Dante's Vita Nuova and the New Testament

Modelling knowledge as revelation and theology as poetry, this powerful new reading of the Vita nuova not only challenges Dante scholars to reconsider the book's speculative emphases but also offers the general reader an accessible yet penetrating exploration of some of the Western tradition's most far-reaching ideas surrounding love and knowledge. Dante's 'little book', included in full here in an original parallel translation, captures in its first emergence the same revolutionary ferment that would later become manifest both in the larger oeuvre of this great European writer and in the literature of the entire Western canon. William Franke demonstrates how Dante's youthful poetic autobiography disrupts sectarian thinking and reconciles the seeming contraries of divine revelation and human invention, while also providing the means for understanding religious revelation in the Bible. Ultimately, this revolutionary unification of Scripture and poetry shows the intimate working of love at the source of inspired knowing.

“accipiendo vel compilando ab aliis”: De vulgari eloquentia 1.1. Reading Dante with Dante: A contribution to Dante’s theory of language

This article analyzes Dante’s theory of language and considers at first a few fragments of Dante’s Latin treatise on the vernacular, reading them in light of their ancient-medieval contexts. This reading allows part-modification of the critical discourse about Dante’s theory of language. The article argues that Dante’s discussion did not start in the De vulgari eloquentia, as is commonly assumed, but was at first introduced in the Vita nuova. Recent studies show that the theme of laude in the Vita nuova includes a linguistic theory and a discourse on the deep structures of language. Focussing on specific words, considering them in light of the ancient-medieval background, the article organizes a transverse reading that considers layers of Dante’s discourse on language from the Vita nuova to the Commedia not yet explored and evaluated.

Is Dante a pilgrim? Pilgrimage, material culture, and modern Dante criticism

The phrase “Dante the pilgrim” has become commonplace within scholarship on the Commedia as a way to refer to the character within the text who travels the Christian afterlife, as distinct from “Dante the poet,” the voice which narrates the poem. Yet, despite such prevalence, the validity of the term “pilgrim” goes rather unquestioned by scholars. This study aims to challenge the label through Dante’s own definition of a peregrino in the Vita nuova as “chiunque è fuori de la sua patria” (XL.6), a definition that shows a more nuanced understanding of the term than modern scholarship acknowledges. Instead, by tracing out the legacy of the term “Dante the pilgrim” as emerging from late 19th-century criticism such as Francesco de Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana, this article will show that the typical understanding of pilgrim ignores a central dimension of Dante’s own definition: a sense of physical displacement. For Dante, pilgrimage becomes constitutive of the virtual world in the poem, drawing off of material practices of travel to inform the physical experiences of the protagonist. This literal level, signified by an embodied protagonist in similar ways as pilgrims to holy sites interacted with those places, is fundamental for interpreting the larger theological truths Dante conveys, even in minute details such as kicking rocks in Inferno 12.

A STUDY OF THEMES AND AESTHETICS IN ELUCIDATING LOVE AS A THEME IN DANTE ALIGHIERI'S VITA NUOVA.

Dante was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral st philosopher and political thinker. He was born on May 21 and he is best known for his monumental epic poem; La Divina Comedia (The Divine Comedy). Although the Divine Comedy is very well-known literary piece, this often overlooks the other works he has done as well. He is seen as the father of modern Italian, and his works have ourished even after his death in 1321. How did Dante's Vita Nuova change the perception of romance and love in the time of the 13th century; furthermore, how did it change the belief of people view literary works of romance in the modern era?

Dante and Cecco d’Ascoli on Love and Compulsion: The Epistle to Cino, Io sono stato, the Third Heaven

Arguing that Dante ultimately views compulsion in the erotic sphere as part and parcel of compulsion in the properly philosophical sphere, aka determinism, this article traces Dante’s variable thinking on this core issue as he veers from a moralistic view in the Vita Nuova to a more “scientific” view in the third epistle and again to a moralistic view in the Commedia (whose circle of lust boasts, in the wind that buffets the lustful, an example of compulsion borrowed from Nicomachean Ethics 3.1). The philosopher and astrologer Cecco d’Ascoli is a contemporary witness to the philosophical importance of these issues: in his philosophical poem Acerba, Cecco attacks Dante’s love poetry for harboring deterministic belief.