We are pleased to meet Dr. Tristan Kay, a distinguished scholar from the University of Bristol, who was among the 2023-24 recipients of the Italian Studies Library Award and recently completed significant research at Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library. Supported by a prestigious Leverhulme Research Fellowship, Dr. Kay is working on a project that explores the complex relationship between Dante Alighieri and the nationalist imagination.
During his two-week visit, Dr. Kay focused on examining rare materials from the Zahm Dante collection, with a particular interest in the 19th-century Italian culture and the 1865 centenary of Dante's birth, as well as publications from the Fascist period. His research promises to complicate the traditional modern view of Dante as the “father of Italian identity,” and to emphasize the problems associated with thinking about medieval literatures and cultures in national terms.
In the following interview, we had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Kay to discuss his research, findings, and how his time at Notre Dame has influenced his upcoming book.
Can you elaborate on how the materials from the Zahm Dante collection have influenced or expanded your understanding of Dante’s reception in the newly unified Italy?
My project attempts to do two things above all. First, it traces some of the ways in which Dante has been used in service of the modern Italian nation-state. And second, it invites an approach to Dante and medieval Italian culture that disavows the nation as a suitable frame of understanding. My focus at Notre Dame was on finding interesting new examples of the “national” Dante. I spent much of my time in Rare Books and Special Collections, where I received generous help and support from the library staff. The Zahm collection contained a wealth of material relating to the commemoration of Dante in the newly unified Italy. I worked with a number of speeches, pamphlets, prints, and poems published for the sixth centenary of Dante’s birth in 1865. I also studied materials relating to the campaign for a statue of Dante to be built in Rome around the turn of the twentieth century. The statue was never built, yet the arguments and fervent rhetoric around the campaign are illuminating. As in the centennial celebrations, we see Dante (a pre-national figure, of course) conceived as the ultimate expression of national character and identity.
In your research on Dante-related publications from the Fascist period, what insights have you gained about how Dante’s image was manipulated by the regime?
It was extremely helpful to be able to consult the entire series of La difesa della razza – the biweekly magazine that sought to promote and disseminate the ideology associated with the Racial Laws instituted in 1938. I knew that a Dantean quote was used on the cover of this publication, but I found several articles and images that used the poet (and indeed other aspects of medieval and early modern Italian culture) to uphold the regime’s racist and antisemitic ideology. I also explored a couple of propaganda photo books published under the regime, where I explored how Dante was incorporated into the iconography of Fascism. From the same period, but providing a very different perspective, it was a privilege to work with the spectacular and monumental edition of the Commedia illustrated by Amos Nattini. The edition was commissioned for the sixth centenary of Dante’s death in 1921 and eventually published in three instalments in the 1930s. The full series of illustrations are spectacular and impossible to access without consulting the (enormous!) books in person, so it was a treat to be able to work with these closely.
How has your research at Notre Dame helped in challenging the traditional image of Dante as the "father of Italian identity"? Were there any unexpected findings that reshaped your approach?
The Fascist materials I found were especially interesting. It is tempting to see the Fascists as continuing to endorse the idea of Dante (as “prophet of the nation” and prototype of the Italian people) that we witnessed in the nineteenth century, albeit with a harder rhetorical and ideological edge. But in the Difesa della razza and other publications we see Dante’s work used (and exploited) to reinforce very specifically Fascist ideologies around race, virility, and empire. Dante is promoted not merely as an icon of Italian national genius, but as the embodiment of a specifically Italian racial type. The different forms of nationalism that have seized upon Dante (and I include here contemporary populism) have certain things in common but have also all responded to Dante in very specific and distinctive ways. The nationalist idea of Dante is not fixed and stable, and nor, of course, is the nationalist idea of Italy.
Your work also offers broader methodological reflections regarding pre-modern and pre-national literary cultures. How has your time at Notre Dame influenced your perspective on these broader questions?
The examples I found and worked with at Notre Dame, both from the early years of the unified Italy and from the Fascist period, have been vital in showing some of the ways in which this idea of a “national” Dante has developed and been articulated and disseminated. It’s an extremely rich field and I am hoping to build upon the valuable work on Dante’s political reception by scholars such as Guy Raffa and Fulvio Conti. But I am also trying to emphasize that such an image of Dante, one that still endures today, obscures the ways in which pre-national medieval cultures operated and interacted, and that viewing them through a national lens is an anachronism. Just think of medieval Sicily, the birthplace of Italian vernacular literary culture, and its extraordinary linguistic, cultural, and religious pluralism. Dante said very interesting and suggestive things about “Italia,” it is true. But he was himself a multilingual and extremely eclectic writer, and his cultural influences were strikingly diverse. What’s more, he never promoted the idea of an autonomous Italian state with which he has come to be so indelibly associated. The idea of Dante as a monolithic national figure is, in my view, a caricature of the real Dante, who is a much more complex and interesting figure than that. Nationalists of different types have long attempted to “solidify” and contain Dante, to make him the ultimate representative of a clearly delineated national culture. His work, and indeed his transnational afterlives, tell a different story. We are accustomed today, even in our hyper-connected and globalized reality, to see the world in terms of neatly demarcated nation-states – and Dante has so often been used in the service of that very idea. But medieval culture can teach the modern world a thing or two about the limits of national thinking and understanding.
Dr. Kay’s research at Notre Dame marks a critical step in his ongoing project, which promises to make a substantial contribution to the study of Dante and Italian cultural history. Some of this recent work in this area can be found in the latest issue of the journal Bibliotheca Dantesca. We look forward to the publication of his book and the new perspectives it will bring to the field.
The Notre Dame Center for Italian Studies and Notre Dame International jointly administer an Italian Studies Library Research Award. This award provides funding for scholars to utilize the Hesburgh Libraries’ extensive collections, including the renowned Zahm Dante Collection and the Primo Levi Collection. The award supports research visits of one to three weeks, with funding ranging from $1,500 to $4,000. The program encourages applications from established scholars, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students, with a focus on the relevance of the Hesburgh Libraries' resources in Italian Studies to the proposed research project. Further information and the upcoming application deadline can be found here.