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First, a confession: my university dissertation was on Dante and, specifically, the historical context behind his masterpiece The Divine Comedy, so I was coming to hear A.N. Wilson with a certain amount of knowledge and no little curiosity as to how he would make the great Florentine poet feel fresh again.
Wilson began by brandishing “a 10p bit”, which would once have been called a Florin, after Florence – he used this visual cue to lead into a description of the city into which Dante was born in 1265, a banking and political powerhouse that became the battleground between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor.
“We think of it as a recreation,” said Wilson of Florence, yet “it was the largest city in Europe” – about the size of Bath, in fact, with a population of 90,000. “He who controlled Florence controlled the world,” Wilson told us. This was a city that invented a single European currency and was of huge cultural import, but which was also bloody and factionalised, its most powerful families residing in towers and the streets torn apart by their armed squabbles.
There were political divides on international affairs too, over support for the Emperor or the Pope. Dante, meanwhile, “had two ambitions: to be the most successful poet in Italy, and to be a powerful politician”. In concentrating on the second, Dante made enemies and found himself “stitched up” while he was away in Rome, accused by (a relative of his wife) Corso Donati of selling political office.
“At the age of 35, in 1300, Dante was out, ruined,” Wilson said. “It was the making of him.” Dante never returned to the city of his birth and instead concentrated on the first of his ambitions.
So The Divine Comedy was born of great personal bitterness and fury – indeed, Dante envisaged horrible punishment for Corso Donati in Inferno, and set his epic poem in the year of his own exile. There was righteous religious ire too, targeted at a Papacy that Dante believed to be thoroughly corrupt, hell-bent on money-making.
But it was Dante’s love that Wilson focused most on and which gives his book its original angle. Dante grew up in a small community in Florence in which the same people passed each other several times a day, so Wilson was dubious of Dante’s claim that he only met Beatrice, his great love and his heavenly guide in The Divine Comedy, twice.
He first encountered Beatrice as a nine-year-old girl in a red dress at a party. The young boy Dante “was bewitched by her”, later casting her “as an allegory of religious faith”; by contrast, we know little or nothing about his wife Gemma Donati because “he never tells us a single thing about her… She wasn’t part of his imagination.”
However, in 1307, when Dante was married to Gemma with children, “Dante fell in love [with someone else] in the normal sense of the word… he felt heartbroken, humiliated. It’s after that date that he went back to that childhood party.”
The poet fused his personal sense of despair with the wretchedness of the entire European experience in the form of poetry. The result was a revelation. The Divine Comedy was “an autobiography; a history of his time; and a completely new theology”. It also, said Wilson, “consecrated for use the Tuscan dialect”. Here was a poem that altered not merely what people thought was allowable in poetry (and for which he invented a new rhyme scheme based on the Trinity), but what was possible in art, a visionary work that still today influences innumerable works of culture. (Lyra’s surname in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, for example, comes from a character in Purgatory called Belacqua.)
And no wonder – “Dante, as well as being of his times, was penetratingly and weirdly modern.” Though an orthodox Christian, he accepted, unlike the Church (even now), that ‘good’ love could include physical affection, taking the view (in Wilson’s words) that “all physical life is sacred and must be consecrated.”
Wilson’s fine event showcased the man behind the work. For versions of The Divine Comedy itself, Wilson suggested Robin Kirkpatrick’s translation (Penguin), including the original Italian beside the translated, or Allen Mandelbaum’s version (Everyman), complete with Boticelli illustrations.
A.N. Wilson’s Dante in Love is out now in hardback and out in May 2012 in paperback, published by Atlantic.