Previous articleNext article FreeMaria Luisa Ardizzone Dante: Il paradigma intellettuale; Un’“inventio” degli anni fiorentini Dante: Il paradigma intellettuale; Un’“inventio” degli anni fiorentini. Maria Luisa Ardizzone. Florence: Olschki, 2011. Pp. xxvi+264.Federica AnichiniFederica AnichiniThe College of New Jersey Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWith this study, Maria Luisa Ardizzone adds to her pivotal investigations of the philosophical components of medieval poetry. She casts light on new intellectual scenarios by examining the auctoritates that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries filtered through the guarded boundaries of theological orthodoxy into poetry. In Dante: Il paradigma intellettuale, which follows her monograph on Dante’s primo amico (Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages [University of Toronto Press, 2002]), Ardizzone presents the reader with a groundbreaking reading of a selection of poems included in Dante’s Vita nova and Il convivio. Modeling her inquiry after his method of composition—gathering sources into a form that establishes new connections between them—Ardizzone identifies a paradigm that structures Dante’s thought from the onset. Through this “intellectual paradigm” Ardizzone explains the nature of human ontology in Dante and rigorously documents the possibility, hinted at by Maria Corti in La felicità mentale: Nuove prospettive per Cavalcanti e Dante (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), of dating back the first nucleus of Il convivio to Dante’s early years in Florence.In a passage from De vulgari eloquentia (2, viii), Dante compares writing to tying sticks together into a bundle. Adopting this simile, Ardizzone reads Dante’s lines as composed sources pulled together and kept in balance even when they are drawn from contrasting doctrines. Her exegesis portrays Dante’s cultural horizon as an enterprise that does not abide by a single and strictly orthodox tradition. In the conclusion of this formidable study, Dante is seen as responding to the collision of cultural universes in thirteenth-century Christian culture by comparing them, not by testing the truth of new content against the existing, mainstream one. Ardizzone concludes that for Dante the conciliatio consists of a system of contiguity that does not make one single doctrine prevail. Ardizzone presents textual enigmas, disjunctions, and uncertainties as organic parts of a composing strategy that leads the readers through a paideia.Her argument is supported by a selection of texts that she binds into a sequence. The anthology—reproduced in the book’s appendix—includes the canzone Donne ch’avete intellecto d’amore, a few sonnets from the Vita nova, and the first two canzoni of the Convivio: Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete and Amor che nella mente mi ragiona. These texts are where the intellectual paradigm decisively coalesces, connecting the libello to the treatise, albeit via a “discontinuous/continuity” (116). The texts are structured by the poetic of praise (lode), on which an analogy between heaven and the sublunary world is founded. The doubling of the praise’s object—an intellectual being in the Convivio displaces the “donna gentile” of the Vita nova—alters the compilation’s uniformity, but the transition from “donna gentile” to a separate substance stands as an example of a rhetorical device, the transumptio, which Ardizzone sees as the crucial figura that establishes a transubstantiating relation between the sublunary world and the Supreme Being in Dante’s poetry.Ardizzone shows that Saint Augustine interprets John the Baptist and Christ as cried word and interior word, respectively. On the basis of these Augustinian interpretations as well as on the notion of verbum intus prolatum, on which Augustine establishes a correspondence between human and divine, Ardizzone introduces a new interpretation of chapter 15 (in the Gorni edition) of the Vita nova and reads the contraposition of Cavalcanti/John the Baptist and Dante/Christ as the contraposition of vox and verbum. Cavalcanti’s theory of the verbal and sensorial human essence prepares the way for Dante’s conclusions—that human essence is linguistic, therefore intellectual, and that through their intellectual essence human beings participate in the divine.In the first two chapters, “Intellectualiter: Frammenti di un discorso” and “Frammenti di un metodo,” Ardizzone reads the canzone Donne ch’avete intellecto d’amore, included in the Vita nova, as the first formulation of the intellectual paradigm. Extracting the canzone from the prose, she presents it as the germinal text that consolidates the nucleus for praise. Drawing on both the Platonic and the Christian traditions, praise becomes a language that connects the human and the divine. Ardizzone demonstrates that the heart of the canzone points to mental speech analogous to that produced by angels when they contemplate God’s mind. In “Frammenti di un metodo,” Ardizzone demonstrates that the canzone originates from an intellectual tension between heaven and earth, but while that has the form of angelic contemplation, its contents concern a human being, Beatrice. Dante erases the notions of potency and act addressed by Guinizzelli and ascribes to Beatrice the capacity to act upon the “cuori gentili.” This stands as the miraculous sign that the divine exists and operates on the earth. Two canzoni later included in the Convivio—Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete and Amor che nella mente mi ragiona—will confirm and consolidate this theme.In chapters 3 and 4, Ardizzone presents a close reading of the two canzoni. Connecting philosophy and theology, the first canzone enunciates an important new idea. As in Donne ch’avete, the theme is that of interior language, the Augustinian verbum intus prolatum, but in the case of Voi che ’ntendendo, the interlocutors are intelligences, that is, separate substances. Ardizzone demonstrates that already in Dante’s early years, before the philosophical commentary included in the Convivio—which will be the object of her next study—Dante conjoins his Augustinian source with Aristotelian and Neoplatonic learning. She highlights how in Voi che ’intendendo the mover intelligences tend toward the divine and, via intentio, move the celestial bodies (the sources are the Liber de causis and the commentaries of Thomas Aquinas, Albert the Great, and Sigier of Brabant). Ardizzone reads the two distinct objects of love in Voi che ’intendendo as memory and intellectual vision, bound in a relation that indicates that the latter has overshadowed the former. Ardizzone puts forward here a fresh approach to the “friendship” between Dante and Guido Cavalcanti via a palimpsest—the verses of Donna me prega are written over—but Cavalcanti’s main philosophical premise remains as Dante presents the two objects of love—memory and intellectual vision—as two coexisting human modes. Ardizzone sees the other canzone, Amor che nella mente mi ragiona, as addressing the issue of human knowledge and representing love as a relationship connecting the mind and the woman, who is portrayed as a separate substance. Ardizzone points out that by indicating a separate substance as the object of intellectual activity, Dante includes material that is decisively dismissed by Thomas but exists in the works of Albert the Great—specifically, the notion of intellectus adeptus (the data that the possible intellect receives from the agent intellect).In the last pages of this monograph, the author notes an even more significant development in Dante’s thought. By tracing a further connection within the group of poems she has selected, Ardizzone concludes that if an angelic mode of intellectual activity is bestowed on human beings, then human beings can also participate in a speculation that moves history: Dante, through his love theory, shapes Sigier’s notion of possible intellect into a civil plan. The desire that activates love—namely, the relation between the human mind and a divine being—also activates horizontal relations within urban space. In Dante’s works, Ardizzone contends, intellectuals are aware that the experience of love, that is, of knowledge, must be transferred to the field of civil relationships: “Una communitas si intravede dietro l’amore per la donna che a livello filosofico si coglie in relazione a ‘mente’ e questo permette a Dante ancora fiorentino di reperire, attraverso un contenuto estremamente dibattuto, la base naturale che fa degli individui una comunità.” (Behind the philosophical relation connecting the love for the woman with the human mind, the notion of a communitas surfaces, the same notion that allowed Dante to draw from deeply debated material, and while he was still in Florence, the natural basis that makes the individuals into a community.) (232).The Dantean vision of a worldly community bound by our intellectual essence concludes Ardizzone’s book. Dante’s work is not a structured encyclopedia of medieval learning but a laboratory—one in which the reader is prompted to activate connections and cross-doctrinal limits. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 111, Number 3February 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/673345 Views: 234Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.