Books in the William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature series

While the structure and themes of the Divine Comedy are defined by the narrative of a spiritual pilgrimage guided by Christian truth, Winthrop Wetherbee's remarkable new study reveals that Dante's engagement with the great Latin poets Vergil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius constitutes a second, complementary narrative centered on psychological and artistic self-discovery. This fresh, illuminating approach departs from the usual treatment of classical poets in Dante criticism, which assigns them a merely allegorical function. Their true importance to Dante's project is much greater. As Wetherbee meticulously shows, Dante's use of the poets is grounded in an astute understanding of their historical situation and a deeply sympathetic reading of their poetry. Dante may have been motivated to correct pagan thought and imagery, but more pervasive was his desire to recreate classical style and to restore classical auctoritas to his own times. Dante's journey in the Commedia, beginning with the pilgrim's assumption of a tragic view of the human condition, progresses with the great poetry of the classical past as an intrinsic component of-not just a foil to-the spiritual experience. Dante ultimately recognizes classical poetry as an essential means to his discovery of truth. A stunning contribution by one of the nation's leading medievalists, Wetherbee's investigation of the poem's classicism makes possible an ethical and spiritual but non-Christian reading of Dante, one that will spur new research and become an indispensable tool for teaching the Commedia.

In Interpreting Dante: Essays on the Traditions of Dante Commentary, Paola Nasti and Claudia Rossignoli gather essays by prominent scholars of the Dante commentary tradition to discuss the significance of this tradition for the study of the Comedy, its broad impact on the history of ideas, and its contribution to the development of literary criticism.Interest in the Dante commentary tradition has grown considerably in recent years, but projects on this subject tend to focus on philological reconstructions. The contributors shift attention to the interpretation of texts, authors, and reading communities by examining how Dante commentators developed interpretative paradigms that contributed to the advancement of literary criticism and the creation of the Western literary canon. Dante commentaries illustrate the evolution of notions of "e;literariness"e; and literature, genre and style, intertextuality and influence, literary histories, traditions and canons, authorship and readerships, paratexts and textual materiality. The volume includes methodological essays exploring theoretical aspects of the tradition, such as the creation of a taxonomy for categorizing typologies of commentaries; the relationship between commentators and their contemporary readers; the interplay between written and visual commentaries; and the impact of patronage on the forms of exegesis. Other essays, including two in Italian, examine case studies of individual commentaries, giving an account of the modus operandi of Dante's exegetes by relating their approaches to the cultural, ideological, and political agendas of the community of readers and scholars to which the commentators belonged.

This study explores ways in which Dante presents liturgy as enabling humans to encounter God.In Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante's "e;Commedia,"e; Helena Phillips-Robins explores for the first time the ways in which the relationship between humanity and divinity is shaped through the performance of liturgy in the Commedia. The study draws on largely untapped thirteenth-century sources to reconstruct how the songs and prayers performed in the Commedia were experienced and used in late medieval Tuscany. Phillips-Robins shows how in the Commedia Dante refashions religious practices that shaped daily life in the Middle Ages and how Dante presents such practices as transforming and sustaining relationships between humans and the divine. The study focuses on the types of engagement that Dante's depictions of liturgical performance invite from the reader. Based on historically attentive analysis of liturgical practice and on analysis of the experiential and communal nature of liturgy, Phillips-Robins argues that Dante invites readers themselves to perform the poem's liturgical songs and, by doing so, to enter into relationship with the divine. Dante calls not only for readers' interpretative response to the Commedia but also for their performative and spiritual activity.Focusing on Purgatorio and Paradiso, Phillips-Robins investigates the particular ways in which relationships both between humans and between humans and God can unfold through liturgy. Her book includes explorations of liturgy as a means of enacting communal relationships that stretch across time and space; the Christological implications of participating in liturgy; the interplay of the personal and the shared enabled by the language of liturgy; and liturgy as a living out of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. The book will interest students and scholars of Dante studies, medieval Italian literature, and medieval theology.

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 "e;divine justice,"e; 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.

The Portrait of Beatrice examines both Dante's and D. G. Rossetti's intellectual experiences in the light of a common concern about visuality. Both render, in different times and contexts, something that resists clear representation, be it the divine beauty of the angel-women or the depiction of the painter's own interiority in a secularized age. By analyzing Dante's Vita Nova alongside Rossetti's Hand and Soul and St. Agnes of Intercession, which inaugurates the Victorian genre of 'imaginary portrait' tales, this book examines how Dante and Rossetti explore the tension between word and image by creating 'imaginary portraits.' The imaginary portrait-Dante's sketched angel appearing in the Vita Nova or the paintings evoked in Rossetti's narratives-is not (only) a non-existent artwork: it is an artwork whose existence lies elsewhere, in the words alluding to its inexpressible quality. At the same time, thinking of Beatrice as an 'imaginary Lady' enables us to move beyond the debate about her actual existence. Rather, it allows us to focus on her reality as a miracle made into flesh, which language seeks incessantly to grasp. Thus, the intergenerational dialogue between Dante and Rossetti-and between thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, literature and painting, Italy and England-takes place between different media, oscillating between representation and denial, mimesis and difference, concealment and performance. From medieval Florence to Victorian London, Beatrice's 'imaginary portrait' touches upon the intertwinement of desire, poetry, and art-making in Western culture.

"Rather than speak of Dante's 'minor works,' according to an age-old tradition of Dante scholarship going back at least to the eighteenth century, this volume puts forward the designation 'other works' both in light of their enhanced status and as part of a general effort to reaffirm their value as autonomous works. Indeed, had Dante never written the Commedia, he would still be considered the most important writer of the late Middle Ages for the originality and inventiveness of the other works he wrote besides his monumental poem, including the Rime, the Fiore, the Detto d'amore, the Vita nova, the Epistles, the Convivio, the De vulgari eloquentia, the Monarchia, the Egloge, and the Questio de aqua et terra. Each contributor to this volume addresses one of the 'other works' by presenting the principal interpretative trends and questions relating to the text, and by focusing on aspects of particular interest. Two essays on the relationship between the 'other works' and the issues of philosophy and theology are included."--Back cove

Explores how medieval ideas about the body and gender inspired Boccaccio's vernacular and Latin writings. This study revises modern scholarship by showing that Boccaccio's texts were informed by contemporary ideas about allegory, gender, and theology.

Since the beginnings of Italian vernacular literature, the nature of the relationship between Francesco Petrarch and his predecessor Dante Alighieri 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.

The second volume in the original William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante Studies, The Fiore in Context is the record of a milestone in the study of the Fiore, and perhaps in Dante studies: the international conference on the Fiore held at St. John's College, Cambridge, in September 1994.

In Interpreting Dante: Essays on the Traditions of Dante Commentary, Paola Nasti and Claudia Rossignoli gather essays by prominent scholars of the Dante commentary tradition to discuss the significance of this tradition for the study of the Comedy, its broad impact on the history of ideas, and its contribution to the development of literary criticism. Interest in the Dante commentary tradition has grown considerably in recent years, but projects on this subject tend to focus on philological reconstructions. The contributors shift attention to the interpretation of texts, authors, and reading communities by examining how Dante commentators developed interpretative paradigms that contributed to the advancement of literary criticism and the creation of the Western literary canon. Dante commentaries illustrate the evolution of notions of "literariness" and literature, genre and style, intertextuality and influence, literary histories, traditions and canons, authorship and readerships, paratexts and textual materiality. The volume includes methodological essays exploring theoretical aspects of the tradition, such as the creation of a taxonomy for categorizing typologies of commentaries; the relationship between commentators and their contemporary readers; the interplay between written and visual commentaries; and the impact of patronage on the forms of exegesis. Other essays, including two in Italian, examine case studies of individual commentaries, giving an account of the modus operandi of Dante''s exegetes by relating their approaches to the cultural, ideological, and political agendas of the community of readers and scholars to which the commentators belonged.

The Meditations on the Life of Christ was the most popular and influential devotional work of the later Middle Ages. This volume is a critical edition, with English translation and commentary, of a hitherto-unpublished Italian text that McNamer argues is likely to be the original version of this influential masterpiece.

Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third. This study attempts to explain and justify T.S. Eliot's claim. John Scott offers a critical overview of Dante's writings: the ""Vita Nova"", the ""Convivio"", the ""De Vulgari Eloquentia"", his ""Rime"", and ""Monarchia"",

Examines Dante's relation to his contemporary public, an audience that included poets who responded to Dante's early work as well as those who first copied, preserved, and circulated his poetry. Based on research of manuscripts and documents, this study reveals the importance of professional, urban classes as cultivators of early Italian poetry.

Offers perspectives focused on the relationship between theology and poetry in the Commedia. Examining Dante's treatment of questions of language, personhood, and the body, this title argues for the close intersection of theology and poetry as well as the importance of theology for Dante studies.

This text takes a serious look at Dante's relation to Latin grammar and the new ""mother tongue"" - Italian vernacular - by exploring the cultural significance of the nursing mother in medieval discussions of language and selfhood.

This is the first English translation of ""Il Fiore"", the late 13th century narrative poem in 232 sonnets based on the Old French ""Roman de la Rose"" and the ""Detto d'Amore"", a free-wheeling version of many Ovidian precepts of love in 240 rhymed couplets.

Recovers the specifically medieval interpretation of the structure of the ""The Divine Comedy"". This work provides a useful tool for students interested in studying Dante's calculated use of poetry to overcome the limits of human understanding.

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 a fascinating question of both literary and cultural history. This title explores the emergence of an anti-Dantean polemic in Petrarch's work.

A record of the papers presented, and the discussions arising from them, at the International Conference on the ""Fiore"". They deal with the arguments for and against the attribution of the ""Fiore"" to Dante.

These essays arise from a conference on Dante held at the University of Notre Dame in 1993. They focus in particular on three areas: poetics (style, ideology, hermeneutics, epistemology); ""minor works"" (textual problems); and reception (in medieval England, in France and in film and video).

Provides a literary-historical study of the many surprising ways in which Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy have assumed a position of importance in African American culture. Dennis Looney examines how African American authors have read, interpreted, and responded to Dante and his work from the late 1820s to the present.

A Boccaccian Renaissance brings together internationally recognized scholars to reveal Boccaccio's impact on early modern literature and culture in Italy and Europe.

Experiencing the Afterlife provides an analysis of depictions of the afterlife written in Italy before the Divine Comedy by authors such as Uguccione da Lodi, Glacomino da Verona, and Bonvesin da la Riva. Manuele Gragnolati uses his readings of these poets to provide an interpretation of Dante's work.