Dante and the Florentine Chronicles

Bibliotheca Dantesca: Journal of Dante Studies, 2020

Dante Studies, 2018

The 136th issue of Dante Studies (2018) hosts a new section, the Forum, devoted to new research trends in the field. This first Forum, coordinated by Elisa Brilli, explores the questions of Biography and new Historical Studies in current research on Dante. Brilli’s opening piece on "Dante’s Biographies and Historical Studies" draws a cross-disciplinary state of the art over the last decade and raises five major questions (pp. 133-142: 10.1353/das.2018.0004). The answers tackle all or some of these questions from different angles and traditions of studies. Manuele Gragnolatiand Elena Lombardi focus on Dante’s textual constructions and storytelling ("Autobiografia d’autore," pp. 143-169: 10.1353/das.2018.0005). Giorgio Inglese reflects on his biography (Dante. Una biografia possible) in a new contribution entitled "Una biografia impossibile" (pp. 161-166: 10.1353/das.2018.0006). Giuliano Milani develops a methodological reflection on the possibility of writing "La vita di Dante iuxta propria principia" (pp. 167-175: 10.1353/das.2018.0007). Paolo Pellegrini engages the discussion with the new trend and declares the "De profundis per l’Instant Book" (pp. 176-186: 10.1353/das.2018.0008). Jean-Claude Schmitt challenges Dante Studies by analyzing Dante’s Vita Nova with the approach of historical anthropology ("Dante en rêveur médiéval : « Memoria » funéraire et récit autobiographique, pp. 187-200: 10.1353/das.2018.0009). Mirko Tavoni’s "Dante e il ‘paradigma critico dellacontingenza’" (pp. 201-212: 10.1353/das.2018.0010) offers a theoretical reflection on Tavoni’s critical approach. Finally, David Wallace compares the situation in Dante studies with other research fields, and asks the most uncomfortable question: "Lives of Dante: Why Now?" (pp. 213-222: 10.1353/das.2018.0011). A Bibliography completes the Forum (pp. 223-231: 10.1353/das.2018.0012). This issue also includes the essays by Luca Fiorentini, "Archaeology of the Tre Corone: Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio in Benvenuto da Imola's Commentary on the Divine Comedy" (pp. 1-21), Ronald L. Martinez, "Dante 'buon sartore' (Paradiso 32.140): Textile Arts, Rhetoric, and Metapoetics at the End of the Commedia" (pp. 22-61), Barbara Newman, "The Seven-StoreyMountain: Mechthild of Hackeborn and Dante's Matelda" (pp. 62-92) and Matthew Collins, "The Forgotten Morgan Dante Drawings, Their Influence on the Marcolini Commedia of 1544, and Their Place within a Visually-Driven Discourse on Dante's Poem" (pp. 93-132). Dante Studies is available on print and online on Project Muse. Access to Dante Studies is a primary benefit of membership in the Dante Society of America (https://www.dantesociety.org/). Current members receive both print copies and electronic access to current and recent issues. Individual subscriptions are available only through membership in the Society (https://www.dantesociety.org/membership-and-benefits#Joining_or_Renewing). Institutions that wish to subscribe to Dante Studies may place their order online via the JHUP journals website (https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals).

Throughout the fourteenth century, Dante’s Divina Commedia was the poem of the Italian high bourgeoisie and university culture. However, the early fifteenth-century Italian humanists looked with suspicion at vernacular literature, and particularly at Dante’s work. By contrast, in that same period, a popular cult for Dante began to develop. My dissertation investigates the habits and attitudes of a great variety of early modern readers in relation to the text that today is considered the greatest literary work in the Italian language. Through a comparative investigation of the data derived from the analysis of manuscript marginalia contained in early printed copies of the Commedia, my dissertation assesses how ordinary and less-ordinary readers in the broad geographic and social Italian context read and assimilated Dante’s poem in the early modern age. My close examination of marginalia suggests that the first typographic readers used the Commedia both as a literary text that conveyed various levels of knowledge—e.g., poetry, astrology, theology, philosophy—and a work of extensive political and moral value that, especially after Charles VIII’s invasion of the Italian peninsula in 1494, assumed a prominent role in shaping the emerging Italian national consciousness. Moreover, the dissertation will show also how intellectual readers vii from the 17th-19th centuries used the early printed copies of the poem to get close to Dante’s world, at that point easily available and “cheap.” My dissertation, therefore, tells the history of the post-medieval reception of Dante as a form of diachronic material exchange by mapping the reading attitudes of men and women of different social classes that influenced the creation of modern Italian cultural identity.

The Sixteenth Century Journal, 2006

Simon Gilson explores Dante's reception in his native Florence between 1350 and 1481. He traces the development of Florentine civic culture and the interconnections between Dante's principal 'Florentine' readers, from Giovanni Boccaccio to Cristoforo Landino, and explains how and why both supporters and opponents of Dante exploited his legacy for a variety of ideological, linguistic, cultural, and political purposes. The book focuses on a variety of texts, both Latin and vernacular, in which reference was made to Dante, from commentaries to poetry, from literary lives to letters, from histories to dialogues. Gilson pays particular attention to Dante's influence on major authors such as Boccaccio and Petrarch, on Italian humanism, and on civic identity and popular culture in Florence. Ranging across literature, philosophy, and art, across languages and across social groups, this study fully illuminates for the first time Dante's central place in Italian Renaissance culture and thought. simon gilson is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Medieval Optics and Theories of Light in the Works of Dante (2000) and the co-editor of Science and Literature in Italian Culture: From Dante to Calvino (2004). He has published journal articles on topics related to Dante's scientific interests, the Dante commentary tradition, and his reception in the Italian Renaissance.

Studies in Medieval Culture 12, 1978

Using pilgrim accounts I relate the exegesis of the topographies of Rome and Florence to Dante's Commedia,

A study of the semantic field around the word memoria in Dante's Convivio, which points out to the convergence of multiples meaning of the word memory. Dante used the rhetorical concept of memory, as well as a philosophical memory, and even a more theological memory, derived from Augustine's works.

Preface xi duction, and circulation should figure in critical assessments; and that the book itself be treated as an expressive form. The intent is to try to develop a bibliographic code, which, in turn would help us to understand the situation of the critic. The relation then, between chapters 3, 4, and 5, on the one hand, and chapter 6, on the other, is a dynamic one. Critical study along either line informs the other approach. Books not only, as Umberto Eco reminds us, "talk among themselves," they speak in a variety of waysthrough words as well as forms.1 Quotations from the Commedia are taken from the edition by Giorgio Petrocchi, La Commedia secondo I'antica vulgata, 4 vols.

Medieval Sermon Studies, 2018

PhD Dissertation. University of Notre Dame, 2020

by Lorenzo Dell'Oso This dissertation examines Dante Alighieri's intellectual formation and explores the ways in which a laicus such as the poet might have gained access to theological and philosophical knowledge in 1290s Florence.

Heliotropia, 2015