Dante Studies

Introduction

E su cotesto andare gli sciatti semplicioni potrebbero ridurre tutta la storia all'aritmetica commerciale; e da ultimo una nuova interpretazione autentica di Dante potrebbe darci la Divina Commedia illustrata coi conti delle pezze di panno, che gli astuti mercanti fiorentini vendeano con tanto profitto loro!

(Labriola 1896)

In 1927, the philosopher Benedetto Croce argued that socialism revitalized the political landscape and affected every aspect of intellectual life in Italy. Yet there was a space which socialism could not penetrate: literature. Croce was responding explicitly to Frederick Engels's preface to the Italian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1893). Engels claimed that, just as medieval Italy was the cradle [End Page 176] of capitalism and Dante its poet, at the end of the nineteenth century Italy was awaiting the Dante of socialism (Engels 1893). For Croce, conversely, poetry was irreducible to economics, and Dante's gaze at the past was precisely what made him a poet: "Dante era uno spirito doloroso, in contrasto coi suoi tempi, e rivolto romanticamente al passato, e perciò fu poeta" (Croce 1991 [1927]: 207–8).

Croce and Engels exemplify the two main approaches that twentiethcentury scholars have taken to Dante and economics. On the one hand, Dante is presented as resistant to the rising monetary economy, rescuing the Empire and the Church in an anachronistic attempt to reform the system and preserve a declining medieval world. On the other, Dante emerges as a champion of progress: capitalist, modern, socialist or democratic, sometimes aligned with the poor and sometimes with the wealthy class. The contradictions apparent across these conclusions raise the question: what exactly does it mean to investigate Dante and economics? As we know, economics was not a separate discipline in the Middle Ages. What we understand today as "economics" was then a set of rules and aspects intertwined with theology, philosophy, and broader moral concerns (Lambertini 2019), encompassing questions of the circulation and distribution of resources, the determination of value, the nature and fairness of exchange, monetary policies, and legislation. Dante certainly engages with these themes in his works: he stages and envisions systems of distribution; he presents sins such as avarice, simony, usury, and greed; he uses language and metaphors involving trade, usury, and debt; he represents money, and takes sides in the theorization of excess and moderation, trade and gift. These matters were particularly important in the context of late medieval Florence, a city under transformation, with an increasing population, a growing economy, and an expanding trade network (Faini 2010, Day Jr. 2015; Goldthwaite 2009; Caferro 2020). So where was Dante standing in relationship to this world in flux? Was he aware of the significant financial shifts and techniques that Florence was witnessing and developing at this time? Did he reject or embrace the economic changes that made the Florentine economy so influential? In what follows, we examine the state of the field in order to orient readers around the constellations of scholarly debates on this topic, and then move to considering the specific contributions to this Forum. [End Page 177]

I

After the Italian publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, a few scholars engaged the question of Dante's attitude towards the rise of capitalism in medieval Florence. The first monograph on Dante and economics by Livio Cibrario proposed a distinctly moderate view of Dante's relationship to the economic world. For Cibrario, Dante condemned avarice, usury, wealth, and greed and opposed the newcomers in Florence, but had a neutral attitude towards commerce (Cibrario 1898: 78). Cibrario's book was an early attempt to analyze Dante's text in light of economic practices in Florence and alongside canonists and theologians' writings on economic matters (Einaudi 1898). Around the same time, two of the most influential historians of Florence, Gaetano Salvemini and Robert Davidsohn, inquired into the political and economic landscape of medieval Florence, later placing Dante within this context (Davidsohn 1896–1929; Salvemini 1899 and 1936). With Croce, Davidsohn and Salvemini shared the idea that Dante was not ahead of his time; with Marx and Engels, they called attention to the social phenomena surrounding him...