Bea(ta Lec)trix

This chapter looks at Dante’s great textual invention, Beatrice, as both the empowered beloved turned addressee as discussed in Chapter 2 and a powerful textual construct as seen in Chapter 3. I argue that Beatrice’s unique trait is what I call her ‘lyric irreducibility’—a rather resistant aspect of her character, which follows her all the way to the vision of God. Such a trait is posited already in a figure that lays in the archaeology of Beatrice, the unsteady joining of the lyrical and the doctrinal in Dante’s first and failed rendition of his woman interlocutor: the donna gentile-Lady Philosophy, who complexly negotiates the ending of the Vita Nova and the beginning of the Convivio. The chapter follows Beatrice in her development as a non-silent lyric addressee (in Inferno), as textual construct that talks back (in Purgatorio), and as glossator and lector (in Paradiso).