This book presents the proceedings of the fifth and final meeting of the International Dante Seminar. It addresses four major topics of present-day Dante studies: Dante as a lyric poet; Dante as an ethical poet; Dante and the Eclogues; and Dante in nineteenth-century Britain.

In the past seven centuries Dante has become world renowned, with his works translated into multiple languages and read by people of all ages and cultural backgrounds. This volume brings together interdisciplinary essays by leading, international scholars to provide a comprehensive account of the historical, cultural and intellectual context in which Dante lived and worked: from the economic, social and political scene to the feel of daily life; from education and religion to the administration of justice; from medicine to philosophy and science; from classical antiquity to popular culture; and from the dramatic transformation of urban spaces to the explosion of visual arts and music. This book, while locating Dante in relation to each of these topics, offers readers a clear and reliable idea of what life was like for Dante as an outstanding poet and intellectual in the Italy of the late Middle Ages.

This book provides a comprehensive account of the culture of modern Italy. Specially-commissioned essays by leading specialists focus on a wide range of political, historical and cultural questions. The volume provides information and analysis on such topics as regionalism, language, social and political cultures, the Church, feminism, organized crime, literature, art, the mass media, and music. Each essay contains suggestions for further reading on the topics covered. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture is an invaluable source of materials for courses on all aspects of modern Italy.

This newly commissioned volume presents a focused overview of Dante's masterpiece, the Commedia, offering readers of today wide-ranging insights into the poem and its core features. Leading scholars discuss matters of structure, narrative, language and style, characterization, doctrine, and politics, in chapters that make their own contributions to Dante criticism by raising problems and questions that call for renewed attention, while investigating contextual concerns as well as the current state of criticism about the poem. The Commedia is also placed in a variety of cultural and historical contexts through accounts of the poem's transmission and reception that explore both its contemporary influence and its continuing legacy today. With its accessible approach, its unstinting focus on the poem and its attention to matters that have not always received adequate critical assessment, this volume will be of value to all students and scholars of Dante's great poem.

This newly commissioned volume presents a focused overview of Dante's masterpiece, the Commedia, offering readers of today wide-ranging insights into the poem and its core features. Leading scholars discuss matters of structure, narrative, language and style, characterization, doctrine, and politics, in chapters that make their own contributions to Dante criticism by raising problems and questions that call for renewed attention, while investigating contextual concerns as well as the current state of criticism about the poem. The Commedia is also placed in a variety of cultural and historical contexts through accounts of the poem's transmission and reception that explore both its contemporary influence and its continuing legacy today. With its accessible approach, its unstinting focus on the poem and its attention to matters that have not always received adequate critical assessment, this volume will be of value to all students and scholars of Dante's great poem.

This book provides a comprehensive account of the culture of modern Italy. Specially-commissioned essays by leading specialists focus on a wide range of political, historical and cultural questions. The volume provides information and analysis on such topics as regionalism, language, social and political cultures, the Church, feminism, organized crime, literature, art, the mass media, and music. Each essay contains suggestions for further reading on the topics covered. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture is an invaluable source of materials for courses on all aspects of modern Italy.

Critical introductions to fifteen contemporary novelists whose work is of international calibre. Central to most is a preoccupation with the relationship between writing and the world. The authors deal with a vast range of topics and periods - including present-day events, the past, and the problems faced by women and by society as a whole - but nearly all lookat how such matters might be tackled in literature.

This original volume proposes a novel way of reading Dante’s Vita nova, exemplified in a rich diversity of scholarly approaches to the text. This groundbreaking volume represents the fruit of a two-year-long series of international seminars aimed at developing a fresh way of reading Dante’s Vita nova. By analyzing each of its forty-two chapters individually, focus is concentrated on the Vita nova in its textual and historical context rather than on its relationship to the Divine Comedy. This decoupling has freed the contributors to draw attention to various important literary features of the text, including its rich and complex polysemy, as well as its structural fluidity. The volume likewise offers insights into Dante’s social environment, his relationships with other poets, and Dante’s evolving vision of his poetry’s scope. Using a variety of critical methodologies and hermeneutical approaches, this volume offers scholars an opportunity to reread the Vita nova in a renewed context and from a diversity of literary, cultural, and ideological perspectives. Contributors: Zygmunt G. Barański, Heather Webb, Claire E. Honess, Brian F. Richardson, Ruth Chester, Federica Pich, Matthew Treherne, Catherine Keen, Jennifer Rushworth, Daragh O’Connell, Sophie V. Fuller, Giulia Gaimari, Emily Kate Price, Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, Francesca Southerden, Rebecca Bowen, Nicolò Crisafi, Lachlan Hughes, Franco Costantini, David Bowe, Tristan Kay, Filippo Gianferrari, Simon Gilson, Rebekah Locke, Luca Lombardo, Peter Dent, George Ferzoco, Paola Nasti, Rebecca Bowen, Marco Grimaldi, David G. Lummus, Helena Phillips-Robins, Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė, Alessia Carrai, Ryan Pepin, Valentina Mele, Katherine Powlesland, Simon Gilson, Federica Coluzzi, K. P. Clarke, Nicolò Maldina, Theodore J. Cachey Jr., Chiara Sbordoni, Lorenzo Dell’Oso, and Anne C. Leone.

Prominent Dante scholars from the United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom contribute original essays to the first critical companion in English to Dante's "other works." Rather than speak of Dante's "minor works," according to a tradition of Dante scholarship going back at least to the eighteenth century, this volume puts forward the designation "other works" both in light of their enhanced status and as part of a general effort to reaffirm their value as autonomous works. Indeed, had Dante never written the Commedia, he would still be considered the most important writer of the late Middle Ages for the originality and inventiveness of the other works he wrote besides his monumental poem, including the Rime, the Fiore, the Detto d'amore, the Vita nova, the Epistles, the Convivio, the De vulgari eloquentia, the Monarchia, the Egloge, and the Questio de aqua et terra. Each contributor to this volume addresses one of the "other works" by presenting the principal interpretative trends and questions relating to the text, and by focusing on aspects of particular interest. Two essays on the relationship between the "other works" and the issues of philosophy and theology are included. Dante's "Other Works" will interest Dantisti, medievalists, and literary scholars at every stage of their career. Contributors: Manuele Gragnolati, Christopher Kleinhenz, Zygmunt G. Baranski, Claire E. Honess, Simon Gilson, Mirko Tavoni, Paola Nasti, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., David G. Lummus, Luca Bianchi, and Vittorio Montemaggi.

In the past seven centuries Dante has become world renowned, with his works translated into multiple languages and read by people of all ages and cultural backgrounds. This volume brings together interdisciplinary essays by leading, international scholars to provide a comprehensive account of the historical, cultural and intellectual context in which Dante lived and worked: from the economic, social and political scene to the feel of daily life; from education and religion to the administration of justice; from medicine to philosophy and science; from classical antiquity to popular culture; and from the dramatic transformation of urban spaces to the explosion of visual arts and music. This book, while locating Dante in relation to each of these topics, offers readers a clear and reliable idea of what life was like for Dante as an outstanding poet and intellectual in the Italy of the late Middle Ages.

This original volume proposes a novel way of reading Dante’s Vita nova, exemplified in a rich diversity of scholarly approaches to the text. This groundbreaking volume represents the fruit of a two-year-long series of international seminars aimed at developing a fresh way of reading Dante’s Vita nova. By analyzing each of its forty-two chapters individually, focus is concentrated on the Vita nova in its textual and historical context rather than on its relationship to the Divine Comedy. This decoupling has freed the contributors to draw attention to various important literary features of the text, including its rich and complex polysemy, as well as its structural fluidity. The volume likewise offers insights into Dante’s social environment, his relationships with other poets, and Dante’s evolving vision of his poetry’s scope. Using a variety of critical methodologies and hermeneutical approaches, this volume offers scholars an opportunity to reread the Vita nova in a renewed context and from a diversity of literary, cultural, and ideological perspectives. Contributors: Zygmunt G. Barański, Heather Webb, Claire E. Honess, Brian F. Richardson, Ruth Chester, Federica Pich, Matthew Treherne, Catherine Keen, Jennifer Rushworth, Daragh O’Connell, Sophie V. Fuller, Giulia Gaimari, Emily Kate Price, Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, Francesca Southerden, Rebecca Bowen, Nicolò Crisafi, Lachlan Hughes, Franco Costantini, David Bowe, Tristan Kay, Filippo Gianferrari, Simon Gilson, Rebekah Locke, Luca Lombardo, Peter Dent, George Ferzoco, Paola Nasti, Rebecca Bowen, Marco Grimaldi, David G. Lummus, Helena Phillips-Robins, Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė, Alessia Carrai, Ryan Pepin, Valentina Mele, Katherine Powlesland, Simon Gilson, Federica Coluzzi, K. P. Clarke, Nicolò Maldina, Theodore J. Cachey Jr., Chiara Sbordoni, Lorenzo Dell’Oso, and Anne C. Leone.

Since the beginnings of Italian vernacular literature, the nature of the relationship between Francesco Petrarch and his predecessor Dante Alighieri has remained an open and endlessly fascinating question of both literary and cultural history. In this volume nine leading scholars of Italian medieval literature and culture address this question involving the two foundational figures of Italian literature. The authors examine Petrarch's contentious and dismissive attitude toward the literary authority of his illustrious predecessor; the dramatic shift in theological and philosophical context that occurs from Dante to Petrarch; and their respective contributions as initiators of modern literary traditions in the vernacular. Petrarch's substantive ideological dissent from Dante clearly emerges, a dissent that casts in high relief the poets' radically divergent views of the relation between the human and the divine and of humans' capacity to bridge that gap. Contributors: Albert Russell Ascoli, Zygmunt G. Baranski, Teodolinda Barolini, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., Ronald L. Martinez, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Christian Moevs, Justin Steinberg, and Sara Sturm-Maddox.

Prominent Dante scholars from the United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom contribute original essays to the first critical companion in English to Dante’s “other works.” Rather than speak of Dante’s “minor works,” according to a tradition of Dante scholarship going back at least to the eighteenth century, this volume puts forward the designation “other works” both in light of their enhanced status and as part of a general effort to reaffirm their value as autonomous works. Indeed, had Dante never written the Commedia, he would still be considered the most important writer of the late Middle Ages for the originality and inventiveness of the other works he wrote besides his monumental poem, including the Rime, the Fiore, the Detto d’amore, the Vita nova, the Epistles, the Convivio, the De vulgari eloquentia, the Monarchia, the Egloge, and the Questio de aqua et terra. Each contributor to this volume addresses one of the “other works” by presenting the principal interpretative trends and questions relating to the text, and by focusing on aspects of particular interest. Two essays on the relationship between the “other works” and the issues of philosophy and theology are included. Dante’s “Other Works” will interest Dantisti, medievalists, and literary scholars at every stage of their career. Contributors: Manuele Gragnolati, Christopher Kleinhenz, Zygmunt G. Barański, Claire E. Honess, Simon Gilson, Mirko Tavoni, Paola Nasti, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., David G. Lummus, Luca Bianchi, and Vittorio Montemaggi.

Since the beginnings of Italian vernacular literature, the nature of the relationship between Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) and his predecessor Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) has remained an open and endlessly fascinating question of both literary and cultural history. In this volume nine leading scholars of Italian medieval literature and culture address this question involving the two foundational figures of Italian literature.Through their collective reexamination of the question of who and what came between Petrarch and Dante in ideological, historiographical, and rhetorical terms, the authors explore the emergence of an anti-Dantean polemic in Petrarch's work. That stance has largely escaped scrutiny, thanks to a critical tradition that tends to minimize any suggestion of rivalry or incompatibility between them. The authors examine Petrarch's contentious and dismissive attitude toward the literary authority of his illustrious predecessor; the dramatic shift in theological and philosophical context that occurs from Dante to Petrarch; and their respective contributions as initiators of modern literary traditions in the vernacular. Petrarch's substantive ideological dissent from Dante clearly emerges, a dissent that casts in high relief the poets' radically divergent views of the relation between the human and the divine and of humans' capacity to bridge that gap. "An absolute A-list of contributors here considers all that falls, all forms of regard and disregard, between two of the great poets and cultural legislators of the western world. Timely, original, and highly recommended." --David Wallace, Judith Rodin Professor, University of Pennsylvania "A collection of sparkling essays exploring Petrarch's efforts to conceal his enormous debt to Dante while seeking to replace Dante's authority with his own. I found it hard to stop reading." --Ronald Witt, Duke University ""Petrarch and Dante" is a magnificent volume of uniformly superb essays. Instead of surveying Petrarch's variety or his influence upon later culture, the authors have ingeniously focused on shifting relationships with the poet's most formidable Italian predecessor, Dante; in so doing, they have produced scholarship that teases out the issues with great subtlety and nuance." --William J. Kennedy, Cornell University

This book presents the proceedings of the fifth meeting of the International Dante Seminar. As with previous volumes, the proceedings also include a carefully edited account of the extensive discussions which followed the presentations. The papers, given by some of the leading international scholars of the poet - from Italy, the UK and the USA - address four major topics of particular concern to present-day Dante studies: Dante as a lyric poet; Dante as an ethical poet; Dante and the Eclogues; and Dante in nineteenth-century Britain. These topics reflect both areas which are currently the subject of heated critical debate (several editions of the lyric poems are in preparation, and the ethical dimension of Dantes works is very much under discussion) and areas which are long overdue a reassessment (Dantes remarkable revival of Latin pastoral poetry, and the extraordinary British contribution to Dante studies in the nineteenth century). As this set of conference proceedings makes clear, in Dante and in his legacy, ethics and poetry are inseparable. The contributors include Paola Allegretti, Michael Caesar, Paolo Falzone, Manuele Gragnolati, Claudio Giunta, Claire Honess, Robin Kirkpatrick, John Lindon, Lino Pertile, Justin Steinberg, Claudia Villa, and Diego Zancani.

The second volume in the original William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante Studies, The Fiore in Context: Dante, France, Tuscany is the record of a milestone in the study of the Fiore, and perhaps in Dante studies: the international conference on the Fiore held at St. John's College, Cambridge, in September 1994. The conference, attended by most of the world's leading experts on the Fiore, examined many aspects of the poem, including textual questions, its cultural context, and its relations with the Roman de la Rose and the Comedy. Above all it constituted, in the judgment of the participants themselves, the most important discussion of the poem's attribution to Dante since Contini's pronouncement of the question in 1965. The published proceedings reproduce both the questionnaire that framed the conference, in which each participant weighs all the principal arguments for and against attributing the Fiore to Dante, as well as the lively discussion that followed each paper.