Author Spotlight: Joseph Luzzi

In this 'Author Spotlight', we feature a recent contributor - Dr. Joseph Luzzi, who is the Asher B. EdelmanProfessor of Literature at Bard College. He authored the essay "Dante’s Contested Legacy: Sacred Poetry and Secular Politics" in MWCC.17.

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• Tell us a bit about your background as an historian (education or otherwise). What edge do you think it gives you as an author and as an historian?

I have been teaching and studying Dante for about three decades, beginning with my graduate work in Italian literature at Yale. I’m currently offering the course Love and Death in Dante at Bard, where I’m the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature. I have authored numerous articles, essays, and reviews on Dante and his world, both for specialists and general readers, and my most sustained work on Dante has been in three books: my translation of Dante’s first book, the Vita Nuova (Liveright, 2024); Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2024), which charts the seven-hundred-year reception history of Dante’s epic poem; and my memoir In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love (HarperCollins, 2015), which describes how my turn to Dante’s work during a period of intense grief and mourning helped me rebuild my life.

• Do you have a favourite event or figure or object from Middle Ages? 

I think my favorite moment in medieval literature in general, and Dante’s Divine Comedy in particular, is at the beginning of Paradiso 25. As I write in my article for Medieval World: Culture and Conflict, it’s there that this “usually tough-minded poet lets down his guard” and describes with heart-wrenching frankness how difficult exile from Florence has been for him. He calls his Divine Comedy a “sacred poem” (Dante was never one to lack for confidence!), before claiming that the long years of writing it have made him “lean.” Above all, he narrates how he continues to feel the pain of exile from his beloved hometown of Florence, “the fair fold where I slept / a lamb opposed to the wolves that war on it” (trans. Mandelbaum). The original Tuscan is achingly musical and nostalgic: he calls Florence his “bello ovile,” “the fair fold,” and you can just hear the purr of those soft l and v sounds communicate Dante’s sense of painful dislocation from his womblike paese, homeland.

• What sparks your initial interest in writing an article? 

The inspiration for writing an article can come from so many places. These days, because I give my books priority in my writing schedule, I’m more selective than ever in terms of committing myself to the demands of producing an article, so I’m likely to opt for commissions related to a new book project. That’s why I was so drawn to this invitation from Medieval World: Culture and Conflict: the topic of the “medieval bestseller” is closely related to my book Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography because Dante’s epic was one of those rare works that enjoyed a mix of critical acclaim and popular success from the moment it began to circulate among readers. As I write in my book:

Despite the undeniable impact of Boccaccio and Petrarch in shaping the afterlife of Dante in the first decades after his death, Dante’s work reached a range of other readers outside of this elite perch. For one thing, the Commedia was copied, quite literally, into the legal codices and official documents of Italy’s increasingly literate professional class—leaving us with the image of lawyers, scribes, and clerks daydreaming about Dante’s verse while they presumably should have been focused on their paid duties. Dante also became a character in prose works whose representation of the poet bore witness to his widespread celebrity. In Franco Sacchetti’s Three Hundred Tales, a Decameron-like collection of short stories, Dante appears in various guises: in one story, he upbraids a blacksmith for not reciting his Commedia correctly; in another, he insults a garbage collector for the same sin of mispronouncing his work; and in a third, a scandalous poet takes refuge in a church and swears that the Commedia, though written by a mere mortal, is superior to the Bible.

Given this runaway appeal of Dante to readers in the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, you can probably imagine why I was so enthusiastic about contributing this essay!

• Tell us a bit about your research and writing process. What research do you usually undertake for your articles? What is the perfect environment/circumstance for you to write?

One of my principles in writing about an author or text is to try to engage with the work in the original for a sustained period of time and develop my own personal reading and thoughts before consulting any secondary sources or outside scholarship. I encourage my students to do the same. I believe that this “one-on-one” period of encountering a work of literature is essential, even in those cases where the original source is so demanding and opaque that it can be difficult to formulate that personal interpretation. For me, that initial moment of unmediated immersion in a work becomes a kind of “engine” that propels forward what I end up writing. Of course, as the process of writing continues, I then avail myself of all the outside scholarship and background material necessary for establishing a fuller and more textured understanding of the work in question. So the writing process often takes the form of that initial, intense “personal immersion” opening up to the broad community of scholarship and fellow researchers over time.