This volume takes Dante's rich and multifaceted discourse of desire, from the Vita Nova to the Commedia, as a point of departure in investigating medieval concepts of desire in all their multiplicity, fragmentation and interrelation. As well as offering several original contributions on this fundamental aspect of Dante's work, it seeks to situate the Florentine more effectively within the broader spectrum of medieval culture and to establish greater intellectual exchange between Dante scholars and those from other disciplines. The volume is also notable for its openness to diverse critical and methodological approaches. In considering the extent to which modern theoretical paradigms can be used to shed light upon the Middle Ages, it will interest those engaged with questions of critical theory as well as medieval culture.

In medieval culture, the consideration of language is deeply connected to other aspects of the system of knowledge. One interesting connection takes place between theories of language and theories of larger concepts such as love and desire. The Syntax of Desire is an interdisciplinary examination of the interlacing operation of syntax and desire in three medieval 'grammars:' theological, linguistic, and poetic. Exploring three representative aspects of medieval language theory, Elena Lombardi uncovers the ways in which syntax and desire were interrelated in the Middle Ages. She suggests that, in Augustine's theology, the creative act of God in the universe emerges as a syntax that the human individual must interpret by means of desire; in the linguistic theory of the Modistae, she sees the syntax of language as parallel to a syntax of reality, one organized by the desiring interplay of matter and form; in Dante's poetry, she argues that the language of the fallen human is bound together by the syntax of poetry, an act of desire that restores language to its primitive innocence. In addition to detailed analyses of medieval texts, The Syntax of Desire examines some aspects of the same relationship in light of contemporary linguistics, philosophy of language, and psychoanalysis.

In The Wings of the Doves, Elena Lombardi undertakes a detailed reading of Dante's Inferno V - the canto of Francesca da Rimini and her doomed love for her brother-in-law, Paolo Malatesta, a richly layered episode within the Divine Comedy, which continues to challenge readers today, blurring the distinction between poetry and doctrine, pity and condemnation, and literature and reality. Lombardi plays on the complex nature of the canto in order to shed light on a larger and much-debated theme in medieval culture - the relation between spiritual and erotic forms of love and desire. Eschatology and law, pilgrimage and beauty, the role of affective practices in the religious and social spheres, intertextuality and the medieval culture of reading are just some of the themes that come together to unravel this tale of adultery and its bordering with the soul's search for God. The Wings of the Doves examines the flexibility of the medieval notion of desire to unearth the hidden meanings of this complex story of lust and love and the radical nature of medieval love poetry.

This book reformulates the master narrative of erotic discourse in medieval literature. Individual chapters offer fresh readings of the nature and claims of erotic attachments in Abelard and Heloise, Marie de France, Jean de Meun, Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer - writers profoundly influenced by Augustine and Ovid.

Ranging chronologically from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries and thematically from Latin to vernacular literary modes, this book challenges standard assumptions about the musical cultures and philosophies of the European Middle Ages. Engaging a wide range of premodern texts and contexts, the author argues that medieval music was quintessentially a practice of the flesh. It will be of compelling interest to historians of literature, music, religion, and sexuality, as well as scholars of cultural, gender, and queer studies.

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Medieval attempts to capture a glimpse of heaven range from the ethereal to the mundane, utilizing media as diverse as maps, cathedrals, songs, treatises, poems, visions and sewer systems. Heaven was at once the goal of the individual Christian life and the end of the cosmic plan. It was, simply stated, perfection. But interpretations varied from the traditional to the dangerously unique as artists and authors, theologians and visionaries struggled to define that perfection. Depending on the source, heaven's attributes vary from height to depth, darkness to light, silence to symphony; the souls within it from activity to passivity, experience to essence, participation to distant admiration. Questions addressed in this anthology include: Are erotic and spiritual love mutually exclusive? Does the soul's happiness depend on the resurrection of the body? What will be the nature of the transfigured body? Will it retain its gender? Will it have senses? Will it know desire? How can desire and fulfillment exist together? Can the human soul ever know God? Contributors to this volume examine well-known and previously unexplored texts and artefacts from historical and art historical, theological, philosophical, and literary perspectives, to complement and challenge more general surveys of the history of heaven, and above all to illuminate the richness and variety of medieval Christian ideas on heaven.

The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.

Dante's Lyric Redemption offers a re-examination of two strongly interrelated aspects of the poet's work: the role and value he ascribes to earthly love and his relationship to the Romance lyric tradition of his time. It argues that an account of Dante's poetic journey that posits a stark division between earthly and divine love, and between the secular lyric poet and the Christian auctor, does little justice to his highly distinctive and often polemical handling of these categories. The book firstly contextualizes, traces, and accounts for Dante's intriguing commitment to love poetry, from the 'minor works' to the Commedia. It highlights his attempts, especially in his masterpiece, to overcome normative oppositions in formulating a uniquely redemptive vernacular poetics, one oriented towards the eternal while rooted in his affective, and indeed erotic, past. It then examines how this matter is at stake in Dante's treatment of three important lyric predecessors: Guittone d'Arezzo, Arnaut Daniel, and Folco of Marseilles. Through a detailed reading of Dante's engagement with these poets, the book illuminates his careful departure from a dualistic model of love and conversion and shows his erotic commitment to be at the heart of his claims to pre-eminence as a vernacular author.

The Oxford Handbook of Dante contains forty-four specially written chapters that provide a thorough and creative reading of Dante's oeuvre. It gathers an intergenerational and international team of scholars encompassing diverse approaches from the fields of Anglo-American, Italian, and continental scholarship and spanning several disciplines: philology, material culture, history, religion, art history, visual studies, theory from the classical to the contemporary, queer, post- and de-colonial, and feminist studies. The volume combines a rigorous reassessment of Dante's formation, themes, and sources, with a theoretically up-to-date focus on textuality, thereby offering a new critical Dante. The volume is divided into seven sections: 'Texts and Textuality'; 'Dialogues'; 'Transforming Knowledge'; Space(s) and Places'; 'A Passionate Selfhood'; 'A Non-linear Dante'; and 'Nachleben'. It seeks to challenge the Commedia-centric approach (the conviction that notwithstanding its many contradictions, Dante's works move towards the great reservoir of poetry and ideas that is the Commedia), in order to bring to light a non-teleological way in which these works relate amongst themselves. Plurality and the openness of interpretation appear as Dante's very mark, coexisting with the attempt to create an all-encompassing mastership. The Handbook suggests what is exciting about Dante now and indicate where Dante scholarship is going, or can go, in a global context.