Medieval Italian Literature

Con la metodologia di analisi esegetica creata da Carlos López Cortezo si esamina l'episodio del cielo di Marte con speciale attenzione alla cornice iconografica che precede il dialogo fra Dante e Cacciaguida e che lo condiziona e dà di esso chiavi di lettura imprescindibili per la sua comprensione.

'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'.

A cura di Davide Checchi 🔗 https://bit.ly/2VxVjR0 Il Libro della natura degli animali (noto anche come Bestiario toscano) è il primo bestiario moralizzato in prosa della letteratura italiana. Composto nell’ultimo quarto del XIII impiegando fonti latine e francesi, questo testo fu copiato fino alla fine del XV secolo ed ebbe una notevole diffusione nell’area toscana, nell’Italia settentrionale e in Catalogna, dove fu tradotto in catalano nella prima metà del XLV secolo. Il presente volume ne offre un’edizione critica, per la prima volta fondata su un’analisi completa della tradizione diretta e indiretta.

While verses detailing hellish suffering are plentiful in Dante’s Purgatory, the poet unambiguously represents Hell as an eternal prison which he strikingly carves out in Inferno 10 dedicated to the heretics where we discover Farinata and Cavalcante in one of the most poignant cantos of the 'Inferno.'

In this essay, I will focus on Dante and Virgil’s entrance into lower Hell (the city of Dis) and particularly Circle 6 dedicated to the heretics with the objective of exploring how the poet constructs and amplifies the metaphor of Hell as a prison which echoes the characterization delineated in the widely read apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus where Christ’s Descent into Hell is described as a liberation of pre-Christian souls from Satan’s infernal prison-house.  My reading of Dante’s poem aims to enhance our understanding of Inferno 10 by revealing another layer of meaning in this very complex canto through the notion of Hell as a place of eternal confinement.

The volume is available for free download at https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/106880.

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.

CU Boulder - FREN1200
Offered FA2014, FA2015, FA2016
Course Description: The popularity of George RR Martin's fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire and its Emmy-winning HBO adaptation Game of Thrones shows us that major themes from medieval stories still resonate with audiences a thousand years after their composition. This course will examine major epic and romance texts of the Middle Ages such as Beowulf, The Song of Roland, and The Death of King Arthur. We will aim to understand the rich literary tradition that has led to our modern interest in dragons, knights, heroes and magic. We will also look at how representations of medieval culture in contemporary series such as Game of Thrones influence our conceptions (and misconceptions) of the Middle Ages. Much like Sansa, we will find that the stories do not necessarily reflect the reality.

L’articolo offre un’analisi puntuale dei versi che Dante dedica a Maometto nel ventottesimo canto dell’Inferno, al fine di precisarne le finalità poetiche e ideologiche; il passo viene poi collocato nel contesto costituito dai numerosi riferimenti al profeta dell’Islam presenti nella letteratura italiana duecentesca e primo-trecentesca, qui raccolti, analizzati e organizzati in maniera sistematica. Gli elementi connotativi riconosciuti nell’episodio infernale e in altri riferimenti alla civiltà islamica che si leggono nel capolavoro dantesco, pur nella loro geniale eccezionalità artistica, risultano così coerentemente inseribili in un più vasto e articolato panorama culturale, nel quale, all’ostilità per l’Islam inteso come entità religiosa e politica, si affianca la curiosità per il mondo musulmano percepito invece come comunità culturale, rilevabile anche presso fasce inaspettate del pubblico medievale.

RIASSUNTO: Nel presente articolo si analizzano il modo in cui Dante, nelle quattro canzoni politico-dottrinali, converte la dottrina in etica politica e la teoria su cui è basata questa conversione. A tal fine si esamina il tipo di amore che compare nelle can-zoni dantesche degli anni 1290 e 1300 e che, venuto dal cielo, diventa il fonda-mento di una vita civile virtuosa. Si considerano inoltre le conseguenze metapoetiche di tale cambiamento sulle relazioni tra contenuto e bellezza della canzone, tra argomentazione-esposizione e mezzi retorici di persuasione. Tutti questi elementi sono utili per un riesame graduale di ogni canzone.

PAROLE CHIAVE: Dante, canzoni, dottrina, etica, politica, retorica.

The dialogue treatise De remediis utriusque fortune is often considered a repetitive work of little literary value. A previously neglected dialogue, "De totius corporis dolore ac languore vario" (II, 114), deviates from the overall structure of this work, while it has surprising common points (in terms of themes, sources, dialogue structure and meta-dialogical reflection) with Secretum. The article brings the hypothesis that the Dialog II, 114 represents an initial idea of De remediis, based originally on the Ciceronian model and later abandoned in favour of a large moral encyclopedia of Pseudo-Senecan derivation.

В статье рассматривается проблема жанровой принадлежности "Новой жизни" Данте Алигьери. Анализ структуры текста, "идеологических" установок его автора, стремящегося представить свой текст как значимый, стоящий в одном ряду с сочинениями латинских auctoritas, а также существующего литературного контекста, позволяет отнести "Новую жизнь" к распространенному в Средние века  жанру комментария (самокомментария как его разновидности).
We examine the genre of Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova. The structure of the text, the "ideological" views of its author, who seeks to highlight the text's importance by placing it alongside works of Latin auctoritas, and the literary context of the time allow us to attribute La Vita Nuova to the popular medieval genre of commentary (or self-commentary, to be precise).

In an effort to put my knowledge on thirteenth-century Florence in general - and Brunetto Latini in particular - to practical use and to share it with a broad audience, I have designed, researched and written a travel guide to Medieval Florence.

This guide invites tourists to skip the beaten path of Renaissance Florence and to discover Medieval Florence instead. To this end, the guide consists of two walks (of 2,8 and 1,6 miles respectively) which introduce the visitor to the hillside, south of the city centre, and guide him/her deep into the heart of its city centre.

In addition to a traditional paper format (see attachment), I have also re-worked this travel guide into two multi-media travel apps which are freely available for download on the izi.travel platform:

(1) https://izi.travel/nl/browse/fdb5f2e6-c489-4355-9d0b-97d78ce164eb/en#tour_details_first;

(2) https://izi.travel/nl/browse/db9625a2-239c-4890-816a-bfeb757b72b9/en#tour_details_first

This paper will engage with issues of material culture and medieval technologies of writing in conversation with representations of the creative process through the close-reading of a sonnet by the Florentine poet (and friend of Dante) Guido Cavalcanti (c.1255-1300). The sonnet in question is ‘Noi siàn le triste penne isbigottite’ (‘We are the poor bewildered quills’), in which Cavalcanti vividly represents the art of writing and the artefact of the text, erasing the lyric ‘I’ and imbuing the tools of writing with speaking voices. In this short poem Cavalcanti gives voice not only to his quills, but to the clippers and the knife with which he prepares them. He simultaneously renders the ‘I’ completely absent and leaves the talking to these other speakers in this novel and subversive example love lyric which demands close attention. Across Cavalcanti’s lyric output we witness a disassembling of the self into myriad parts (often physiological), which are given individual voices through sustained prosopopoeia, generating a ‘rhetoric of the body’ (a term coined by Federica Anichini in Voices of the Body). This practice is extended even to the implements of textual production in this sonnet. The multiple voices of Cavalcanti’s texts engage in an internalised dialogic intercourse which is fundamental to the representation of his poetic self. My reading will investigate this sonnet’s representation of tools of writing as lyric voices in themselves, contextualising it within Cavalcanti’s poetics of self-fragmentation and placing it in discussion with the material culture of the circulation of poetry in late-medieval Italy. The precision of the image of writing will be contrasted with the vagueness of the image and impression of the beloved (reduced to ‘cose dubbiose’ ‘fearful things’) as it appears in this text. As an exploration of the explicit ‘writtenness’ of the Italian tradition (in contrast with the vocality of troubadour lyric) this paper will draw on the work of Olivia Holmes (particularly Assembling the lyric self) and Justin Steinberg (Accounting for Dante) on poetic circulation and production in the period, as well as my own archival work with the ‘Vatican Song Book’ (Vat. Lat. 3793, one of the earliest MS collections of Italian lyric). This paper will act as a meeting place for issues of material culture, textuality and poetics in so far as they all contribute to the foregrounding of creative processes (the creation of poetic texts, content and selves) in this Cavalcantian text. Guido Cavalcanti is often read as an unremittingly gloomy poet of destructive love, or simply as a context for Dante’s poetic development. This paper will undertake a reading of Cavalcanti on his own terms and in a more playful vein than usual, reclaiming for him a greater critical independence and some of that lightness which Italo Calvino identified in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

For an expanded, edited English version of the text, see Celli, A. (2022). Exposing Maometto’s Contrapasso: The Arabic Sources from Spain and the Early Commentators on the Commedia. In: Dante and the Mediterranean Comedy. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07402-8_4

The historical identity of  Laura has always been a matter of discussion among Petrarch's scholars. Vellutello was the first (1525) mentioning the question, by talking of an "invecchiata opinione" which wants Laura as member of the Sade family of Avignon. To that opinion Vellutello opposed instead the hypothesis Laura was descending from Henry de Chiabau, seigneur of Cabrieres. The Sade-hypothesis was however die hard, being drawn on again, with a more relevant lot of arguments and justifications, by the Abbé Jacques-François-Paul-Aldonce de Sade, best known as the uncle of Marquis de Sade. During the 19th and 20th century such opinion was constantly and persistently opposed as legendary by the official critics, with the exception of rare cases. The discovery of the autograph of Luigi Peruzzi and of the complete draft of his Petrarch's biography - which mentions in several points the belonging of Laura to the "famiglia de' Salsi" (de Sade) - gives an authoritative precedent (between 1470 and 1475) to Vellutello's account.

"La discussione sulla tradizione manoscritta della Commedia – bloccata per oltre un trentennio dalla presenza di un’edizione “ufficiale” subito avallata dagli specialisti (l’Edizione Nazionale del 1966-1967, curata da Giorgio Petrocchi), ma esplosa dopo l’apparizione della Commedia curata da Federico Sanguineti nel 2001 e rilanciata nel 2007 da un volume miscellaneo intitolato Nuove prospettive sulla tradizione della «Commedia» – non accenna a placarsi. Di qui l’idea della presente raccolta, che contiene saggi di taglio e argomento diverso, ma tutti caratterizzati dall’attenzione agli esiti più recenti della ricerca e dal desiderio di continuare a offrire nuovi dati per avviare a soluzione un problema tra i più delicati della filologia moderna, da cui dipende la stessa ricostruzione del testo di Dante. Il primo obiettivo di queste pagine è appunto quello di consentire, tanto agli specialisti quanto agli studenti di italianistica e alle persone colte, di seguire più agevolmente il vivace dibattito in corso.

Indice:
Introduzione
Bibliografia
I. Prospetto dei segni convenzionali e delle sigle utilizzate nella classificazione dei testimoni, di Elisabetta Tonello
II. Il testo della Commedia dopo l’edizione Petrocchi, di Andrea Canova
III. Dai lemmi del commento verso il perduto Dante del Lana, di Mirko Volpi
IV. La tradizione della Commedia secondo Luigi Spagnolo e la sottofamiglia a0 (Mart Pal. 319 Triv e altri affini), di Elisabetta Tonello
V. Il canone editoriale dell’antica vulgata di Giorgio Petrocchi e le edizioni dantesche del Boccaccio, di Angelo Eugenio Mecca
VI. Nuovi dati sulla famiglia p, di Paolo Trovato
VII. Un programma per la classificazione «Computer-Assisted» delle copie della Commedia e di altre tradizioni sovrabbondanti, di Gian Paolo Renello
Appendice
Altre correzioni o integrazioni a NP, di Paolo Trovato
Indice dei manoscritti
Indice dei nomi

Nota sugli Autori
Elisabetta Tonello ha studiato nelle Università di Ferrara e di Padova e ha collaborato al Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (TLIO). Si è occupata della prosa di Gozzano e della tradizione manoscritta della Commedia, sulla quale verte la sua tesi di dottorato (Ricerche sulla tradizione manoscritta tre e quattrocentesca della «Commedia»).

Paolo Trovato insegna Storia della lingua italiana e Critica testuale all’Università di Ferrara e condirige «Filologia italiana». Tra i suoi lavori più recenti Nuove prospettive sulla tradizione della «Commedia» (Firenze, Cesati, 2007), l’edizione critica della prima Cortigiana dell’Aretino (Roma, Salerno, 2010) e, per libreriauniversitaria.it Edizioni, la riedizione di Storia della lingua italiana. Il primo Cinquecento (2012). Da un decennio coordina una piccola équipe in vista della classificazione dei testimoni e poi dell’edizione della Commedia dantesca."

Enrico di Castiglia è un caso emblematico di cavaliere e principe alla ricerca di una signoria. Dopo aver guidato senza successo una ribellione nobiliare contro il celebre fratello Alfonso X el Sabio (1252-1284) re di Castiglia, prese la via dell’esilio. Barcellona, Londra e Tunisi furono le mete dei suoi viaggi. In Africa guadagnò grandi onori e ricchezze combattendo con i suoi cavalieri al servizio del sultano di Tunisi, che nel 1258 si era proclamato califfo. Venuto a sapere della spedizione angioina volta alla conquista del regno di Sicilia, il principe castigliano prestò la somma di 40.000 once d’oro a Carlo d’Angiò chiedendo come interesse in caso di vittoria la concessione di una signoria. La vittoria angioina di Benevento tuttavia lo lasciò a mani vuote e, dopo alcuni incontri, infruttuosi, con il papa e con Carlo d’Angiò, Enrico accettò l’elezione a senatore di Roma. Governò il comune capitolino sostenendo il “popolo” contro le aspirazioni nobiliari e angioine. Sottomise all’autorità comunale diversi centri del Patrimonium Beati Petri con la diplomazia o con la forza delle armi. Nel 1267 si schierò dalla parte di Corradino che scendeva in Italia per reclamare l’eredità paterna del regno di Sicilia, e utilizzò l’arma della propaganda politica (poesia di argomento politico, cerimonie pubbliche, laudes regiae) per sostenere la sua causa, denigrare Carlo d’Angiò e trovare nuovi alleati. Nel frattempo anche la corte papale metteva in atto una propaganda contraria al principe Enrico e favorevole a Carlo d’Angiò, in particolare con i sermoni del cardinale francese Odo da Châteauroux, che dipingeva Enrico di Castiglia, Corradino e il sultano di Babilonia come i tre spiriti immondi dell’Apocalisse e presentava invece il fratello del re di Francia come campione e difensore della Chiesa e del popolo cristiano. I due piani si intersecano in occasione della battaglia di Tagliacozzo presentata dalla propaganda di Enrico come una facile vittoria per Corradino e tutti coloro che avessero militato sotto le sue bandiere, e vissuta invece momento per momento dal cardinale francese a causa delle notizie, ora cattive, poi confuse e infine buone, che man mano arrivavano alla corte papale. Giustiziato Corradino nella pubblica piazza, Enrico fu condannato all’ergastolo. Dopo 23 anni di prigionia verrà liberato da Carlo II lo Zoppo e, tornato prima a Tunisi e poi in patria, divenne principe-reggente al trono di Castiglia-Leon per il nipotino Fernando IV.

With regards to the alleged homosexuality of Brunetto Latini there has been much ink spilled, despite the only testimony to that effect coming from Dante in the Divine Comedy. With this essay, I aim to analyze this topic starting from the historical bibliographic sources in our possession, and continuing with the analysis of an essay, with the relevant answer, that Latini gave to another Florentine poet, his contemporary, during the time of his exile to France.

This essay  presents part of a larger study on Boccaccio's  "Filocolo" ("Per difetto rintegrare", 2004). The essays deals in particular with the rewriting of the Old French romance "Floire et Blancheflor" in  the  "Filocolo"  in the light of medieval epistemology and literary theory as  Fiammetta's request to the composer of the work raises matters of interest to both narratology and poetics.  I argue that before his defense of poetry in Book XIV of the  Genealogie", Boccaccio had already formulated his own literary theory and the premise of his defense of poetry: poetry has its own truth. The "Filocolo" through the voice of the poet-philosopher affirms the autonomy of poetry and its "veritatis similima", and most possible, reveals Boccaccio’s lifetime desire to be considered the “seventh” among “cotanto senno”.

Butlin #812.100 is an illustration that suggests the characters (Purgatorio 13) Sapia (the supine figure has a stitch closing its eye and is female) and Piero (described, inaccurately, as a "hermit" in the Cary translation, and of course in almost all of the old commentary tradition); Blake has Sapia supine and on a flaming water-margin to indicate her close call in avoiding damnation for her blasphemy; Piero is in a hermit's cave as Blake liked to draw them (see "Milton: Old Age" illustration to "Il Penseroso") and has the accoutrements for the psalm-recitation (the book) and self-flagellation (the two curlicues at least suggest *disciplinae*) that Peter Damian describes as helping, if used by holy hermits, the souls in Purgatory. Despite scant English translation, by the 1820s, of Damian's writings, he is noted in De Lolme's _History of the Flagellants_, and in English print available to Blake (Hagiography, Biography in Encyclopediae, Religious Polemic) for his ghost stories, theories of Purgatory and prayer for the dead, and systematic attention to penance including self-flagellation and psalm recitation. English translators of Dante--Boyd especially, but also Cary--felt it necessary to explain the doctrine of Purgatory, and of prayer for the dead, to their mostly-Protestant English audiences. Our Blake drawing may have been intended (in a portfolio for the whole *Commedia* had Blake lived to engrave it) to go between the section of illustrations for *Purgatorio* and those for *Paradiso* showing the curious and interesting custom of penance and prayer for the souls in Purgatory to an audience of Regency English. It may have other references to places in Dante's text, as late Blake illustrations are wont: the hermit Blake depicts may have been intended to at least resonate with Peter Damian's praise of the life of eremitical penance, and the landscape setting--a river flowing through the mountains to a hermit's cell at their base--with Fonte Avellana, which the soul of Peter Damian celebrates in *Paradiso* Canto 21.. John Linnell, the patron for this project, seems to have stumbled on an error by the translator Henry Boyd,, which led Linnell to add the gratuitous and bizarre inscription--"Hell Canto 18"--to his tracing of this drawing, made in 1831. Linnell, reading Boyd's mangled account of the composition of the *Commedia*, may have thought this Blake drawing was a representation of a hermit at Fonte Avellana. Despite Boyd's garbling and Linnell's possible acceptance of it, this illustration may after all have chosen, for the location of a hermit, a scene like the hermitage of Fonte Avellana, for a representation of a hermit (as Blake and nearly every Dante scholar thought Pier was) in penitential solitude, helping the soul of Sapia. If Blake shared the notion Linnell seems to have received from Boyd's error, there is then an outside chance this could be an epitome of (possibly a frontispiece for) the whole *Commedia* project--showing the site of composition of its last 83 cantos--but this is unlikely. In any other event, this drawing of a hermit doing penance for a soul belongs with the *Purgatorio* illustrations--probably going, as John Flaxman's epitome of *Purgatorio* did, after that canticle and before *Paradiso*--either as an epitome of penance for souls in Purgatory, or (what is I think least likely) as an illustration to Canto 13.