‘That Prayer-Book of Love’

Abstract

This chapter examines critical and literary engagements with La vita nuova within the circle gathered around Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Leigh Hunt in early 1820s Pisa. Its aim is to highlight how Romantic-era interest in Dante was not entirely absorbed by the Commedia, but also addressed the earlier prosimetrum, its revolutionary ‘stile della lode’ and re-envisioning of love as a spiritual-intimate yet also collective experience. Accordingly, the chapter collects and analyzes traces and echoes of this interest in Shelley’s ‘A Defence of Poetry’ and Epipsychidion, Byron’s The Prophecy of Dante, Mary Shelley’s Valperga, and Teresa Guiccioli’s Vie de Lord Byron en Italie. These works testify to a diversified but interconnected reworking of Dante’s discourse on the effects and value of amor gentile. This chapter contends that Dante’s blending of self-analysis with conversational creativity and sociable contact in his youthful prosimetrum is central to Shelley’s interpretation of it and his envisioning of the Pisan circle’s intellectual and emotional atmosphere and, relatedly, to the references encountered in Byron’s, Mary Shelley’s, and Teresa Guiccioli’s rewritings.