Co-edited with Zygmunt Baranski and a team of section editors, this groundbreaking volume represe... more Co-edited with Zygmunt Baranski and a team of section editors, 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.
In questo volume, Heather Webb analizza il concetto di “persona” contenuto nella Commedia di Dant... more In questo volume, Heather Webb analizza il concetto di “persona” contenuto nella Commedia di Dante, rilevandone la natura etica. Nel corso dei capitoli, la studiosa si sofferma su alcuni incontri del Purgatorio e del Paradiso offrendo una prospettiva nuova e valorizzando rispettivamente la crescita ottenuta dai personaggi della seconda cantica e la pienezza della beatitudine celeste. Due stati che vengono espressi attraverso gesti e posture, sorrisi e sguardi. Tutti questi elementi caratterizzano il viaggio di Dante come un paradigma utile alla formazione e al mantenimento delle relazioni personali e sociali, aspetti fondamentali per giungere a una diretta (e completa) visione di Dio.
La traduzione dell'opera è stata realizzata grazie al contributo del SEPS - SEGRETARIATO EUROPEO PER LE PUBBLICAZIONI SCIENTIFICHE
Dante, Artist of Gesture proposes a visual technique for reading Dante's Comedy, suggesting that ... more Dante, Artist of Gesture proposes a visual technique for reading Dante's Comedy, suggesting that the reader engages with Dante's striking images of souls as if these images were arranged in an architectural space. Art historians have shown how series of discrete images or scenes in medieval places of worship, such as the mosaics in the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence or the frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, establish not only narrative sequences but also parallelisms between registers, forging links between those registers by the use of colour and gestural forms. Heather Webb takes up those techniques to show that the Comedy likewise invites the reader to make visual links between disparate, non-sequential moments in the text. In other words, Webb argues that Dante's poem asks readers to view its verbally articulated sequences of images with a set of observational tools that could be acquired from the practice of engaging with and meditating on the bodily depictions of vice and virtue in fresco cycles or programmes of mosaics in places of worship. One of the most inherently visible aspects of the Comedy is the representation of signature gestures of the characters described in each of the realms. This book traces described gestures and bodily signs across the canticles of the poem to provide a key for identifying affective and devotional itineraries within the text.
Dante's Persons explores the concept of personhood as it appears in Dante's Commedia and seeks ou... more Dante's Persons explores the concept of personhood as it appears in Dante's Commedia and seeks out the constituent ethical modes that the poem presents as necessary for attaining a fullness of persona. The study suggests that Dante presents a vision of 'transhuman' potentiality in which the human person is, after death, fully integrated into co-presence with other individuals in a network of relations based on mutual recognition and interpersonal attention. The Commedia, Heather Webb argues, aims to depict and to actively construct a transmortal community in which the plenitude of each individual's person is realized in and through recognition of the personhood of other individuals who constitute that community, whether living or dead.
Webb focuses on the strategies the Commedia employs to call us to collaborate in the mutual construction of persons. As we engage with the dead that inhabit its pages, we continue to maintain the personhood of those dead. Webb investigates Dante's implicit and explicit appeals to his readers to act in relation to the characters in his otherworlds as if they were persons. Moving through the various encounters of Purgatorio and Paradiso, this study documents the ways in which characters are presented as persone in development or in a state of plenitude through attention to the 'corporeal' modes of smiles, gazes, gestures, and postures. Dante's journey provides a model for the formation and maintenance of a network of personal attachments, attachments that, as constitutive of persona, are not superseded even in the presence of the direct vision of God
This volume will help instructors lead their students through the many dimensions—historical, lit... more This volume will help instructors lead their students through the many dimensions—historical, literary, religious, and ethical—of Dante’s difficult and rewarding Divine Comedy. An overview of the important scholarship is provided, along with ways of teaching the work through its contemporary culture and ours. Various teaching situations are considered, an updated bibliography is offered, and many available translations are discussed.
Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy is a reappraisal of the poem by an international team of thir... more Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy is a reappraisal of the poem by an international team of thirty-four scholars. Each vertical reading analyses three same-numbered cantos from the three canticles: Inferno i, Purgatorio i and Paradiso i; Inferno ii, Purgatorio ii and Paradiso ii; etc. Although scholars have suggested before that there are correspondences between same-numbered cantos that beg to be explored, this is the first time that the approach has been pursued in a systematic fashion across the poem.
This collection – to be issued in three volumes – offers an unprecedented repertoire of vertical readings for the whole poem. As the first volume exemplifies, vertical reading not only articulates unexamined connections between the three canticles but also unlocks engaging new ways to enter into core concerns of the poem. The three volumes thereby provide an indispensable resource for scholars, students and enthusiasts of Dante.
The book is available to read free online at the link in this entry.
Drawing from the works of Dante, Catherine of Siena, Boccaccio, Aquinas, and Cavalcanti and other... 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.
Plurality, Action and Delight in Dante and Arendt · Despite obvious contradictions in their polit... more Plurality, Action and Delight in Dante and Arendt · Despite obvious contradictions in their political thought, this essay considers Hannah Arendt’s sensitive and productive engagement with Dante, departing from Arendt’s citation of the Monarchia in The Human Condition (1958) to consider Arendt’s visions of plurality, action, and delight against Dante’s construction of these concepts as both thinkers seek to imagine what might hold the human community together.
Malgrado ovvie contraddizioni tra i rispettivi pensieri politici, questo saggio prende in considerazione il legame, sensibile e produttivo, che Hannah Arendt instaura nei confronti di Dante ; muovendo dal brano della Monarchia citato nell’opera di Arendt The Human Condition (1958), si esamineranno le idee della filosofa tedesca a proposito di nozioni quali pluralità, azione e diletto rispetto alla costruzione dantesca dei medesimi concetti, nella prospettiva in cui entrambi i pensatori si adoperano per immaginare cosa possa tenere insieme la comunità umana.
Negli ultimi anni abbiamo assistito a un'esplosione di studi sulle culture visive intorno a Dante... more Negli ultimi anni abbiamo assistito a un'esplosione di studi sulle culture visive intorno a Dante. È un approccio che, in quest'anno del Centenario, ha favorito anche l'inclusione di un pubblico molto vasto. Penso, innanzi tutto, ai lavori a Ravenna, alla mostra a cura di Laura Pasquini e Giuseppe Ledda: «La bellezza ch'io vidi… (Pd, XXX, 19). La Divina Commedia e i mosaici di Ravenna», che, nella Basilica di Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, ha messo in evidenza i richiami tra i mosaici ravennati e l'opera di Dante. La mostra si propone come una sintesi ideale tra ricerca scientifica e apertura verso il pubblico, in modo perfettamente inserito nell'ambiente circostante e radicato negli spazi storici di Dante. Essa mette infatti in relazione i mosaici ravennati, le terzine della Commedia, e i testi esplicativi del libro Iconografie Dantesche di Laura Pasquini 1. È esattamente di questo tipo di lavoro, a metà strada tra l'esperienza visiva e l'analisi testuale, che vorrei discutere in questo contributo. L'anno 2021 ha visto un periodo di grande fermento negli Studi Danteschi a livello internazionale. Studiosi di tutto il mondo, in Italia, nel Regno Unito, in Germania, negli Stati Uniti-giusto per nominare alcune sedi-stanno forgiando e proponendo nuovi metodi che siano in grado mettere in collaborazione gli strumenti dell'analisi testuale e quelli dell'analisi visiva. Ci stiamo facendo, in modi diversi, la stessa domanda: in che modo il testo dantesco ci chiede di "guardare"? Verso che tipo di sguardo ci invita? Quando Dante dice «vedi» nella Commedia-e lo fa spesso-sta spingendo il suo lettore verso una serie di pratiche che includono, ma anche superano, il semplice concetto di "leggere" per come lo intendiamo noi oggi e sembrano avere piuttosto
ABSTRACT This article illustrates the different shape that discourses of corporeality have taken ... more ABSTRACT This article illustrates the different shape that discourses of corporeality have taken within the discipline from a chronological perspective. The first section explores how critical frameworks relating to embodiment, performativity and affect expand premodern Italian studies beyond the limited patriarchal canon and better understand ‘performances’ of the Passion by late medieval and early modern women religious as a form of co-suffering that foregrounds embodiment as discourse and substitute for silenced female voices. This is followed by a detailed reflection on how modern understandings of biopolitics and its technologies, mass demo-graphic mobility, and contemporary discourses on race and gender effect a shift away from binary modes of categorisation and critical understandings of the body to produce alternative forms of knowledge and more complex understandings of the symbolic figuration of the body as an object of national concern.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0).... more This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
I canti 5 e 6 del Purgatorio sono pieni di riferimenti all’Eneide di Virgilio, ma sono caratteriz... more I canti 5 e 6 del Purgatorio sono pieni di riferimenti all’Eneide di Virgilio, ma sono caratterizzati anche da un linguaggio che evoca la corporeità in modo immediato e intuitivo. Se da una parte il testo offre al lettore la possibilità di visualizzare una serie di scene mediante il ricorso al repertorio di memorie virgiliane che vedono Enea negli inferi, dall’altra gli stessi lettori sono anche sollecitati dal testo a visualizzare vari stati corporei che, insieme all’ermeneutica dell’intertestualità, suggeriscono modalità di condotta (comportamentale, filosofica, politica, etica, spirituale) in grado di rivisitare le tipologie di postura attinenti al mondo classico. In questi canti dell’Antipurgatorio, possiamo discernere lo sforzo di stabilire un equilibrio tra due poli: da un lato, le virtù classiche della verticalità, del magnanimo, e della stabilità della linea retta; dall’altro, un nuovo schema di modelli cristiani di movimento responsivo verso l’altro.
This article illustrates the different shape that discourses of corporeality
have taken within th... more This article illustrates the different shape that discourses of corporeality have taken within the discipline from a chronological perspective. The first section explores how critical frameworks relating to embodiment, performativity and affect expand premodern Italian studies beyond the limited patriarchal canon and better understand ‘performances’ of the Passion by late medieval and early modern women religious as a form of co-suffering that foregrounds embodiment as discourse and substitute for silenced female voices. This is followed by a detailed reflection on how modern understandings of biopolitics and its technologies, mass demo-graphic mobility, and contemporary discourses on race and gender effect a shift away from binary modes of categorisation and critical understandings of the body to produce alternative forms of knowledge and more complex understandings of the symbolic figuration of the body as an object of national concern. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/XAJSIX5PIFXGCEQJQFQV/full?target=10.1080/00751634.2020.1744866
Poesia e profezia nell'opera di Dante, Giuseppe Ledda, ed. , 2019
La Commedia è contrassegnata da un’altissima concentrazione di descrizioni di stati e condizioni ... more La Commedia è contrassegnata da un’altissima concentrazione di descrizioni di stati e condizioni corporali. In questo saggio cerco di fornire alcune osservazioni preliminari riguardo a un particolare marcatore somatico che caratterizza alcuni momenti profetici della Commedia, ovvero il viso di Beatrice all’atto dell’arrossire. Il viso arrossito di Beatrice nel contesto di episodi profetici non è un tema circoscritto, in sé concluso, come potrebbe sembrare, ma richiede invece un’attenzione e un approfondimento puntuali. Ad oggi gli studiosi hanno indagato gli arrossimenti di Beatrice principalmente come occorrenze isolate. Vorrei qui suggerire, invece, che i vari episodi di rossore sono parte di una vasta coreografia di segni somatici che attraversa la Commedia. Il saggio fornisce un’analisi che metta in luce le modalità attraverso le quali uno specifico segnale fisico possa essere finalizzato ad agire sul lettore in termini emotivi.
The notion of reading with Sandro Botticelli is one that has intrigued scholars for some time. T... more The notion of reading with Sandro Botticelli is one that has intrigued scholars for some time. This essay explores the illustrations of Dante’s Paradiso as, first and foremost, readings of the poem, suggesting that Botticelli, as a particularly “sophisticated” reader (to use Vasari’s loaded term), engages Dante’s most challenging invitation to those who take up this canticle. This is the invitation to imagine the possibility of what I am calling “conjoined vision,” a mode of vision that Dante describes in the Paradiso as the privilege of the blessed. Botticelli’s engagement with this visionary challenge enables the viewers of his illustrations to reflect on and imaginatively expand their own modes of vision through a series of techniques that include the illustration of a plural gaze, the affective presentation of multiple foci of devotion, and the opportunity to see or read the poem, aided by Botticelli’s illustrations, in a synchronous mode. https://doi.org/10.1086/705470
Co-edited with Zygmunt Baranski and a team of section editors, this groundbreaking volume represe... more Co-edited with Zygmunt Baranski and a team of section editors, 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.
In questo volume, Heather Webb analizza il concetto di “persona” contenuto nella Commedia di Dant... more In questo volume, Heather Webb analizza il concetto di “persona” contenuto nella Commedia di Dante, rilevandone la natura etica. Nel corso dei capitoli, la studiosa si sofferma su alcuni incontri del Purgatorio e del Paradiso offrendo una prospettiva nuova e valorizzando rispettivamente la crescita ottenuta dai personaggi della seconda cantica e la pienezza della beatitudine celeste. Due stati che vengono espressi attraverso gesti e posture, sorrisi e sguardi. Tutti questi elementi caratterizzano il viaggio di Dante come un paradigma utile alla formazione e al mantenimento delle relazioni personali e sociali, aspetti fondamentali per giungere a una diretta (e completa) visione di Dio.
La traduzione dell'opera è stata realizzata grazie al contributo del SEPS - SEGRETARIATO EUROPEO PER LE PUBBLICAZIONI SCIENTIFICHE
Dante, Artist of Gesture proposes a visual technique for reading Dante's Comedy, suggesting that ... more Dante, Artist of Gesture proposes a visual technique for reading Dante's Comedy, suggesting that the reader engages with Dante's striking images of souls as if these images were arranged in an architectural space. Art historians have shown how series of discrete images or scenes in medieval places of worship, such as the mosaics in the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence or the frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, establish not only narrative sequences but also parallelisms between registers, forging links between those registers by the use of colour and gestural forms. Heather Webb takes up those techniques to show that the Comedy likewise invites the reader to make visual links between disparate, non-sequential moments in the text. In other words, Webb argues that Dante's poem asks readers to view its verbally articulated sequences of images with a set of observational tools that could be acquired from the practice of engaging with and meditating on the bodily depictions of vice and virtue in fresco cycles or programmes of mosaics in places of worship. One of the most inherently visible aspects of the Comedy is the representation of signature gestures of the characters described in each of the realms. This book traces described gestures and bodily signs across the canticles of the poem to provide a key for identifying affective and devotional itineraries within the text.
Dante's Persons explores the concept of personhood as it appears in Dante's Commedia and seeks ou... more Dante's Persons explores the concept of personhood as it appears in Dante's Commedia and seeks out the constituent ethical modes that the poem presents as necessary for attaining a fullness of persona. The study suggests that Dante presents a vision of 'transhuman' potentiality in which the human person is, after death, fully integrated into co-presence with other individuals in a network of relations based on mutual recognition and interpersonal attention. The Commedia, Heather Webb argues, aims to depict and to actively construct a transmortal community in which the plenitude of each individual's person is realized in and through recognition of the personhood of other individuals who constitute that community, whether living or dead.
Webb focuses on the strategies the Commedia employs to call us to collaborate in the mutual construction of persons. As we engage with the dead that inhabit its pages, we continue to maintain the personhood of those dead. Webb investigates Dante's implicit and explicit appeals to his readers to act in relation to the characters in his otherworlds as if they were persons. Moving through the various encounters of Purgatorio and Paradiso, this study documents the ways in which characters are presented as persone in development or in a state of plenitude through attention to the 'corporeal' modes of smiles, gazes, gestures, and postures. Dante's journey provides a model for the formation and maintenance of a network of personal attachments, attachments that, as constitutive of persona, are not superseded even in the presence of the direct vision of God
This volume will help instructors lead their students through the many dimensions—historical, lit... more This volume will help instructors lead their students through the many dimensions—historical, literary, religious, and ethical—of Dante’s difficult and rewarding Divine Comedy. An overview of the important scholarship is provided, along with ways of teaching the work through its contemporary culture and ours. Various teaching situations are considered, an updated bibliography is offered, and many available translations are discussed.
Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy is a reappraisal of the poem by an international team of thir... more Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy is a reappraisal of the poem by an international team of thirty-four scholars. Each vertical reading analyses three same-numbered cantos from the three canticles: Inferno i, Purgatorio i and Paradiso i; Inferno ii, Purgatorio ii and Paradiso ii; etc. Although scholars have suggested before that there are correspondences between same-numbered cantos that beg to be explored, this is the first time that the approach has been pursued in a systematic fashion across the poem.
This collection – to be issued in three volumes – offers an unprecedented repertoire of vertical readings for the whole poem. As the first volume exemplifies, vertical reading not only articulates unexamined connections between the three canticles but also unlocks engaging new ways to enter into core concerns of the poem. The three volumes thereby provide an indispensable resource for scholars, students and enthusiasts of Dante.
The book is available to read free online at the link in this entry.
Drawing from the works of Dante, Catherine of Siena, Boccaccio, Aquinas, and Cavalcanti and other... 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.
Plurality, Action and Delight in Dante and Arendt · Despite obvious contradictions in their polit... more Plurality, Action and Delight in Dante and Arendt · Despite obvious contradictions in their political thought, this essay considers Hannah Arendt’s sensitive and productive engagement with Dante, departing from Arendt’s citation of the Monarchia in The Human Condition (1958) to consider Arendt’s visions of plurality, action, and delight against Dante’s construction of these concepts as both thinkers seek to imagine what might hold the human community together.
Malgrado ovvie contraddizioni tra i rispettivi pensieri politici, questo saggio prende in considerazione il legame, sensibile e produttivo, che Hannah Arendt instaura nei confronti di Dante ; muovendo dal brano della Monarchia citato nell’opera di Arendt The Human Condition (1958), si esamineranno le idee della filosofa tedesca a proposito di nozioni quali pluralità, azione e diletto rispetto alla costruzione dantesca dei medesimi concetti, nella prospettiva in cui entrambi i pensatori si adoperano per immaginare cosa possa tenere insieme la comunità umana.
Negli ultimi anni abbiamo assistito a un'esplosione di studi sulle culture visive intorno a Dante... more Negli ultimi anni abbiamo assistito a un'esplosione di studi sulle culture visive intorno a Dante. È un approccio che, in quest'anno del Centenario, ha favorito anche l'inclusione di un pubblico molto vasto. Penso, innanzi tutto, ai lavori a Ravenna, alla mostra a cura di Laura Pasquini e Giuseppe Ledda: «La bellezza ch'io vidi… (Pd, XXX, 19). La Divina Commedia e i mosaici di Ravenna», che, nella Basilica di Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, ha messo in evidenza i richiami tra i mosaici ravennati e l'opera di Dante. La mostra si propone come una sintesi ideale tra ricerca scientifica e apertura verso il pubblico, in modo perfettamente inserito nell'ambiente circostante e radicato negli spazi storici di Dante. Essa mette infatti in relazione i mosaici ravennati, le terzine della Commedia, e i testi esplicativi del libro Iconografie Dantesche di Laura Pasquini 1. È esattamente di questo tipo di lavoro, a metà strada tra l'esperienza visiva e l'analisi testuale, che vorrei discutere in questo contributo. L'anno 2021 ha visto un periodo di grande fermento negli Studi Danteschi a livello internazionale. Studiosi di tutto il mondo, in Italia, nel Regno Unito, in Germania, negli Stati Uniti-giusto per nominare alcune sedi-stanno forgiando e proponendo nuovi metodi che siano in grado mettere in collaborazione gli strumenti dell'analisi testuale e quelli dell'analisi visiva. Ci stiamo facendo, in modi diversi, la stessa domanda: in che modo il testo dantesco ci chiede di "guardare"? Verso che tipo di sguardo ci invita? Quando Dante dice «vedi» nella Commedia-e lo fa spesso-sta spingendo il suo lettore verso una serie di pratiche che includono, ma anche superano, il semplice concetto di "leggere" per come lo intendiamo noi oggi e sembrano avere piuttosto
ABSTRACT This article illustrates the different shape that discourses of corporeality have taken ... more ABSTRACT This article illustrates the different shape that discourses of corporeality have taken within the discipline from a chronological perspective. The first section explores how critical frameworks relating to embodiment, performativity and affect expand premodern Italian studies beyond the limited patriarchal canon and better understand ‘performances’ of the Passion by late medieval and early modern women religious as a form of co-suffering that foregrounds embodiment as discourse and substitute for silenced female voices. This is followed by a detailed reflection on how modern understandings of biopolitics and its technologies, mass demo-graphic mobility, and contemporary discourses on race and gender effect a shift away from binary modes of categorisation and critical understandings of the body to produce alternative forms of knowledge and more complex understandings of the symbolic figuration of the body as an object of national concern.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0).... more This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
I canti 5 e 6 del Purgatorio sono pieni di riferimenti all’Eneide di Virgilio, ma sono caratteriz... more I canti 5 e 6 del Purgatorio sono pieni di riferimenti all’Eneide di Virgilio, ma sono caratterizzati anche da un linguaggio che evoca la corporeità in modo immediato e intuitivo. Se da una parte il testo offre al lettore la possibilità di visualizzare una serie di scene mediante il ricorso al repertorio di memorie virgiliane che vedono Enea negli inferi, dall’altra gli stessi lettori sono anche sollecitati dal testo a visualizzare vari stati corporei che, insieme all’ermeneutica dell’intertestualità, suggeriscono modalità di condotta (comportamentale, filosofica, politica, etica, spirituale) in grado di rivisitare le tipologie di postura attinenti al mondo classico. In questi canti dell’Antipurgatorio, possiamo discernere lo sforzo di stabilire un equilibrio tra due poli: da un lato, le virtù classiche della verticalità, del magnanimo, e della stabilità della linea retta; dall’altro, un nuovo schema di modelli cristiani di movimento responsivo verso l’altro.
This article illustrates the different shape that discourses of corporeality
have taken within th... more This article illustrates the different shape that discourses of corporeality have taken within the discipline from a chronological perspective. The first section explores how critical frameworks relating to embodiment, performativity and affect expand premodern Italian studies beyond the limited patriarchal canon and better understand ‘performances’ of the Passion by late medieval and early modern women religious as a form of co-suffering that foregrounds embodiment as discourse and substitute for silenced female voices. This is followed by a detailed reflection on how modern understandings of biopolitics and its technologies, mass demo-graphic mobility, and contemporary discourses on race and gender effect a shift away from binary modes of categorisation and critical understandings of the body to produce alternative forms of knowledge and more complex understandings of the symbolic figuration of the body as an object of national concern. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/XAJSIX5PIFXGCEQJQFQV/full?target=10.1080/00751634.2020.1744866
Poesia e profezia nell'opera di Dante, Giuseppe Ledda, ed. , 2019
La Commedia è contrassegnata da un’altissima concentrazione di descrizioni di stati e condizioni ... more La Commedia è contrassegnata da un’altissima concentrazione di descrizioni di stati e condizioni corporali. In questo saggio cerco di fornire alcune osservazioni preliminari riguardo a un particolare marcatore somatico che caratterizza alcuni momenti profetici della Commedia, ovvero il viso di Beatrice all’atto dell’arrossire. Il viso arrossito di Beatrice nel contesto di episodi profetici non è un tema circoscritto, in sé concluso, come potrebbe sembrare, ma richiede invece un’attenzione e un approfondimento puntuali. Ad oggi gli studiosi hanno indagato gli arrossimenti di Beatrice principalmente come occorrenze isolate. Vorrei qui suggerire, invece, che i vari episodi di rossore sono parte di una vasta coreografia di segni somatici che attraversa la Commedia. Il saggio fornisce un’analisi che metta in luce le modalità attraverso le quali uno specifico segnale fisico possa essere finalizzato ad agire sul lettore in termini emotivi.
The notion of reading with Sandro Botticelli is one that has intrigued scholars for some time. T... more The notion of reading with Sandro Botticelli is one that has intrigued scholars for some time. This essay explores the illustrations of Dante’s Paradiso as, first and foremost, readings of the poem, suggesting that Botticelli, as a particularly “sophisticated” reader (to use Vasari’s loaded term), engages Dante’s most challenging invitation to those who take up this canticle. This is the invitation to imagine the possibility of what I am calling “conjoined vision,” a mode of vision that Dante describes in the Paradiso as the privilege of the blessed. Botticelli’s engagement with this visionary challenge enables the viewers of his illustrations to reflect on and imaginatively expand their own modes of vision through a series of techniques that include the illustration of a plural gaze, the affective presentation of multiple foci of devotion, and the opportunity to see or read the poem, aided by Botticelli’s illustrations, in a synchronous mode. https://doi.org/10.1086/705470
Co-authored with Heather Webb in P. Antonello and H. Webb (eds), "Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel:... more Co-authored with Heather Webb in P. Antonello and H. Webb (eds), "Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel: René Girard and Literary Criticism" (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015). Forthcoming. Uncorrected proofs.
This essay proposes a way of understanding Dante’s differing treatments of sodomy in the Comedy (... more This essay proposes a way of understanding Dante’s differing treatments of sodomy in the Comedy (a sin of violence against nature in Inferno but a sub-category of lust in Purgatorio) through examination of two larger issues in the poem: power differentials and the function of the pilgrim as model for the reader. I argue that Inferno xv and xvi look at cases of sodomy as abuse of power; in Purgatorio xxvi, the sinners are instead characterized by their refusal to dominate others. In each case the pilgrim performs a role in his interaction with the souls that reveals the relational dynamics of the group. The mutual passivity of the sinners in Purgatorio xxvi is prefigured in Purgatorio ix, where the pilgrim dreams he is Ganymede, rapt in the clutches of an eagle. Such passivity is the model for eroticism in Paradiso, in which each soul is perfectly and completely open to the only agent, God, and is the state that will be necessary for the pilgrim to attain in order to receive the inspiration that will produce the poem itself.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears... more Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.
"GESTI, ESPRESSIONI E FACCE NELLA COMMEDIA" è il terzo appuntamento del 2021 del ciclo "Conversaz... more "GESTI, ESPRESSIONI E FACCE NELLA COMMEDIA" è il terzo appuntamento del 2021 del ciclo "Conversazioni su Dante" che intende avviare una riflessione a più voci sulla "Commedia" in preparazione del Dantedì, entrato ufficialmente nel calendario nazionale il 25 marzo.
La lezione è tenuta da Heather Webb, professoressa di Letteratura italiana alla University of Cambridge. Introduce Paolo Di Stefano, giornalista del Corriere della Sera. Letture di Valeria Perdonò de Il Menu della Poesia.
L'incontro è stato realizzato il 12 marzo con il contributo di Intesa Sanpaolo e con il patrocinio del Comitato Nazionale per la celebrazione dei 700 anni dalla morte di Dante Alighieri.
La proposta di una giornata dedicata al poeta è nata nei mesi scorsi sulle pagine del Corriere della Sera.
Registration is now open: https://forms.gle/wqPbPVfRnthXaqAh8. Reduced fees are available to supp... more Registration is now open: https://forms.gle/wqPbPVfRnthXaqAh8. Reduced fees are available to support the attendance of PGRs / ECAs and unwaged academics. The conference aims to promote a fruitful dialogue on the perception and the representation of emotions between scholars working across different periods and different media. It will investigate how emotional repertoires and vocabularies for identifying affects and sensations evolved and changed in Italian language, literature, and the visual arts, from medieval to contemporary production. In order to further enrich the discussion, the conference will include comparative sessions with colleagues working on other languages and literatures, thus offering a comprehensive overview of ‘Italian’ thought before, after, and beyond the concretization of national boundaries. The conference is organised by Heather Webb, Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė, Nicolò Crisafi, Alessia Carrai, Giulia Boitani, George Rayson, and Orsolya Petocz.
Posture is a key signifier of spiritual and psychological states in Dante’s Comedy. This conferen... more Posture is a key signifier of spiritual and psychological states in Dante’s Comedy. This conference investigated the way in which these postures communicate by means of a range of interdisciplinary approaches:
placing depictions of posture in Dante’s work within medieval cultural contexts;
analysis of postures in manuscript illuminations and other selected illustrations, sculptures, and filmic versions of the Comedy;
study of the embodiment of postures through staging selected episodes and consequent analysis by means of acting theory, kinesis, and concepts derived from recent work in neuroscience.
The conference focused on two principal questions:
1. By means of conceptual tools from neuroscience, can we put modes of reading posture that range from performance to illustration to adaptation to criticism (to conversion – Dante’s endgame) into productive dialogue?
2. How does the work of visualising postures - as described, analysed, illustrated, or embodied - enable new approaches to intersubjectivity, reception, and interpretation?
Speakers: Heather Webb (Selwyn College, Cambridge), Nicolò Crisafi (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford), ... more Speakers: Heather Webb (Selwyn College, Cambridge), Nicolò Crisafi (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford), David Bowe (University of Oxford) Chair: Manuele Gragnolati (Somerville College, Oxford)
This panel will explore the intersections of physicality, materiality and strategies of representation in the works of Dante. From the rhetorical garments in the Vita Nova, via the rhetorics of physical bodies and their penances in Purgatorio, to the corporeality of faces and forms of presence in the Paradiso, the speakers will explore the manners in which the material and the matter of the text interact. Beginning with the pre-Commedia works, David Bowe’s paper, ‘Writing as bodies as writing’, will explore the notion that garments, written words, and bodies exist in a creative tension fundamental to Dantean textuality. In the Vita nova the ‘sacrificial’ red of Beatrice’s garments (Cervigni) intersects with the red ink of rubrication and ordinatio in the libello. This, in turn activates the images of poetic writing as dressing the (female) body of intendimento in VN XXV in the specific context of Dante’s textual and poetic practice. By examining these intersections this paper will shed light on the sort of material concern for the body as text which later resurface in Dante’s Convivio and Commedia. Nicolò Crisafi’s paper, ‘Spiritual fires and literal bodies: the rhetorics of corporal punishment’, will then proceed to Purgatorio to chart the relationship between secular rhetorics of corporal punishment and the Commedia’s own rhetorical treatment of the bodies of sinners in Dante’s otherworld. The rhetorics of corporal punishment in medieval secular justice often charged literal bodies with a symbolic meaning. The Commedia responds to these rhetorics of corporal punishment and stages its own. Focussing largely on Dante’s treatment of sexual sinners, this paper will look at the interplay between the literal and the metaphorical when it comes to the body and its otherworldly punishments, by providing a close reading of the rhetorical figures at play in Dante’s poetic text. Ascending to the third realm of Dante’s afterlife, Heather Webb’s paper, ‘On the Materiality of the Face in Dante’s Paradiso’ begins from the assertion that faces in Paradiso do what bodies do in Inferno and Purgatorio. As David Ruzicka points out, we have long assumed that all those references to Beatrice's eyes and mouth mean that she is decorporealised. But bodies remain crucial in Paradiso; if, as Robin Kirkpatrick suggests, bodies in Purgatorio are ‘all face’, then we might argue that faces in Paradiso are bodies. This paper focusses on the materiality of the Veronica, the physicality of Beatrice’s face, and modes of personal presence in Paradiso. Spanning a range of Dante’s works, this panel will offer a broad overview of the textual representations of physical bodies and material cultures.
To register: iniuria.eventbrite.co.uk
Registration fee £2 [members of Pembroke College Cambridge... more To register: iniuria.eventbrite.co.uk
Registration fee £2 [members of Pembroke College Cambridge will be refunded at the entrance]; the keynote is free to attend and pre–registration is not required.
The event is sponsored by Pembroke College; the Keith Sykes Research Fund; and CIRN (Cambridge Italian Research Network)
--
This two-day symposium brings together international experts working at the crossroads of disciplines including Philosophy, Law, Art History and Literature, to provide an assessment of the use and regulation of languages of injury in late medieval Italy (e.g. insults, offensive paintings, injurious poems, satirical writing, beffe, tenzoni, libelli famosi, and others). Particular attention will be paid to moral doctrines (e.g. the sins of the tongue), legal theories and practices connected to non-physical violence in Italian communes and city states (e.g. jurisdiction on the crimes of insult and of lèse-majesté, pitture infamanti, libel writs, and others). The symposium will include presentations on art and social control, censorship, gender and insults, contested images, and defamation laws.
PROGRAMME
30th April 2018
Old Library, Pembroke College, Cambridge
2 p.m. Refreshments and registration
2.30 p.m. Opening remarks
3 p.m. First Panel : Legal Perspectives, chaired by Trevor Dean (Professor of Social History, University of Roehampton)
* Hannah Skoda (Professor of History, University of Oxford), 'Languages of Injury in Late Medieval Universities'
* Giuliano Milani (Professor d’Histoire du Moyen Âge, Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée), 'Impotenti, debitori, ladroni e usurai. Fonti giudiziarie e fonti letterarie a confronto'
* Lorenzo Caravaggi (DPhil History Candidate, Balliol College, University of Oxford), 'Rituals of Affront in the City and Contado: an Interpersonal Perspective (late XIII century)'
4.30 p.m. Coffee Break
5 p.m. KEYNOTE ADDRESS
* Justin Steinberg (Professor of Italian Literature, University of Chicago), 'The Artist and the Police: Decameron 8.3’
1st May 2018
Old Library, Pembroke College, Cambridge
9 a.m. Coffee and biscuits
9.30 a.m. Second Panel : Visual Perspectives, chaired by Irene Galandra Cooper (Research Associate, ERC-funded project Genius Before Romanticism: Ingenuity in Early Modern Art and Science, CRASSH, University of Cambridge)
* Andrew Chen (Fellow, John’s College, University of Cambridge), 'Staging Enemies in Text and Image: Comforting Rituals in Emilia'
* Felix Jäger (Doctoral Assistant, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut), 'The Silence of the Sirens: Infamy and Political Reason in the Armor of the Negroli’
* Melissa Vise (Somsen Fellow, IRH, University of Wisconsin), 'Crimes Against Art: Blasphemy in Fourteenth-Century Bologna'
11 a.m. Coffee Break
11.15 a.m. Third Panel : Literary Perspectives, chaired by Heather Webb (Reader in Medieval Italian Literature and Culture, University of Cambridge)
* Maggie Fritz-Morkin (Assistant Professor of Italian, The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), '"Totum tribunal inplevit": Petrarch, Cicero, and the Politics of Public Vomiting'
* Cécile Le Lay (Maître de conférences de Langue et Littérature italiennes, Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3), 'Funzione giuridica della maledizione: le ultime parole di Beatrice (Paradiso XXX, 139-148)'
* Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja (Keith Sykes Fellow, Pembroke College, University of Cambridge), ‘"Poesia Giocosa" in Late Medieval Tuscany: Law and Art'
L'ottava edizione del Convegno Internazionale della "Sezione Studi e ricerche" del Centro Dantesc... more L'ottava edizione del Convegno Internazionale della "Sezione Studi e ricerche" del Centro Dantesco dei Frati Minori Conventuali di Ravenna è dedicata al tema "Poesia e profezia nell'opera di Dante".
Il convegno si svolgerà sabato 11 novembre.
Interverranno: Luca Azzetta, Elisa Brilli, Sergio Cristaldi, Giuseppe Ledda, Nicolò Maldina, Paola Nasti, Anna Rodolfi, Francesco Santi, Heather Webb, Robert Wilson.
To celebrate the seventh centenary of Dante’s death in 2021, AdI plans to devote its 39th monogra... more To celebrate the seventh centenary of Dante’s death in 2021, AdI plans to devote its 39th monographic volume to the connections between Christ’s violent sacrifice—the sine qua non for Everyman’s salvation—and the poetic rendering of the Pilgrim’s journey from Hell to Purgatory and Paradise. To this purpose, the editors of the volume plan to organize several sessions at national and international conventions on the volume’s topic and welcomes paper proposals on the following issues: the torments of the damned in Inferno as a parody of Christ’s salvific sacrifice; the sufferings of the purgatorial souls, who, contrary to those in Hell, shed no blood, as the manifestation of their full acceptance of Christ’s Redemption; and the singing, dancing, and splendor of the blessed in Heaven as the glorification of Christ’s redemptive death. Although not sharing in the torments of the souls in Hell, the Pilgrim actively participates in the purifications of Purgatory and in the joy of the blessed. Dante the Poet plies his poetic craft to describe appropriately the spiritual condition of the souls and the Pilgrim’s journey in the afterlife. Dante the Poet does not eschew—in fact, he embraces it realistically and/or metaphorically—the language of violence needed to narrate the experience of the souls and of the Pilgrim in his threefold journey. Thus, for instance, the two terms which Capaneus employs to describe realistically his own defeat by Jove, folgore and percuotere, are the same that Dante the Poet uses to describe metaphorically the Pilgrim’s vision of the Triune God in Paradise. Also, word(s) and silence(s) characterize the souls’ experiences and the Pilgrim’s voyage. Thus, Dante’s name—which, like Christ’s, is never written or uttered in Inferno—is pronounced once only, by Beatrice, in an accusatory manner in Purgatorio, and never in Paradiso, where his name is known to all the blessed and loved by them, thus becoming synonymous with the Augustinian definition of verbum: “cum amore notitia” (“knowledge with love,” De Trinitate 9: 10.15).
Si rende disponibile in forma integrale il volume degli atti dell'ottavo convegno della Sezione S... more Si rende disponibile in forma integrale il volume degli atti dell'ottavo convegno della Sezione Studi e Ricerche del Centro Dantesco di Ravenna, dedicato a un tema problematico quanto cruciale per la comprensione delle opere di Dante: la loro dimensione profetica. Interventi di Sergio Cristaldi, Anna Rodolfi, Heather Webb, Francesco Santi, Paola Nasti, Luca Azzetta, Nicolò Maldina, Giuseppe Ledda.
The event brings together art historians and literary scholars for a preliminary exploration of t... more The event brings together art historians and literary scholars for a preliminary exploration of the visual cultures that were associated with the poetic tropes of metaphor and simile in early modern Italy. By focusing on the extensive and multifaceted presence of these figures of speech in two foundational pillars of Italian literature, Dante's Divina Commedia and Petrarch's Canzoniere, and on the impact that these writings had on the arts of the following centuries, the workshop aims to shed light on a variety of interrelated issues. Among other questions, it will for instance consider the pictorial potential inherent in the high degree of visuality that is typical of metaphoric expressions, the use of similes grounded in artistic practices, the reification of figurative language in artworks or everyday objects, and the creative ways in which Renaissance artists responded to the suggestions coming from those tropes.
Uploads
Books by Heather Webb
La traduzione dell'opera è stata realizzata grazie al contributo del SEPS - SEGRETARIATO EUROPEO PER LE PUBBLICAZIONI SCIENTIFICHE
Webb focuses on the strategies the Commedia employs to call us to collaborate in the mutual construction of persons. As we engage with the dead that inhabit its pages, we continue to maintain the personhood of those dead. Webb investigates Dante's implicit and explicit appeals to his readers to act in relation to the characters in his otherworlds as if they were persons. Moving through the various encounters of Purgatorio and Paradiso, this study documents the ways in which characters are presented as persone in development or in a state of plenitude through attention to the 'corporeal' modes of smiles, gazes, gestures, and postures. Dante's journey provides a model for the formation and maintenance of a network of personal attachments, attachments that, as constitutive of persona, are not superseded even in the presence of the direct vision of God
This collection – to be issued in three volumes – offers an unprecedented repertoire of vertical readings for the whole poem. As the first volume exemplifies, vertical reading not only articulates unexamined connections between the three canticles but also unlocks engaging new ways to enter into core concerns of the poem. The three volumes thereby provide an indispensable resource for scholars, students and enthusiasts of Dante.
The book is available to read free online at the link in this entry.
Papers by Heather Webb
Malgrado ovvie contraddizioni tra i rispettivi pensieri politici, questo saggio prende in considerazione il legame, sensibile e produttivo, che Hannah Arendt instaura nei confronti di Dante ; muovendo dal brano della Monarchia citato nell’opera di Arendt The Human Condition (1958), si esamineranno le idee della filosofa tedesca a proposito di nozioni quali pluralità, azione e diletto rispetto alla costruzione dantesca dei medesimi concetti, nella prospettiva in cui entrambi i pensatori si adoperano per immaginare cosa possa tenere insieme la comunità umana.
sollecitati dal testo a visualizzare vari stati corporei che, insieme all’ermeneutica dell’intertestualità, suggeriscono modalità di condotta (comportamentale, filosofica, politica, etica, spirituale) in grado di rivisitare le tipologie di postura attinenti al mondo classico. In questi canti dell’Antipurgatorio, possiamo discernere lo sforzo di stabilire un equilibrio tra due poli: da un lato, le virtù classiche della verticalità, del magnanimo, e della stabilità della linea retta; dall’altro, un nuovo schema di modelli cristiani di movimento responsivo verso l’altro.
have taken within the discipline from a chronological perspective. The first
section explores how critical frameworks relating to embodiment, performativity and affect expand premodern Italian studies beyond the limited patriarchal canon and better understand ‘performances’ of the Passion by late medieval and early modern women religious as a form of co-suffering that foregrounds embodiment as discourse and substitute for silenced female voices. This is followed by a detailed reflection on how modern understandings of biopolitics and its technologies, mass demo-graphic mobility, and contemporary discourses on race and gender effect a shift away from binary modes of categorisation and critical understandings of the body to produce alternative forms of knowledge and more complex understandings of the symbolic figuration of the body as an object of national concern. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/XAJSIX5PIFXGCEQJQFQV/full?target=10.1080/00751634.2020.1744866
qui suggerire, invece, che i vari episodi di rossore sono parte di una vasta coreografia di segni somatici che attraversa la Commedia. Il saggio fornisce un’analisi che metta in luce le modalità attraverso le quali uno specifico segnale fisico possa essere finalizzato ad agire sul lettore in
termini emotivi.
La traduzione dell'opera è stata realizzata grazie al contributo del SEPS - SEGRETARIATO EUROPEO PER LE PUBBLICAZIONI SCIENTIFICHE
Webb focuses on the strategies the Commedia employs to call us to collaborate in the mutual construction of persons. As we engage with the dead that inhabit its pages, we continue to maintain the personhood of those dead. Webb investigates Dante's implicit and explicit appeals to his readers to act in relation to the characters in his otherworlds as if they were persons. Moving through the various encounters of Purgatorio and Paradiso, this study documents the ways in which characters are presented as persone in development or in a state of plenitude through attention to the 'corporeal' modes of smiles, gazes, gestures, and postures. Dante's journey provides a model for the formation and maintenance of a network of personal attachments, attachments that, as constitutive of persona, are not superseded even in the presence of the direct vision of God
This collection – to be issued in three volumes – offers an unprecedented repertoire of vertical readings for the whole poem. As the first volume exemplifies, vertical reading not only articulates unexamined connections between the three canticles but also unlocks engaging new ways to enter into core concerns of the poem. The three volumes thereby provide an indispensable resource for scholars, students and enthusiasts of Dante.
The book is available to read free online at the link in this entry.
Malgrado ovvie contraddizioni tra i rispettivi pensieri politici, questo saggio prende in considerazione il legame, sensibile e produttivo, che Hannah Arendt instaura nei confronti di Dante ; muovendo dal brano della Monarchia citato nell’opera di Arendt The Human Condition (1958), si esamineranno le idee della filosofa tedesca a proposito di nozioni quali pluralità, azione e diletto rispetto alla costruzione dantesca dei medesimi concetti, nella prospettiva in cui entrambi i pensatori si adoperano per immaginare cosa possa tenere insieme la comunità umana.
sollecitati dal testo a visualizzare vari stati corporei che, insieme all’ermeneutica dell’intertestualità, suggeriscono modalità di condotta (comportamentale, filosofica, politica, etica, spirituale) in grado di rivisitare le tipologie di postura attinenti al mondo classico. In questi canti dell’Antipurgatorio, possiamo discernere lo sforzo di stabilire un equilibrio tra due poli: da un lato, le virtù classiche della verticalità, del magnanimo, e della stabilità della linea retta; dall’altro, un nuovo schema di modelli cristiani di movimento responsivo verso l’altro.
have taken within the discipline from a chronological perspective. The first
section explores how critical frameworks relating to embodiment, performativity and affect expand premodern Italian studies beyond the limited patriarchal canon and better understand ‘performances’ of the Passion by late medieval and early modern women religious as a form of co-suffering that foregrounds embodiment as discourse and substitute for silenced female voices. This is followed by a detailed reflection on how modern understandings of biopolitics and its technologies, mass demo-graphic mobility, and contemporary discourses on race and gender effect a shift away from binary modes of categorisation and critical understandings of the body to produce alternative forms of knowledge and more complex understandings of the symbolic figuration of the body as an object of national concern. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/XAJSIX5PIFXGCEQJQFQV/full?target=10.1080/00751634.2020.1744866
qui suggerire, invece, che i vari episodi di rossore sono parte di una vasta coreografia di segni somatici che attraversa la Commedia. Il saggio fornisce un’analisi che metta in luce le modalità attraverso le quali uno specifico segnale fisico possa essere finalizzato ad agire sul lettore in
termini emotivi.
La lezione è tenuta da Heather Webb, professoressa di Letteratura italiana alla University of Cambridge. Introduce Paolo Di Stefano, giornalista del Corriere della Sera. Letture di Valeria Perdonò de Il Menu della Poesia.
L'incontro è stato realizzato il 12 marzo con il contributo di Intesa Sanpaolo e con il patrocinio del Comitato Nazionale per la celebrazione dei 700 anni dalla morte di Dante Alighieri.
La proposta di una giornata dedicata al poeta è nata nei mesi scorsi sulle pagine del Corriere della Sera.
The conference aims to promote a fruitful dialogue on the perception and the representation of emotions between scholars working across different periods and different media. It will investigate how emotional repertoires and vocabularies for identifying affects and sensations evolved and changed in Italian language, literature, and the visual arts, from medieval to contemporary production. In order to further enrich the discussion, the conference will include comparative sessions with colleagues working on other languages and literatures, thus offering a comprehensive overview of ‘Italian’ thought before, after, and beyond the concretization of national boundaries.
The conference is organised by Heather Webb, Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė, Nicolò Crisafi, Alessia Carrai, Giulia Boitani, George Rayson, and Orsolya Petocz.
placing depictions of posture in Dante’s work within medieval cultural contexts;
analysis of postures in manuscript illuminations and other selected illustrations, sculptures, and filmic versions of the Comedy;
study of the embodiment of postures through staging selected episodes and consequent analysis by means of acting theory, kinesis, and concepts derived from recent work in neuroscience.
The conference focused on two principal questions:
1. By means of conceptual tools from neuroscience, can we put modes of reading posture that range from performance to illustration to adaptation to criticism (to conversion – Dante’s endgame) into productive dialogue?
2. How does the work of visualising postures - as described, analysed, illustrated, or embodied - enable new approaches to intersubjectivity, reception, and interpretation?
Chair: Manuele Gragnolati (Somerville College, Oxford)
This panel will explore the intersections of physicality, materiality and strategies of representation in the works of Dante. From the rhetorical garments in the Vita Nova, via the rhetorics of physical bodies and their penances in Purgatorio, to the corporeality of faces and forms of presence in the Paradiso, the speakers will explore the manners in which the material and the matter of the text interact.
Beginning with the pre-Commedia works, David Bowe’s paper, ‘Writing as bodies as writing’, will explore the notion that garments, written words, and bodies exist in a creative tension fundamental to Dantean textuality. In the Vita nova the ‘sacrificial’ red of Beatrice’s garments (Cervigni) intersects with the red ink of rubrication and ordinatio in the libello. This, in turn activates the images of poetic writing as dressing the (female) body of intendimento in VN XXV in the specific context of Dante’s textual and poetic practice. By examining these intersections this paper will shed light on the sort of material concern for the body as text which later resurface in Dante’s Convivio and Commedia.
Nicolò Crisafi’s paper, ‘Spiritual fires and literal bodies: the rhetorics of corporal punishment’, will then proceed to Purgatorio to chart the relationship between secular rhetorics of corporal punishment and the Commedia’s own rhetorical treatment of the bodies of sinners in Dante’s otherworld. The rhetorics of corporal punishment in medieval secular justice often charged literal bodies with a symbolic meaning. The Commedia responds to these rhetorics of corporal punishment and stages its own. Focussing largely on Dante’s treatment of sexual sinners, this paper will look at the interplay between the literal and the metaphorical when it comes to the body and its otherworldly punishments, by providing a close reading of the rhetorical figures at play in Dante’s poetic text.
Ascending to the third realm of Dante’s afterlife, Heather Webb’s paper, ‘On the Materiality of the Face in Dante’s Paradiso’ begins from the assertion that faces in Paradiso do what bodies do in Inferno and Purgatorio. As David Ruzicka points out, we have long assumed that all those references to Beatrice's eyes and mouth mean that she is decorporealised. But bodies remain crucial in Paradiso; if, as Robin Kirkpatrick suggests, bodies in Purgatorio are ‘all face’, then we might argue that faces in Paradiso are bodies. This paper focusses on the materiality of the Veronica, the physicality of Beatrice’s face, and modes of personal presence in Paradiso.
Spanning a range of Dante’s works, this panel will offer a broad overview of the textual representations of physical bodies and material cultures.
Registration fee £2 [members of Pembroke College Cambridge will be refunded at the entrance]; the keynote is free to attend and pre–registration is not required.
The event is sponsored by Pembroke College; the Keith Sykes Research Fund; and CIRN (Cambridge Italian Research Network)
--
This two-day symposium brings together international experts working at the crossroads of disciplines including Philosophy, Law, Art History and Literature, to provide an assessment of the use and regulation of languages of injury in late medieval Italy (e.g. insults, offensive paintings, injurious poems, satirical writing, beffe, tenzoni, libelli famosi, and others). Particular attention will be paid to moral doctrines (e.g. the sins of the tongue), legal theories and practices connected to non-physical violence in Italian communes and city states (e.g. jurisdiction on the crimes of insult and of lèse-majesté, pitture infamanti, libel writs, and others). The symposium will include presentations on art and social control, censorship, gender and insults, contested images, and defamation laws.
PROGRAMME
30th April 2018
Old Library, Pembroke College, Cambridge
2 p.m. Refreshments and registration
2.30 p.m. Opening remarks
3 p.m. First Panel : Legal Perspectives, chaired by Trevor Dean (Professor of Social History, University of Roehampton)
* Hannah Skoda (Professor of History, University of Oxford), 'Languages of Injury in Late Medieval Universities'
* Giuliano Milani (Professor d’Histoire du Moyen Âge, Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée), 'Impotenti, debitori, ladroni e usurai. Fonti giudiziarie e fonti letterarie a confronto'
* Lorenzo Caravaggi (DPhil History Candidate, Balliol College, University of Oxford), 'Rituals of Affront in the City and Contado: an Interpersonal Perspective (late XIII century)'
4.30 p.m. Coffee Break
5 p.m. KEYNOTE ADDRESS
* Justin Steinberg (Professor of Italian Literature, University of Chicago), 'The Artist and the Police: Decameron 8.3’
1st May 2018
Old Library, Pembroke College, Cambridge
9 a.m. Coffee and biscuits
9.30 a.m. Second Panel : Visual Perspectives, chaired by Irene Galandra Cooper (Research Associate, ERC-funded project Genius Before Romanticism: Ingenuity in Early Modern Art and Science, CRASSH, University of Cambridge)
* Andrew Chen (Fellow, John’s College, University of Cambridge), 'Staging Enemies in Text and Image: Comforting Rituals in Emilia'
* Felix Jäger (Doctoral Assistant, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut), 'The Silence of the Sirens: Infamy and Political Reason in the Armor of the Negroli’
* Melissa Vise (Somsen Fellow, IRH, University of Wisconsin), 'Crimes Against Art: Blasphemy in Fourteenth-Century Bologna'
11 a.m. Coffee Break
11.15 a.m. Third Panel : Literary Perspectives, chaired by Heather Webb (Reader in Medieval Italian Literature and Culture, University of Cambridge)
* Maggie Fritz-Morkin (Assistant Professor of Italian, The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), '"Totum tribunal inplevit": Petrarch, Cicero, and the Politics of Public Vomiting'
* Cécile Le Lay (Maître de conférences de Langue et Littérature italiennes, Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3), 'Funzione giuridica della maledizione: le ultime parole di Beatrice (Paradiso XXX, 139-148)'
* Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja (Keith Sykes Fellow, Pembroke College, University of Cambridge), ‘"Poesia Giocosa" in Late Medieval Tuscany: Law and Art'
For more info: Dr Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja, ac654@cam.ac.uk
Il convegno si svolgerà sabato 11 novembre.
Interverranno: Luca Azzetta, Elisa Brilli, Sergio Cristaldi, Giuseppe Ledda, Nicolò Maldina, Paola Nasti, Anna Rodolfi, Francesco Santi, Heather Webb, Robert Wilson.
Interventi di Sergio Cristaldi, Anna Rodolfi, Heather Webb, Francesco Santi, Paola Nasti, Luca Azzetta, Nicolò Maldina, Giuseppe Ledda.