2022 Global Dante Project of New York
Bionotes
Jason Aleksander is Professor of Philosophy at San José State University. The majority of his research focuses on Dante’s Divine Comedy and various topics in the intersections between medieval and Renaissance philosophy, theology, literature, and the natural sciences. He is a co-editor of the Nicholas of Cusa and Times of Transition (Brill, 2018) and the forthcoming volume, Mystical Theology and Renaissance Platonism in the Time of Cusanus. In the area of Dante studies, Jason's current book project is titled Redefining Faith in the Divine Comedy: Theology, Ethics, and the Poetics of Orthopraxis.
Roberto Antonelli e’ Presidente dell'Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Professore emerito di Filologia romanza nell'Università di Roma "Sapienza". Ha studiato origini e sviluppo delle letterature romanze dal Medio Evo all'età contemporanea. Ha studiato il ruolo della Filologia romanza e della critica letteraria nella cultura del Novecento, privilegiando lo studio del rapporto tradizione-innovazione e il ruolo degli intellettuali europei nella società medievale e moderna, fino al XX secolo, con speciale riguardo ai secoli XIII-XIV, alla Scuola poetica siciliana e a Dante e Petrarca. Ha pubblicato, fra libri e saggi, più di 200 lavori, fra cui il primo commento integrale al fondatore della lirica italiana, Giacomo da Lentini (2008), e il Repertorio metrico della Scuola poetica siciliana (1984). Ha studiato lo sviluppo dell'idea di "Europa" dall'Antichità all'età contemporanea, promuovendo e coordinando ricerche e pubblicazioni sul canone letterario europeo e sul lessico europeo delle emozioni. Ha introdotto nuove prospettive storico-culturali e critiche negli studi metrici e nella critica del testo promuovendo per primo la “Filologia materiale” e la «Filologia del Lettore».
Ha curato e introdotto la traduzione italiana di E. R. Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, Firenze 1992; nuova edizione Roma 2022.
Ha pubblicato, in collaborazione con Maria Serena Sapegno, due storie della letteratura italiana (L’europa degli scrittori, 2008, in 7 voll. e Il senso e le forme, 2011, in 5 voll.).
Ha ideato e organizzato, con L. Mainini e M. Cecconi, la mostra "I libri che hanno fatto l'Europa" dell' Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei-Biblioteca Corsiniana. Ha organizzato e curato per l'Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, la mostra "Leonardo a Roma. Influenze ed eredità".Ha ideato e curato vari convegni internazionali e vari Atti di Convegni Lincei.Ha fondato e diretto la rivista «Critica del testo» dell'Università di Roma e dirige «Studj romanzi» e la collana "Biblioteca di Studj romanzi".
Prima di essere eletto Presidente dell'Accademia dei Lincei, ha fondato e diretto il Dipartimento di Studi europei, la Facoltà di Scienze umanistiche e l'Ateneo delle Scienze umane, delle Arti e dell'Ambiente dell'Università di Roma "Sapienza". È Presidente della Fondazione Primoli, della Società Filologica Romana ed è stato Presidente della Société de Linguistique Romane per il triennio 2016-2019. Invitato come Visiting Professor e conferenziere nelle principali Università del mondo, è stato insignito del Premio «Honoré Chavée» dell'Institut de France (1986). Distinguished Chair Fulbright presso l’Università di Chicago (2008-2009), è socio straniero dell'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres dell'Institut de France. Ha appena pubblicato il libro Dante poeta-giudice del mondo terreno e curato le mostre "La biblioteca di Dante" e "La ricezione della Commedia dai manoscritti ai media", con i relativi cataloghi.
Maria Luisa Ardizzone is Professor of Italian Literature at New York University, NY.
Ardizzone’s publications include: The Young Dante: Archetypes of his Intellectual Biography, 2022; Reading as the Angels Read. Speculation and Politics in Dante’ s Banquet, 2016; Dante: il paradigma intellettuale. Un’inventio degli anni fiorentini, 2011; Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages, 2002; Italian translation, 2006; Ezra Pound, Machine Art and Other Writings. The Lost Thought of the Italian Years, 1996; German Translation, 2005; Polish Translation, 2003; Ezra Pound e la scienza. Scritti inediti o rari, 1987. Ardizzone’s in progress works include a book on Dante’s Commedia.
Teodolinda Barolini is Lorenzo Da Ponte Professor of Italian, Columbia University. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Medieval Academy of America. She was fifteenth President of the Dante Society of America. Barolini is the author of Dante’s Poets (1984; Italian trans. 1993), The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (1992; Italian trans. 2003), Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture (2006; Italian trans. 2012), and Dante’s Multitudes: History, Philosophy, Method (2022; Italian trans. 2023). She is the editor/commentator of Dante Alighieri, Rime giovanili e della ‘Vita Nuova’ (2009; English trans., 2014). Editor-in-Chief of Columbia’s Digital Dante website, Barolini has written the first on-line commentary to the Commedia, the Commento Baroliniano.
Susanna Barsella graduated from The Johns Hopkins University and is Professor of Italian for the Modern Languages and Literatures Department and the Center for Medieval Studies at Fordham University. Dr. Barsella’s main area of research is in Italian Medieval literature with a specific interest in the literature of Early Humanism. Her publications range from Dante, to Petrarca, Boccaccio, Michelangelo, and on the idea of work from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Dr Barsella’s interests also embrace twentieth-century literature with publications on Pirandello, Gadda, and twentieth-century poetry. Her book In the Light of the Angels. Angelology and Cosmology in Dante’s Divina Commedia was published by Olschki in 2010. Co-edited with Francesco Ciabattoni she has published The Humanist Workshop. Essays in Honor of Salvatore Camporeale O.P. in 2012. Co-edited by A. Andreini, S. Barsella, E. Filosa, J. Houston, S. Tognetti, she has published the volume Niccolò Acciaiuoli, Boccaccio e la Certosa del Galluzzo. Politica, religione ed economia nell’Italia del Trecento, Rome, Viella, 2020. The book The Decameron Ninth Day in Perspective (Lectura Boccaccii Series IX), co-edited with Simone Marchesi for The University of Toronto Press, was published in May 2022. She has served as a member of the Council of the Dante Society of America and as Treasurer and Vice-President of the American Boccaccio Association.
Piero Boitani is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Rome “Sapienza” and at the University of Italian Switzerland, Lugano. A Fellow of, amongst others, the British Academy, the Medieval Academy of America, the Accademia dei Lincei, and the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics, in 2016 he received the Balzan Prize for Comparative Literature. His most recent books in English include Looking Upwards: Stars in Ancient and Medieval Cultures and The Machine of the World: the Modern Cosmos (New York, Nova, 2017 and 2018), A New Sublime. Ten Timeless Lessons on the Classics (New York, Europa, 2020), and Anagnorisis: Scenes and Themes of Recognition and Revelation in Western Literature (Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2021).
Danielle Callegari (Ph.D., New York University) is Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Dartmouth College. Her teaching and research focus on premodern Italian literature and food and beverage studies. She has published on a variety of subjects including Dante, early modern women’s writing and religion, and Italian food and politics from the premodern to the contemporary. Her first monograph, Dante’s Gluttons: Food and Society from the Convivio to the Comedy, was published with Amsterdam University Press in 2022. She is also a writer at large for Wine Enthusiast, covering Tuscany and southern Italy, and co-host of the Italian food and beverage culture podcast Gola.
Paolo Cherchi is an Emeritus Professor from the University of Chicago in the Department of Romance Languages where he taught from 1965 to 2003. His main interests are in Medieval and Renaissance literatures. Among his works are: Capitoli di critica cervantina (Rome, 1977), Enciclopedismo e politica della riscrittura: Tomaso Garzoni (Pisa, 1981), Andreas and the Ambiguity of Courtly Love (Toronto, 1994), Polimatia di riuso – Mezzo secolo di plagio: 1539-1589 (Roma, 1998), L’onestade e l’onesto raccontare di Boccaccio (Fiesole, 2004), Verso la chiusura. Saggio sul Canzoniere di Petrarca (Bologna, 2008), Il tramonto dell’onestade (Roma, 2016), Ignoranza ed erudizione. L’italia dei dogmi di fronte all’Europa scettica e critica (1500-1750) (Padova 2020). Has edited Tomaso Garzoni, Opere (Ravenna, 1994) and La Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (Turin, 1996). Has written about 400 essay mostly on Italian and Spanish literature. He has taught Italian Literature at the Università di Ferrara (2003-2009). He is “socio straniero” of the Accademia dei Lincei.
Nassime Chida is a lecturer in Italian at Columbia University. She earned her PhD in Italian and Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University in 2019 where her dissertation 'Local power in Dante's Inferno' explored Dante's representations of local leaders. Her work on Dante's biographies appeared on Digital Dante and her research on Inferno 27 appeared in Romanic Review (2021). Her current book project, Dante Historian and Political Theorist uses the works of medieval chroniclers and current historians to historicize the political and historical content of Dante's Commedia.
Alison Cornish is Professor of Italian Studies at New York University and President of the Dante Society of America. She is the author of Reading Dante’s Stars (Yale, 2000), Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterate Literature (Cambridge, 2011) and a commentary on Dante’s Paradiso, translated by Stanley Lombardo (Hackett, 2017), as well as a number of essays on Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Her latest book, Believing in Dante, is just out from Cambridge University Press this year. During the seventh centenary of the poet's death, she organized a crowd-sourced podcast series of conversations between members of the Dante Society of America, entitled Canto per Canto: Conversations with Dante in Our Time, available here.
Akash Kumar is an Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at UC Berkeley. His research primarily focuses on Dante and 13th-century Italian lyric through the lens of the history of science, Mediterranean and global exchange, and digital humanities. Recent work includes collaborating with Richard Lansing on the first complete English translation of the poetry of Giacomo da Lentini, contributions on Dante to Wiley-Blackwell’s Companion to World Literature, the Oxford Handbook of Dante, and an essay on Dante and migration in the volume Migrants Shaping Europe, Past and Present (Manchester University Press, 2022) He is currently finishing his first book, Dante’s Elements: Translation and Natural Philosophy from Giacomo da Lentini to the Comedy.
Luca Marcozzi is professor of Italian Literature at Roma Tre University, Department of Humanities. His studies focus on Dante, Petrarch and Renaissance literature. Among the books he wrote or edited, Bembo (2017), Dante e la retorica (2017), Dante e il mondo animale (2013), Lessico critico petrarchesco (2016), the entry Petrarca, Francesco for the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (2015), the commentary to the Comedia di Dante con figure dipinte. L’incunabolo veneziano del 1491 nell’esemplare della Casa di Dante in Roma (2015), as well as several Dante’ s papers in books and journals. He has been Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer at Notre Dame University (2013) and he has held courses and seminars in several universities (University College London, College University of New York, UCLA, Johns Hopkins University, Paris Sorbonne, Freie Universität Berlin, Shanghai International University ecc.). He is a member of the Board of the Casa di Dante in Rome.
Giacomo Marramao studied philosophy at the University of Florence and social sciences at the University of Frankfurt. Visiting professor at several universities in Europe, America and Asia, is currently Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Rome III and member of the Honor Committee of the Collège International de Philosophie (Paris). Among the main awards: the “Palmes Académiques” by the Presidency of the French Republic; the title of Professor honoris causa from the University of Bucharest; the title of Doctor honoris causa in Philosophy from the Universidad Nacionál de Córdoba; the “Karl-Otto Apel” International Philosophy Award. Among his works translated into English: Kairós: Towards an Ontology of Due Time, Davies, Aurora, CO 2006; The Passage West, Verso, London-New York, 2012; Against Power: For an Overhaul of Critical Theory, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham-Newark 2016; Interregnum, Mimesis International, Milan 2020.
Roberta Morosini is Professor of Italian Literature at the Istituto Universitario Orientale,Napoli. She has a Ph.D. from McGill University in Italian Literature, with a specialization in Italian Medieval Literature and Culture. She also has an Italian Laurea in European Languages and Literatures from the University “Federico II” of Naples and a French D.E.A. (Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies) in Littératures françaises from the Université de Rennes II, as well as a Diploma from the School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University. She has studied Dante and linguistics at the University of Reading, UK. A recipient of the Luigi De Lise Culture Award, Dr. Morosini has been a Fellow at The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, at the NEH Mediterranean Summer Institute, at the Bogliasco Foundation, and at the Cini Foundation’s Centro Studi di Civiltà Italiana Vittore Branca. Dr. Morosini’s research interests lie in Medieval and Renaissance Italian Culture and Literature. These include studies of the Mediterranean, metaliterary and geocritical studies, and spatial and cartographic writings from Dante to Renaissance island books. Part of her pan-Mediterranean research evolve around the study of Christian-Muslim Relations and mis-representations of Muhammad the Prophet of Islam. In her approach to the sea as a network of knowledge and a space of crossings of people as well as stories, she blends scholarship in the visual arts with transcultural investigations of slavery, mobility, and identity. Dr. Morosini is currently working on the English edition of her Dante, Il Profeta and Il Libro (Rome: 2018) and completing a book on travelling tales of the Italian Alexander for AUP. Her recent books include Il mare salato. Il Mediterraneo di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio, Rome: Viella, 2019; Paolino Veneto. Storico, Narratore e Geografo, eds. with M. Ciccuto, Rome: 2019; Dante, il Profeta e il Libro. La leggenda del toro dalla Commedia a Filippino Lippi, tra sussurri di colomba ed echi di Bisanzio, Rome: 2018; and Boccaccio geografo. Un viaggio nel Mediterraneo, tra le città, i giardini, e il “mondo” di G. Boccaccio.
Kristina Olson is Associate Professor of Italian and the Associate Chair and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason University. She is the author of Courtesy Lost: Dante, Boccaccio and the Literature of History (University of Toronto Press, 2014) and articles on Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. She is the co-editor of three volumes, including Approaches to Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy (second edition) with the Modern Language Association (2020). She serves as the President of the American Boccaccio Association (2020-2023).
Bruno Pinchard è un filosofo francese che si e’ formato presso l'Ecole Normale Supérieure di Parigi e la Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Oggi emerito, è stato professore ordinario di Filosofia al Centre d'Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance, Università di Tours (1991-2003), e poi all'Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 di Lione (2003-2020). Ha studiato il concetto di ragione nell'umanesimo rinascimentale (La Raison dédoublée, la Fabbrica della mente, 1992), in dialogo con la Ragione cartesiana (Écrits sur la raison classique, 2016), coll' Idealismo tedesco (Métaphysique de la destruction, 2012) e la dialettica marxiana (Marx à rebours, 2017). Ha cominciato a studiare Dante in un saggio sull' intelletto d'amore (Le bûcher de Béatrice, 1996), e poi sull'idea del Libro nella Commedia (Méditations mythologiques, 2002). Ha contributo al dibattito contemporaneo sul futuro del pensiero occidentale (Hespérie : contribution virgilienne à une politique occidentale, 2018). Attualmente cura la traduzione commentata delle Opere di Dante presso le edizioni Classiques Garnier. Uscirà in gennaio 2023 il Convivio, in una edizione bilingue commentata. É Presidente fondatore della Société dantesque de France (dantesque.fr).
Alessandro Vettori is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, where he currently serves as Chair of the Department of Italian. His most recent monograph is Dante’s Prayerful Pilgrimage: Typologies of Prayer in Dante’s Comedy (Brill, 2019, Italian translation Edizioni Storia e Letteratura, 2021). Other publications are: Poets of Divine Love (Fordham University Press, 2004), Giuseppe Berto, La passione della scrittura (Marsilio Editore, 2013), and articles on Dante, Boccaccio, Francis of Assisi, Iacopone da Todi, Giuseppe Berto, Diego Fabbri, and Luigi Pirandello. At the moment his research involves the use of money and poverty in Dante and Franciscan thinkers of the 13th and 14th centuries. He is the co-editor of a new translation series, “Other Voices of Italy,” with Rutgers University Press and he is the editor of the journal of Italian Studies Italian Quarterly.
Julianna Visco received her PhD in Italian Literature from Columbia University in 2020. Her dissertation focused on the representation of textiles and clothing in the works of Dante and Boccaccio. In addition to the intersection of material culture, specifically textiles, with late medieval Italian literature. Her research interests include artisanal workshop practices and theories of the body and materiality. She is currently a Lecturer at Princeton University where she teaches an interdisciplinary seminar called The Craft of Authenticity. She is the faculty liaison for the student “Handicrafts Club” and a member of the Hiring Committee for the Writing Program. In 2023-2024, she will be teaching a course that she is designing on the relationship between sustainability and accountability in global textile production.
Gur Zak is an Associate professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem, where he also serves as the head of the Institute of Literatures. His research concentrates on the interrelations between literature, ethics, and the emotions in late medieval and Renaissance Italy, with a particular emphasis on Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. He is the author of Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self (Cambridge, 2010) and Boccaccio and the Consolation of Literature, which has just been published with Toronto’s PIMS press. Earlier this year has also appeared a volume he co-edited with Bernhard Huss and Timothy Kircher, entitled Petrarchan Passions: Affects and Community Formation in the Renaissance World (Schriften des Italienzentrums der Freien Universität Berlin 8). Later this year will be published a volume he edited and co-translated of selected Hebrew translations of Petrarch’s Latin works – the first translation of the Latin Petrarch into Hebrew.
Abstracts
Jason Aleksander, San Jose State University
The Complex Relationship between Agency (or Will) and Personal Identity in The Divine Comedy
The Divine Comedy exhibits an ambivalence (or, at any rate, is hard to pin down) about the question of how free the "free will" might be. To help better appreciate this ambivalence, this paper will reflect on a few key ways in which the Divine Comedy seems to depict the role of agency in the development of personal identity. In reflecting on these depictions of the relationship between agency and personal identity, I also hope to discuss how the Divine Comedy might also help us reflect on the question of how the processes that are at work in the formation of personal identity position us relative to patterns of social justice/injustice.
Roberto Antonelli, Universita’ degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”, Roma
A new and ancient Dante: the poet-judge
The definition of Dante as a “judge” of the world goes back to G. F. Hegel, but the consequences of this definition were not deepened either by Hegel or by later Dante criticism, despite F. De Sanctis and E. Auerbach. If, on the other hand, we assume this definition as the interpretative key of the whole Comedy, we will be able to understand both Dante’s use of the ars memoriae as a tool of organizing time and creating characters, and the reason for the splitting of the Ego-Author and Ego-Personage, already indicated as a fundamental heuristic tool by Ch. Singleton and, in part, by G. Contini. Some famous encounters between Dante and the damned (Francesca da Rimini, Ulysses) can then be read in a new way.
Maria Luisa Ardizzone, New York University, NY
Gravitas: A Theoretical Perspective on Dante’s Commedia
This paper attempts to introduce an innovative perspective in Dante’s criticism proposing that a theoretical structure presides over the Commedia and that gravitas is one epicenter of its construction. My study considers the theory of gravitas of Aristotelian matrix in its internal relationship with the theory of matter. Gravitas and materia, intrinsically connected to corporeality in Aristotle and medieval Aristotelianism, are taken up by Dante and utilized to shape his idea of vice and sin. In addressing the scientific-ethical-emotional roots of the discourse on evil, this paper shows how gravitas and its related issues open a space of relations among the three canticles that is dialectical and conflictual in nature. Shaped on a discontinuous continuity, such conflict allows us to establish that a unified theoretical structure rules Dante’s Commedia.
Teodolinda Barolini, Columbia University
Aristotle’s Wind: Nicomachean Ethics 3.1 and Dante on Voluntary and Involuntary Action (Inferno 5 and Paradiso 3-5)
In broad terms, this essay addresses Aristotle’s role in shaping Dante’s thought on voluntary and involuntary action, or—in more Dantean phrasing—on free will versus compulsion. The point of departure for this essay is an observation that I first noted many years ago: Dante, in forging the contrapasso of hell’s circle of lust, draws on Nicomachean Ethics 3.1 and on Aristotle’s example of wind as a force that compels, causing true involuntary action. On the foundation of that original observation, I now construct a reading that further explores the implications of Nicomachean Ethics 3.1 as a Dantean intertext. According to the thesis I will put forward, the presence of Aristotle on compulsion in Inferno 5 connects to the Commedia’s great meditation on the will in Paradiso 3-5, where not coincidentally we find the second of Aristotle’s two examples of compulsive force from Nicomachean Ethics 3.1.
Susanna Barsella, Fordham University
The Sweet Wind of Eden. Creation, Fall, and Cosmology in The Commedia
This paper explores the relationship between cosmology and creation in Dante’s Divina Commedia and focuses on Lucifer’s fall and the “theophysical” characteristics of the cosmos after the fall considering in particular the location and nature of the Earthly Paradise. I analyse how the complex cosmological architecture of the Commedia depends and is connected to Dante’s interpretation of the two crucial moments of the beginning and end of creation. In Dante’s reading of sacred history, Lucifer’s fall is the event that subverts the initial order of the cosmos to establish a new order that remains in place until the Last Judgment. In this order, I argue that the Earthly Paradise becomes a liminal place of no-return. Lucifer’s fall prefigures Eve and Adam’s fall and gives origin to providential and human history. In the perspective that this essay offers, the connection between creation and cosmology reveals an essential aspect of Dante’s reflection on evil, its origins, its causes, and its consequences on the cosmos and history.
Piero Boitani, Universita’ degli Studi “La Sapienza”, Roma
Dante agli Antipodi
In questo intervento vorrei esplorare la creazione e la formazione del potente immaginario che associano la presenza di Dante e della sua Commedia al Sud più estremo del mondo. Dante stesso immaginò gli Antipodi come una distesa immensa di mare nella quale sorge un’unica terra, un’isola occupata dall’altissimo monte del Purgatorio, il Paradiso Terrestre sulla cima. L’unico personaggio del poema che l’avvisti – prima dell’arrivo di Dante stesso – è Ulisse, che laggiù fa naufragio. Il primo personaggio storico che veleggia verso gli Antipodi ricordando Dante e Ulisse è Amerigo Vespucci. Colui che esplora e cartografa lo Stretto di Magellano è Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, che ispirandosi a Dante fa risalire a Ulisse la fondazione della ‘Nuova Spagna’, cioè dell’America meridionale. Ed è in Patagonia che in pieno XX secolo Bruce Chatwin ritrova l’Ulisse dantesco. Ben più in là si spingono i poeti, da Coleridge a Kazantzakis, e soprattutto all’australiano John Kinsella e alla neozelandese Jan Kemp.
Paolo Cherchi, University of Chicago
Alfonso Varano imitatore di Dante nel tardo Settecento
Le visioni sacre e morali (1789) by Alfonso Varano are the first imitation of the Comedy after centuries of neglect. It is an imitation sui generis: Varano uses Dante’s terzina, his vocabulary and numerous themes, his scheme of the “trip” into the other world, his frequent recourse to allegory, and above all the basic themes concerning God’s justice, man’s Free Will, and the traveller’s “prophetic” mission clearly demonstrate Varano’s intention of imitating the Comedy. But there are also clear differences. The trip is discontinuous, and some major topics have nothing of Dante’s flavor, such as the Lisbon earthquake, the plague of Messina, the Seven-years war, the sacrament of marriage, and the cult of the Virgin Mary. Varano was engaged in his contemporary problems of theodicy and on the debate among the Molinism and the Jansenism, and he sided with a kind of moderate form of Jansenism, supported by people like Muratori, and later by Manzoni, a Jansenism which rejected the notion of predestination but accepted the moral severity against the more relaxed Molinism. This engagment brought Varano to find in Dante the inspiration to put “il mondo che mal vive” on the right path. In the early decades of the Seventeenth century Vico discovered Dante’s powerful “fantasia”; at the end of the same century Varano brought to light the powerful moral lesson of Dante. The Ottocento capitalized on both these acquisitions and brought back to full life Dante’s work.
Nasside Chide, Columbia University
Dante poet and historian: Montaperti’s legacy in The Commedia
Dante’s allusions to Montaperti in Inferno 10 and 32 appear in almost all recent historical examinations of the battle. His verse memorialized the bloodshed and collective trauma of the event, offering a vision expanded by Villani - and destined to shape the Florentine perception of Montaperti for centuries. But Dante also expressed an understanding of the battle’s immediate legacy that is distinct from the pre-existing and subsequent record, pointing to its role in the urgent problem of Dante’s time and life: intractable polarization and the routine practice of political exclusion on a mass scale. Far from minimizing a military failure, scapegoating long-standing political enemies or highlighting the shortcomings of previous regimes, Dante interrogates the recent past to illuminate the present. My paper will examine Dante’s reading of Montaperti in Inferno to identify the place of the Commedia in the historical record, and compare Dante’s analysis to Villani’s extrapolations, and to recent scholarship on “Lo strazio e’l grande scempio” of September 1260.
Alison Cornish, New York University, New York
"To live among those who will call this time ancient": Fictions Worthy of Faith
In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled "Losing Faith in the Humanities," Simon During argued that "the decline of religion and the decline of the study of culture are part of the same big story. No longer a shared culture, a base-line premise, an inherited belief system, a set of stories handed down from one generation to the next meant to civilize or cultivate the lot of us, "the humanities have become merely a (rather eccentric) option for a small fraction of the population." We have experienced a cultural shift whereby the old authorities are no longer trusted. They are like what Virgil admits about his own, superseded culture, a "time of the false and lying gods." Virgil is consigned to Dante's Hell for no other fault than for not having faith, for not being a believer, in what the modern world now believes. In our own modern era it has been a question how to read Dante if we do not share his faith, his medieval Catholic religion. One approach is to bracket off anything doctrinal, dogmatic, or theological in the Divine Comedy and deal with the "rest". This would be Benedetto Croce's distinction between poetry and non-poetry, and may undergird readings common today that want to see Dante's message as primarily political. In this brief paper, I will sketch out how faith, belief, trust even and perhaps especially in fictions is something Dante has to teach us now, in our post-religious and post-canonical moment.
Akash Kumar, University of California, Berkeley
From One Shore to the Other: A Global Approach to the Commedia
This paper will consider some key moments such as the assassin simile that describes Nicholas III in Inferno 19, the poetic geography of Ulysses’ voyage, and the Xerxes connection in the encounter with Matelda in Purgatorio 28 in order to propose a model for reading the Commedia as a globally engaged text. These moments serve to highlight Dante’s interest in boundary crossings and cultural syncretism. They also reveal much when subjected to an analysis that historicizes, engages in intertextual readings in the century of vernacular production that informs the Commedia, and foregrounds the cultural mingling of the medieval Mediterranean. My paper will also propose a theoretical frame for such work that builds on Erich Auerbach’s notion that “our philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation” and Teodolinda Barolini’s detheologizing approach in order to posit decolonizing as a way to make Dante new and open the poem out to the wide world both in its moment and in our own.
Giacomo Marramao, Universita’ degli Studi Roma Tre
Dante and the Autonomy of the Political: "Multitudo" and "General intellect" between Monarchia and Commedia
Impossibile comprendere la radicale autonomia della dimensione politica in Dante senza una lettura incrociata di Monarchia e Commedia. Si tratta di uno snodo cruciale del suo percorso. Alto e ardimentoso l’obiettivo che vi viene perseguito. Non replicare la “tediosa superfluità” di chi presenta come nuove arcinote teorie del passato, ma avventurarsi in una terra sconosciuta. Ridefinire l’impero come una monarchia secolare, anticipando un grande teorico della sovranità moderna come Bartolo da Sassoferrato. Operare una netta distinzione tra la finalità teologica della salvezza (individuale) e l’obiettivo politico della felicità (comune). Cruciale il ruolo svolto, nella Commedia, dalla distinzione tra Paradiso terrestre e Paradiso celeste: Dante afferma la possibilità della politica di realizzare la felicità terrena senza alcun bisogno della teologia, ma con il solo ricorso agli insegnamenti della filosofia e dell’etica degli antichi. Sta qui il senso di uno dei casi-limite della “geografia normativa” della Commedia: un pagano suicida, Catone Uticense, posto a custode del Purgatorio. E altrettanto indicativo il caso-limite di un eretico averroista come Sigieri di Brabante collocato nel Paradiso tra i beati della Sfera del Sole con l’avversario Tommaso che ne tesse l’elogio. Per questa via si rende necessaria una messa a punto del particolare modo in cui Dante usa i testi di Averroè per introdurre il vero attore della politica: una multitudo che può tradurre in atto l’intelletto possibile, l’intellectus in potentia, solo costituendosi in general intellect, in humana civilitas. Qui la vera radice del dissidio con il “primo amico” Guido Cavalcanti, non sul fatto ma sul modo di richiamarsi al commento di Ibn Rushd: Dante proteso a operare una saldatura tra singolare e universale, Guido concentrato sull’elemento tragico e irresolubile della contingenza del singolo. Ma qui si apre un nuovo affascinante problema, i cui risvolti sulla politica restano ancora tutti da scoprire.
Roberta Morosini, Universita’ degli Studi L’Orientale di Napoli
On Poetry and Navigation in the Commedia: Hypsipyle, Jason the plowman and Dante the seafarer.
Dante sees Jason among the fraudolents. He is in the first ditch of the Malebolge, the eighth Circle (Inf. XVIII, 82-99), where the panders and flatterers are punished, and one wonders what relation Dante, the poet-sailor of the Commedia establishes with the Argonaut whose name is carefully silenced to rather focus on his navigation in Par. II and XXXIIII. My paper wishes to explore the relationship between Jason and Dante, both sailors in waters never crossed before (Par. II 7) within a geo-political and poetical approach. The goal is to show that, although E. H. Curtius claims that Dante navigates for a «navigare necesse est» unknown to Virgil and carved in his heart, it is, on the contrary, Jason’s maritime dimension that fascinates the poet-sailor of the Commedia. Within a maritime perspective, a study of the role assigned to Hypsipyle in pivotal moments of the poem, offers a new light to read Jason’s relation with the poet -sailor, and with the poem itself. In fact I claim that Dante identifies with the Argonaut only to articulate the difference between the goals of their maritime journeys, and the different modalities to achieve those goals: Jason embarks to conquer the vello d’oro, the golden fleece through «parole ornate» (Inf. XVIII 91), while Dante’s navigation proceed with «altra voce» e with «altro vello» (Par. XXV 7-9). Finally, representing Jason as a plowman, not as a sailor, in Par. II 18 allows Dante to take distance from the Argonaut who plows with the intervention of magic to conquer the golden fleece, and the poet-sailor who instead “plows” with his pen a “sacrato poema,” which is the prodigious navigation that he has undertaken, “keeping to the furrow before the sea goes smooth again” (“servando mio solco / dinanzi a l’acqua che ritorna equale” (vv. 14-15).
Kristina Olson, George Mason University
Making Gender: Diviners, Weavers, and the Transgender Women and Men of Inferno 20
The population of the diviners, found in the fourth pouch of the Eighth Circle, is diverse and compelling in ways that have not yet been explored for Dante's interpretation of gender and human agency. Here, the poet features Tiresias, who experienced life both as male and as female, in addition to his daughter, Manto (Purg. 22.113), described as a childless and "savage virgin," ("Globala vergine cruda," Inf. 20.82), and upon whose authority the foundation of Vergil's native city rests. Both Ovidian figures deviate from seemingly normative definitions of gender along binary lines: both prophets, one might argue, inhibit a liminal, or even transgendered, space, in ways that appear unique in the poem. Yet it is their ability to move beyond gender and gendered expectations that enables this father and daughter, as well as the "sad women who have left their needles, shuttle and spindle" (Inf. 20.121-23), to become diviners. As Teodolinda Barolini has affirmed, "It is clear that for Dante one of the major boundaries to be transgressed is that of gender." How do we read Dante's representation of these figures, and of other women and men in the poem, as attempting to test the limits of gender? Taking inspiration from both Barolini and Gary Cestaro, who has recently argued for a "queer reading" of the Commedia including Inferno 20, I explore how the transgression of gender and gendered expectations is enabled by two associated activities -- divination and the technical arts, such as weaving -- and how Dante relies upon Ovid in this interpretation of the masculine, the feminine, and the spaces woven in between.
Bruno Pinchard, Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3
The Divina Commedia as Philosophy of Revelation
It is impossible to limit Dante’s philosophy to the so-called “opera philosophica” and to lose the philosophical “investissement” in Dante’s poetry and, therefore, in the Commedia. It is true that there are some criticisms of professional philosophers in Par. XXIX, 86, sq., but it is also true that the Comedy is a “Phenomenology of Love”, in the sense of Phenomenology of the Spirit in Hegel – which is to say that it is a path towards an Absolute which creates itself. I will try to show that there is a place for an “esoterischeBetrachtung Gottes und der Identität” as Hegel defines it in his Encyclopedy (§ 573) in Dante’s proceeding, and that it remains not in the horizon of secret, but that it opens to a kind of Revelation, which we can call: Age of Spirit.
Alessandro Vettori, Rutgers University
Manfredi’s Cleft Eyebrow: Church Injustice and Divine Mercy
Manfred is one of the saved souls of Purgatorio (3. 103-145), even though he died while still excommunicated. While excommunication in the late middle ages was not necessarily a sentence to damnation in hell (Vodola 1986), Dante challenges church custom by creating a separate place for excommunicates in ante-purgatory, but he also subverts the common Guelph belief at his time that Manfred must be damned in hell because of his opposition to the papacy and the church. Dante also saves Manfred for other reasons. He possesses uncommon intellectual and poetic qualities (as outlined in De vulgari eloquentia 1.12.4), which elevate his mind and soul; his political alignment with the Ghibellines and his strong opposition to the church’s mingling in worldly affairs also play in his favor; finally, he is persecuted and massacred by an unjust church and obtains salvation as reward. The contrast between his merits and the faults of an inimical church extend to his death being imputed to the archbishop of Caserta’s command, while his speedy ascent to heaven is attributed to the pure soul of his daughter Costanza, whose intercessory prayers will help his purging process (Purg. 3. 114-117 and 142-145). Manfred’s cleft eyebrow is a reminder of his martyrdom (for Augustine, martyrs preserved their injuries on their glorious bodies in the afterlife) and a symbol of his unjust separation from the church through excommunication. While acknowledging his grave sins (“orribil furon li peccati miei,” 121), Manfredi explains his salvation by contrasting human injustice with divine mercy (“quei che volontier perdona,” 120; “la bontà infinita ha sì gran braccia,” 122). Partial answers to Dante’s fascination with this character may be found in the poet’s (possible) acquaintance with the Manifesto that Manfredi wrote to incite the Romans to rebel against the pope; additionally, the Liber de pomo sive de morte, which was attributed to Aristotle and which Manfredi translated into Latin, contains similar reflections on the relationship between human sins and divine forgiveness and may have served as a source of Dante’s inspiration.
Julianna Visco, Princeton University
Practices of Making: Lexical Craft in Dante’s Commedia
Throughout the Commedia, and particularly in his spiritual vision of Paradiso, Dante paradoxically leverages similes and metaphors of embodied and material knowledge to communicate a realm distinctively characterized by the immaterial and ineffable. To reconcile this tension and show Dante’s role in empowering a vernacular culture, this paper scrutinizes the craft and sensory lexicon of making in the Commedia to reveal a craft epistemology, or an alternate way of knowing based on doing, that Dante constructs in the text against the grain of other epistemologies (scholastic, theological, etc.). Tools borrowed from anthropology and material culture bring a crucial understanding to the relationship between the contemporary making practices performed by Trecento artisans and the vernacular language Dante uses to reference those practices. Further,this paper considers the inherent complications of mediation present in importing these strategies to the discipline of literary studies.
Gur Zak, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Sapìa’s Sin: Compassion and Community in Purgatorio 13 and Beyond
Contemporary scholarship has given much attention to the question of the social, ethical, and political merits of the emotion of compassion. While some scholars – most notably Martha Nussbaum – have dubbed compassion “the basic social emotion,” others have been more skeptic regarding its social and ethical value. Alluding to the partial, passive, and at times volatile nature of compassion, critics from Lauren Berlant to Paul Bloom have warned against the reliance on compassion as the basis of political community. In this presentation, I would like to turn to Dante’s Commedia in order to reflect on what it can tell us about the merits – and possible hazards – of compassion. Concentrating especially on Purgatorio 13 – the only canto in the work in which the actual word “compassion” appears (13.54) – I wish to show how Dante uses his depiction of the terrace of envy to make a very strong case for the value of compassion as the essential social emotion. Drawing upon Aquinas’ distinction between misericordia (mercy or compassion) and invidia (envy) in the Summa theologiae 2a2ae Q.36, Dante masterfully dramatizes in the canto the social implications of these contrasting emotions. Whereas invidia – embodied in the example of his interlocutor Sapìa – leads to the disintegration of community, compassion emerges as critical for its restoration. At the same time, I wish to show how the canto also brings to light some of the possible pitfalls of this emotion, particularly its partial nature (evident in Dante’s search for “anima… latina”) and perilous connection to the desire for revenge. While compassion may be the basis of community, its partial nature, Purgatorio 13 suggests, cannot really be transcended in this world.