Interpreting Dante: Essays on the Traditions of Dante Commentary

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In Interpreting Dante: Essays on the Traditions of Dante Commentary, Paola Nasti and Claudia Rossignoli gather essays by prominent scholars of the Dante commentary tradition to discuss the significance of this tradition for the study of the Comedy, its broad impact on the history of ideas, and its contribution to the development of literary criticism. Interest in the Dante commentary tradition has grown considerably in recent years, but projects on this subject tend to focus on philological reconstructions. The contributors shift attention to the interpretation of texts, authors, and reading communities by examining how Dante commentators developed interpretative paradigms that contributed to the advancement of literary criticism and the creation of the Western literary canon. Dante commentaries illustrate the evolution of notions of “literariness” and literature, genre and style, intertextuality and influence, literary histories, traditions and canons, authorship and readerships, paratexts and textual materiality. The volume includes methodological essays exploring theoretical aspects of the tradition, such as the creation of a taxonomy for categorizing typologies of commentaries; the relationship between commentators and their contemporary readers; the interplay between written and visual commentaries; and the impact of patronage on the forms of exegesis. Other essays, including two in Italian, examine case studies of individual commentaries, giving an account of the modus operandi of Dante’s exegetes by relating their approaches to the cultural, ideological, and political agendas of the community of readers and scholars to which the commentators belonged. Cover Series List Title Page Copyright Series Description Contents Acknowledgments Ilustrations Introduction 1. Reading, Writing, and Speech in the Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Commentaries on Dante’s Comedy 2. Allegory as Avoidance in Dante’s Early Commentators: “bella menzogna” to “roza corteccia” 3. Uses of Learning in the Dante Commentary of Iacomo della Lana 4. How to Read the Early Commentaries 5. A Friar Critic: Guido da Pisa and the Carmelite Heritage 6. Guido da Pisa’s “Chantilly” Dante: A Complex Exegetical System 7. Presenze del Liber de vita et moribus philosophorum nell’Ottimo Commento alla Commedia 8. Pietro Alighieri and the Lexicon of the Comedy 9. Modes of Reading in Boccaccio’s Esposizioni sopra la Comedia 10. Tipologie compositive e hapax nel Commento alla “Commedia” di Francesco da Buti (con una nota sulla cultura grammaticale e lessicografica dell’autore) 11. A “Commentary for the Court”: Guiniforte Barzizza 12. A Text in Movement: Trifon Gabriele’s Annotationi nel Dante, 1527– 1565 13. Castelvetro on Dante: Tradition, Innovation, and Mockery in the Sposizione 14. A Pictorial Interpretation of Dante’s Commedia: Federigo Zuccari’s Dante historiato 15. Notes on Nineteenth-Century Dante Commentaries and Critical Editions Contributors Index of Names and Subjects Index of Passages from Dante’s Works