Un'epistola 'dantesca' di Albertino Mussato

The article studies an epistle in verse written by Albertino Mussato to Fra Benedetto of
the Dominican convent of Saint Augustine of Padua: the topic of correspondence of the poet
and the religious man (whose carmen has been lost) is the nature of a comet, which prompts
a larger reflection on the movement of the planets and on the configuration of the eighth
sphere. Asked to attempt a treatise on celestial matter, Mussato says he means to aim his
poetry at less exalted topics, lamenting his incapacity to elevate his rhetorical intruments to
the doctrinal level that astronomy would exact of him. Having demurred from the invitation
to compose celestial verses, he then professes disinterest in the topic of hell, as he is no Hercules
and no Aeneas. The metaliterary implications of what Mussato says, and the fact that
the most immediate example of “poetry of the hereafter” must have been the coeval Commedia,
suggest that we consider the epistle with respect to that poem, so as both to specify
the ideological fulcra in the presumed intellectual rivalry of Dante and Mussato, and to note
the ways and the context in which the earliest reception of the Commedia in northern Italy
seems to have propagated.