No issue in Dante studies has been more debated than the authenticity of Dante’s last surviving Epistle, the "Letter to Cangrande."  What Dante (or someone else, according to others [1]) put forward in that document may have a decisive role in determining our basic response to the fictive status and the epistemological strategy of this great poem – or, contrariwise, our view of the poem may determine our response to the question of the Epistle’s authenticity.  This is not the place to enter yet again that dispute, which featured such heavyweight contenders as Francesco Mazzoni and Bruno Nardi [2].  And such is not my purpose here.  The most interesting new discussion is found in an article published in 2003 by Luca Azzetta [3].  Azzetta shows that, some years before 1340, an important reader of Dante, Andrea Lancia, not only knew the epistle as Dantean, but treated it as a key to opening the Commedia.  The most important aspect of Azzetta’s work, for those of us who are convinced that Dante wrote the Epistle, is that it leaves little to speculation, but establishes the fact that Dante’s self-exegesis was known as such well before any supposed "pseudo-Dantes" were supposedly active at the margins of the poem.  If Azzetta is correct – and there has been no challenge to his data of which I am aware – we are forced to acknowledge, once and for all, that, and as Lino Pertile argued many years ago [4], the author of the poem and the writer of the Epistle were indelibly marked by the same signs of workmanship.  It is difficult today to deny Dantean authorship to the Epistle to Cangrande.

Albert Ascoli has recently published a book [5] in which he refers often, even obsessively, to the problem of the authenticity of the Epistle.  His book is a welcome and important addition to Dante studies, reflecting a young lifetime’s brooding over this magnificent poem, and should be read by anyone interested in Dante.  Among its many strong points is its rich bibliographical notation.  In short, it deserves the praise it has already received and that which it will undoubtedly gain.  However, there is at least one aspect of this book that is troubling.  Yes, you guessed it, Ascoli’s treatment of the Epistle to Cangrande.  A mere two of Ascoli’s notes [6] point to more than forty articles and parts of books written on this subject.  Azzetta’s important article is listed in the bibliography; however, it is discussed (though somehow omitted from the index) in fewer than three lines of a single footnote in this more-than-four-hundred-page book.  Ascoli admits that Azzetta "offers significant ammunition for supporters of authenticity [7] " but does not tell us more than that, allowing a reader so inclined to believe that Azzetta’s is only another in the endless parade of theoretical arguments.  Indeed, Ascoli appears not to be shaken in his belief that one simply cannot decide whether Dante wrote the Epistle or not.  This is the unswerving dogma to which Ascoli seems unswervingly to cling [8], as is evident by his unflagging insistence on the questionable status of this document, marked by "iffy" phrases (such as "if authentic" [twice], "if [it] is recognized as Dantean," "the so-called Epistle to Cangrande" [twice]), culminating in a reference to "the writer calling himself Dante in the epistolary section" of the document [9].  Ascoli’s treatment of the Epistle extends, if intermittently, nearly the length of the book (pp. 7 to 393) and he returns to it some two dozen times.  His earlier work on this topic is carefully documented[10].  And in that work, appearing in 1997 and 2000, Ascoli had decided that the authorship of the Epistle was not knowable by mere human agency.  Is that why he does not now refer to four fairly recent books devoted to the problem, three of which resolve it in favor of Dantean authorship?  These, in chronological order, are the convoluted and now discredited (by Azzetta’s findings) attacks on the Epistle’s authenticity by Henry Kelly [11], Thomas Ricklin’s edition and commentary [12]; my own monograph, referred to in note 1, above, and, finally, the annotated edition of Enzo Cecchini [13].  That none of these works is even referred to, much less discussed, is disconcerting [14].  There is, I repeat, no reference to any of these in text, footnotes, or bibliography.  And so Ascoli, having himself insisted on the importance of the issue of "Cangrandism," simply leaves unconsidered the work of the two most recent European editors of the text and two fellow American scholars’ monographs, the only two published on the Epistle in quite some time.  And this is not to mention, in this brief note, his omission of consideration of this epistle along with three others (V, VI, VII, the "political epistles" – all four are signed by the exul inmeritus) as themselves revealing Dante’s quest for auctoritas.  In all of these three he also presents himself as "authoritative" [15].  Should there be a second edition of this book, I hope that Ascoli will remedy this fault.  I dare even hope that he might make up his mind, which he has until now allowed – even encouraged – to vacillate about one of the most important issues in Dante scholarship.  However, it seems apparent that he has decisively made up his mind not to make up his mind.  It would have been less troubling had he chosen to leave the Epistle to Cangrande on the sidelines of this book, off the playing field.  As it is, by including it in the way he has chosen to do, he has chosen to assert his opinion repeatedly while avoiding the central issue that besets it.

[2] See Ahern, ibid., pp. 281-85, for a brief history of this debate in English.

[3]See "Le chiose alla Commedia di Andrea Lancia, l'Epistola a Cangrande e altre questioni dantesche," L'Alighieri 21 (2003): 5-76, to which I recently referred on this site (EBDSA March 2008) for its discussion of the Convivio.

[4] See his "Canto-cantica-Comedía e l'Epistola a Cangrande," Lectura Dantis [virginiana] 9 (Fall, 1991): 103-23.

[5] Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge, 2007).

[6] Ibid., pp. 42-43, n. 56; p. 110, n. 65.

[7] Ibid., p. 55, n. 75.

[8] However, see ibid., p. 279, where he almost refers to the Epistle as though it indeed were from Dante’s hand.

[9] This particular formulation occurs last in the following list: Ibid., pp. 7 (n. 5), 8, 42, 55 (n. 75), 71 (n. 11), 81, 176, 184 (n. 22), 204 (n. 60), 217 (n. 68), 271 (n. 59), 276 (n. 4), 375 (n. 104).

[10] See, in addition to the article referred to in note 1, his brief treatment in The Dante Encyclopedia, ed. R. Lansing (Garland, 2000), pp. 348-52.

[11] Tragedy and Comedy from Dante to Pseudo-Dante (California, 1989).

[12] Das Schreiben an Cangrande della Scala, ed. and trans. T. Ricklin (Felix Meiner, 1993).

[13] Epistola a Cangrande, ed. E. Cecchini (Giunti, 1995).

[14] The same may be said of Pertile’s article (referred to in n. 4) and of the sometimes amusing debate between Henry Kelly and me in Lectura Dantis [virginiana] 15-16 (1994): 61-115.  Such reticence is all the more strange because in "Access to Authority," pp. 340-41 (n. 10), Ascoli had referred to two of the four books he neglects to mention now, as well as to Pertile’s article.  He might also have been expected to mention a recent important piece by Selene Sarteschi, "Ancora in merito all'Epistola XIII a Cangrande della Scala," L'Alighieri 26 (2005): 63-96, which also supports the authenticist cause.

[15] Cfr. esp. Ep. V.3-4 (Dante as prophet of Henry VII, the new Moses); VI.17 (Dante’s "presaga mens" predicting the awful future awaiting all backsliding Florentines); VI.25 (imitating Isaiah, Dante prophesying the rule of Henry over Florence as that of a second Christ); VII.6 (Dante as a second Virgil, singing [in Ecl. IV] the advent of a new Golden Age).