Fra Ovidio e Brunetto, nel fiume del tempo

This article attempts to show how Dante Alighieri, in defining the image of humankind as inspired by values of innocence and harmony in an earthly paradise, draws a condition of defective beatitude just before a burst of even superior joy. So in the aim of outlining a beatitudo huius vitae still valid for a Christian Eden, the poet appeals to the text of Ovid’s Fasti through which in many occurrences he is building a harmonic image of human living that, in the shadow of forebears’ sin, only a future intervention of Grace will dispose for Dante’s words. Through exact allusive quotations, Dante opposes to the absolute time of Eden the idea of an imperfect time, tied to the pattern of an all-human knowledge, which Dante himself connected to the teaching and character of Brunetto Latini.

Textual Authority in the Vita Nova’s Nineteenth-Century Editions

This article focuses on the nineteenth-century print circulation of Dante’s Vita Nova (1292–94) and especially on the response in print media to the tension between new critical approaches to text editing, on the one hand, and editors’ dependence on the text’s complex history on the other. At the center of this discussion is one of the thorniest aspects of the Vita Nova’s text: the divisions (technical prose of a scholastic nature in which Dante explains the formal structure of his poems). Over the centuries, Dante’s authority over his own text was brought into question on account of the inclusion in the literary text of what readers and editors considered to be commentary. Even though in the second half of the nineteenth century the editors began recognizing the divisions’ rightful place within the libello’s text, they continued—operating within the centuries-long tradition that did not consider them “text” but rather “gloss”—to engage in efforts to differentiate them from the rest of the text in order to point out their different textual nature.

Text and Document in Dante’s Vita nova

This article considers the importance of material philological features of the early manuscripts of Dante’s Vita nova for the work’s critical reception. Over the centuries, editors (most notably Giovanni Boccaccio) have recast textual meaning in the work mainly by marginalizing the poet’s glosses and by reformatting the poems. Attention to the material features of the earliest extant manuscript of the Vita nova (MS Martelli 12) with respect to later copies, however, prompts us to consider the creative interplay between Dante’s prosimetrum and the material features of the manuscript. To interpret a text critically is to acknowledge and to examine also how a manuscript or print edition orients textual interpretation. The editorial history of the Vita nova teaches us about the cultural processes and discourses of literary culture and about Italian literary history.

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.

Guido da Montefeltro and the Tyrants of Romagna in Inferno 27

This article uses historical scholarship on Guido da Montefeltro and medieval Romagna (Franceschini and Vasina) alongside Ovid’s Metamorphosis and the Serventese del 1277 to contextualize the question asked by the soul of Guido (about peace or war in Romagna) and the catalog of tyrants provided by the pilgrim in Inferno 27. It examines how Dante held Guido accountable for the intensification of warfare in Romagna and made an argument for the responsibility of military strategists in the consolidation of urban signorie. Dante’s assessment coincides with current historiography and shows his concerns about the formation of regional states. A recontextualization of Guido’s question reveals the targeted nature of the pilgrim’s response, in which the pilgrim presents Guido with the triumph of his enemies.

Cultural Mediations and Material Contexts of Dante’s Commedia: The Case of Beinecke MS 428

The textual and cultural interpretations related to the material construction of the first manuscript copies of Dante’s Commedia play a crucial role in shaping its transmission and inevitably also the text that we read today. The processes of preparation and the material structures of these codices, in fact, often reflect more the culture in which they were created than the culture of the original work itself. Starting from a reflection about issues of cultural mediations and material contexts of the early diffusion of Dante’s Commedia, this article introduces a new case study: fourteenth-century manuscript Beinecke Library MS 428, a deluxe copy commissioned by the Bini family.

Painting (and Writing) over Dante

With the advent of studies in the area of mise-en-page and the increased interest in the relationships among text, image, and material structures in medieval manuscripts, the inherent problems of interpretation and “intentionality” have often been concentrated in critics’ assignment of meaning and cultural “readings” to medieval illuminators. Yet numerous sources, especially the instructions to illuminators that remain still visible in unfinished manuscripts, confirm that methods of work in the illustrating of medieval texts were guided by very different criteria than interpretation. Instead, the material and mechanical realities of reproducing medieval texts, among them Dante’s Commedia, were often subject more to production efficiency, cost effectiveness, taste, and scribal and cultural norms. Examining the instructions to the illuminator of an unfinished copy of a uniquely edited Veneto copy of the Commedia, initially produced in the 1340s (Codex Italicus 1 of the University Library and Archives of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest), this essay investigates the systems and constructions imposed on the Commedia by a new scribal culture in the reproduction and “visual glossing” of the poem.

Mapping the Knowledge of Dante Commentaries in the Digital Context: A Web Ontology Approach

With digital repositories and databases available since the 1990s, Dante scholarship has always been at the forefront of the digital humanities and the digitization of medieval texts and manuscripts. However, the amount of information available about such aspects is imposing, and its location subject to the extreme dispersion of traditional scholarly publications: commentaries first but also academic journals, miscellanies, and so forth. Rather than being based on traditional word searches, a true advancement of knowledge needs to overcome the rigidity of text-based queries (and in-line markup embedded in text). Such paramount evolution is now made possible by the Semantic Web, an extension of the current web by description standards that help machines to understand and connect the information already available on the web. To achieve this, the latter is mapped using formal description and classification patterns, called ontologies. Ontologies are a key factor in managing meaningful search/data extraction, publishing relevant results on the web, search existing web resources, and offering answers to more sophisticated queries. Due to its vastness and complexity, Dante scholarship has calls for an ontology-based mapping, and specific tools have been designed to express the most difficult and articulate aspects of Dante’s literary production, such as its use of biblical, classical, and medieval sources. This paper aims to introduce the aims and scope of a new digital library of Dante commentaries, built according to the aforementioned standards and aiming to refine and extend the ontologies developed for Dante’s minor works to the more complex world of the Commedia.

Memorie letterarie nel Convivio di Dante

Focusing on book 4 of Dante’s Convivio (The Banquet), this article analyzes the complexity of the unfinished poetic and philosophical treatise that the poet wrote at the beginning of his exile. The relevance of the Convivio within Dante’s overall production can be attributed to the presence of numerous themes dear to the poet, which sometimes emerge only in nuce and sometimes already in a mature form in the treatise. Nonetheless, Dante took many of these subjects and linguistic experimentations and elaborated on them in his later works. In particular, book 4 functions as a precedent for some of the choices, themes, and styles subsequently developed in the Commedia. However, when the inspiration for the Convivio as a vehicle for both poetic and prose production is supplanted by the larger and even more ambitious project of his Commedia, Dante abandoned the treatise and left its linguistic mission unfinished.