Dante's Multitudes

Dante's Multitudes
Author: Teodolinda Barolini
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 508
Release: 2022-10-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 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.

The Early Printed Illustrations of Dante’s "Commedia"

The Early Printed Illustrations of Dante’s
Author: Matthew Collins
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2024-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0268208395
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The Early Printed Illustrations of Dante’s “Commedia” provides the first systematic overview of the earliest illustrated editions of Dante’s poem, stretching from 1481 through 1596, and features over 230 illustrations. Developing a series of interdisciplinary methods for studying early printed book illustrations, Matthew Collins explores the visual sources for the first illustrated editions of the Commedia, their narrative qualities, and their influence on Renaissance readers. He traces the visual genealogies that link these images to each other and to renderings of the poem in other media, including illuminated manuscripts and drawings, such as those by Sandro Botticelli. Collins additionally delves into a group of cartographically oriented renderings of Dante’s afterlife, interpreting them in the context of the Age of Exploration. He addresses the utilitarian aspect of the illustrations as well by revealing the multidimensional role that these images played for Renaissance readers, particularly emphasizing their pedagogical and mnemonic uses. Of value to numerous disciplines, The Early Printed Illustrations of Dante’s “Commedia” fills a gap in Dante studies and will inspire similar investigations into the visual representation of other literary works in the age of early print.

Dante’s Performance

Dante’s Performance
Author: Francesco Ciabattoni
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2024-07-22
Genre:
ISBN: 3111406822
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Dante's Education

Dante's Education
Author: Filippo Gianferrari
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2024-07-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 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.

The Measure of Multitude

The Measure of Multitude
Author: Peter Biller
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 506
Release: 2000-12-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191542490
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By 1300, medieval men and women were beginning to measure multitude, counting, for example, numbers of boys and girls being baptized. Their mental capacity to grapple with population, to get its measure, was developing and this book describes how medieval people thought about population through both the texts which contained their thought and the medieval realities which shaped it. They found many topics, such as the history of population and variations between polygamy, monogamy and virginity, through theology. Crusade and travel literature supplied the themes of Muslim polygamy, military numbers, the colonization of the Holy Land,and the populations of Mongolia and China. Translations of Aristotle provided not only new themes but also a new vocabulary with which to think about population. In this innovative new study Peter Biller challenges the view that medieval thought was fundamentally abstract. He investigates medieval thought's capacity to deal with concrete contemporary realities, and sets academic discussions of population alongside the medieval facts of 'birth, and copulation, and death'.

Dante's "Vita Nova"

Dante's
Author: Zygmunt G. Baranski
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2023-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 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.

Experiencing the Afterlife

Experiencing the Afterlife
Author: Manuele Gragnolati
Publisher:
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2005
Genre: Civilization, Medieval, in literature
ISBN:
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Experiencing the Afterlife provides the first sustained analysis of popular, vernacular depictions of the afterlife written in Italy before the Divine Comedy by authors such as Uguccione da Lodi, Giacomino da Verona, and Bonvesin da la Riva. Manuele Gragnolati uses his readings of these poets to provide a new interpretation of Dante's work. Combining elements from several disciplines, he investigates the richness of high medieval eschatology and the concept of personal identity it expresses. Gragnolati is particularly concerned with how the notions of body and pain characteristic of medieval spirituality and devotion inform the eschatological representations of the time, especially in their paradoxical urge to stress at once the physical experience of the separated soul and the final necessity of bodily resurrection. By integrating lesser-known texts and scholarship from other disciplines into the specialized field of Dante studies, Gragnolati sheds new light on some of the most vigorously debated and crucial questions raised by the Divine Comedy, including the embryological discourse of Purgatorio 25, the relation between the soul's experience of pain in Purgatory and the devotion that late medieval culture expressed toward Christ's suffering, and the significance of the audacious vision of resurrected bodies that Dante the pilgrim enjoys at the end of his journey. At the same time, Gragnolati brings these questions back into contemporary discussions of medieval eschatology and opens new perspectives for current and future work on embodiment and identity. Scholars and students of Dante and Italian studies, as well as those in medieval history, religion, culture, and art history, will be rewarded by the fresh insights contained in Experiencing the Afterlife.

Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante's Commedia

Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante's Commedia
Author: Helena Phillips-Robins
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2021-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 026820070X
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This study explores ways in which Dante presents liturgy as enabling humans to encounter God. In Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante’s “Commedia,” 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.

Dante’s Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion

Dante’s Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion
Author: G. Stone
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2006-05-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 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's Penitential Psalms and Prayers

Petrarch's Penitential Psalms and Prayers
Author: Francesco Petrarca
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 103
Release: 2024-05-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 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.