Harvard University

Ph.D September 2011, Romance Languages and Literatures

Thesis Title: The Order of All Things: Mimetic Craft in Dante's Commedia

About

Catherine Adoyo Ph.D is primarily focused on scholarship exploring the homology of form and signification in the aesthetics of Medieval and Early Modern poetry. Her research extends to the quantitative, empirical analysis of structural dispositio of Medieval and Renaissance compositions.

DISSERTATION ABSTRACT
Although scholars have long speculated about the structural details of Dante Alighieri’s Commedia, none have articulated an empirically founded model of the poem’s comprehensive architecture, leaving open the debate about the details of Dante’s design of the poem. While some have adopted widely conjectural numerological methods, others have developed more sustainable mathematical analyses of the poem’s textual dispositio. This study maintains a strictly empirical approach in examining the homology of form and signification in Dante’s Commedia, revealing a close correspondence between the poem’s textual architecture and both physical and metaphysical concepts in Ptolemaic cosmology.

Analyzing the Commedia’s program of composition, I first examine the hermeneutic correlation between the multiple Dante subjects and the poem’s stratified diegesis. I then uncover programmatic indices of the poem’s genesis and development in the polysemy of selva, stilo and iri. A close reading of the pilgrim’s final vision reveals the explicitly Trinitary ontology of the terza rima whose ordering function and ubiquity in the text offer a structural mimesis of Divine omnipresence. Following a survey of Dante’s innovative use of Vergilian aesthetics, I demonstrate how Classical nautical metaphors for poetic composition underpin Beatrice’s authority as ammiraglio in the Commedia’s poetic enterprise. Finally, I empirically show that Beatrice’s mathematical identity as the square of the Trinity together with the terza rima are the key to understanding how the Commedia’s quantitative properties — namely the poem’s inventory of distinct rhymes, its canto lengths, their frequencies of occurrence and their distribution across the text — all strictly conform to Pythagorean principles of harmony and proportion.

This study analyzes how Dante based the comprehensive architecture of the Commedia on the mathematical musica universalis intrinsic to Ptolemaic cosmology. With thirteen notes from the hexachorda dura arranged according to the fundamental Pythagorean musical intervals (octave, 2nd, 4th and 5th), Dante composed the blueprint for crafting a poetically mimetic sign for the cosmos. This study thus provides the empirical grounds for developing and sustaining scholarship concerning the poem’s textual structure. Moreover, the study’s enumeration of the poet’s exacting methods contributes to ongoing rational examinations of Medieval aesthetics and Dante’s own mimetic craft as poet.

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