Approaches to Teaching Dante's Divine Comedy

Approaches to Teaching Dante's Divine Comedy
Author :
Publisher : Modern Language Association
Total Pages : 212
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781603294287
ISBN-13 : 1603294287
Rating : 4/5 (87 Downloads)

Synopsis Approaches to Teaching Dante's Divine Comedy by : Christopher Kleinhenz

Dante's Divine Comedy can compel and shock readers: it combines intense emotion and psychological insight with medieval theology and philosophy. This volume will help instructors lead their students through the many dimensions--historical, literary, religious, and ethical--that make the work so rewarding and enduringly relevant yet so difficult. Part 1, "Materials," gives instructors an overview of the important scholarship on the Divine Comedy. The essays of part 2, "Approaches," describe ways to teach the work in the light of its contemporary culture and ours. Various teaching situations (a first-year seminar, a creative writing class, high school, a prison) are considered, and the many available translations are discussed.

Dante's Education

Dante's Education
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Total Pages : 337
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780198881780
ISBN-13 : 0198881789
Rating : 4/5 (80 Downloads)

Synopsis Dante's Education by : Filippo Gianferrari

In fourteenth-century Italy, literacy became accessible to a significantly larger portion of the lay population (allegedly between 60 and 80 percent in Florence) and provided a crucial means for the vernacularization and secularization of learning, and for the democratization of citizenship. Dante Alighieri's education and oeuvre sit squarely at the heart of this historical and cultural transition and provide an ideal case study for investigating the impact of Latin education on the consolidation of autonomous vernacular literature in the Middle Ages, a fascinating and still largely unexamined phenomenon. On the basis of manuscript and archival evidence, Gianferrari reconstructs the contents, practice, and readings of Latin instruction in the urban schools of fourteenth-century Florence. It also shows Dante's continuous engagement with this culture of teaching in his poetics, thus revealing his contribution to the expansion of vernacular literacy and education. The book argues that to achieve his unprecedented position of authority as a vernacular intellectual, Dante conceived his poetic works as an alternative educational program for laypeople, who could read and write in the vernacular but had little or no proficiency in Latin. By reconstructing the culture of literacy shared by Dante and his lay readers, Dante's Education shifts critical attention from his legacy as Italy's national poet, and a "great books" author in the Western canon, to his experience as a marginal intellectual engaged in advancing a marginal culture.

Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age

Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age
Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages : 813
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9783110253986
ISBN-13 : 3110253984
Rating : 4/5 (86 Downloads)

Synopsis Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age by : Albrecht Classen

Although it seems that erotic love generally was the prevailing topic in the medieval world and the Early Modern Age, parallel to this the Ciceronian ideal of friendship also dominated the public discourse, as this collection of essays demonstrates. Following an extensive introduction, the individual contributions explore the functions and the character of friendship from Late Antiquity (Augustine) to the 17th century. They show the spectrum of variety in which this topic appeared ‐ not only in literature, but also in politics and even in painting.

Dante and His Circle

Dante and His Circle
Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
Total Pages : 356
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9783031440939
ISBN-13 : 3031440935
Rating : 4/5 (39 Downloads)

Synopsis Dante and His Circle by : Julia Bolton Holloway

The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts

The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts
Author :
Publisher : BRILL
Total Pages : 422
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9789004222434
ISBN-13 : 900422243X
Rating : 4/5 (34 Downloads)

Synopsis The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts by :

In response to the dominance of Latin as the language of intellectual debate in early modern Europe, regional centers started to develop a new emphasis on vernacular languages and forms of cultural expression. This book shows that the local acts as a mark of distinction in the early modern cultural context. Interdisciplinary in scope, essays examine vernacular strands in the visual arts, architecture and literature from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. Contributions focus on change, rather than consistencies, by highlighting the transformative force of the vernacular over time and over different regions, as well as the way the concept of the vernacular itself shifts depending on the historical context. Contributors include James J. Bloom, Jessica E. Buskirk, C. Jean Campbell, Lex Hermans, Sun Jing, Trudy Ko, David A. Levine, Eelco Nagelsmit, Alexandra Onuf, Bart Ramakers, and Jamie L. Smith

Imago and Contemplatio in the Visual Arts and Literature (1400–1700)

Imago and Contemplatio in the Visual Arts and Literature (1400–1700)
Author :
Publisher : BRILL
Total Pages : 541
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9789004682641
ISBN-13 : 9004682643
Rating : 4/5 (41 Downloads)

Synopsis Imago and Contemplatio in the Visual Arts and Literature (1400–1700) by : Stijn Bussels

This volume contains twenty-four essays, which, in their subjects and methodology, pay tribute to the scholarship of Walter S. Melion. The contributions are grouped under three categories: “Devotion,” “Art and Image Theory,” and “Vision and Contemplation.” The Devotion section addresses votive practices, theological theory and polemic literature. The Art and Image Theory section focuses on Jesuit image theory, the reflexive dimension of works, and artists’ reflections on the function of images. Finally, the Vision and Contemplation section discusses the ‘early modern eye’ as a tool for thoughtful, prolonged looking to ascertain visual wit, deception, self-assessment and friendship, sacred and profane allegories.

Personification

Personification
Author :
Publisher : BRILL
Total Pages : 787
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9789004310438
ISBN-13 : 9004310436
Rating : 4/5 (38 Downloads)

Synopsis Personification by : Walter Melion

Personification, or prosopopeia, the rhetorical figure by which something not human is given a human identity or ‘face’, is readily discernible in early modern texts and images, but the figure’s cognitive form and function, its rhetorical and pictorial effects, have rarely elicited sustained scholarly attention. The aim of this volume is to formulate an alternative account of personification, to demonstrate the ingenuity with which this multifaceted device was utilized by late medieval and early modern authors and artists in Italy, France, England, Scotland, and the Low Countries. Personification is susceptible to an approach that balances semiotic analysis, focusing on meaning effects, and phenomenological analysis, focusing on presence effects produced through bodily performance. This dual approach foregrounds the full scope of prosopopoeic discourse—not just the what, but also the how, not only the signified, but also the signifier.

The Living Icon in Byzantium and Italy

The Living Icon in Byzantium and Italy
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages : 301
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781107782969
ISBN-13 : 1107782961
Rating : 4/5 (69 Downloads)

Synopsis The Living Icon in Byzantium and Italy by : Paroma Chatterjee

This is the first book to explore the emergence and function of a novel pictorial format in the Middle Ages, the vita icon, which displayed the magnified portrait of a saint framed by scenes from his or her life. The vita icon was used for depicting the most popular figures in the Orthodox calendar and, in the Latin West, was deployed most vigorously in the service of Francis of Assisi. This book offers a compelling account of how this type of image embodied and challenged the prevailing structures of vision, representation and sanctity in Byzantium and among the Franciscans in Italy between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Paroma Chatterjee uncovers the complexities of the philosophical and theological issues that had long engaged both the medieval East and West, such as the fraught relations between words and images, relics and icons, a representation and its subject, and the very nature of holy presence.

Quid est secretum?

Quid est secretum?
Author :
Publisher : BRILL
Total Pages : 780
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9789004432260
ISBN-13 : 9004432264
Rating : 4/5 (60 Downloads)

Synopsis Quid est secretum? by : Ralph Dekoninck

This book examines how secret knowledge was represented visually in ways that both revealed and concealed the true nature of that knowledge, giving and yet impeding access to it.