Tangible Politics

The Transmission of Dante Alighieri’s Monarchia (ca. 1350–1559)

Individual Research Project

Image: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana

‘This book looks schismatic to me […] my reverend master, I leave it to your judgement to determine whether this should be given to the Inquisitor of the heretics or outright destroyed’

– Note written by a fifteenth-century Benedictine priest on MS Znojmo, Archiv, AMZ-II 306, fol. 2r

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In his Latin treatise Monarchia, Dante Alighieri famously opposed papal claims to supreme power over temporal matters, arguing that the pope’s function is to lead humanity to beatitude in the afterlife, and that peace in this life was instead the emperor’s business.

Such an argument was inevitably controversial, as famously testified by Giovanni Boccaccio who reports that in the early 1330s the papal legate in Bologna staged public burnings of manuscripts containing the treatise. At the same time, though, Dante’s stringent arguments, his adoption of Latin rather than the vernacular, and the lack of references to historical contingencies in the text, made the Monarchia easily adaptable to a variety of political contingencies and needs. Thus, we find it being employed to bolster a variety of positions ranging from the Medici’s policies in Renaissance Florence, to the Reformation in Protestant Basle.

My project aims to reconstruct the history of the Monarchia’s fortune in the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods by looking at material aspects of the manuscripts containing it, such as the material support, the association with other works, the presence of marginal notes, and more. The following questions will be addressed:

1. Who read the Monarchia at different points in history, how did they read it, and how did it answer their needs and interests?
2. How did the dynamics of the Monarchia’s contrasted reception reflect on the manuscripts? What mechanisms were there in place to either ‘neutralise’ it or protect it from destruction?
3. How do the two earliest printed editions of the Monarchia reflect the shape and structure of the manuscripts and how do they depart from them?
4. What does the case of the Monarchia tell us about the dynamics of literary reception in general?