Introduction to the Dover Edition
INTRODUCTION TO THE DOVER EDITION
IN the first twenty years of the last century, Paget Jackson Toynbee (1855–1932) made a lasting mark on Dante studies. (His main contributions will be mentioned below.) This book, published as a short monograph in 1899 (with less detailed descriptions of the works being the most notable difference with respect to the present volume), was much revised in the fourth edition of 1910 (the third edition had already been paid the rare–at that time–compliment, for a book about Dante, of an Italian translation).
What distinguishes Toynbee’s work is its meticulous attention to detail, bringing a gift for clear-headed analysis into play in an attempt to get the life and works “right,” since both are surrounded by uncertainty that results from the near-total absence of any corroborating record for the “facts” about Dante and his work that have come down to us. It is also distinguished by a judicious turn of mind in dealing with most of these thorny problems (some nearly inevitable, given that uncertainty).
We want to remember (as Toynbee himself demonstrates in his later volume Dante in English Literature) that, until the Romantic era, with the imposing exception of Chaucer, rarely were English poets excited to the level of imitation by Dante’s great poem, as were, to name but two, Byron and Shelley. Thus Toynbee’s enthusiasm is part of a second British “Dante moment,” this one centered in Oxford (where both he and Edward Moore taught) and involving literary critics more than poets. The most important of these figures was the first of them, Moore (1835–1916), one of the great textual editors of the Comedy, his work used and admired even by Italian scholars, who did not hesitate to employ the texts that he edited as the new standard. In addition, and among his other contributions, were his “Studies in Dante,” collected in four volumes, useful even today. A great scholar himself, Toynbee, who collaborated with Moore on the collection of Dante’s works known as “The Oxford Dante” (1924), frequently acknowledges his debt to Moore in the footnotes at the bottom of these pages. Another brilliant Dantean presence on the scene was that of Philip Wicksteed (1844–1927), a clergyman, a prolific student of economics, and a man who raised an amateur’s interest in the Italian poet to the highest levels of scholarship, as is evident, for instance, in his Dante and Aquinas (1913). A sometime collaborator of Wicksteed was the much younger Edmund Gardner (1869–1935), whose two important book-length contributions are Dante’s Ten Heavens (1898) and Dante and the Mystics (1913). These four men were the flower of this period in English Dante studies, but several other scholars also contributed to making this time extraordinary for Dante studies in Great Britain.
Toynbee’s own other major contributions include A Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante (1898; second edition, Charles Singleton, 1968); Dante in English Literature from Chaucer to Cary (1909), an effort to gather every instance of the occurrence of references to Dante in English literature up to 1840; important articles collected in Dante Studies and Researches (1902) and Dante Studies (1921); and at that point the best critical edition of Dante’s letters (1920). It is a record of accomplishment in Dante studies that is difficult to match.
This particular book was the first of its kind and obviously filled a need; it is a concise, straightforward presentation of Dante’s life and works written for the general reader but useful for the specialist as well. One is impressed, reading through it, at how it has not become dated in a field of study in which the essential bibliography changes in major respects every quarter century. Only one present issue concerning the Dantean canon is not broached here, the question of the attribution of Il fiore and Il Detto d’amore, a question that divides its contemporary students but was not even an issue in Toynbee’s day; indeed, the first editions of Dante’s complete works containing these two extended poetic exercises saw the light of day only after the First World War. Toynbee’s judgments hold up remarkably well, even his hedging on the date of composition of the Monarchia (while leaving the question open, he decidedly prefers a date sometime between 1310 and 1313, while most contemporary students of the problem, after Pier Giorgio Ricci’s intervention in his edition [1965], date it later, and no earlier than 1317). A century and more after he decided to dedicate himself to this task, forty years after Charles Singleton republished the then out-of-print text (1965), this book remains one of the best guides to someone trying to find an orientation in the world that Dante manufactured.
Hopewell, New Jersey
31 December 2004