Dante Studies

1. Introduction

In the face of the monetary transformations of today, when—thanks to the increasing diffusion of new kinds of currency—the relationship between sovereignty and money seems to be on the verge of unprecedented change, it is worth lending our ears to Dante's words on the matter. While the Comedy will not supply direct solutions to the monetary quandaries of our age, there is still reason to ask how Dante conceived of money. Reaching us from the very moment of the split between the age of Latin and that of the vernacular languages, poised before the landscape of an unknown world, Dante's words widen the horizon of what is possible for those who lend him their ears, as he himself says of philosophy in the third book of Convivio:

E puossi dir che 'l suo aspetto giovaa consentir ciò che par maraviglia.

(Conv. 3.0.51–52)

Dante's monetary conception has usually been addressed through the study of the great cantos of Inferno related to sins involving the use of money, usury (Inf. 17), simony (Inf. 19), and forgery (Inf. 30). Following this thematic path, however, we run the risk of isolating these cantos and overlooking the wider context wherein Dante embeds these reflections. As shown by Joan Ferrante's study on the relationship between commerce and language in the Comedy, images, concepts, and words related [End Page 92] to the economic sphere permeate the entire poem. Their presence exceeds by far the narrow limits of the monetary sins of Inferno; passing through the steep lanes of Purgatory, the economic discourse reaches the supreme heights of Paradise. This is why, as I seek to show in the following pages, Dante's thinking on money can be best understood by reading the literal and figural uses of money together across the Comedy.

Except for one occurrence in Fiore 173, in Dante's vernacular writings the use of the Italian word moneta—which can be rendered both as "currency" and "coin"—happens exclusively in the Comedy. It seems that only into the context of the Comedy's comic style could such a prosaic word have been aptly woven. Even more revealing, however, is the peculiar dynamic of the usage of this word across the poem: three different kinds of currency seem to circulate in the three kingdoms of the afterlife. Following the plurality of levels of signification of the Comedy, the word moneta bears a different meaning in each canticle, progressively elevating from the literal to the metaphorical level, from the trivial to the sublime. The distribution of the occurrences of this word throughout the three canticles presents a certain singularity: the word moneta appears once in Inferno, twice in Purgatorio, thrice in Paradiso. This mathematical progression is accompanied by a rhetorical one: the word is employed in its literal sense in the first canticle, once in a metaphorical sense in the second, and twice in a metaphorical sense—and of a superior rhetorical rank—in the third.

Taken on its own, this progression might be deemed a simple curiosity. Yet the association of semantic fields connected with justice in relation to the sin of forgery in Inferno 30, together with the metaphorical usage of the word moneta in Purgatorio 11 for "punishment," introduces the possibility of a wide-ranging connection between the word moneta and the concept of justice in the poem. The different kinds of coins that can be found in the three kingdoms provide some evidence for thinking of the three reigns of the Comedy as ruled by different kinds of justice, corresponding to the interpretation of justice given by Aristotle in the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics.¹ This link between money and justice in the Comedy demands an understanding of Dante's stance in the context of the monetary debates and the great economic transformation taking place in Europe between the thirteenth and the fourteenth century. [End Page 93]

2. Monetary Debates in the Age of Dante

In Dante's time, Florence, followed shortly by a number of other Italian cities including Genoa, Venice, and Lucca, was the...