Dante eterodosso? : vecchie polemiche e nuove prospettive di ricerca

It is frequently assumed that doubts about Dante’s orthodoxy begun to circulate in historiography at the beginning of the twentieth century, when his alleged “Thomism” was seriously questioned by Bruno Nardi, who demonstrated that not only in the Convivio, but even in the Monarchia and in the Commedia one can find themes and ideas inspired by Averroes and by the so-called Latin Averroists. Besides showing that controversies on this point started much earlier, this paper highlights that, whilst a plurality of conceptions of Dante’s “heterodoxy” soon emerged, “orthodoxy” was, and still is, too hastily identified with “Thomism”. Moreover, it argues that anachronistic views of the distinction between “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy”, as well as of “Thomism”, have to be avoided, and suggests that some passages of Dante’s works where Nardi and his followers detected “residuals” of Averroism have been over-interpreted.