Authors:Patricia Vázquez Abstract: Even though every English translation of the Inferno describes the wild cat that impedes Dante’s way up the mountain of Salvation in Canto I as a leopard, there is no direct correlation between the leopard we know and the Italian term Dante uses, 'una lonza.' A glance at Singleton's notes on the "lonza" reveals how the term’s ambiguity has resulted in little agreement about the cat’s gender, whether it was a live, breathing animal or merely mythical. This paper examines a variety of sources from art history to zoology to argue that the wild cat Dante was trying to conjure up was a cheetah rather than a leopard. There is evidently a long history of confusing the pair, which we’ll see from studying the illuminated manuscripts in medieval bestiaries, the sketchbooks by Italian artists who drew these animals from life, and the lynchpin, a painting by Titian. What follows is a dissection of Dante’s lonza in three parts: its etymology, zoology and allegory. PubDate: Tue, 13 Dec 2022 08:38:17 PST
Authors:Jonny Wiles Abstract: Any examination of the phenomenon of absence in the Commedia must account for a crucial linguistic issue: though they are amply attested in the Commedia’s sources, the words assenza, assente, and their derivatives are themselves conspicuously absent from the poem’s lexicon. Absence experiences are expressed in the poem partly through imagery and circumlocution, but also through a constellation of individual words which invoke experiences of absence without naming absence as such. One particularly suggestive word operating within this language of omission is the verb scemare. With a focus on Purgatorio 30, in this paper, I discuss the importance of scemare to Dante’s lexicon of exclusion, and the ways in which it shapes our experience and understanding of absence in the Commedia more broadly. PubDate: Tue, 13 Dec 2022 08:38:09 PST
Authors:Elizabeth Coggeshall Abstract: Departing from the enigmatic 2006 Chinese-oil-painting-turned-digital-curio Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante, this essay first defines the conceptual framework behind Dante Today, a crowdsourced but curated digital archive that catalogs references to Dante and his works across contemporary global cultures. Then it explains our editorial decision to employ crowdsourcing as the principal mechanism behind collection development. This choice has advantages and pitfalls. On the one hand, crowdsourcing enables the participation of large and diverse publics in collection development, engaging the “crowd” in scholarly practice. On the other hand, outsourcing collection development to the “crowd” threatens to replicate the center-periphery model that Dante’s works are often accused of perpetuating. Although crowdsourcing aspires to democratize participatory heritage projects such as ours, I interrogate the limits of such claims, particularly from the perspective of transcultural and de-colonial scholarly practice. In my conclusion, I articulate our plans for future initiatives that aim to remedy this imbalance. PubDate: Tue, 13 Dec 2022 08:37:13 PST
Authors:Julie Van Peteghem Abstract: Dante’s Commedia is a highly allusive text, and readers throughout time have noted the many parallels between Dante’s verses and those of others. Now that the text of the Commedia and various scholarly and artistic interpretations of the poem (commentaries, translations, illuminated manuscripts) have become accessible online, also the concordance, the lists of parallel passages in Dante’s poem and other works, has become a digital resource. In this essay I explore the study of Dante’s sources in a digital environment mainly through the Intertextual Dante project and its Dante-Ovid edition, published on Digital Dante. Intertextual Dante visualizes moments of Dante’s text reuse: its interactive reading interface presents parallel passages side by side, and allows users to search, analyze, and interpret these passages in their broader textual contexts. I further review the advances in (semi-)automated detection of text reuse are reviewed in the context of Dante’s allusive and intertextual practices, and consider the knowledge base on Dante’s use of primary sources and the commentaries on the Commedia that the Hypermedia Dante Network project will provide. PubDate: Tue, 13 Dec 2022 08:37:06 PST
Authors:Matteo Maselli Abstract: This paper reflects on the current configuration of Dantean digital resources and proposes some possible perspectives to implement their functionality (disambiguation, RDF and Semantic Web, Distant & Close Reading, attention to the processes of digitization of texts). The second part of the essay explains the structure and presents the basic functionality of the Database Allegorico Dantesco (DAD) a new repository on Dantean allegory. PubDate: Tue, 13 Dec 2022 08:36:58 PST
Authors:Laura Ingallinella Abstract: This contribution discusses WikiDante, a set of best practices for the implementation of content related to the Divine Comedy on Wikipedia, chiefly designed for (yet not limited to) the undergraduate classroom. Developed as a digital project involving undergraduate students in partnership with Wiki Education, WikiDante consisted of two iterations, the first of which created or revised entries on the women from Dante’s recent history mentioned in the poem. For two decades, scholars have treated Wikipedia as the proverbial elephant in the room—shunned, ignored, or shamefully used only in lack of more anointed tools. This essay explores the benefits of using Wikipedia for digital scholarly activism in Dante Studies, outlining the challenges and educational outcomes of organizing editing campaigns on Wikipedia focusing on Dante and his work. After discussing the project’s components, the essay indicates future venues for the applicability of this framework by scholars and educators interested in digital public scholarship and knowledge equity. PubDate: Tue, 13 Dec 2022 08:36:51 PST
Authors:Jacob Blakesley Abstract: Studies of the translation and reception history of Dante’s Divina Commedia have rarely included the use of either distant reading (aka large-scale literary analysis) or Digital Humanities, much less both. However, using both these methods allows innovative research questions to be pursued and answered with regard to Dante’s fortuna, as I have shown in four previous articles regarding Dante and other writers. This contribution draws on three new datasets that I constructed myself in order to study canons of world literature, using Dante’s Divine Comedy as a case study: a comprehensive catalogue of all the worldwide complete translations of the Commedia (or single canticles such as Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso), published from the 16th century until 2021; readership data pertaining to all the Wikipedia entries dedicated to Dante’s biographical entry and his works; and Commedia holdings, in both Italian and translation, in all national libraries with online searchable catalogues. The aim is to see where Dante’s text is translated and circulates the most, and whether his work is globally popular. PubDate: Tue, 13 Dec 2022 08:36:45 PST
Authors:Lorenzo Bartolucci Abstract: This article explores the idea of the soul through the framework of two of the most elusive terms in Dante’s Commedia, “umano” and “persona.” It begins with an analysis of the soul’s formation, outlined in Purgatorio 25, by way of the conjunction of corporeal matter and a supernal “spirito novo,” which after death seems to ascend beyond the realm of human existence. This account is then contrasted with the etymological and theological affordances of the concept of personhood, which frames the body as the form—the “mask” of flesh and bones—that continues to individuate the soul after death, immortalizing rather than transcending the human moment of its origin. From the examination of these disparities emerges a new perspective on Dante’s conception of human existence, illustrating its complex but fundamental place within the idea of perfection at the heart of his poetic universe. PubDate: Tue, 13 Dec 2022 08:36:29 PST
Authors:Robert J. Clines Abstract: This essay investigates the political and literary culture of late Duecento Florence as well as the entangled rather than mutually exclusive nature of Dante’s pre- and post-exile political and literary visions. I read Dante’s political vision against the Fiore, a Tuscan form of the medieval French epic Roman de la Rose that appeared in Italy before 1290. Pervasive in Dante’s politics, poetics, and the cultural milieux in which the Fiore appeared are the rejection of French/Provençal cultural dominance, Franco-Angevin political influence in Italy, and mendicants as morally bankrupt threats to civil society. In turn, this essay argues that the Fiore and Dante’s participation in the literary culture that produced it were the consequence of the geopolitical landscape of the late Duecento, which paved the way for his exile and subsequent rancor that pervaded his later works. PubDate: Tue, 13 Dec 2022 08:36:21 PST
Authors:Mattia Petricola Abstract: Between 1976 and 1989, the production of British visual artist Tom Phillips (b. 1937) found its main source of inspiration in Dante and particularly in his Inferno. This article aims to provide a new approach to the question that drives, directly or indirectly, most of the scholarship on Phillips’s reception of Dante: how can we best describe the relation between the text of the Comedy and the images by Phillips that accompany it' Rather than relying on notions such as “adaptation” and “illustration”—which might prove inadequate to account for the text-image relations in Phillips’s works—I would propose to interpret Phillips’s reception of Dante as an attempt to create “a world to see the Comedy by.” More specifically, the analyses that follow will have four objectives. First, I will provide an overview of the transmediation strategies deployed by Phillips across his Dante-related projects. Second, I will attempt to explain the system of relations that shapes Phillips’s Dante-inspired visual world and to show, more in general, how this world ‘works’ by drawing on Georges Poulet’s phenomenology of reading and Stanley Fish’s reader-response theory. Third, I will argue that Dante’s Inferno should not be seen as an illustrated book but rather as a livre d’artiste in which Phillips transmediates his aesthetic experience of the Inferno into a visual world whose unique iconography needs, in turn, to be explained to the reader-viewer in the form of a commentary. Fourth, I will show how Phillips’s Dantesque visual world and, more in general, Phillips’s very identity as an artist depend on his identification with Dante himself—or, rather, on his ‘absorption’ of certain traits of Dante’s otherworldly journey into the conceptualization of his own life journey PubDate: Tue, 13 Dec 2022 08:36:14 PST
Authors:Federico Sessolo Abstract: This paper describes the influence exerted by Dante on the Italian antifascist exile Giuseppe Antonio Borgese (1882-1952), who fled from Mussolini’s Italy in 1931 to find refuge in the United States. In the 1930s and 1940s, Borgese made relevant contributions to the field of Italian Studies modernizing the American reception of Dante: his original interpretation—a blend of literary criticism and political theory, centered on the concept of «structural beauty»— was destined to generate unexpected outcomes in the post-war era, as the philosophical viewpoints stressed in Dante’s De Monarchia were to be planted, somehow unexpectedly, in the newborn ideology of world federalism. PubDate: Tue, 13 Dec 2022 08:36:07 PST
Authors:Laura Banella Abstract: This essay focuses on two early copies of Dante’s vernacular poetry with idiosyncratic interventions by Renaissance readers: a 1491 Venetian incunable of the Commedia with an extensive translation of the poem into Spanish and copious annotations in Spanish and Latin (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Auct. 2Q inf. 1.43); and an early Venetian printed edition of Dante’s lyric poetry (1518) with notes, substantial marks, and underlinings, bound together ab antiquo with a copy of Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina and a vernacularization of Petrarch’s Secretum (London, British Library, C.20.a.13). These books show Dante’s success among Spanish (or hispanophile) readers both as a moral and didactic poet, and as a linguistic and stylistic model. Through an analysis of these two early copies of Dante's vernacular poetry, this essay looks at readers of Dante’s works in order to reveal the transnational quality of their publics and, in so doing, invite us to reorient our view of Dante’s role as a function of discourse. PubDate: Tue, 13 Dec 2022 08:35:59 PST
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