Dante did not have an easy life. The loss of his mother when he was still a child, and of his father ten years later, which compelled him to take charge of his family when he was barely eighteen; his early, prearranged marriage, admittedly not unusual at the time; the addition of his three or four children to a household that could only count on a modest income; the death of Beatrice in 1290, and that of Guido Cavalcanti (b. 1250/59) ten years later in circumstances for which Dante could feel partly responsible; the bitter disappointment of his political career in Florence; the unspeakable offence of the trial in absentia, and the wound of the capital sentence, extended eventually to his children; the twenty years of exile, spent wandering from court to court without a permanent home for himself and his wife and children; finally, his own death of malaria when he was fifty-six (not young for the fourteenth century, but not old either): this definitely looks like a difficult life. What is astonishing is that, despite the many obstacles, Dante was able to write a body of work that placed him permanently at the forefront not only of Italian literature, but also of Italian language and philosophical studies. There is no doubt that the difficulties he encountered in life stimulated his work as a writer; indeed it can be argued that we owe his masterpiece, the Commedia, to his experiences as a politician and his exile. Dante's writing is quintessentially autobiographical, which is not all that unusual in the Trecento. What distinguishes Dante's work is the way in which historical events, poetic autobiography, and reflection on poetry are inextricably interwoven in it. From its very inception, Dante's poetry appears to be a self-conscious elaboration of personal experiences, where the lines between dreams, imaginings, and real events are blurred and crossed. This procedure was conventional among Dante's circle of friends and correspondents; however, the coherence and originality with which he developed it made him unique. Its first, but already mature and refined, result is the Vita nova, probably begun in 1292 but certainly written after Beatrice's death in 1290, and before 1295.

Rime

Dante's lyric production spans twenty-five years, from the early 1280s to 1306–07, when he began to compose his major poem.

The idea for this book came to us as it comes to every university teacher when preparing a list of secondary readings for a course on Dante. One needs to offer a context, namely, an idea of the cultural, historical, intellectual, and geographical conditions in which Dante lived and wrote. What was happening in Florence around the year 1300, and why was Dante banished? Who were the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, and the Whites and the Blacks? And why were the empire and the Church always at loggerheads? How could the Church be so wealthy when St Francis was so poor? There are also trickier questions that one must be ready to answer – questions concerning vernacular and Latin; genre, language, and style; poetry, philosophy, and theology; religion, heresy, and orthodoxy. And questions concerning everyday life: rich and poor; immigration, the expansion of cities, forms of government, and social change; public health, justice, and injustice; literate and illiterate audiences; the condition of women (Dante does not spare them his invectives, yet he is also sensitive to issues of what today we would term gender difference); not to mention family life, lust, and love (why does Dante write so much about Beatrice, and not a word about his wife Gemma?). Answers do exist, but students, and we their teachers, must extract them from scores of scholarly volumes, each dealing with individual aspects of the economy, society, politics, religion, philosophy, art, literature, and music of the time, just to mention the most obvious subjects the knowledge of which would help facilitate an understanding and an enjoyment of Dante's works. In short, there is no single volume, as far as we are aware, either in English or in Italian, that offers a comprehensive overview of the material, cultural, and intellectual world in which Dante became Dante. This book aims to fill this lacuna by providing original essays on a broad array of facets of life in central and northern Italy at the time of Dante Alighieri, roughly between the middle of the thirteenth and the middle of the fourteenth centuries.

Yet despite the range of Dante in Context, its treatment of the late medieval Italian world cannot but be partial and fragmentary. There are issues, such as literature written in Latin in the post-classical age, and especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that might have merited chapters of their own.

Very little is known with certainty about the life of Dante Alighieri. We do not have a single line, word, or signature written by him; nor do we have a single book or manuscript or object that belonged to him. The Casa di Dante that is shown to tourists in Florence was largely built in the early twentieth century in the area of the city where we know that the Alighieri had their houses in the thirteenth century. Archival documents concerning Dante are very rare too, except for the short period when he served in the Florentine government. Of the little we know about him, most is gleaned from indirect references scattered throughout his works, and hardly any of it is corroborated by independent sources. We must be even more cautious with Giovanni Boccaccio's (1313–75) Life of Dante, which is largely a fictional work, written around the middle of the fourteenth century.

Early life

Dante Alighieri was born into a modest Guelph family under the sign of Gemini, towards the end of May 1265, in the parish of San Martino del Vescovo in Florence, between the Duomo and Piazza della Signoria. He was probably baptized with the name of Durante, which later was shortened to Dante. We know that he was the only child of Alighiero di Bellincione degli Alighieri (d. before 1283) and Bella, probably the daughter of Durante degli Abati. Dante's mother died between 1270 and 1273, and his father married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi, of a very modest background, who bore him two children, Francesco and Tana (shortened from Gaetana). Documents mention another sister, though we do not know whether she was Bella's or Lapa's daughter.

The Alighieri were minor Florentine nobility who had seen their social status and economic position considerably reduced in the course of the previous two centuries. Dante's great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida (c.1091–c.1148) was knighted by Emperor Conrad III (1093–1152) and followed him to the Holy Land where he died fighting (Par. XV, 139–48). His immediate descendants were aristocrats who married into other families of similar social standing. However, Dante's grandfather and father clearly belong to a different, more modest social class of small businessmen and landowners. Bellincione, Dante's grandfather, was an active Guelph who was banished twice from Florence between 1248 and 1251 and again from 1260 to 1267.