In a recent article Lino Pertile has unriddled the metaphor that lies behind one of the crucial texts of the Comedy, devoting ten pages of his most recent study of Purgatorio 24.49-63 to Dante's noun "nodo" {"Il nodo di Bonagiunta, le penne di Dante e il Dolce Stil Novo," Lettere italiane 46 (1994), 52-61}. He has shown that the word is borrowed from a technical term in falconry, the noose or "knot" used to restrain young falcons in training. I am in complete agreement with this important contribution to our understanding of the difficult verse. On the other hand, in a related argument concerning Dante's self-definition as poet of Love, Pertile attempts to convince us, in a preceding study, that Dante did not employ the text of his Convivio in "an intertextual discourse based on this tension [between Commedia and Convivio] and carried out by Dante with the specific intention of conveying exemplary meanings to the reader of the Comedy" {"Dante's Comedy beyond the Stilnovo," Lectura Dantis [virginiana], 13 (Fall 1993), p. 58}. I hope that my admiration for Pertile's work will not be obscured by the strength of my disagreement with this formulation.

Pertile's ingenious argument has it that, since the date of the voyage is 1300, Dante had not yet, within the autobiographical construct of the Comedy, written the Convivio and thus could not know it and, in any case, would not have counted on his readers to know it, since its diffusion was minimal. However, the very fact that there was any diffusion of Convivio indicates that Dante surely knew that there was at least one manuscript in circulation or, in any event, out of his possession. Therefore, he had to be aware how often he had to account for opinions changed in the Comedy. Pertile's theory, as attractive as it may seem, is problematic. For it to be true, Dante would have had to avoid all pointed reference to the Convivio in the Comedy. Yet the pages of the poem are dotted with references to explicit passages in Convivio, usually in full accord with the ideas earlier expressed, but sometimes with the express purpose of cancelling a wrong bit of doctrine or a piece of disloyalty to Beatrice. Even brief consultation of the Dartmouth Dante Project reveals how often modern commentators cite the Convivio as source or parallel for thoughts and expressions found in the Comedy. To offer some statistics, which are tentative but indicative, Lombardi is the first modern commentator to cite Convivio fairly often: 61 or so times. With Tommaseo there comes an explosion: ca. 384 references; Scartazzini, ca. 477; Torraca, ca. 682; among our near contemporaries we find in Singleton ca. 242, in Bosco/Reggio ca. 326. Beginning with Landino and Vellutello, commentators have linked the opening of the Comedy, "nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita," with Convivio 4.23.9 and 11, where Dante makes "lo punto sommo di questo arco [de la nostra vita]" the age between thirty and forty, and goes on to describe the thirty-fifth year of Christ's life as "lo colmo de la sua etade." (That we may be fairly certain that Dante means, in Inferno 1.1, to put himself at exactly this mid-point of thirty-five years is underlined by the less-often-cited passage from 1.3.4, where he castigates Florence for casting him into exile: "Fiorenza,... nel quale nato e nutrito fui in fino al colmo de la vita mia.") The first verse of the poem is joined quickly by the second as revealing a Convivial source: the "selva oscura" is frequently perceived as reflecting the phrase "la selva erronea di questa vita" of 4.24.12. It seems difficult to argue that Dante did not want any reader who happened to be aware of the text of the earlier Convivio not to address the relation between the two works from one end of the Comedy to the other.

There is a related problem. Others, most recently John Scott {see "Dante and Philosophy," in Dante and Modern American Criticism, ed. Dino S. Cervigni (Annali d'Italianistica 8 [1990]), 258-277}, have argued that Dante indeed does often and favorably relate his thoughts in the poem to those put forward earlier in Convivio. And here I need to emend some of my previous statements. Where I have argued that Dante "rejects" Convivio, what I should have said is that while Dante usually cites previous ideas and expressions in Convivio as currently valid (and this in the vast majority of cases), he does indeed put under hostile scrutiny crucial passages which need to be negated or emended. {For the wider problem see Bruno Nardi, Dal "Convivio" alla "Commedia", Rome, Ist. stor. ital. per il medio evo, 1960, 1-150; Maria Corti, La felicita' mentale, Turin, Einaudi, 1983, 72-155; for a far more totalizing view of Dante's hostility toward Convivio from the vantage point of the Comedy see Antonio Gagliardi, La tragedia intellettuale di Dante: Il "Convivio," Catanzaro, Pullano, 1994.} While I hope soon to return to this subject, for now let me simply give a brief list of Convivial passages that are censured in the Comedy. In this listing I will not include less-than-obvious occurrences or merely potentially hostile revisitings of Convivio, but only oppositional confrontations that reveal clear corrections of previous views. (1 & 2) The damnations of Guido da Montefeltro in Inferno 27 and of Bertran de Born in 28 stimulated Castelvetro, in his commentary to 18.134, to conclude that Dante has thereby contradicted, in each case, what he had suggested of these two men in Convivio (4.28.8 and 4.11.14, respectively), namely, that they had turned to God at the end of their lives. (3) In Purgatorio 2 we find a passage in dispute between Pertile and others, when Casella sings Dante's second Convivial ode {see John Freccero, "Casella's Song," Dante Studies 91 (1973), 73-80; Hollander, "Cato's Rebuke and Dante's scoglio," Italica 52 (1975), 348-363}. (4) Paradiso 2 is usually understood as countering the theory that accounts for the spots on the Moon offered in Convivio 2.12.9 {see, e.g., Daniel J. Ransom, "A Palinode in the Paradiso," Dante Studies 95 (1977), 81-94; Maria Corti, Percorsi dell'invenzione, Turin: Einaudi, 1993, p. 155. (5) The eighth canto of Paradiso includes a correction of Convivio. It is administered by Charles Martel in the most courteous of chastisements. In the first Convivial ode, addressed to "Voi che 'ntendendo il terzo ciel movete," the order of angels associated with the heaven of Venus, Dante addressed, as the commentary at 2.5.13 makes plain, "Thrones"; but now Charles informs Dante that his angelic mates while he is in this heaven are Principalities ("Noi ci volgiam coi principi celesti" -- v. 34), not Thrones. {For more venturesome discussions of the implicit further correction of Convivio here, see Hollander, "Cato's Rebuke," pp. 351-353; Rachel Jacoff, "The Post-Palinodic Smile," Dante Studies 98 (1980), 111-122; Teodolinda Barolini, Dante's Poets, Princeton, Princeton Univ. Press, 1984, 71-75. Dante's "error" here is potentially more disturbing, the abandonment of Beatrice for Lady Philosophy.} (6) The angelological problem is insisted on again and far more frontally in Paradiso 28.121- 135, where Dante's Convivial ordering of the angelic hierarchy is shown to have been led astray (more in fact by Brunetto Latini than by Gregory the Great, who has only Principalities and Virtues confused) in the placement of four of the nine orders (Powers, Principalities, Dominions, and Thrones). It is impossible to take Gregory's supposed smile of recognition for his fault as not being Dante's as well.

There are other cases that might be made for passages in the later poem that "correct" those in Convivio (e.g., the ultimate simile of Paradiso 33.133-138, which compares Dante, wanting to understand the relations among the three persons of the Trinity, to the geometer who wishes to discover the principle by which he might square the circle. Convivio 2.13.27 is clear about this: "lo cerchio per lo suo arco e' impossibile a quadrare perfettamente." In the following lines we are told that this impossible desire was answered by a "fulgore" that fulfilled Dante's wish, thus implying that, against the rationalist confines of Convivio, the Comedy allows a mystical solution for the "squaring of the circle"). However, my point here is not to see how often in the Comedy Dante is in polemic with his own previous work, only that he sometimes is, and that the argument that Dante neither expected nor in fact authorized his first readers, as Pertile claims, to consider the text of Convivio as relevant to its meaning is simply unacceptable. What results from such an analysis is that neither Scott nor I have been entirely correct nor entirely wrong. My position, better stated, has it that, among its tasks, the Comedy is asked by its author at least to clear the record of errors in Convivio. And, as we have seen, some of these are not trivial.