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Simon Gilson's new volume provides the first in-depth account of the critical and editorial reception in Renaissance Italy, particularly Florence, Venice and Padua, of the work of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). Gilson investigates a range of textual frameworks and related contexts that influenced the way in which Dante's work was produced and circulated, from editing and translation to commentaries, criticism and public lectures. In so doing he modifies the received notion that Dante and his work were eclipsed during the Renaissance. Central themes of investigation include the contestation of Dante's authority as a 'classic' writer and the various forms of attack and defence employed by his detractors and partisans. The book pays close attention not only to the Divine Comedy but also to the Convivio and other of Dante's writings, and explores the ways in which the reception of these works was affected by contemporary developments in philology, literary theory, philosophy, theology, science and printing.
A richly detailed graveyard history of the Florentine poet whose dead body shaped Italy from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the Risorgimento, World War I, and Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. Dante, whose Divine Comedy gave the world its most vividly imagined story of the afterlife, endured an extraordinary afterlife of his own. Exiled in death as in life, the Florentine poet has hardly rested in peace over the centuries. Like a saint’s relics, his bones have been stolen, recovered, reburied, exhumed, examined, and, above all, worshiped. Actors in this graveyard history range from Lorenzo de’ Medici, Michelangelo, and Pope Leo X to the Franciscan friar who hid the bones, the stone mason who accidentally discovered them, and the opportunistic sculptor who accomplished what princes, popes, and politicians could not: delivering to Florence a precious relic of the native son it had banished. In Dante’s Bones, Guy Raffa narrates for the first time the complete course of the poet’s hereafter, from his death and burial in Ravenna in 1321 to a computer-generated reconstruction of his face in 2006. Dante’s posthumous adventures are inextricably tied to major historical events in Italy and its relationship to the wider world. Dante grew in stature as the contested portion of his body diminished in size from skeleton to bones, fragments, and finally dust: During the Renaissance, a political and literary hero in Florence; in the nineteenth century, the ancestral father and prophet of Italy; a nationalist symbol under fascism and amid two world wars; and finally the global icon we know today.
In The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic, Andrea Moudarres examines influential works from the literary canon of the Italian Renaissance, arguing that hostility consistently arises from within political or religious entities. In Dante’s Divina Commedia, Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, enmity is portrayed as internal, taking the form of tyranny, betrayal, and civil discord. Moudarres reads these works in the context of historical and political patterns, demonstrating that there was little distinction between public and private spheres in Renaissance Italy and, thus, little differentiation between personal and political enemies. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Simon Gilson explores Dante's reception in his native Florence between 1350 and 1481. He traces the development of Florentine civic culture and the interconnections between Dante's principal 'Florentine' readers, from Giovanni Boccaccio to Cristoforo Landino, and explains how and why both supporters and opponents of Dante exploited his legacy for a variety of ideological, linguistic, cultural and political purposes. The book focuses on a variety of texts, both Latin and vernacular, in which reference was made to Dante, from commentaries to poetry, from literary lives to letters, from histories to dialogues. Gilson pays particular attention to Dante's influence on major authors such as Boccaccio and Petrarch, on Italian humanism, and on civic identity and popular culture in Florence. Ranging across literature, philosophy and art, across languages and across social groups, this study fully illuminates for the first time Dante's central place in Italian Renaissance culture and thought.
Dante Alighieri's argument on the question of the language stimulated the debate among fifteenth century humanists. This book provides a novel and open-ended reading of Dante's literature on language as well as a systematic reconstruction of the whole body of humanistic literature on linguistic phenomena.
Celebrated in Italy as the 'Tre Corone' (the three crowns), Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio have exerted an immense influence over western culture. This book looks at their impact on Italian culture up to the Renaissance.
In this book, Teodolinda Barolini explores the sources of Italian literary culture in the figures of its lyric poets and its “three crowns”: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Barolini views the origins of Italian literary culture through four prisms: the ideological/philosophical, the intertextual/multicultural, the structural/formal, and the social. The essays in the first section treat the ideology of love and desire from the early lyric tradition to the Inferno and its antecedents in philosophy and theology. In the second, Barolini focuses on Dante as heir to both the Christian visionary and the classical pagan traditions (with emphasis on Vergil and Ovid). The essays in the third part analyze the narrative character of Dante’s Vita nuova, Petrarch’s lyric sequence, and Boccaccio’s Decameron. Barolini also looks at the cultural implications of the editorial history of Dante’s rime and at what sparso versus organico spells in the Italian imaginary. In the section on gender, she argues that the didactic texts intended for women’s use and instruction, as explored by Guittone, Dante, and Boccaccio—but not by Petrarch—were more progressive than the courtly style for which the Italian tradition is celebrated. Moving from the lyric origins of the Divine Comedy in “Dante and the Lyric Past” to Petrarch’s regressive stance on gender in “Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature”—and encompassing, among others, Giacomo da Lentini, Guido Cavalcanti, and Guittone d’Arezzo—these sixteen essays by one of our leading critics frame the literary culture of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Italy in fresh, illuminating ways that will prove useful and instructive to students and scholars alike.
Leonardo Bruni (1370Ð1444) is widely recognized as the most important humanist historian of the early Renaissance. But why this recognition came aboutÑand what it has meant for the field of historiographyÑhas long been a matter of confusion and controversy. Writing History in Renaissance Italy offers a fresh approach to the subject by undertaking a systematic, work-by-work investigation that encompasses for the first time the full range of BruniÕs output in history and biography. The study is the first to assess in detail the impact of the classical Greek historians on the development of humanist methods of historical writing. It highlights in particular the importance of Thucydides and PolybiusÑauthors Bruni was among the first in the West to read, and whose analytical approach to politics led him in new directions. Yet the revolution in history that unfolds across the four decades covered in this study is no mere revival of classical models: Ianziti constantly monitors BruniÕs position within the shifting hierarchies of power in Florence, drawing connections between his various historical works and the political uses they were meant to serve. The result is a clearer picture of what Bruni hoped to achieve, and a more precise analysis of the dynamics driving his new approach to the past. Bruni himself emerges as a protagonist of the first order, a figure whose location at the center of power was a decisive factor shaping his innovations in historical writing.
De Profundis and Other Prison Writings is a new selection of Oscar Wilde's prison letters and poetry in Penguin Classics, edited and introduced by Colm Tóibín. At the start of 1895, Oscar Wilde was the toast of London, widely feted for his most recent stage success, An Ideal Husband. But by May of the same year, Wilde was in Reading prison sentenced to hard labour. 'De Profundis' is an epistolic account of Oscar Wilde's spiritual journey while in prison, and describes his new, shocking conviction that 'the supreme vice is shallowness'. This edition also includes further letters to his wife, his friends, the Home Secretary, newspaper editors and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas - Bosie - himself, as well as 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', the heart-rending poem about a man sentenced to hang for the murder of the woman he loved. This Penguin edition is based on the definitive Complete Letters, edited by Wilde's grandson Merlin Holland. Colm Tóibín's introduction explores Wilde's duality in love, politics and literature. This edition also includes notes on the text and suggested further reading. Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin. His three volumes of short fiction, The Happy Prince, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and A House of Pomegranates, together with his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, won him a reputation as a writer with an original talent, a reputation enhanced by the phenomenal success of his society comedies - Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. Colm Tóibín is the author of five novels, including The Blackwater Lightship and The Master, and a collection of stories, Mothers and Sons. His essay collection Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar appeared in 2002. He is the editor of The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction.
This volume opens with the bold suggestion that the seven deadly sins constitute a key to the structure of Inferno and Paradiso, as well as Purgatorio. It ends with a discussion of cowardice (not strictly a deadly sin) in Inferno iii, followed by a look at Dante himself in the light of all the capital vices. In between, each of the seven is focused on in turn. Intellectual pride is cited as the reason for Cavalcanti's absence from the Commedia, while-separately-the pride cantos in Purgatorio are read as a reconstruction of the individual's passage from pride to piety. Envy is located in the political sphere and shown to be almost always figured in conjunction with other vices whose sinful acts it prompts. It is then argued that Dante clarifies problems encountered in medieval attempts to distinguish between just and unjust anger. Sloth in The Divine Comedy is explored next, with particular attention to the poet Statius, its only named exponent. The poet's understanding of avarice is placed in the context of the revived money economy and the papacy's inflated temporal pretensions, while that understanding is, secondly, viewed in relation to the ancient Romans. Gluttony occasions reflection about analogies between the body and the book, as well as remarks about illustrations of the gluttons' aerial bodies in The Divine Comedy's early printed editions. The ambivalence of Dante's principal representations of lust is seen to imply a tension in his great poem between love poetry and spirituality, a tension he seeks to resolve in Beatrice. (Series: UCD Foundation for Italian Studies) [Subject: Literary Criticism, Dante, Italian Studies, The Divine Comedy, Renaissance Italy]