Perpetual Return: What a Fascist Reading of Dante Tells Us About Philology
At the Affiliations conference, held at St Anne’s College, Oxford (24th‑25th May 2024), colleagues across literary studies were considering methodologies of cross-temporal reading and comparison, asking: how does literary studies, or philology in its broadest sense, contribute to intellectual history?
Thinking about comparison across time holds liberatory possibilities, through what Donna Haraway calls “diffractive reading”, or “feeling backward”, in the words of Heather Love, to create transtemporal communities. Cross-temporal reading, however, has a nefarious side: for instance, in the propagandistic imitation of philology in Fascist Italy.
During the Affiliations conference, my mind turned to amateur philologist Pietro Iacopini’s propaganda masquerading as literary study. Iacopini’s Dante e il Fascismo nel canto di Sordello (Dante and Fascism in the Canto of Sordello, published 1928, second edition 1929) shows one such attempt to read cross-temporally, or anachronistically, to manufacture a sense of Fascism as a transhistorical concept that existed even in the Middle Ages.
Portrait of Dante by Sandro Boticelli, 1495.
By the late 1920s, the appropriation of Dante for nationalistic causes was not new, and occurred through a variety of media, in public settings, as underlined by Federica Coluzzi and Tristan Kay. Iacopini was not a professional philologist. Nothing about his work would pass peer review. So, the question is: how and why does Iacopini choose to make his argument by leveraging the authority of both Dante’s text and literary study itself?
The book itself compresses different temporal moments into one object, as if by bringing them together, the book could speak across them. Its page-design attempts to bridge the centuries: a modified leaf motif appears on the first page, evoking the design of humanist bookmaking. The book imitates the conventions of medieval manuscript making, too, by beginning with a full-page author portrait of Dante opposite the title page, only to later include a full-page portrait of Mussolini, according the dictator a visual status almost equivalent to the author.
The study begins with a thesis statement: “That Dante is Fascist is demonstrated by all of his works, constantly characterized by a deep sense of love for the Fatherland and by sincere respect for the authorities and for the law.” Although his study lacks many aspects of scholarly apparatus, including reference notes, Iacopini imitates two key techniques used in philological study: close reading of the primary text, and scholarly dialogue, in the form of a letter about the study from aviator and later Governor of Libya, Italo Balbo, which opens the second edition.
Pietro Iacopini, Dante E Il Fascismo (2nd edn, 1929).
The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
Iacopini follows a series of largely descriptive readings of Purgatorio VI with a discussion of Dante’s theory of universal empire, outlined in Monarchia. Iacopini dismisses the idea of Monarchia as a precursor of socialist internationalism. To him, it represents the imperial expansion of the nation, Italy: “Indeed with the Universal Monarchy the Poet intended to valorise Italy all the more, making only her worthy of governing the world”. This interpretation purports to offer a centuries-old justification for Italy’s imperial expansions into North Africa, beginning in the nineteenth-century and reframed in the Fascist era as “spazio vitale” (“living space”).
Dante and Fascism proves a deeply uncritical work, as Luigi Scorrano observes. Yet, it represents an attempt to leverage the authority of philology as a methodology to legitimise Fascism as a transhistorical concept, with a long intellectual tradition, and claim Dante as a part of that history.
Iacopini inadvertently exposes the tension between philology’s authority and its malleability. As Siraj Ahmed reminds us, nineteenth‑century philology made textual critique an authoritative, expert domain, which delegitimized other modes of interpretation. Despite philology’s façade of objectivity, this rhetoric of scientific inquiry proved flexible, and therefore useful, to authoritarian regimes, like that of Mussolini. Iacopini’s arguments reinforce Edward W. Said’s observations in Orientalism on the effectiveness of philology as a tool to support imperialist modes of knowing. Iacopini’s desire to leverage the authority not only of Dante’s text but of philology itself reveals the cultural power of textual study, and its role in articulating noxious fantasies of national identity, empire, and dominion, even beyond the professionalized domains of academia.
Portrait of Dante, opposite title page of Dante E Il Fascismo.
The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
Philology leaves a difficult cultural legacy, yet, as at the Affiliations conference, we keep returning to it. As Merve Emre points out, the essay title “the return to philology” has been employed by “disparate figures”, including Paul de Man, Edward W. Said, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Sheldon Pollock, Stephen Nichols, Michael Holquist, and Emre herself.
Why, then, do we keep returning to it? The term “philology” captures an intellectual history, a sense of change over time. Philology is one of the oldest and broadest terms for textual study we have. Meaning simply “love of learning”, the Latin “philologia” dates to at least the fifth century, when Martianus Capella transfigured the abstract noun into a woman, in the Marriage of Philology and Mercury. The “New Philology” of the nineteenth century, developed in Germany, was by no means the first attempt to articulate a technical methodological toolkit, with Giambattista Vico and Lorenzo Valla providing notable precursors. By the 1990s, philology was once again renewed by another “New Philology”, concentrated in the United States and informed by New Materialisms. The 2020s are seeing a flourishing of digital philologies, using technology to make manuscripts digitally available and edit texts in new ways, as well as Queer and Trans philologies. The line between philology and literary criticism is becoming increasingly, and productively, blurred through these perpetual renewals.
As Werner Hamacher says, “every definition of philology must […] give way to another”. Philology is not limited to nineteenth-century methodologies of genetic criticism, Lachmannian archetypes, or Bédier-esque value judgements of “best” manuscripts. It can be understood more broadly as a discursive mode of understanding the world though text, and text through the world. Philology is discursive, therefore recursive. It always returns, always renewed.
For many, philology still summons the image of leather-bound, nineteenth-century concordances, surrounded by the smell of old paper, thinning as the acid used in its manufacture consumes it. The odor of a “failed discipline”, as John Guillory terms it. As one delegate at Affiliations observed, “philology” may still be considered a “dirty word”, but, as Sarah Kay suggests in Philology’s Vomit: An Essay on the Immortality and Corporeality of Texts, it was metaphorically figured that way even in Late Antiquity. In the Marriage of Philology and Mercury, the personified figure of Philology regurgitates tome after tome, suggesting philology has always been unclean, vomit-stained. Each volume escapes Philology, still bearing the traces of its journey out of the body where it originated. As we do philology today, our books, too, are covered in the traces of the knowledge systems that produced them, and their history.
This continuous production of volumes, as figured in Martianus’ text, suggests the perpetual renewal of philology. This renewal can prove liberatory, or, in Iacopini’s case, reactionary. Philology acts as a container, and the tools inside it are in constant flux; reinvention renders philology nebulous, capacious, and, therefore, useful to our increasingly interdisciplinary modes of study. Philology provides a space for new methodologies while reminding us that books, even our own, always stink of the past.
Kate Travers is the Powys Roberts Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern Languages at St Hugh's College, Oxford, researching medieval Italian literature and its afterlives.
