Dante in Love : The World's Greatest Poem and How It Made History

Amazon.com
No figure speaks for the Christian High Middle Ages more emphatically than Dante Alighieri, and according to Harriet Rubin, author of Dante in Love, no writer reveals the path to creative genius more emphatically either. Combining history and literary criticism, Rubin contends that "there is another way to read Dante"--not as a scholar, but as a fellow journeyman. Rubin's admiration and grasp of Dante's masterpiece is clear. She writes as one with an intimate knowledge not only of the period that shaped the poet, but also of the subsequent artists, thinkers, scientists, and statesmen that the poet helped to shape. But this strength, paradoxically, turns out to be the book’s biggest weakness: Rubin's obsessive contextualizing. The bulk of Dante in Love consists of historical references that are meant to define Dante's age and to illustrate the poet’s development and far-reaching influence. However, with each historical digression, we get farther and farther away from Dante and the Commedia itself. The result is a meandering narrative that in the end lacks focus, despite Rubin’s references to the poem (from multiple translations) and her stated intention of tracing Dante’s progress as an exile and artist through Italy and his creative process. Many of Rubin’s historical asides, such as her discussion of the rise of devotion to the Virgin Mary, truly help illuminate the poem. But others read like sweeping pronouncements that lack sufficient explanation: "Keats had the right instinct but the wrong method for exploiting Dante." Rubin marvels how Dante "kept his vision alive over nineteen years of trials to make the Comedy seem as if it were all one line, the work of one awful moment of birth which time stopped for genius." Unfortunately, Rubin's own work lacks a similar cohesiveness. -- Silvana Tropea


From Publishers Weekly
The infectious blend of accessibility, erudition and practical wisdom that characterized Rubin's previous The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women is abundantly present in her Dante in Love. Acting as our Virgil, Rubin follows Dante not only through the haunted realms of his Commedia but through the worldly circumstances and ideas that shaped it. Along the way we are givenâ€"in the form of brief but pungent digressionsâ€"deft thumbnail portraits of contemporaries like Guido Cavalcanti and Pope Boniface VIII as well as succinct explications of such crucial aspects of Dante's cosmology as Gothic architecture and the philosophy of Aquinas. One might single out Rubin's pages on the "memory theatre" and its role in medieval education as a model of insightful concision, but the book offers numerous other examples. That Rubin is able to interweaveâ€"without oversimplificationâ€"such occasionally arcane material into a compelling and fast-paced narrative speaks to an overall sense of great learning lightly worn and of a trust in the reader's intelligence not always evident in such popularizing accounts. Rubin's professional background in the world of business publishing (she founded the highly successful Doubleday Currency line) might have made her earlier meditation on the elegantly blunt insights of the early modern Machiavelli seem a more natural subject than the spiritual journey of the medieval Dante, but the book shows no signs of it. To say that she makes Dante's great poem "relevant" to the concerns of today might make her work seem like a crude exercise in empty uplift. Rather, she recognizes that the all-too-human pain of Dante's exile and slow progress toward authenticity produced a work whose hard-fought insights are more urgent than ever. Rubin quotes from a number of translations of the Commedia, most often and gratifyingly from the much-underrated rhyming version of John Ciardi. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


Review
"Rubin's ardor for her subject can be contagious....Her book will certainly inspire countless readers to embark on the revelatory, life-changing journey of reading The Divine Comedy." -- Los Angeles Times

"A thoughtful and enlightening analysis of the writing of The Divine Comedy that centers on the physical and spiritual journey of its author, Dante Alighieri." -- Seattle Post-Intelligencer