Reading and Listening to the Liber de causis in Florence

Abstract

This essay opens with an analysis of the first stanza of Dante’s Amor che movi, highlighting how—and in what terms—it engages with key emanationist concepts. It then explores the circulation of the Liber de causis and related emanationist ideas within the mendicant convents of 1290s Florence, the very context in which Dante recalls encountering philosophy in the “schools of the religious orders.” It examines the manuscript availability in the Dominican convent of Santa Maria Novella and in the Franciscan convent of Santa Croce. Special attention is given to the oral transmission of the De causis within the Franciscan studium, focusing on the teaching of the Franciscan friar Peter of Trabibus. The analysis of his unedited Lectura on the Sentences, quaestiones disputatae, and quodlibetales (all held in the convent in 1295) and of an anonymous quaestio reveals the frequent use of the Liber in public disputations, probably accessible to lay listeners like Dante. The essay returns to the opening of Amor che movi to show how the first stanza of the canzone engages with key emanationist concepts—particularly divine causality and the primacy of being—which, in 1290s Florence, may also have circulated through these channels. Without implying any direct influence, but rather acknowledging points of difference, the essay examines how Dante reconfigures these ideas to provide the figure of Love with a theological substratum.