpoint of the sinning protagonists of the episode. More conclusive in this regard is Dante's allusion in his vernacular treatise on the nature of poetry, Convivio, Book IV, Chapter 28, Section 8, to Lancelot's end, as a monk repentant of the adultery that kept him from fulfilling his high mission. Dante makes clear that Paolo and Francesca miss the warning provided by the disastrous conclusion of Lancelot and Guenevere's relationship because they do not finish reading the book: "non vi leggemmo piu avanti" ("we read no farther"). He is himself fully aware that the Lancelot author provided such a warning, and his reader must be, too, if Paolo and Francesca's situation is to succeed in teaching the reader anything important. Thus, the high judgment of Arthurian literature expressed in the Vulgari Eloquentia is not diminished in any way by the Paolo and Francesca episode.