Dante's Vita Nuova and the New Testament

William Franke is Professor of Comparative Literature and Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University and Visiting Professor at the University of Navarra. He is a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and has been Fulbright-University of Salzburg Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology and Study of Religions. His books include Dante's Interpretive Journey (1996), On What Cannot Be Said (2007), Poetry and Apocalypse (2009), Dante and the Sense of Transgression (2013), A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014), The Revelation of Imagination: From the Bible and Homer through Virgil and Augustine to Dante (2015), Secular Scriptures: Modern Theological Poetics in the Wake of Dante (2016), A Theology of Literature (2017), and On the Universality of What is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking (2020).

• 1. Introduction: The Vita nuova as Theological Revelation through Lyrical Interpretation; 2. The New Testament Model of Salvific Reminiscence; 3. From Appearing and Imagining to Revealing through Interpreting: The Vita nuova's Hermeneutics of Witness; 4. Phenomenology versus Hermeneutics (Debate with Harrison): Revelation as Mediation; 5. History of Effect and a New Hermeneutics-Oriented Critical Paradigm; Picture Album; 6. Conclusion. The Existential Grounding of Revelation in Lyric; Coda; Epilogue: Dream Epistemology and Religious Revelation in Dante's Vita nuova; Appendix: Italian Text and English Translation of the Vita nuova.

'This book, which includes the original text and a new, spirited English translation of it, proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the presence of the Christian New Testament on young Dante's mind when he wrote the Vita nuova is not just occasional – it is indeed part of Dante's determined effort to write a kind of 'sacred story' long before he conceived the 'sacred poem' – the Divine Comedy. William Butler Yeats once wrote, in a poem entitled after Dante's Vita nuova 'Ego Dominus Tuus', that Dante 'has made that hollow face of his / more plain to the mind's eye than any face / but that of Christ'. Franke now shows that there is more to the Irish poet's lines than we thought. He bravely confronts the problems of hermeneutics which making his 'face' plain in the Vita nuova's love story might imply for its author and proposes, shedding light on both texts, that this strange 'autobiography' deliberately looks for a 'poetics of revelation' and is constructed as a true 'New Testament'.' Piero Boitani, Emeritus, Comparative Literature, Sapienza University of Rome