Dante's Multitudes
Dante's Multitudes

Author: Teodolinda Barolini

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2022-10-15

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 0268202923

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A critical addition to Dante studies that illuminates the poet’s disruptive impact within Italian culture and foregrounds Barolini’s marked contribution to the field. In Dante’s Multitudes, the newest addition to the renowned William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature, Teodolinda Barolini gathers sixteen of her essays exploring the revolutionary character of Dante’s work. Embracing the Vita Nuova, De vulgari eloquentia, Convivio, Epistles, Monarchia, and Rime, and of course the Divine Comedy, these essays together feature the many facets of the poet’s enduring legacy. Dante’s Multitudes showcases the poet’s embrace of multiplicity, difference, and disruption in five parts, each with its own general focus. It begins with an introductory essay on method and the use of history in order to set the stage for the expert analyses that follow. Barolini treats various topics in Dante studies, including sexualized and racialized others in the Comedy, Dante’s unorthodox conception of limbo, his celebration of metaphysical difference within the paradoxical unity of the Paradiso, and his use of Aristotle to think disruptively about wealth and society, on the one hand, and about love and compulsion, on the other. The volume closes with a final meditation on method and “critical philology,” highlighting the ways in which philology has been used uncritically to bolster fallacious hermeneutical narratives about one of the West’s most celebrated and influential poets. Barolini once again opens avenues for further research in this compelling collection of essays. This volume will be of interest to scholars in Dante studies, Italian studies, and medieval and Renaissance literature more broadly.

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).

Dante's Education
Dante's Education

Author: Filippo Gianferrari

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-07-09

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0198881789

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In fourteenth-century Italy, literacy became accessible to a significantly larger portion of the lay population (allegedly between 60 and 80 percent in Florence) and provided a crucial means for the vernacularization and secularization of learning, and for the democratization of citizenship. Dante Alighieri's education and oeuvre sit squarely at the heart of this historical and cultural transition and provide an ideal case study for investigating the impact of Latin education on the consolidation of autonomous vernacular literature in the Middle Ages, a fascinating and still largely unexamined phenomenon. On the basis of manuscript and archival evidence, Gianferrari reconstructs the contents, practice, and readings of Latin instruction in the urban schools of fourteenth-century Florence. It also shows Dante's continuous engagement with this culture of teaching in his poetics, thus revealing his contribution to the expansion of vernacular literacy and education. The book argues that to achieve his unprecedented position of authority as a vernacular intellectual, Dante conceived his poetic works as an alternative educational program for laypeople, who could read and write in the vernacular but had little or no proficiency in Latin. By reconstructing the culture of literacy shared by Dante and his lay readers, Dante's Education shifts critical attention from his legacy as Italy's national poet, and a "great books" author in the Western canon, to his experience as a marginal intellectual engaged in advancing a marginal culture.

Dante's "Vita Nova"
Dante's

Author: Zygmunt G. Baranski

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2023-12-15

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 0268207380

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This original volume proposes a novel way of reading Dante’s Vita nova, exemplified in a rich diversity of scholarly approaches to the text. This groundbreaking volume represents the fruit of a two-year-long series of international seminars aimed at developing a fresh way of reading Dante’s Vita nova. By analyzing each of its forty-two chapters individually, focus is concentrated on the Vita nova in its textual and historical context rather than on its relationship to the Divine Comedy. This decoupling has freed the contributors to draw attention to various important literary features of the text, including its rich and complex polysemy, as well as its structural fluidity. The volume likewise offers insights into Dante’s social environment, his relationships with other poets, and Dante’s evolving vision of his poetry’s scope. Using a variety of critical methodologies and hermeneutical approaches, this volume offers scholars an opportunity to reread the Vita nova in a renewed context and from a diversity of literary, cultural, and ideological perspectives. Contributors: Zygmunt G. Barański, Heather Webb, Claire E. Honess, Brian F. Richardson, Ruth Chester, Federica Pich, Matthew Treherne, Catherine Keen, Jennifer Rushworth, Daragh O’Connell, Sophie V. Fuller, Giulia Gaimari, Emily Kate Price, Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, Francesca Southerden, Rebecca Bowen, Nicolò Crisafi, Lachlan Hughes, Franco Costantini, David Bowe, Tristan Kay, Filippo Gianferrari, Simon Gilson, Rebekah Locke, Luca Lombardo, Peter Dent, George Ferzoco, Paola Nasti, Marco Grimaldi, David G. Lummus, Helena Phillips-Robins, Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė, Alessia Carrai, Ryan Pepin, Valentina Mele, Katherine Powlesland, Federica Coluzzi, K. P. Clarke, Nicolò Maldina, Theodore J. Cachey Jr., Chiara Sbordoni, Lorenzo Dell’Oso, and Anne C. Leone.

The Oxford Handbook of Dante
The Oxford Handbook of Dante

Author: Manuele Gragnolati

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 778

ISBN-13: 0198820747

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The Oxford Handbook of Dante contains forty-four specially written chapters that provide a thorough and creative reading of Dante's oeuvre. It gathers an intergenerational and international team of scholars encompassing diverse approaches from the fields of Anglo-American, Italian, and continental scholarship and spanning several disciplines: philology, material culture, history, religion, art history, visual studies, theory from the classical to the contemporary, queer, post- and de-colonial, and feminist studies. The volume combines a rigorous reassessment of Dante's formation, themes, and sources, with a theoretically up-to-date focus on textuality, thereby offering a new critical Dante. The volume is divided into seven sections: 'Texts and Textuality'; 'Dialogues'; 'Transforming Knowledge'; Space(s) and Places'; 'A Passionate Selfhood'; 'A Non-linear Dante'; and 'Nachleben'. It seeks to challenge the Commedia-centric approach (the conviction that notwithstanding its many contradictions, Dante's works move towards the great reservoir of poetry and ideas that is the Commedia), in order to bring to light a non-teleological way in which these works relate amongst themselves. Plurality and the openness of interpretation appear as Dante's very mark, coexisting with the attempt to create an all-encompassing mastership. The Handbook suggests what is exciting about Dante now and indicate where Dante scholarship is going, or can go, in a global context.

Petrarch's Penitential Psalms and Prayers
Petrarch's Penitential Psalms and Prayers

Author: Francesco Petrarca

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2024-05-15

Total Pages: 103

ISBN-13: 0268207836

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The first English translation of Petrarch’s Psalms and Prayers provides an intimate look at the personal devotions of the “Father of Humanism.” Throughout Petrarch’s work, there is an undercurrent of tension between the secular and the sacred. In this captivating new translation of the Psalms and the Prayers, Demetrio Yocum turns to a previously overlooked area of Petrarchan studies to open a window on the scholar’s innermost religious thoughts. Petrarch's Psalms and Prayers are intricately crafted poetic and devotional works, presented in facing Latin/English format. In his extensive introduction and commentary, Yocum situates these bold, original compositions within their historical, literary, and religious contexts, deftly drawing connections to classical texts, the Bible and the writings of the church fathers, and Petrarch’s own life, work, and poetics. This remarkable first-ever English translation of the Psalms and Prayers helps to reconcile Petrarch’s classical humanism with his devout, deeply personal Christianity.

The Measure of Multitude
The Measure of Multitude

Author: Peter Biller

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 507

ISBN-13: 0198206321

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This innovative study challenges the view that medieval thought was fundamentally abstract. He describes what medieval people 'thought' about population, studying the texts which contained their thought, and examining the medieval realities which shaped it, such as birth, birth-control, sex-ratio, marriage ages, length of life, and the population of the Holy Land.

Manuscript Poetics
Manuscript Poetics

Author: Francesco Marco Aresu

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2023-11-15

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0268206473

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Manuscript Poetics explores the interrelationship between the material features of textual artifacts and the literary aspects of the medieval Italian texts they preserve. This original study is both an investigation into the material foundations of literature and a reflection on notions of textuality, writing, and media in late medieval and early modern Italy. Francesco Marco Aresu examines the book-objects of manuscripts and early printed editions, asking questions about the material conditions of production, circulation, and reception of literary works. He invites scholars to reconcile reading with seeing (and with touching) and to challenge contemporary presumptions about technological neutrality and the modes of interfacing and reading. Manuscript Poetics investigates the correspondences between textuality and materiality, content and medium, and visual-verbal messages and their physical support through readings of Dante Alighieri’s Vita nova, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Teseida, and Francesco Petrarca’s canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta). Aresu shows that Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarca evaluated and deployed the tools of scribal culture to shape, signal, or layer meanings beyond those they conveyed in their written texts. Medieval texts, Aresu argues, are uniquely positioned to provide this perspective, and they are foundational to the theoretical understanding of new forms and materials in our media-saturated contemporary world.

Dante’s Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion
Dante’s Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion

Author: G. Stone

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2006-05-12

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1403983097

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This book explores the Islamic roots of the Western values of tolerance and religious pluralism, and considers Dante from the perspective of the Arab-Islamic philosophical tradition. It examines the relations between Islamic and Western thought, the historical origins of Western values, and the tradition of tolerance in classical Islamic thought.

Petrarch and Dante
Petrarch and Dante

Author: Zygmunt G. Baranski

Publisher:

Published: 2009-08-15

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 9780268048778

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Since the beginnings of Italian vernacular literature, the nature of the relationship between Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) and his predecessor Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) has remained an open and endlessly fascinating question of both literary and cultural history. In this volume nine leading scholars of Italian medieval literature and culture address this question involving the two foundational figures of Italian literature. Through their collective reexamination of the question of who and what came between Petrarch and Dante in ideological, historiographical, and rhetorical terms, the authors explore the emergence of an anti-Dantean polemic in Petrarch's work. That stance has largely escaped scrutiny, thanks to a critical tradition that tends to minimize any suggestion of rivalry or incompatibility between them. The authors examine Petrarch's contentious and dismissive attitude toward the literary authority of his illustrious predecessor; the dramatic shift in theological and philosophical context that occurs from Dante to Petrarch; and their respective contributions as initiators of modern literary traditions in the vernacular. Petrarch's substantive ideological dissent from Dante clearly emerges, a dissent that casts in high relief the poets' radically divergent views of the relation between the human and the divine and of humans' capacity to bridge that gap.