Music and Grammar

Abstract

Dante’s original and insightful linguistics and poetics have prompted important conversations among scholars, in terms of their anthropological, theological, and philosophical implications. In this article, I reconsider Dante’s understanding of language and poetics from the perspective of grammar and music. I bring together the scholarship from these two disciplines to analyze Dante’s theoretical and poetical works, and I argue that grammar and music offered Dante two distinct ways to think about language. I trace the relationship between the two disciplines in the De Vulgari Eloquentia first, and in the first cantos of the Comedy (Inf. 1–3), in the second part of this article. Ultimately, I show that a deeper understanding of Dante’s grammatical and musical models of linguistic inquiry can shed new light on our comprehension not only of his poetics but also of his ethical and political project.