The Young Dante and the One Love

by Andrew Frisardi (Contributor)

Contents: (1) Courtly Love and Sacred Love in the Vita Nova: In his youth, Dante was part of an avant-garde of Florentine poets who combined scholastic philosophy and metaphysics with the traditional themes of courtly love poetry, as part of a research into the philosophy of beauty and the "intellect of love." Dante went much further in this exploration than any of the other poets with whom he was associated, creating a poetry of divine love, or theologized courtly love, which maintains that one divine reality underlies all desire, whether "romantic" or spiritual. This lecture traces Dante's development of this insight as it is depicted in the poetry and prose of the Vita Nova, and indicates how it carries over into Dante's later work, including the Divine Comedy. (2) Beatrice: At the beginning of the Vita Nova, Dante refers to Beatrice as "the glorious lady of my mind"--a description that Counter-Reformation editors, alarmed by Dante's theologizing of courtly love and not understanding how to read his language of analogy, changed to "the graceful lady of my mind," In the course of this visionary work of Dante's youth, Beatrice is also likened to Christ and is said to be "a creature who has descended from heaven to earth in order to show a miracle." This lecture explores what Dante meant by depicting Beatrice in this manner, and how the Vita Nova, which has been called the "Book of Beatrice," prepares the way for Beatrice's appearance in the Divine Comedy as a manifestation of Sapienza or Wisdom.

48 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2013

About the author

Andrew Frisardi is the author, translator, and/or editor of several books, most recently The Harvest and the Lamp, a collection of poetry published in the Colosseum Book series of Franciscan University Press (2020). His annotated editions of Dante’s Convivio (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Vita nova (Northwestern University Press, 2012) are widely used in Dante studies and by general readers of Dante in English. His work has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hawthornden Literary Fellowship, and the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. Frisardi is a fellow of and a frequent contributor to the Temenos Academy in London, which offers adult education in philosophy and the arts in the light of the sacred traditions of East and West.