Dante's political thought has long constituted a major area of interest for Dante studies, yet the poet's political views have traditionally been considered a self-contained area of study and viewed in isolation from the poet's other concerns. Consequently, the symbolic and poetic values which Dante attaches to political structures have been largely ignored or marginalised by Dante criticism. This omission is addressed here by Claire Honess, whose study of Dante's poetry of citizenship focuses on more fundamental issues, such as the relationship between the individual and the community, the question of what it means to be a citizen, and above all the way in which notions of cities and citizenship enter the imagery and structure of the Commedia.

Dante's political thought has long constituted a major area of interest for Dante studies. Yet there has been a tendency for the poet's views on matters of politics to be seen by critics as a self-contained, discrete area for study.This edition of four political letters examines the extent to which they can be said to contain the seeds of the political poetry of the Commedia, and to look again at the ways in which the author transforms the Latin political rhetoric of the letters into the Italian poetic language of his vernacular masterpiece.Table of Contents:1. Introduction: `Rome once had two suns? 2. The Letter to the Princes and Peoples of Italy (Epistola V)3. The Letter to the Florentines (Epistola VI)4. The Letter to the Emperor Henry VII (Epistola VII)5. The Letter to the Italian Cardinals (Epistola XI)6. BibliographyDr Claire Honess is a Senior Lecturer in the Italian Department at the University of Leeds.

"This book presents the proceedings of the fifth meeting of the International Dante Seminar. As with previous volumes, the proceedings also include a carefully edited account of the extensive discussions which followed the presentations. The papers, given by some of the leading international scholars of the poet - from Italy, the UK and the USA - address four major topics of particular concern to present-day Dante studies: Dante as a lyric poet; Dante as an ethical poet; Dante and the Eclogues; and Dante in nineteenth-century Britain. These topics reflect both areas which are currently the subject of heated critical debate (several editions of the lyric poems are in preparation, and the ethical dimension of Dantes works is very much under discussion) and areas which are long overdue a reassessment (Dantes remarkable revival of Latin pastoral poetry, and the extraordinary British contribution to Dante studies in the nineteenth century). As this set of conference proceedings makes clear, in Dante and in his legacy, ethics and poetry are inseparable. The contributors include Paola Allegretti, Michael Caesar, Paolo Falzone, Manuele Gragnolati, Claudio Giunta, Claire Honess, Robin Kirkpatrick, John Lindon, Lino Pertile, Justin Steinberg, Claudia Villa, and Diego Zancani."

Apocalypse, it seems, is everywhere. Preachers with vast followings proclaim the world's end. Apocalyptic fears grip even the nonreligious amid climate change, pandemics, and threats of nuclear war. As these ideas pervade popular discourse, grasping their logic remains elusive. Ben Jones argues that we can gain insight into apocalyptic thought through secular thinkers. He starts with a puzzle: Why would secular thinkers draw on Christian apocalyptic beliefs – often dismissed as bizarre – to interpret politics? The apocalyptic tradition proves appealing in part because it theorizes a relation between crisis and utopia. Apocalyptic thought points to crisis as the vehicle to bring the previously impossible within reach, offering resources for navigating challenges in ideal theory, which involves imagining the best, most just society. By examining apocalyptic thought's appeal and risks, this study arrives at new insights on the limits of utopian hope. This title is available as open access on Cambridge Core.

This study offers the first extensive analysis of the function and significance of urban panegyric in the Central Middle Ages, a flexible literary genre which enjoyed a marked and renewed popularity in the period 1100 to 1300. In doing so, it connects the production of urban panegyric to major underlying transformations in the medieval city and explores praise of cities primarily in England, Flanders, France, Germany, Iberia, and Italy (including the South and Sicily). The volume demonstrates how laudatory ideas on the city appeared in extremely diverse textual formats which had the potential to interact with a wide audience via multiple textual and material sources. When contextualized within the developments of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries these ideas could reflect more than formulaic, rhetorical outputs for an educated elite, they were instead integral to the process of urbanisation. In Urban Panegyric and the Transformation of the Medieval City, 1100-1300, Paul Oldfield assesses the generation of ideas on the Holy City, on counter-narratives associated with the Evil City, on the inter-relationship between the City and abundance (primarily through discourses on commercial productivity, hinterlands and population size), on landscapes and sites of power, and on knowledge generation and the construction of urban histories. Urban panegyric can enable us to comprehend more deeply material, functional, and ideological change associated with the city during a period of notable urbanization, and, importantly, how this change might have been experienced by contemporaries. This study therefore highlights the importance of urban panegyric as a product of, and witness to, a period of substantial urban change. In examining the laudatory depiction of medieval cities in a thematic analysis it can contribute to a deeper understanding of civic identity and its important connection to urban transformation.

In this book, Irina Chernetsky examines how humanists, patrons, and artists promoted Florence as the reincarnation of the great cities of pagan and Christian antiquity – Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. The architectural image of an ideal Florence was discussed in chronicles and histories, poetry and prose, and treatises on art and religious sermons. It was also portrayed in paintings, sculpture, and sketches, as well as encoded in buildings erected during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Over time, the concept of an ideal Florence became inseparable from the real city, in both its social and architectural structures. Chernetsky demonstrates how the Renaissance notion of genealogy was applied to Florence, which was considered to be part of a family of illustrious cities of both the past and present. She also explores the concept of the ideal city in its intellectual, political, and aesthetic contexts, while offering new insights into the experience of urban space.

This collection – to be issued in three volumes – offers an unprecedented repertoire of vertical readings for the whole poem. As the first volume exemplifies, vertical reading not only articulates unexamined connections between the three canticles but also unlocks engaging new ways to enter into core concerns of the poem. The three volumes thereby provide an indispensable resource for scholars, students and enthusiasts of Dante. The volume has its origin in a series of thirty-three public lectures held in Trinity College, the University of Cambridge (2012-2016) which can be accessed at the Cambridge Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy website.

This book is about the impact of literature upon cities world-wide, and cities upon literature. It examines why the city matters so much to contemporary critical theory, and why it has inspired so many forms of writing which have attempted to deal with its challenges to think about it and to represent it. Gathering together 40 contributors who look at different modes of writing and film-making in throughout the world, this handbook asks how the modern city has engendered so much theoretical consideration, and looks at cities and their literature from China to Peru, from New York to Paris, from London to Kinshasa. It looks at some of the ways in which modern cities – whether capitals, shanty-towns, industrial or ‘rust-belt’ – have forced themselves on people’s ways of thinking and writing.

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.

After almost seven centuries, Dante endures and even seems to haunt the present. Metamorphosing Dante explores what so many authors, artists and thinkers from varied backgrounds have found in Dante’s oeuvre, and the ways in which they have engaged with it through rewritings, dialogues, and transpositions. By establishing trans-disciplinary routes, the volume shows that, along with a corpus of multiple linguistic and narrative structures, characters, and stories, Dante has provided a field of tensions in which to mirror and investigate one’s own time. Authors explored include Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, André Gide, Derek Jarman, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, James Joyce, Wolfgang Koeppen, Jacques Lacan, Thomas Mann, James Merrill, Eugenio Montale, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cesare Pavese, Giorgio Pressburger, Robert Rauschenberg, Vittorio Sereni, Virginia Woolf.