Dante Giving the Finger to the Pope: A Dantean Manuscript Anecdote from 1492

Leon Jacobowitz-Efron Ph.D. – Shalem College, Jerusalem

Dante Notes / April 7, 2023

The following short note sheds light on a Dantean facezia, a brief tale of verbal wit, that has yet to be transcribed from its manuscript source and thus slipped by the scrutiny of previous scholarship on Dantean anecdotes, such as Papanti’s magisterial compilation.[1] This note will hopefully offer another small piece to the puzzle of Dante’s reception and make further studies of this narrative possible.

The Manuscript

The text appears in a codex from the Benedictine monastery of Camaldoli in Tuscany. Today it is kept in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence under the signature Conventi Soppressi B.II.122 (formerly S. E. C. II O-23 Camaldoli). This small codex (21.2 cm x 14.2 cm) is a compendium of authorities (altorità or alturità in the dialect form it uses) and was possibly meant to be an aid for preachers. Five of these authorities are religious (St. Bernard and the Four Latin Fathers), several are classical (Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and Boethius), three are contemporaries (Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch), and some are anonymous. The anecdote that is of interest to us could be interpreted as belonging to this final category. However, since all the other texts including the anonymous ones bear ‘altorità’ in their titles, while only this narrative and the two that follow it do not, one may also interpret this scribal choice to mean our anecdote has a different, vaguer, purpose than the surrounding altorità.[2]

Titled “Events that occurred to Dante” (Cose ocorse a Dante), the text is located on folio 118v. It is preceded by Jerome and followed by two anonymous texts titled ‘Reasonings’ (rag(i)oni) and ‘Proverbs’ (proverbi). It is written in mercantesca script, often omitting letter and word spacing. Luckily, the recto side of the same folio bears the date 24 September 1462 and is written in the same hand, and, thus, 1462 is in all probability the year the verso text under discussion was penned.

The Text

The following is a faithful transcription of the text, spelling, and paragraph breaks. The only modifications are the introduction of spacing, capitalization, and modern punctuation:

<Es>sendo Dante a Roma inanzi al Pa/pa e ridendosi di lui che no(n) llo stima/vono, rispose loro in questo modo:/ ‘Voi che ghigniate la nona vochale/ e no(n) valete la sua antecedente,/ suo chonseghuente gite a calchulare.’

La nona vochale sie ‘I,’ cioè vuol dire/ ‘voi che ghigniate, no(n) valete un’accha,’/ che l’accha è l’anticedente dell ‘I.’/ ‘Andare a chachare,’ cioè la suo(!) con/seguente dell ‘I’ è il ‘K.’ ‘Chalchulare’/ vuol dire due ‘cha,’ cioè ‘chacha.’/ E chon q(u)esta co<m>p(os)ta risposta li con/fuse mostra(n)do loro errore.

I<o> vorrei anpriare gli cinque rami,/ cioè apri la mano a fatto/ emett(re) e’l primo fra lli duo piú p(re)sso./ Ciò q(ues)to grosso fra li altri duo dito/ e dire poi ‘togli in che tanto lanii!’/ Cioè farli una ficha co(n) parole.[3]

The jest hinges on the expression “non valere un’acca” (to not be worth an ‘H’); since in Italian, the H is not pronounced, this turn of phrase is the equivalent of “not worth salt,” i.e., being worthless. The story tells how Dante, whom the pope held in low regard, was mocked while visiting Rome. The absence of explicit reference to curia or cardinals, while the pope is expressly said to be present (“inanzi al papa”), makes this a scandalous exchange between Dante and the pope himself – rather than between Dante and the curia, as one might assume from the use of “loro.”[4]

Since the story is set in Rome and not in Avignon, one is to understand it as occurring in Boniface VIII’s court, perhaps alluding to Dante’s fateful embassy there in September 1301, during which Florentine government was toppled in the Black Guelphs’ coup d’état, initiating Dante’s exile.[5] The narrative focuses on how Dante’s quick wit vindicated him. “You who snickering make the ninth letter,” Dante responds to papal derision, “are not worth its antecedent, and should go add the letter following it.”

In the second paragraph, the compiler-scribe expounds Dante’s riddle to the best of his ability. He who snickers, making the sound ‘i,’ is not even worth the letter preceding the letter ‘I.’ He is not worth an ‘H’; he is worthless. The scribe then clarifies that by advising the pope to go attach an acca (H) to a cha (K), Dante tells him “to go shit” (andare a chachare) since this supposedly spells out the word ‘chacha.’ The offended pope then realizes that Dante’s lightning-quick scatological wordplay proves he erred in underestimating his guest’s intellectual prowess.

To make sure the reader grasps the joke fully, the compiler-scribe then describes how one makes the obscene “fig” gesture with one’s fingers, concluding by saying Dante’s wordplay was the equivalent of telling the pope to “stick it” (literally “take it with much wool,” togli in che tanto lanii!)[6] while “giving them the finger with words” (literally “making a fig with words,” farli una ficha co(n) parole).

Analysis

The text seems to be a written retelling of some existing pseudo-biographical account. The hint to this is the slightly disjointed explanation of the punchline. When one adds an ‘acca’ to a ‘cha’ - as the pre-glossed narrative of the first paragraph narrates, one does not in fact get a preposition and verb (andare a chachare), as per the first part of the scribe’s gloss. One does not get a noun (chacha) either, as described in the second half of the same interpretation. The punchline should have been glossed as spelling a preposition and noun “go into excrement” (gite a chacha, ‘acca’-‘cha’, as in the modern vai a cacà), not ‘go defecate’ (a chachare) as per the extant manuscript explanation. This mild discrepancy suggests the scribe conveyed an existing joke accurately in the first paragraph, but in explicating it, he partially blundered in the details.

A possible prudish preconception that such a vulgar portrayal of the sommo poeta is below his dignity would be misplaced. Tales celebrating Dante’s ability to put others to shame with a single well-phrased retort were popular since as early as the fourteenth century. Examples of such short narratives include ‘Dante and the Peasant,’ ‘Dante’s retort to the Jester,’ and ‘Dante and the Three Gentlemen’ transcribed by Papanti,[7] ‘Dante’s retort to Cangrande’ by Petrarch,[8] ‘Dante and the Genoese’ by Franco Sacchetti (c.1335-c.1400),[9] as well as ‘Dante and the Nag’ and ‘Dante in Can Grande’s Court’ by Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459).[10] Moreover, Petrarch’s anecdote from Rerum memorandum libri (1343-1345) not only depicts Dante as cleverly rebuking Cangrande in his own court, in a manner not dissimilar to our narrative, but in its prologue, the author also turns to the reader excusing Dante, saying he had “more insolent manners and freer speech than is acceptable to the delicate and fastidious eyes and ears of the princes of our day.”[11] Thus, Petrarch’s remark makes evident that fourteenth-century Italians could conceive the divine poet quite capable of such vulgar jokes at the pope’s expense. This is not surprising given that in Inf. 19, before Dante-Pilgrim verbally chides Pope Nicholas III, the narrator, Dante-Poet, lays the foundation for this conception by telling the reader “I do not know if then I was too bold / when I answered him in just this strain” (“Io non so s'i mi fui qui troppo folle, / ch’i’ pur rispuosi lui a questo metro” Inf. 19.88-89). This excess follia, this boldness of overstepping social norms, is exactly what characterizes Dante in many of the abovementioned anecdotes, including our narrative of Dante and the pope.

An example of a less explicit story using Dante’s persona to lampoon the papacy directly appears in a mid-fifteenth-century note from Codex Magliabechiano cl.35, cod.113, describing the supposed historical context for the authoring of the (pseudo-Dantean) Credo di Dante:[12]

Questo si è il credo che fece dante alighieri ((ms. Alinghieri)), però esso è più che poeta fiorentino. Il quale lui fece quando fu acusato per eretico al papa. Il papa gli rispose e disse “tu meriti meglio ((ms. meglo)) questo am<m>anto di me,” cioè quello del papato.

Despite its more serious subject matter of an inquisitorial accusation, this note’s final confession that Dante merits the papal mantle more than the pontiff himself smacks of being a punchline at the pope’s expense.[13]

The compiler-scribe’s additional mention of the “fig” gesture, which does not appear in the anecdote proper, also merits attention. Dante scholars are familiar with this vulgar gesture from the Vanni Fucci episode in the seventh bolgia (Inf. 25.1-3) and the many studies it inspired. Before Landino’s commentary (1481) no commentator bothered explaining the posture of the gesture itself. Thus, the exact nature of the “fiche” of Vanni Fucci was the basis of some debate among modern scholars only to be finally laid to rest, one would hope, with Mazzucchi’s 2003 article, which used contemporary visual representations of this scene to settle the matter.[14] The detailed verbal description of the gesture in our note from 1462 precedes Landino’s description, and is thus a small contribution, bolstering the consensus regarding the configuration of this gesture.

Although the making the sign that “no honorable person ever makes”[15] does not appear in the story of Dante’s wordplay, the compiler-scribe chose to introduce the “ficha” to his explanation of the narrative. One can only guess as to the reason for this addition. He may have conceived of the recalcitrant Dante, rebelliously “punching up” at the pontiff in our anecdote, as echoing the brazenness of the Pistoian thief provoking God himself. But such an interpretation would imply a negative association of the poet with this bestial sinner, which would be counterproductive to the purpose of such pro-Dantean anecdotes. That being said, there may be another reason for this choice having to do with wider trends in Dante’s reception. Specifically, it may have to do with the collective memory of Dante’s early persecution under the influence of Cardinal Legate Bertrand du Poujet.[16]

Between 1319 and 1335, John XXII took advantage of the civil war in the Holy Roman Empire to tilt the balance of power in northern Italy, at that point uncomfortably favorable to pro-imperial Ghibellines. In 1319, he made Cardinal Bertrand du Poujet Papal-Legate to Lombardy. Empowered as a legatus a latere, the highest legate status possible, representing “a new phase in both the development of the legatine office,”^[17] Poujet set to purge the Ghibelline heresy from northern Italy using his unprecedented papal prerogatives.^[18]

The first chord in Dante’s reception was dominated by Poujet’s imposing figure. In 1320, mere months before setting for Italy, Poujet served as the head of the Avignonese commission in which a priest named Bartolomeo Cagnolato claimed Dante was a sorcerer the Visconti wished to hire to assassinate Pope John XXII.[19] Poujet was the patron of the first antidantean treatise in 1328, Guido Vernani da Rimini’s De reprobatione monarchiae.[20] It was Poujet who according to Boccaccio ordered the burning of Dante’s Monarchy and made the attempt on Dante’s physical remains a year later.[21] It was also after Poujet’s brief stay at Santa Maria Novella Friary in Florence in April 1334 that the Dominican prohibition on the study of Dante was decreed in Florence in September of the same year.[22]

In 1334, having overstayed his welcome by antagonizing the local populace, the legate was finally expelled from Bologna. Soon after he departed from Italy never to return. In the collective Italian memory, he was to be remembered as a cruel and ferocious tyrant.[23] In a forthcoming contribution titled “Legend of Dante and the Inquisitor,” I demonstrate that the details of his mission to Italy, and specifically Boccaccio’s description from the Trattatello in Laude di Dante (1357-62) of Poujet’s attempt to burn Dante’s bones, informed late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century reimagining of Dante’s early persecution. Two such reimaginings, the legend of “Dante and the Papal Mantle” mentioned above being one of them, recast Poujet as the pope. Such stories were written in hindsight, in post-Avignonese and post-Schism Italy, when Italian sentiment towards the past papacies of Boniface VIII, Clement V, and John XXII was at a low, and Dante’s fame was growing.

I would like to suggest that the mention of the “fica” gesture in the compiler-scribe’s gloss may indicate that he too had been thinking of the much-hated legate when writing the last line of his explanation. The fifth chapter of the chronicles known as Anonimo Romano (1357-1358) describes the failure of Bertrand du Poujet’s legateship and his final expulsion from Bologna in 1334. As his Florentine allies extracted him from his besieged Bolognese palace of La Galliera, so the Anonimo Romano tells, the people of Bologna shouted obscenities at him and “made the figs at him” (facevanolli le ficora). More humiliatingly still, the prostitutes of Bologna did the same, lifting their skirts and showing the prelate “the first of the Decretals and the sixth of the Clementines” (mostravanolli lo primo delli Decretali e lo sesto delle Clementine). This last vague phrasing seems to be a humorous euphemism for the display of both vagina and anus, even as they made the figs with their hands.[24]

As a legatus a latere, Poujet was a legal and symbolical embodiment of papal authority in Italy. Just as the anonymous author of “Dante and the Papal Mantle” seems to have recast the cardinal villain as the pope himself, as a shortcut to lampoon John XXII,[25] our scribe may have had in mind the Anonimo Romano or another chronicle documenting Poujet’s expulsion when he remarked that Dante’s retort to the pope was like the vulgar gesture the Bolognese used to humiliate the pope’s representative.

To conclude, this facezia about Dante and the pontiff is more than a pseudo-historical curiosity. It deserves further study in its historical context. It is part of a genre of irreverent accounts reimagining Dante’s frictions with the papal institution from the relative safety of the poet’s mid-fifteenth-century iconic status. The genre of narratives set in the courts of Dante’s exile, both real and imaginary, and describing Dante wittily lashing back at patrons, courtiers, and servants, usually after some form of mistreatment, is recast here. Our facezia can thus be interpreted as a “radicalized” variation, taking this existing theme one step further both in terms of making the object of Dante’s retort the highest of offices and by making the nature of Dante’s retort a more overt profanity than all those described in previous anecdotes.