Good history requires responsible speculation. Marco Santagata’s most recent book on Dante hints that it will engage in some speculation in its very title, Dante. Il romanzo della sua vita, literally “Dante: The Novel of His Life” (Dante: The Story of His Life, as Richard Dixon’s new translation has it). The book reconstructs Dante’s activity chronologically while also dividing it geographically into two parts: half a life climbing the social and political ladder of medieval Florentine society and half a life spent in itinerant uncertainty after being banished from his hometown.
Chronicling the life of a man who was born more than 700 years ago and not to a noble family leaves us with scarce documentation and thus requires a great deal of guesswork. The extent of Santagata’s bibliography and explanatory notes—which take up more than a quarter of the text—can give the reader some reassurance that speculation, when it does occur, announces itself promptly and is justified by the secondary literature. Without these moments of creativity, one might be tempted to read the book as merely a long synthesis and reordering of the seemingly endless historical scholarship on Dante.
Dante’s elaborate self-fashioning as a prophet makes the labor of the biographer a difficult one.
An Anglophone readership may be less forgiving of the book’s occasional if necessary dryness
