Dante Studies

Representations of Eve in Antiquity and the English Middle Ages

by John Flood

New York: Routledge, 2010

As the first woman, Eve was the pattern for all her daughters. The importance of readings of Eve for understanding how... more As the first woman, Eve was the pattern for all her daughters. The importance of readings of Eve for understanding how women were viewed at various times is a critical commonplace, but one which has been only narrowly investigated. This book systematically explores the different ways in which Eve was understood by Christians in antiquity and in the English Middle Ages, and it relates these understandings to female social roles. The result is an Eve more various than she is often depicted by scholars. Beginning with material from the bible, the Church Fathers and Jewish sources, the book goes on to look at a broad selection of medieval writing, including theological works and literary texts in Old and Middle English. In addition to dealing with famous authors such as Augustine, Aquinas, Dante and Chaucer, the writings of authors who are now less well-known, but who were influential in their time, are explored. The book allows readers to trace the continuities and discontinuities in the way Eve was portrayed over a millennium and a half, and as such it is of interest to those interested in women or the bible in the Middle Ages.

La luce sulla pelle. Dante e la "dottrina dei sensi spirituali" (forthcoming 2012)

by Valentina Atturo

Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages, eds Manuele Gragnolati, Tristan Kay, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden. Oxford: Legenda, 2012

by Manuele Gragnolati

This volume takes Dante’s rich and multifaceted discourse of desire, from the Vita Nova to the Commedia, as a point of... more This volume takes Dante’s rich and multifaceted discourse of desire, from the Vita Nova to the Commedia, as a point of departure in investigating medieval concepts of desire in all their multiplicity, fragmentation and interrelation. As well as offering several original contributions on this fundamental aspect of Dante’s work, it seeks to situate the Florentine writer more effectively within the broader spectrum of medieval culture and to establish greater intellectual exchange between Dante scholars and those from other disciplines. The volume is open to diverse critical and methodological approaches, and explores the extent to which modern theoretical paradigms can be used to shed light upon the Middle Ages.

Contributors: Daniela Boccassini, Bill Burgwinkle, Fabio Camilletti, Peter Dent, Manuele Gragnolati, Tristan Kay, Giuseppe Ledda, Elena Lombardi, Jonathan Morton, Monika Otter, Francesca Southerden, Robert Sturges, Almut Suerbaum, Paola Ureni, Annette Volfing, Marguerite Waller

Häresie als politisches Delikt

by Marina Decó

The text analyzes for the very first time after their publication by Nikolaj Ottokar in 1919 the trial of the famous... more The text analyzes for the very first time after their publication by Nikolaj Ottokar in 1919 the trial of the famous Ghibelline chief Farinata degli Uberti.

George Frederick Nott (1768-1841). Un ecclesiastico anglicano tra teologia, letteratura, arte, archeologia, bibliofilia e collezionismo, forthcoming in the series of the Memorie della Classe di Scienze Morali dell’Accademia dei Lincei (Roma: Accademia dei Lincei).

by Stefano Villani

[George Frederick Nott (1768-1841). An Anglican Churchman amidst Theology, Literature, Art, Archeology, Bibliophilia... more [George Frederick Nott (1768-1841). An Anglican Churchman amidst Theology, Literature, Art, Archeology, Bibliophilia and Collecting]. This book reconstructs the biography of George Frederick Nott, who reflected the intellectual climate of his time and bridged English and Italian cultures at the turn of the nineteenth century. An erudite and passionate admirer of Italian culture, Nott lived many years in Italy. As a writer, philologist and translator, he was a mediator between English and Italian culture. He met Vincenzo Monti and was befriended by Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen, Giovan Battista Niccolini, Giacomo Leopardi; translated into Italian the Book of Common Prayer, edited Dante and Bosone da Gubbio’s Avventuroso Ciciliano. At the time Italian culture was becoming increasingly important for British high society; the Grand Tour to Italy was an essential part of the British elite’s education. While Italy was considered the cradle of European civilization progressive Italian intellectuals looked to England as a model. George Frederick Nott (1768-1841), an Anglican minister, garnered an initial reputation as a theologian but was later better known for his studies in English literature, culminating in the publishing of the Earl of Surrey’s and Thomas Wyatt’s poems in 1815-1816. Nott delighted in archaeology and art. He was Joseph Anton Koch’s, the spiritual father of the “Nazarenes,” patron and as canon of Winchester he supervised the restoration of the Cathedral. He was among the first members of the Institute of Archaeology in Rome and was also a passionate collector of antiquities, coins, medals and a bibliophile who over time built a refined library of thousands of books and manuscripts. His collections were sold after his death; his important collection of coins was acquired by the British Museum and the manuscripts and books, including some very rare, are scattered throughout all major libraries and museums around the world. Reconstructing Nott’s biography effectively also reconstructs the intellectual climate of the time, which we find described in the works of Jane Austen and George Eliot. In many respects Nott was an exemplary figure of pre-Victorian England. He undertook The Grand Tour as a tutor in the years immediately following the French Revolution. His complex relations with the English court, which had remained chaotic since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, his incredible network of relationships and his diversified interests reveal much about the transition from eighteenth century erudition to a new romantic sensibility. It is difficult to assess what Nott’s impact really was on the development of Anglo-Italian relations. He felt he was unjustly undervalued by Italian scholars, yet he was esteemed by Giacomo Leopardi, whose friendship in itself demonstrated Nott was far from banal. What is certain is that his fascination with Italian culture was shared by many contemporary British writers. Nott was also certainly a very peculiar person. His dismissal as Princess Charlotte’s tutor was talked of at length throughout England. Despite having serious health problems, he was clearly a hypochondriac. He had a difficult temper; many who came into contact with him considered him a “novel character” as a result of his fits and posturing. While Anthony Trollope transformed him into a generally benevolent caricature Shelley and Byron, with whom he had dealings in Pisa in 1821, were much less generous. Nott was a bizarre erudite. As a reflection, we decided to follow his tracks in an erudite fashion. Despite his oft cited work on English Renaissance and thirteenth-century Italian literature, his notable relations with some of the most famous people of the era no biography of Nott was ever written beyond brief entries in the Dictionary of National Biography (1894 by Sidney Lee and 2004 by Rosemary Mitchell) and a recent short article by Carlo De Frede about his relationship with Leopardi. The painstaking reconstruction of Nott’s life, characterised by his intellectual ties and international scope, was the only way to adequately describe his erudite anxiety which is precisely what renders him an emblematic figure of his era.

La Terza Via nella Commedia: la contingenza, struttura dell'inquietudine

by Marina Decó

PhD Dissertation

A textual journey through Dante s Comedy must begin from its beginnings. For this reason I chose the utmost classical... more A textual journey through Dante s Comedy must begin from its beginnings. For this reason I chose the utmost classical approach of the lectura to examine the first three cantos as a textual whole in three movements, as they develop the exposition of the Third Way in Thomas demonstration of the existence of God (Summa Theologiae I, II, 3). Dante s Comedy is a unitary text distinguished by a strong hysteron proteron narrative pattern, where the Author embeds in his main character a manifold profile: pilgrim, reporter and narrator. The narrator has grown in experience through the journey from a complete loss of orientation to a gradual regain of the natural order of things, i.e. from a complete mental submission to contingency or disorder misleading to suicide to a natural order of things wanted by God. The Third Way of Thomas demonstration leads from a crypto-atheism, i.e. God does not exist, to the demonstration that a necessary being has to be. I analyzed Thomas Third Way and then applied this perspective to the first three cantos of Dante s Comedy. At the end I noticed that the Comedy as a whole is necessarily contingent, so that a further analysis of the threefold feature of Dante was crucial for the comprehension of the whole. His experience as a man and above all as a man of culture required also awareness of his contemporary culture and of the main influences he may have perceived and left a print in his conscience. Therefore I chose to investigate contingency as a state of the mind, as the medieval philo-theologicians did too: they understood contingency not only as the interaction of matter and form, but as a condition of the soul between earthly disorder and celestial natural order.

Etica e conoscenza nel XIII e XIV secolo, a cura di Irene Zavattero, Arezzo: Dip. di Studi storico-sociali e filosofici, 2006 (Lavori in corso - Work in Progress 6)

by Irene Zavattero

Dante laico e cattolico

by Enrico Galavotti

2011 pubblicato su http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/galarico

Analisi di alcuni Canti della Commedia e di altre opere di Dante Alighieri Analisi di alcuni Canti della Commedia e di altre opere di Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri, Commedia, Edited by Prue Shaw. A digital edition on DVD-Rom jointly published by SDE-SISMEL (Scholarly Digital Editions and the Società per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino): Birmingham, 2010.

by Prue Shaw

Individual licence: ISBN 1-904628-15-X; ISBN 978-88-8450-389-3

Institutional licence: ISBN 1-904628-09-5; 978-88-8450-391-6

See a preview at www.sd-editions.com

Some comments from users:

Wow!
Robert Hollander, Princeton

L’introduzione è filologicamente... more Some comments from users:

Wow!
Robert Hollander, Princeton

L’introduzione è filologicamente esemplare e affascinante come un giallo. Questo DVD è rivoluzionario, magnifico.
Lino Pertile, Harvard

The scrupulous and lucid analysis is overwhelmingly persuasive. It will revolutionize everyone’s approach to the textual problems.
Robert Durling, University of California


‘… uno strumento di analisi prezioso, anzi insostituibile … queste nuove frontiere della filologia ci offrono, con la massima comodità, una enorme quantità di dati di estremo interesse per lo sviluppo dei nostri studi.’
Paolo Trovato, Ferrara

‘… un’altra magnifica impresa: la Digital edition della Commedia…’
Giorgio Inglese, La Sapienza, Rome

Dante. Monarchia. Cambridge Medieval Classics, 1995.

by Prue Shaw

The Monarchia, Dante's treatise on political theory, addresses the fundamental question of what form of political... more The Monarchia, Dante's treatise on political theory, addresses the fundamental question of what form of political organisation best suits human nature; it embodies a political vision of startling originality and power, and illuminates the intellectual interests and achievements of one of the world's great poets. The whole text is here presented in a new translation, the first for forty years, based on a more up-to-date and scholarly version of the Latin original than has previously been available.

Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Eds Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and fabian Lampart. Wien/Berlin: Turia+Kant, 2011

by Manuele Gragnolati

After almost seven centuries, Dante endures and even seems to haunt the present. "Metamorphosing Dante"... more After almost seven centuries, Dante endures and even seems to haunt the present. "Metamorphosing Dante" explores what so many authors, artists and thinkers from varied backgrounds have found in Dante’s oeuvre, and the ways in which they have engaged with it through rewritings, dialogues, and transpositions. By establishing trans-disciplinary routes, the volume shows that, along with a corpus of multiple linguistic and narrative structures, characters, and stories, Dante has provided a field of tensions in which to mirror and investigate one’s own time. Authors explored include Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, André Gide, Derek Jarman, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, James Joyce, Wolfgang Koeppen, Jacques Lacan, Thomas Mann, James Merrill, Eugenio Montale, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cesare Pavese, Giorgio Pressburger, Robert Rauschenberg, Vittorio Sereni, Virginia Woolf.


CONTRIBUTORS: Erminia Ardissino, Piero Boitani, Fabio Camilletti, Antonella Francini, Nicola Gardini, Manuele Gragnolati, Rachel Jacoff, Nick Havely, Tristan Kay, Dennis Looney, Davide Luglio, Manuela Marchesini, Angela Merte-Rankin, James Miller, Federica Pich, Teresa Prudente, Ronald de Rooy, Francesca Southerden, Florian Trabert, Rebecca West

The Medieval Heart

by Heather Webb

link to Kindle sample (Introduction and beginning of the first chapter) here: http://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Heart-Heather-Webb/dp/0300153937/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329920387&sr=8-1#reader_B0038LB4EO

Drawing from the works of Dante, Catherine of Siena, Boccaccio, Aquinas, and Cavalcanti and other literary,... more Drawing from the works of Dante, Catherine of Siena, Boccaccio, Aquinas, and Cavalcanti and other literary, philosophic, and scientific texts, Heather Webb studies medieval notions of the heart to explore the “lost circulations” of an era when individual lives and bodies were defined by their extensions into the world rather than as self-perpetuating, self-limited entities.

Chaucer and Italian Textuality

by K P Clarke

Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). ISBN: 978-0-19-960777-8. Pp. 248.

See http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199607778.001.0001/acprof-9780199607778

When Chaucer came into contact with Italian literary culture in the second half of the fourteenth century he was... more When Chaucer came into contact with Italian literary culture in the second half of the fourteenth century he was engaging with a productive, lively and highly varied tradition. Chaucer and Italian Textuality provides a new perspective on Chaucer and Italy by highlighting the materiality of his sources, reconstructing his textual, codicological horizon of expectation. It provides new ways of thinking about Chaucer's access to, and use of, these Italian sources, stimulating, in turn, new ways of reading his work. Manuscripts of the major works of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch circulated in a variety of formats, and often the margins of their texts were loci for extensive commentary and glossing. These traditions of glossing and commentary represent one of the most striking features of fourteenth-century Italian literary culture. These authors were in turn deeply indebted to figures like Ovid and Statius, who were themselves heavily glossed and commented upon. The margins provided a space for a wide variety of responses to be inscribed on the page. This is eloquently demonstrated in the example of Francesco d'Amaretto Mannelli's glosses in Decameron, copied by him in 1384. This material dimension of Chaucer's sources has not received sufficient attention; this book aims to address just such a material textuality. This attention to the materiality of Chaucer's sources is further explored and developed by reading the Prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale and the Clerk's Tale through their early fourteenth-century manuscripts, taking account not just of the text but also of the numerous marginal glosses. Within this context, then, the question of Chaucer's authorship of some of these glosses is considered.

Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations and Rewritings in the Twentieth- and Twenty-first Centuries

by Fabio Camilletti

co-edited with Manuele Gragnolati and Fabian Lampart

After almost seven centuries, Dante endures and even seems to haunt the present. Metamorphosing Dante explores what so... more After almost seven centuries, Dante endures and even seems to haunt the present. Metamorphosing Dante explores what so many authors, artists and thinkers from varied backgrounds have found in Dante’s oeuvre, and the ways in which they have engaged with it through rewritings, dialogues, and transpositions. By establishing trans-disciplinary routes, the volume shows that, along with a corpus of multiple linguistic and narrative structures, characters, and stories, Dante has provided a field of tensions in which to mirror and investigate one’s own time. Authors explored include Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, André Gide, Derek Jarman, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, James Joyce, Wolfgang Koeppen, Jacques Lacan, Thomas Mann, James Merrill, Eugenio Montale, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cesare Pavese, Giorgio Pressburger, Robert Rauschenberg, Vittorio Sereni, Virginia Woolf.


CONTRIBUTORS: Erminia Ardissino, Piero Boitani, Fabio Camilletti, Antonella Francini, Nicola Gardini, Manuele Gragnolati, Rachel Jacoff, Nick Havely, Tristan Kay, Dennis Looney, Davide Luglio, Manuela Marchesini, Angela Merte-Rankin, James Miller, Federica Pich, Teresa Prudente, Ronald de Rooy, Francesca Southerden, Florian Trabert, Rebecca West
Volume 2 of the series 'Cultural Inquiry' with Turia + Kant.

Beatrice nell'Inferno di Londra. Saggio su Dante Gabriel Rossetti

by Fabio Camilletti

Nella 'Commedia', Beatrice scende agli Inferi per aiutare Dante, ma la natura perversa dell’oltremondo dantesco non... more Nella 'Commedia', Beatrice scende agli Inferi per aiutare Dante, ma la natura perversa dell’oltremondo dantesco non sfiora né contamina la sua inviolabilità di anima beata: la 'miseria' delle anime dannate non la 'tange', dice a Virgilio prima di ritornare nella 'Candida rosa' del Paradiso, 'né fiamma d’esto incendio non m’assale' (Inf. II, 92-93). Quando però Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a metà Ottocento, traduce la 'Vita Nova', dipinge quadri a soggetto dantesco, scrive racconti, ballate, sonetti in cui cerca di traslare l’esperienza dello stilnovo nel suo tempo, è come se Beatrice si calasse, ancora una volta, all’Inferno: ma si tratta dell’Inferno della Londra vittoriana, a quel punto,  e di questa nuova catabasi la Beatrice di Rossetti non potrà non portare i segni, facendosi metamorfosi perturbante e straniata della 'gentilissima' dantesca.

'Beatrice nell’Inferno di Londra' analizza il fallimento dell’utopia preraffaellita – recuperare la purezza d’intenti del’arte medievale, ritornare al legame tra l’artista e la propria anima -mostrando come l’operazione di Rossetti, proprio nel momento in cui cerca di far rivivere lo stilnovo in pieno XIX secolo, si faccia invece disperatamente moderna: l’esperienza dantesca si trasla nel contesto culturale della Londra vittoriana, svelandone – dietro lo schermo illusorio del revival neomedievale – le contraddizioni, le angosce, le ossessioni. Il simbolismo dantesco si fa cifra esoterica, l’eternità si mostra nel suo volto terribile di Eterno Ritorno, gli unici Paradisi concepibili sono quelli artificiali: e la Beatrice di questa età si fa femminilità algida e mortifera, stordita dal laudano e abbacinata dal magnesio, che non dona più beatitudine e anzi svela – nella sua fissità melanconica – l’assenza d’ogni verità, l’impossibilità d’ogni salvezza.

"Or ti riman, lettor, sovra 'l tuo banco". Il manoscritto Egerton 943 della British Library (forthcoming 2012)

by Anna Pegoretti

PhD dessertation. Supervisor: Lucia Battaglia Ricci

Based on my PhD dissertation, this book is an interdisciplinary enquiry of the MS Egerton 943 (Eg) housed in the... more Based on my PhD dissertation, this book is an interdisciplinary enquiry of the MS Egerton 943 (Eg) housed in the British Library (circa 1340). Eg is the earliest 'Commedia'’s manuscript entirely decorated, with almost 250 scenes and diagrams; it also presents a corpus of Latin glosses generally known as the “Latin Anonymous”. Though verbal and pictorial commentaries are not directly connected, it is possible to consider the MS as an organic editorial product, whose goal is to suggest to the reader a systematic interpretation and to guide his comprehension of Dante’s poem.
Moreover, the dissertation demonstrated the importance of the Dominican Order in the reception of the 'Commedia'. Particular attention has been paid to the global diagrams of heaven and hell, interpreted as medieval "machinae memorialis".
It is forthcoming in a series patronized and directed by the Department of Italian Studies of the University of Pisa.

Dal "lito diserto" al giardino. La costruzione del paesaggio nel Purgatorio di Dante (Bologna, BUP, 2007)

by Anna Pegoretti

The book - based on the author's laurea magistralis' dissertation - explores the medieval traditions and the imagery... more The book - based on the author's laurea magistralis' dissertation - explores the medieval traditions and the imagery that work together in the construction of space in Dante’s Purgatory.

"Che aspetto ha il Purgatorio? Dove si trova? Il Paradiso terrestre è stato risparmiato dal Diluvio? Con queste domande – del tutto legittime per un uomo del Medioevo – si confronta Dante nello scrivere la Commedia, dando loro risposte innovative e coerenti. Grazie all’apporto delle più recenti acquisizioni nel campo degli studi storici, storico-artistici e letterari, questo libro ripercorre le tradizioni e l’immaginario cui il poeta attinge per progettare il regno intermedio dell’aldilà: segue così le tracce degli elementi costitutivi del paesaggio purgatoriale e edenico (il mare, la spiaggia, la montagna, la pietra, l’albero, il fuoco, la scala, il giardino), di cui indaga anche la dimensione simbolica. Ma dietro ai simboli emerge prepotente il mondo terreno – quello in cui Dante ha concretamente vissuto – fatto di suoni, colori, spazi, immagini, mestieri."

Dante Alighieri, Das Gastmahl / Il Convivio

by Roland Béhar