Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante

Abstract

The literature of the Italian Due- and Trecento frequently calls into play the figure of a woman reader. From Guittone d’Arezzo’s piercing critic, the ‘villainous woman’, to the mysterious Lady who bids Guido Cavalcanti to write his grand philosophical song, to Dante’s female co-editors in the Vita Nova and his great characters of female readers, such as Francesca and Beatrice in the Comedy, all the way to Boccaccio’s overtly female audience, this particular sort of interlocutor appears to be central to the construct of textuality and the construction of literary authority in these times. The aim of this book is to shed light on this figure by contextualizing her within the history of female literacy, the material culture of the book, and the ways in which writers and poets of earlier traditions (in particular Occitan and French) imagined her. Its argument is that these figures of women readers are not mere veneers between a male author and a ‘real’ male readership, but that, although fictional, they bring several advantages to their vernacular authors, such as orality, the mother tongue, the recollection of the delights of early education, literality, freedom in interpretation, absence of teleology, the beauties of ornamentation and amplification, a reduced preoccupation with the fixity of the text, the pleasure of making mistakes, dialogue with the other, the extension of desire, original simplicity, and new and more flexible forms of authority.

Kaleidoscopic Beatrice: Through the Theologians, as a Theologian

“…16 Furthermore, as Elena Lombardi has compellingly shown, the character of Beatrice makes sense of her own transtextual evolution, a 'development in terms of accumulation rather than opposition'. 17 Indeed, for Lombardi, in the Commedia Beatrice becomes her own reader, understanding not only her role within the poem, but also outwith it, from the construction of the silent lyric lady of the Vita nova to the 'walking and talking extended piece of poetry fathered by God-the-Author himself'. 18 Dante the author may well seek the validation and qualifications of the theologians with whom he is in dialogue, yet it is the character of Beatrice who activates the critical and intellectual conversion of the pilgrim-poet.…”