Allegoria – figura – senso multiplo della scrittura. Leggere Dante con Auerbach

Abstract

This article first reconstructs the groundbreaking work of Erich Auerbach, who in the 1930s emphasised the importance of figural interpretation for understanding Dante’s Commedia, thereby establishing a new paradigm in Dante scholarship. This method of textual interpretation, also known as the doctrine of multiple meanings, combines the historical and the allegorical dimension. The article then shows how Dante himself, in the Convivio and the Epistola a Cangrande della Scala, applied this method of textual interpretation to his own poetic texts, especially the Commedia. This can be understood as the expression of a medieval mental habit. In the third part of the article, two passages from the Commedia – Purg. XXIV and Inf. XV – are interpreted in terms of multiple meanings, whereby, unlike in Auerbach’s work, the multiple meanings come into play on the innerworldly level, not in the relationship between this world and the world hereafter.