In this study, Professor Kelly analyzes Dante's understanding of the meanings of tragedy and comedy in his undisputed works, especially the 'De vulgari eloquentia' and the 'Comedia'. He finds that Dante's criteria concerned subject-matter and style, not emotions like happiness and sorrow, or plot movement from one mood to another, or humor or the lack of it. He considered Vergil's 'Aeneid' and his own lyric poems to be tragedies because of their sublime subjects and their use of elevated style and vocabulary. He considered the 'Inferno', along with the 'Purgatorio' and the 'Paradiso', to be a comedy because of the range of subjects and styles. Dante's commentators, in contrast, tended to have a plot-based understanding of these genres, and they attributed similar views to Dante himself. On the basis of both content and style, Kelly concludes that the 'Epistle to Cangrande' is not by Dante, except possibly for the first three paragraphs, and therefore ascribes it to Pseudo-Dante. It was not compiled as we have it until the last quarter of the fourteenth century, but it incorporated an earlier anonymous 'accessus' to the 'Comedia'. This 'accessus' drew heavily on Guido da Pisa's commentary, and it in turn was used by Boccaccio.

In this book, Katie Reid argues that the fifth-century author Martianus Capella was a significant influence in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. His poetic encyclopaedia, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, was a source for writing on the liberal arts, allegory and classical mythology from 1300 to 1650. In fact, writers of this period had much more in common with Martianus Capella than they did with older ancients like Homer and Virgil. As such, we must reshape our understanding of late medieval and Renaissance encounters with the classical world by exploring their roots in Late Antiquity.

The Year's Work in Medievalism: 2004 is based upon but not restricted to the 2004 proceedings of the annual International Conference on Medievalism, organized by the Director of Conferences for Studies in Medievalism, Gwendolyn Morgan, and, for 2004, Christa Canitz of the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. The essays of the current volume center on the question of individual responsibility in humanizing one's society through the use of medievalism. ¥ Gwendolyn A. Morgan, ÒMedievalism and Individual Responsibility ¥ Karl Fugelso, ÒDeþning Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Commedia Illustrations ¥ Renee Ward, ÒRemus Lupin and Community: The Werewolf Tradition in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Series. ¥ Nancy M. Thompson, Architectural Restoriation and Stained Glass in 19th-Century Siena: The Place of Light in Giuseppe Partini's Purismo ¥ Barbara Gribling, Nationalism and the Image of the Black Prince ¥ Clare A. Simmons, Small-Scale Humor in the British Medieval Revival ¥ Brian C. Johnsrud, ÒThe Monsters Do Not Depart: Re-Unifying Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and Christian in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings ¥ Jaimie Hensley, J.R.R. Tolkien and Walther von der Volgelweide: Faerie and Reality ¥ Peter G. Christensen, From Waste Land to Grail and Back Again Naomi Mitchison's To the Chapel Perilous

With this volume, Jane Chance concludes her monumental study of the history of mythography in medieval literature. Her focus here is the advent of hybrid mythography, the transformation of mythological commentary by blending the scholarly with the courtly and the personal. No other work examines the mythographic interrelationships among these poets and their unique and personal approaches to mythological commentary.

Available for the first time in paperback, this essential resource presents a systematic introduction to Dante's life and works, his cultural context and intellectual legacy. The only such work available in English, this Encyclopedia: brings together contemporary theories on Dante, summarizing them in clear and vivid prose provides in-depth discussions of the Divine Comedy, looking at title and form, moral structure, allegory and realism, manuscript tradition, and also taking account of the various editions of the work over the centuries contains numerous entries on Dante's other important writings and on the major subjects covered within them addresses connections between Dante and philosophy, theology, poetics, art, psychology, science, and music as well as critical perspective across the ages, from Dante's first critics to the present.

This is the first account of Dante's reception in English to address full chronological span of that process. Individual authors and periods have been studied before, but Dante's British Public takes a wider and longer view, using a selection of vivid and detailed case studies to record and place in context some of the wider conversations about and appropriations of Dante that developed in Britain across more than six centuries, as access to his work extended and diversified. Much of the evidence is based on previously unpublished material in (for example) letters, journals, annotations and inventories and is drawn from archives in the UK and across the world, from Milan to Mumbai and from Berlin to Cape Town. Throughout, the role of Anglo-Italian cultural contacts and intermediaries in shaping the public understanding of Dante in Britain is given prominence - from clerics and merchants around Chaucer's time, through itinerant scholars, collectors and tourists in the early modern period, to the exiles and expatriates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The final chapter brings the story up to the present, showing how the poet's work has been seen (from the fourteenth century onwards) as accessible to 'the many', and demonstrating some of the means by which Dante has reached a yet wider British public over the past century, particularly through translation, illustration, and various forms of performance.

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In this book, Teodolinda Barolini explores the sources of Italian literary culture in the figures of its lyric poets and its “three crowns”: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Barolini views the origins of Italian literary culture through four prisms: the ideological/philosophical, the intertextual/multicultural, the structural/formal, and the social. The essays in the first section treat the ideology of love and desire from the early lyric tradition to the Inferno and its antecedents in philosophy and theology. In the second, Barolini focuses on Dante as heir to both the Christian visionary and the classical pagan traditions (with emphasis on Vergil and Ovid). The essays in the third part analyze the narrative character of Dante’s Vita nuova, Petrarch’s lyric sequence, and Boccaccio’s Decameron. Barolini also looks at the cultural implications of the editorial history of Dante’s rime and at what sparso versus organico spells in the Italian imaginary. In the section on gender, she argues that the didactic texts intended for women’s use and instruction, as explored by Guittone, Dante, and Boccaccio—but not by Petrarch—were more progressive than the courtly style for which the Italian tradition is celebrated. Moving from the lyric origins of the Divine Comedy in “Dante and the Lyric Past” to Petrarch’s regressive stance on gender in “Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature”—and encompassing, among others, Giacomo da Lentini, Guido Cavalcanti, and Guittone d’Arezzo—these sixteen essays by one of our leading critics frame the literary culture of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Italy in fresh, illuminating ways that will prove useful and instructive to students and scholars alike.

Medieval literature and art abounds in descriptions of grotesque torments (punitive in hell, redemptive in purgatory) being meted out to the unhappy dead. But how can pain be experienced in the absence of the body? Can the main agents of suffering specified in Old Testament prophecies, fire and the worm, actually trouble a disembodied soul? The relative merits of material and metaphorical understandings of the economy of pain were debated throughout the Middle Ages, and extended far beyond, surviving the abolition of purgatory within Protestantism. This book brings to life many of the intellectual clashes, beginning with Augustine’s foundational yet troubling doctrines, proceeding to the problems caused by Aristotle’s insistence that death kills off all sense and sensation, and culminating in a fresh reading of Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto XXV. Wide-ranging, lucid and bristling with ideas on every page, it illustrates superbly well the variety, liveliness and continuous creativity of scholastic thought, particularly in respect of the contribution it made to literary theory.