Dantean Dialogues

Dantean Dialogues is a collection of essays by some of the world's most outstanding Dante scholars., These essays enter into conversation with the main themes of the scholarship of Amilcare Iannucci (d. 2007), one of the leading researchers on Dante of his generation and arguably Canada’s finest scholar of the Italian poet. The essays focus on the major themes of Iannucci’s work, including the development of Dante’s early poetry, Dante’s relation to classical and biblical sources, and Dante’s reception. The contributors cover crucial aspects of Dante’s work, from the authority of the New Life to the novelty of his early poetry, to key episodes in the Comedy, to the poem’s afterlife. Together, the essays show how Iannucci’s reading of central cruxes in Dante’s texts continues to inspire Dante studies – a testament to his continuing influence and profound intellectual legacy.

Dantean Dialogues is a collection of essays by some of the world's most outstanding Dante scholars., These essays enter into conversation with the main themes of the scholarship of Amilcare Iannucci (d. 2007), one of the leading researchers on Dante of his generation and arguably Canada's finest scholar of the Italian poet. The essays focus on the major themes of Iannucci's work, including the development of Dante's early poetry, Dante's relation to classical and biblical sources, and Dante's reception. The contributors cover crucial aspects of Dante's work, from the authority of the New Life to the novelty of his early poetry, to key episodes in the Comedy, to the poem's afterlife. Together, the essays show how Iannucci's reading of central cruxes in Dante's texts continues to inspire Dante studies - a testament to his continuing influence and profound intellectual legacy.

This book brings together, in a novel and exciting combination, three authors who have written movingly about mourning: two medieval Italian poets, Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca, and one early twentieth-century French novelist, Marcel Proust. Each of these authors, through their respective narratives of bereavement, grapples with the challenge of how to write adequately about the deeply personal and painful experience of grief. In Jennifer Rushworth's analysis, discourses of mourning emerge as caught between the twin, conflicting demands of a comforting, readable, shared generality and a silent, solitary respect for the uniqueness of any and every experience of loss. Rushworth explores a variety of major questions in the book, including: what type of language is appropriate to mourning? What effect does mourning have on language? Why and how has the Orpheus myth been so influential on discourses of mourning across different time periods and languages? Might the form of mourning described in a text and the form of closure achieved by that same text be mutually formative and sustaining? In this way, discussion of the literary representation of mourning extends to embrace topics such as the medieval sin of acedia, the proper name, memory, literary epiphanies, the image of the book, and the concept of writing as promise. In addition to the three primary authors, Rushworth draws extensively on the writings of Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes. These rich and diverse psychoanalytical and French theoretical traditions provide terminological nuance and frameworks for comparison, particularly in relation to the complex term melancholia.

Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante presents new research by international scholars on the themes of ethics, politics and justice in the works of Dante Alighieri, including chapters on Dante’s modern ‘afterlife’. Together the chapters explore how Dante’s writings engage with the contemporary culture of medieval Florence and Italy, and how and why his political and moral thought still speaks compellingly to modern readers. The collection’s contributors range across different disciplines and scholarly traditions – history, philology, classical reception, philosophy, theology – to scrutinise Dante’s Divine Comedy and his other works in Italian and Latin, offering a multi-faceted approach to the evolution of Dante’s political, ethical and legal thought throughout his writing career. Certain chapters focus on his early philosophical Convivio and on the accomplished Latin Eclogues of his final years, while others tackle knotty themes relating to judgement, justice, rhetoric and literary ethics in his Divine Comedy, from hell to paradise. The closing chapters discuss different modalities of the public reception and use of Dante’s work in both Italy and Britain, bringing the volume’s emphasis on morality, political philosophy, and social justice into the modern age of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante provides a new perspective on the highly networked literary landscape of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy. It demonstrates the fundamental role of dialogue between and within texts in the works of four poets who represent some of the major developments in early Italian literature: Guittone d'Arezzo, Guido Guinizzelli, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante. Rather than reading the cultural landscape through the lens of Dante's works, significant though they may be, the first part of this study reconstructs the rich network of literary, especially poetic dialogue that was at the heart of medieval writing in Italy. The second part uses this reconstruction to demonstrate Dante's engagement with, and indebtedness to, the dynamics of exchange that characterised the practice of medieval Italian poets. The overall argument—for the centrality of dialogic processes to the emerging Italian literary tradition—is underpinned by a conceptualisation of dialogue in relation to medieval and modern literary theory and philosophy of language. By triangulating between Brunetto Latini's Rettorica, Mikhail Bakhtin's 'dialogism', and as sense of 'performative' speech adapted from J. L. Austin, Poetry in Dialogue shows the openness of its corpus to new dialogues and interpretations, highlighting the instabilities of even the most apparently fixed, monumental texts.

This study explores how Dante represents violence in the Comedy and reveals the connection between contemporary private and public violence and civic and canon law violations. Although a number of articles have addressed particular aspects of violence in discrete parts of Dante’s oeuvre, a systematic treatment of violence in the Commedia is lacking. This ambitious overview of violence in Dante’s literary works and his world examines cases of violence in the domestic, communal, and cosmic spheres while taking into account medieval legal approaches to rights and human freedom that resonate with the economy of justice developed in the Commedia. Exploring medieval concerns with violence both in the home and in just war theory, as well as the Christian theology of the Incarnation and Redemption, Brenda Deen Schildgen examines violence in connection to the natural rights theory expounded by canon lawyers beginning in the twelfth century. Partially due to the increased attention to its Greco-Roman cultural legacy, the twelfth-century Renaissance produced a number of startling intellectual developments, including the emergence of codified canon law and a renewed interest in civil law based on Justinian’s sixth-century Corpus juris civilis. Schildgen argues that, in addition to “divine justice,” Dante explores how the human system of justice, as exemplified in both canon and civil law and based on natural law and legal concepts of human freedom, was consistently violated in the society of his era. At the same time, the redemptive violence of the Crucifixion, understood by Dante as the free act of God in choosing the Incarnation and death on the cross, provides the model for self-sacrifice for the communal good. This study, primarily focused on Dante’s representation of his contemporary reality, demonstrates that the punishments and rewards in Dante’s heaven and hell, while ostensibly a staging of his vision of eternal justice, may in fact be a direct appeal to his readers to recognize the crimes that pervade their own world. Dante and Violence will have a wide readership, including students and scholars of Dante, medieval culture, violence, and peace studies.

Dante's Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the 'Commedia' questions the familiar narrative arc at play in the writings of Dante Alighieri and opens his masterpiece to three alternative models that resist it. Dante's masterplot is the teleological trajectory by which the poet subordinates the past to the authority of a new experience. The book analyses the masterplot's workings in Dante's text and its role in the interpretation of the poem, and it documents its overwhelming success in influencing readings of the Commedia over the centuries. The volume then explores three competing narrative models that resist and counter its monopoly which are enacted by paradoxes, alternative endings and parallel lives, and the future. By focusing on these non-linear modes of storytelling and testing the limits of linear narration, the book questions critical paradigms in the scholarship of the Commedia that favour a single normative master truth, exposes their problematic authoritarian implications, and highlights the manifold poetic, theological, and ethical tensions that are often neglected due to the masterplot's influence. The new picture of a vulnerable author and open-ended text that emerges from this study thus doubles as a metacritical reflection on the state of the field. The book's impassioned argument is that, alongside established notions of his trademark plurality of linguistic registers and styles, Dante's narrative pluralism can, and should, come to play a key role in contemporary and future readings of the Commedia.

Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante brings to light a new character in medieval literature: that of the woman reader and interlocutor. It does so by establishing a dialogue between literary studies, gender studies, the history of literacy, and the material culture of the book in medieval times. From Guittone d'Arezzo's piercing critic, the 'villainous woman', to the mysterious Lady who bids Guido Cavalcanti to write his grand philosophical song, to Dante's female co-editors in the Vita Nova and his great characters of female readers, such as Francesca and Beatrice in the Comedy, all the way to Boccaccio's overtly female audience, this particular interlocutor appears to be central to the construct of textuality and the construction of literary authority. This volume explores the figure of the woman reader by contextualizing her within the history of female literacy, the material culture of the book, and the ways in which writers and poets of earlier traditions imagined her. It argues that these figures are not mere veneers between a male author and a 'real' male readership, but that, although fictional, they bring several advantages to their vernacular authors, such as orality, the mother tongue, the recollection of the delights of early education, literality, freedom in interpretation, absence of teleology, the beauties of ornamentation and amplification, a reduced preoccupation with the fixity of the text, the pleasure of making mistakes, dialogue with the other, the extension of desire, original simplicity, and new and more flexible forms of authority.

Dante, the pilgrim, is the image of an author who stubbornly looks ahead, seeking and building the "Great Beyond" (Manguel). Following in his footsteps is therefore not a return to the past, going à rebours, but a commitment to the future, to exploring the potential of humanity to "transhumanise". This dynamic of self-transcendence in Dante’s humanism (Ossola), which claims for European civilisation a vocation for universalism (Ferroni), is analysed in the volume at three crucial moments: Firstly, the establishment of an emancipatory relationship between author and reader (Ascoli), in which authorship is authority and not power; secondly, the conception of vision as a learning process and horizon of eschatological overcoming (Mendonça); finally, the relationship with the past, which is never purely monumental, but ethically and intertextually dynamic, in an original rewriting of the original scriptural, medieval, and classical culture (Nasti, Bolzoni, Bartolomei). A second group of contributions is dedicated to the reconstruction of Dante’s presence in Portuguese literature (Almeida, Espírito Santo, Figueiredo, Marnoto, Vaz de Carvalho): they attest to the innovative impact of Dante’s work even in literary traditions more distant from it.

In the past seven centuries Dante has become world renowned, with his works translated into multiple languages and read by people of all ages and cultural backgrounds. This volume brings together interdisciplinary essays by leading, international scholars to provide a comprehensive account of the historical, cultural and intellectual context in which Dante lived and worked: from the economic, social and political scene to the feel of daily life; from education and religion to the administration of justice; from medicine to philosophy and science; from classical antiquity to popular culture; and from the dramatic transformation of urban spaces to the explosion of visual arts and music. This book, while locating Dante in relation to each of these topics, offers readers a clear and reliable idea of what life was like for Dante as an outstanding poet and intellectual in the Italy of the late Middle Ages.