When describing a big book in a short title, it seems important, as Virgilio instructs his pupil after the brusque hail of Farinata degli Uberti, that “le parole tue fien conte” ([you] make your words count; Inf. 10.39). For this reason, to adapt Mary McCarthy’s renowned mot, each constituent part of the phrase “Dante and the Making of a Modern Author” has plural meanings, including “and,” “the,” “of” and “a.” Let me begin with the least of these, the vowel-word, “a.” The besetting temptation of single author studies, and those of Dante above all, is to turn one's object into the pivot around which history – literary, intellectual, and otherwise – turns. And while I would not wish to underestimate the transformative powers of the Dantean oeuvre, nonetheless I would also insist that, my occasional lapses into hyperbole notwithstanding, it represents neither the only way of construing modern authorship nor the only route for arriving at that complex cultural phenomenon. Rather, the ensemble of works known as “Dante” is a symptom, a case – a particular product of and participant in ongoing historical processes – neither an origin nor an end in itself.

Which brings me to the question of “modernity”.