Dante, Artist of Gesture
Dante, Artist of Gesture

Author: Heather Webb

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-09-05

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0192692623

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Dante, Artist of Gesture proposes a visual technique for reading Dante's Comedy, suggesting that the reader engages with Dante's striking images of souls as if these images were arranged in an architectural space. Art historians have shown how series of discrete images or scenes in medieval places of worship, such as the mosaics in the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence or the frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, establish not only narrative sequences but also parallelisms between registers, forging links between those registers by the use of colour and gestural forms. Heather Webb takes up those techniques to show that the Comedy likewise invites the reader to make visual links between disparate, non-sequential moments in the text. In other words, Webb argues that Dante's poem asks readers to view its verbally articulated sequences of images with a set of observational tools that could be acquired from the practice of engaging with and meditating on the bodily depictions of vice and virtue in fresco cycles or programmes of mosaics in places of worship. One of the most inherently visible aspects of the Comedy is the representation of signature gestures of the characters described in each of the realms. This book traces described gestures and bodily signs across the canticles of the poem to provide a key for identifying affective and devotional itineraries within the text.

Dante's Performance
Dante's Performance

Author: Francesco Ciabattoni

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-08-05

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 3111406490

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Through an historical and philological lens, this book explores passages from Dante's Commedia which reveal elements inspired byprocessions, pageants, liturgical drama, psalm singing, or dance performance. The sacred poem finds influence in medieval theories of the performing arts as well as actual performances which Dante would have seen in churches or town squares. Dante's Performance opens a new perspective from which to consider the Commedia: Dante expected his contemporary readers to recognize references to and echoes of psalms, sacred plays, and performative practices. Twenty-first-century readers are tasked with reconstructing a cultural framework which allows us to grasp those same textual references. From the dramatization of the harrowing of hell in Inferno IX, to Beatrice's celebratory return on top of Mount Purgatory, to the songs of the blessed, this study connects Dante's language to coeval theoretical and practical texts about performance. If hell is "the Middle Age's theatrum diaboli," purgatory stages a performed purification through songs and acting, while paradise offers the spectacle of blessed spirits within the heavenly spheres as an aid to human understanding (Par. IV 28-39).

Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative
Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative

Author: J. A. Burrow

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-08-08

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1139434756

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In medieval society, gestures and speaking looks played an even more important part in public and private exchanges than they do today. Gestures meant more than words, for example, in ceremonies of homage and fealty. In this, the first study of its kind in English, John Burrow examines the role of non-verbal communication in a wide range of narrative texts, including Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's Morte D'arthur, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the Prose Lancelot, Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, and Dante's Commedia. Burrow argues that since non-verbal signs are in general less subject to change than words, many of the behaviours recorded in these texts, such as pointing and amorous gazing, are familiar in themselves; yet many prove easy to misread, either because they are no longer common, like bowing, or because their use has changed, like winking.

Dante's Persons
Dante's Persons

Author: Heather Webb

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-05-06

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 019105321X

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Dante's Persons explores the concept of personhood as it appears in Dante's Commedia and seeks out the constituent ethical modes that the poem presents as necessary for attaining a fullness of persona. The study suggests that Dante presents a vision of 'transhuman' potentiality in which the human person is, after death, fully integrated into co-presence with other individuals in a network of relations based on mutual recognition and interpersonal attention. The Commedia, Heather Webb argues, aims to depict and to actively construct a transmortal community in which the plenitude of each individual's person is realized in and through recognition of the personhood of other individuals who constitute that community, whether living or dead. Webb focuses on the strategies the Commedia employs to call us to collaborate in the mutual construction of persons. As we engage with the dead that inhabit its pages, we continue to maintain the personhood of those dead. Webb investigates Dante's implicit and explicit appeals to his readers to act in relation to the characters in his otherworlds as if they were persons. Moving through the various encounters of Purgatorio and Paradiso, this study documents the ways in which characters are presented as persone in development or in a state of plenitude through attention to the 'corporeal' modes of smiles, gazes, gestures, and postures. Dante's journey provides a model for the formation and maintenance of a network of personal attachments, attachments that, as constitutive of persona, are not superseded even in the presence of the direct vision of God.

Dante's Divine Comedy
Dante's Divine Comedy

Author: Joseph Luzzi

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-11-05

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0691255644

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The life and times of Dante’s soaring poetic allegory of the soul’s redemptive journey toward God Written during his exile from Florence in the early 1300s, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy describes the poet’s travels through hell, purgatory, and paradise, exploring the state of the human soul after death. His poema sacro, sacred poem, profoundly influenced Renaissance writers and artists such as Giovanni Boccaccio and Sandro Botticelli and was venerated by modern critics including Erich Auerbach and Harold Bloom. Dante’s “Divine Comedy” narrates the remarkable reception of Dante’s masterpiece, one of the most consequential religious books ever written. Tracing the many afterlives of Dante’s epic poem, Joseph Luzzi shows how it left its mark on the work of such legendary authors as John Milton, Mary Shelley, and James Joyce while serving as a source of inspiration for writers like Primo Levi and Antonio Gramsci as they faced the most extreme forms of political oppression. He charts how the dialogue between religious and secular ideas in The Divine Comedy has shaped issues ranging from changing conceptions of women’s identity and debates about censorship to the role of canonical literature in popular culture. An intimate portrait of a work that has challenged and inspired generations of readers, Dante’s “Divine Comedy” reveals how Dante’s strikingly original and controversial vision of the afterlife can help us define our spiritual beliefs, better understand ourselves, and navigate the complexities of modern life.

The Gay '90s
The Gay '90s

Author: Thomas C. Foster

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1997-07

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0814726739

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This book examines the process of disciplinary formation as it affects lesbian and gay studies in the academy, contrasting older academic disciplines with newer, identity-based areas of study. It also demonstrates the extent to which contemporary queer studies involves practices of interdisciplinary reading and analysis.

Christ Among Them
Christ Among Them

Author: Edoardo Mungiello

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-05-27

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1443811610

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This essay newly interprets the rise of the individual within the Italian peninsula between 1180 and 1300. It follows the historical events and the cultural products that define the period keeping in mind that the creators were conscious of a tangible, real Christ in their midst. For it is the time when Jesus was known to be in the Eucharist as a carnal potentiality, as well as a time when Europeans on Crusade had reached his temporal abode. As Christ as neighbor became a consistent idea, the relationship towards that idea became one of accommodation, making subsequent worship a form of individualism. The later Renaissance was as much a specific reaction to a particular understanding of Christology within the cultural sphere as it was a reawakening of Classical ideals through a new paradigm of European selfhood outside of Christianity. Understood in this way, the Incarnation helped to produce an action based Christianity amenable to the needs of the Roman Church. The later insistence upon text and notions of personal conscience that identifies the Reformation, can now be seen as a true end to the Renaissance Christian praxis which began with the excitement over Christ among them.