Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nova: between Biography and Autobiography

Abstract

The period of 2015–2021, marked by the celebration of the 750th anniversary of Dante’s birth and the 700th anniversary of his death, is a perfect moment for trying to get a panoramic view of a long way the international Dante studies have gone during the last decades and to evaluate the results they achieved. The paper analyzes how recent developments in medieval studies and Italian studies have changed our perception of one of Dante’s so-called “minor” works, Vita Nova. In the first part of this paper, I offer a brief review of the studies on historical, biographical, and social-political context in which the prosimetrum was born. The most significant common feature of these studies is that they all aspire to reveal a continuity between the strategies of Dante-the-man and Dante-the-author and to bridge the old methodological gap between Dante’s biography and “auto-biography.” In the second part, I briefly touch upon the arguments of those philologists who explore the Vita Nova from the perspective of tension between its prose and poetry and challenge the idea of this work being an auto-biographical narrative. The major result of the recent interdisciplinary turn in Dante studies, I argue, is that scholars managed not only to reinsert the text into its original historical-political context but also to find the angle of analysis that allows us to view Dante’s authorial and personal strategies during this period of his life as two parts of the same whole.

Keywords

• dante alighieri
• vita nova
• biography
• poetics
• autobiographism.