Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge

by Giuseppe Mazzotta

In a masterly synthesis of historical and literary analysis, Giuseppe Mazzotta shows how medieval knowledge systems--the cycle of the liberal arts, ethics, politics, and theology--interacted with poetry and elevated the Divine Comedy to a central position in shaping all other forms of discursive knowledge. To trace the circle of Dante's intellectual concerns, Mazzotta examines the structure and aims of medieval encyclopedias, especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the medieval classification of knowledge; the battle of the arts; the role of the imagination; the tension between knowledge and vision; and Dante's theological speculations in his constitution of what Mazzotta calls aesthetic, ludic theology. As a poet, Dante puts himself at the center of intellectual debates of his time and radically redefines their configuration. In this book, Mazzotta offers powerful new readings of a poet who stands amid his culture's crisis and fragmentation, one who responds to and counters them in his work. In a critical gesture that enacts Dante's own insight, Mazzotta's practice is also a fresh contribution to the theoretical literary debates of the present.

Originally published in 1992.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

348 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Giuseppe Mazzotta is the Sterling Professor of Italian Language and Literature at Yale University.

Reviews

[Andrew Fairweather]

What a fantastic book! I knew Mazotta would be a winner for me, as I enjoyed his essay in the ‘Lectura Dantis’ collection immensely. I guess you ought to read ‘Dante, Poet of the Desert’ before this, but I still got a lot out of it. I guess I’ll read the first book second!

It is often said that Dante’s masterpiece is a complete picture of the middle ages. With this in mind, Mazzotta urges us to consider the “encyclopedia” in an etymological sense, meaning “round learning,” a whole global network of close-knit relations. Encyclopedic knowledge is a closed and complete systematic global order. Dante’s encyclopedia is more than an encyclopedia for its poetic rendering of historical material which places Dante, the historical subject, at its center. Perhaps this has everything to do with the fact that Dante believed in a coincidence of intellect and love—self as the locus and limit to knowledge. And while, with relation to the self, there can be no identity between God and created, his vestige has nevertheless been imprinted on all degrees of creation in the Great Chain of Being, “the virtual bond that stretches continuously from the clarity of the realm of unity to the dimness of multiplicity.”

Yet the realm of multiplicity is not simply a realm of shadows, for even in evil we see the shape of free-will and the consequences of turning from Him who grants us free will. Thus, we must know sin in order to know Good, which is why we pass through the ‘Inferno,’ and *begin in exile,* and the ugliness of Hell. In the twelfth century, as Mazzotta reminds us, there was an ardent defense of the ugly in art, the argument being that the God may be more easily discovered in ugly forms than beautiful ones, for, to quote, “the pure appearing of beauty [...] chains the mind to the sensible world, but what one experiences as ugly forces one away from contemplation of itself and urges one to transcend it.”

Mazzota reminds us that the Divine Comedy is patterned on the paradigm of ‘Exodus,’ another example of how Dante ties the writing of poetry to exile. “Like the prophets, Dante makes of exile a virtue and a necessary perspective from which to speak to the world and from which he can challenges its expectations and assumptions; like the prophets, he also acknowledges that the truth he communicates is, paradoxically, what further alienates him from the world he has already lost.” In such a way, Dante positions himself among the prophets, who have been exiled terrestrially, yet are no longer alienated, spiritually…