Interpreting Dante: Essays on the Traditions of Dante Commentary (William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature)

"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. "Interpreting Dante is an extremely valuable and timely contribution to scholarship on the Dante commentary tradition. Such a collection, devoted both to methodological problems and to single cases, is a novelty. Additionally, as the first comprehensive volume on the topic in English, it will serve as an invaluable resource for students and scholars." --Anna Pegoretti, University of Warwick"-- Provided by publisher Cover 1 Series List 3 Title Page 4 Copyright 5 Series Description 6 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 12 Ilustrations 14 Introduction 18 1. Reading, Writing, and Speech in the Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Commentaries on Dante’s Comedy 34 2. Allegory as Avoidance in Dante’s Early Commentators: “bella menzogna” to “roza corteccia” 47 3. Uses of Learning in the Dante Commentary of Iacomo della Lana 70 4. How to Read the Early Commentaries 101 5. A Friar Critic: Guido da Pisa and the Carmelite Heritage 127 6. Guido da Pisa’s “Chantilly” Dante: A Complex Exegetical System 197 7. Presenze del Liber de vita et moribus philosophorum nell’Ottimo Commento alla Commedia 224 8. Pietro Alighieri and the Lexicon of the Comedy 256 9. Modes of Reading in Boccaccio’s Esposizioni sopra la Comedia 267 10. Tipologie compositive e hapax nel Commento alla “Commedia” di Francesco da Buti (con una nota sulla cultura grammaticale e lessicografica dell’autore) 300 11. A “Commentary for the Court”: Guiniforte Barzizza 345 12. A Text in Movement: Trifon Gabriele’s Annotationi nel Dante, 1527– 1565 358 13. Castelvetro on Dante: Tradition, Innovation, and Mockery in the Sposizione 376 14. A Pictorial Interpretation of Dante’s Commedia: Federigo Zuccari’s Dante historiato 406 15. Notes on Nineteenth-Century Dante Commentaries and Critical Editions 451 Contributors 467 Index of Names and Subjects 475 Index of Passages from Dante’s Works 484