Two recent publications move me to respond, after more than ten years, to my friend Lino Pertile’s criticisms of a contribution to EBDSA (October 7, 1996) in which I argued for Dante’s rejection in the Commedia of some claims made in his unfinished Convivio. I have never accepted the notion that Dante would not have worried about some potential readers’ reactions to a work that he had never finished and never formally published. He knew two things about his manuscript (or manuscripts). The material was fairly portentous (if completed, it would have been by far the longest piece of continuous Italian writing from the hand of a single author). Further, since, as we shall see, close discussion of its prose is a feature of a commentary written some twenty years after his death, he might well himself have been aware of the possibility of readers knowing at least significant parts of the work. And thus, even if, in my opinion, he probably required no further stimulus to engage with it, he would also have responded to the existence of a potential public, no matter how small or how conjectural, that he knew might read about Beatrice’s eclipse by another. For example, he says that he had sought consolation after the death of Beatrice (silver, according to Conv. 2.12.5) but acquired instead the affection of his new Lady (gold). This is to speak of perhaps the most damning flaw, as he himself might have insisted, in the incomplete work.

The core of the issue, and of the disagreement between Pertile and me, is as follows: For Pertile's view to be convincing, Dante would have had to avoid all pointedly negative reference to the Convivio in the Comedy. I think he and I agree that (as I said in 1996), "the pages of the poem are dotted with references to explicit passages in Convivio, usually in full accord with the ideas earlier expressed." However, we then diverge: "[...] but sometimes with the express purpose of cancelling a wrong bit of doctrine or a piece of disloyalty to Beatrice." I still believe that my original argument remains stronger than Pertile’s rejoinder, in part "theoretically" (whether or not the text circulated has nothing necessarily to do with Dante’s desire to correct it), and in part practically, for now more evidence has surfaced about the early post-mortem presence of at least one manuscript containing the work (see below). I returned to some "offending" passages in my Dante: A Life in Works (Yale UP: 2001, pp. 88-90). In both treatments I briefly describe points of the poet’s latter-day disagreement with views expressed in the fourteenth-century prose of the Convivio (and not those found in the three thirteenth-century canzoni, which circulated separately, and therefore could have been read without bringing their later prose context into play). The corrected views considered were (1 & 2) the damnations of Guido da Montefeltro (Inf. 27) and of Bertran de Born (Inf. 28), cited by Castelvetro as contradicting Convivio 4.28.8 and 4.11.14, respectively; (3) Casella’s singing of the second Ode of Convivio as causing Cato’s rebuke, aimed (as John Freccero had argued) at Dante’s replacement of Beatrice with Lady Philosophy, as explained in the accompanying prose; (4) the treatment of the "moonspots" in Paradiso 2, now widely understood as indicating a correction of Dante’s previous formulations (Conv. 2.12.9); (5) Charles Martel (Par. 8.34) as correcting Dante’s association of the angelic order of Thrones (Conv. 2.5.13) with the heaven of Venus – these celestial creatures are in fact Principalities; (6) the second round of self-criticism for angelologically incorrect thinking in Paradiso 28.121-135; and (7) the last simile of a simile-studded poem (Par. 33.133-138) as describing what Dante had said was impossible, the squaring of the circle (Conv. 2.13.27).

Nothing I have read in the intervening years has given me occasion to revise my position. It now enjoys the sort of invaluable support that one is only rarely fortunate to find. In two groundbreaking articles, Luca Azzetta has discovered and presented evidence that makes a strong case not only that the Epistle to Cangrande is nearly certainly authentic and that the tenzone with Forese Donati is probably genuine as well, but that the Convivio, specifically as a Dantean work, was probably known to at least four major literary figures within twenty-two years of Dante’s death. {See Azzetta, "Le chiose alla Commedia di Andrea Lancia, l'Epistola a Cangrande e altre questioni dantesche," L'Alighieri 21 (2003): 5-76, and "La tradizione del Convivio negli antichi commenti alla Commedia: Andrea Lancia, l'Ottimo Commento, e Pietro Alighieri," Rivista di studi danteschi 5 (2005): 3-34.} Azzetta demonstrates that the text of Convivio was known in extenso by Andrea Lancia (in addition to being known, perhaps less well, to the author of the Ottimo Commento [a person, in Azzetta’s view, perhaps known to, but different from, Lancia], to Pietro di Dante, and to Giovanni Villani) no later than 1343. {See "Le chiose," pp. 30-33, for Lancia's knowledge of Convivio, and "La tradizione," pp. 9-16, for Lancia’s explicit and extensive citations, in his commentary, of texts in the Convivio.} While I have particular reason to welcome Azzetta’s findings, all Dantists are in his debt. His work, with its sound scholarship and strict evidentiary procedures, is making possible a much desired resolution of a number of important issues that have been a cause of major and persistent confusion in Dante studies.

Any notion that Dante would have mentioned the Convivio by name had he really wanted us to consider its contents falls of its own weight, because it requires a second given, namely, that Dante still approved of the work (as he did of the Vita nova). On the other hand, as I and any number of others have shown, there is much reference to the prose of the Convivio in the verses of the Commedia. In Convivio l.l.16 {text from PDP} Dante refers to both works by their titles: "[...] la presente opera, la quale è Convivio nominata e vo' che sia, più virilmente si trattasse che nella Vita Nova [...]." He presents the Convivio as continuing and yet surpassing the earlier work, represented as having been "fervida e passionata," while this one, referred to for the first and only time in the work by its title, "temperata e virile essere conviene." That he is presenting these works in opposition to one another, if with some respect for the earlier effort, is perhaps reflected in the presence of both titles in a single sentence. {He will refer to VN twice more (see below) and to the word "convivio" as a metaphor for the work itself, a "banquet" for us his readers, five other times in the first treatise (1.1.11, 14, 19; 1.2.1; 1.10.1) and a single final time in the fourth (4.22.1).} The youthful work, that of a relative tyro, is thus set against this philosophical banquet, the result of the thought and labor of a mature writer, one whose intellect controls his emotions, as, by implication, was not the case in his youthful passionate fervor. The prose containing the second appearance of the title Vita nova (2.2.1) contains only praise for Beatrice. The context of the third (2.12.4), however, also suggests that this later work offers more mature consideration of the meanings of things than was recorded in the earlier, and that these reveal truer aspects of what Dante had then only partly understood.

Concluding, I turn to a related phenomenon: Dante’s insistence on the widespread awareness of Vita nova in his fellow Italian-speakers (Convivio 1.4.13): "Onde, con ciò sia cosa che, come detto è di sopra, io mi sia quasi a tutti l'Italici apresentato, per che fatto mi sono più vile forse che 'l vero non vuole non solamente a quelli alli quali mia fama era già corsa, ma eziandio alli altri, onde le mie cose sanza dubbio meco sono alleviate; conviemmi che con più alto stilo dea [al]la presente opera un poco di gravezza, per la quale paia di maggiore autoritade. E questa scusa basti alla fortezza del mio comento." There is nothing like this in the Commedia about the Convivio. Whatever sense one takes of this abject apology for the low style of the "juvenile" work and promise of a higher one for the Convivio, of his vaunted fame among nearly all speakers of Italian, we can see the egregious egotism of an arriviste as centrally opposed to the stance of the Commedia’s author, one who asks to be considered as writing in the low style, passim. "Con più alto stilo" indeed! Is it difficult to believe that Dante necessarily found himself embarrassed by this earlier work? He never mentions the Convivio by name in the Commedia. This should not prevent our recognizing its frequent function as whipping-boy in the poema sacro. That would be akin to thinking that Petrarch, who never mentions Dante unless forced to (mainly by Boccaccio), when he refers to Laura as his "vera beatrice" in verse 52 of the last poem of the Canzoniere, was innocent of emulous intent.