Dante’s New Lives: Biography and Autobiography

By Elisa Brilli & Giuliano Milani 

Translated by Mary Maschio & Eva Plesnik

Reaktion Books 2023

2021’s Dante: Des vies nouvelles by Elisa Brilli and Giuliano Milani now has an English-language translation, no small feat considering the fine-grained complexity of the text and the very extensive undergirding of References and Bibliography. The translation, Dante’s New Lives: Biography and Autobiography, appeared in bookstores at approximately 10:30 pm on New Year’s Eve and so was promptly consigned to whatever circle of the Inferno that’s reserved for books with appallingly bad timing, but the book is very much worth the time and attention of both Dante fans and enthusiastic readers of biography. It’s a very pleasingly dense examination of everything we know or can know about the life of the Commedia’s great poet. 

Brilli and Milani rightly point out that Dante was “continually rewriting his own story,” and their intriguing project in these pages is to identify that autobiographical performance on Dante’s part as being both a boon to biographers and an unexpectedly serious obstacle. There are so many separate strands, so many traditions, and so many shards and suggestions provided by the poet himself, that biographers have tended to mesh and reconcile the suggestions into a smoother narrative. These biographers have traditionally used what Brilli and Milani refer to as a “combinatory” approach, meshing “flimsy traces in the archives, chronicles of the period or even the indirect witnesses offered a posteriori by the commentators on the Commedia and Dante’s premodern biographers,” and this approach has led to “‘biographical truths’ that are highly varied, if not downright contradictory.” According to our authors, this process “requires mixing together tiles from different mosaics, tiles that can only be understood through separate analyses.” 

On one level, this is odd. There are 42 surviving contemporary records that name Dante, almost all of them dealing with the political activities in the 1290s that would set the course of the rest of his life. It’s a much lower number of documents than we have for a great many of his contemporaries, and each document does a fair bit of living in its own unclear reality, most of the context of which is long lost. This tends to be the way with ancient documents, and it tends to necessitate a “combinatory” approach, especially given the sometimes surreal mixing of autobiography and fantasy that runs through Dante’s own works. Brilli and Milani both recognize this fact and are properly wary of it. “Dante’s biographers have continually reproduced the unprecedented synergy that he created between his works and his life,” they write; “our biographical passion arises in large part from his autobiographical one, we might say.” 

We might indeed say, but lacking 150 more court and civic and personal contemporary documents, how can we say anything else? Biographers are more or less trapped in a contest with Dante as to who’ll do more of the storytelling, and this creates inevitable imbalances: historians have facts and contexts on their side, but there are no better storytellers than Dante. 

This wary talk about the “combinatory” approach raises one main question: will a different approach, a more mosaic approach, actually yield that rarest of rarities, a Dante biography that feels somehow new? 

Generally not. Go back forty years and take up a broad-audience biography of Dante, William Anderson’s excellent Dante the Maker from 1980. Look for the moment when Dante enters upon the career in politics that will bring him so much misery. There are three or four solid sources in and around this moment, and when Anderson combines them, he gets this:

Dante began his political career in 1295, at the age of thirty, at the time when Boniface VIII started to meddle in the affairs of Florence, and when the exile of Giano della Bella signalled the end of the popolo phase of the city’s life and the beginning of the new party conflict , which was to lead to Dante’s exile … How rapidly Dante advanced in politics is shown by the fact that he was elected a prior to the city after only five years of active political life. 

When Brilli and Milani go back to those sources and parse each as its own separate world, doing their best to scrape away the mythologizing done by both Dante and his earliest pietistic biographers, they get this:

At around the age of thirty, Dante’s life underwent a remarkable change: he officially exercised a public role for the first time. From the beginning of his career, he was attached to the members of the most moderate faction of the popolo, those who dominated the priorate in its first phase and who drew up the first version of the Ordinances of 1293 … Evidently, Dante’s participation in the councils of the Commune, where he spoke and voted, was generally to the linking of the more experienced members, such as the judges Palmieri Altoviti and Lapo Saltarelli. 

It’s obvious at once that the “combinatory” approach doesn’t actually distort; it need not be unduly suspected, much less abandoned, in favor of pulling out mosaic tiles. But something else is obvious too, even from such a brief sample: in these pages our authors have constructed a magnificently detailed “life and times” of their subject. They delve into his genealogy; they recreate his childhood, his relatives, his playgrounds, his schooling, the twists and turns of his adulthood, in a mass of detail that manages to be incredibly formidable but also invitingly readable throughout. Their respect for all those different shards and avenues of evidence guarantees that no scrap of Dante lore is overlooked or plowed into bland generalizations. This will likely make Dante’s New Lives daunting for newcomers to reading about Dante, but aficionados of the poet and his story – people, for instance, who devoured John Took’s fiercely brilliant Dante back in 2020 – will feel happily surrounded. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News