Is Dante a pilgrim? Pilgrimage, material culture, and modern Dante criticism

Abstract

The phrase “Dante the pilgrim” has become commonplace within scholarship on the Commedia as a way to refer to the character within the text who travels the Christian afterlife, as distinct from “Dante the poet,” the voice which narrates the poem. Yet, despite such prevalence, the validity of the term “pilgrim” goes rather unquestioned by scholars. This study aims to challenge the label through Dante’s own definition of a peregrino in the Vita nuova as “chiunque è fuori de la sua patria” (XL.6), a definition that shows a more nuanced understanding of the term than modern scholarship acknowledges. Instead, by tracing out the legacy of the term “Dante the pilgrim” as emerging from late 19th-century criticism such as Francesco de Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana, this article will show that the typical understanding of pilgrim ignores a central dimension of Dante’s own definition: a sense of physical displacement. For Dante, pilgrimage becomes constitutive of the virtual world in the poem, drawing off of material practices of travel to inform the physical experiences of the protagonist. This literal level, signified by an embodied protagonist in similar ways as pilgrims to holy sites interacted with those places, is fundamental for interpreting the larger theological truths Dante conveys, even in minute details such as kicking rocks in Inferno 12.