Interpreting Dante - (William and Katherine Devers Dante and Medieval Italian Literature) by Paola Nasti & Claudia Rossignoli (Paperback)

About the Book

Interpreting Dante is a collection of essays discussing the significance of the Dante commentary tradition on general study of the Comedy, the history of ideas, and literary criticism.

Book Synopsis

In Interpreting Dante: Essays on the Traditions of Dante Commentary, Paola Nasti and Claudia Rossignoli gather essays by prominent scholars of the Dante commentary tradition to discuss the significance of this tradition for the study of the Comedy, its broad impact on the history of ideas, and its contribution to the development of literary criticism.

Interest in the Dante commentary tradition has grown considerably in recent years, but projects on this subject tend to focus on philological reconstructions. The contributors shift attention to the interpretation of texts, authors, and reading communities by examining how Dante commentators developed interpretative paradigms that contributed to the advancement of literary criticism and the creation of the Western literary canon. Dante commentaries illustrate the evolution of notions of "literariness" and literature, genre and style, intertextuality and influence, literary histories, traditions and canons, authorship and readerships, paratexts and textual materiality. The volume includes methodological essays exploring theoretical aspects of the tradition, such as the creation of a taxonomy for categorizing typologies of commentaries; the relationship between commentators and their contemporary readers; the interplay between written and visual commentaries; and the impact of patronage on the forms of exegesis. Other essays, including two in Italian, examine case studies of individual commentaries, giving an account of the modus operandi of Dante's exegetes by relating their approaches to the cultural, ideological, and political agendas of the community of readers and scholars to which the commentators belonged.

Review Quotes

"The meticulously researched and footnoted essays offer an entry point into the study not of Dante's Commedia, but of the most important commentaries that have accompanied the poem." --Renaissance Quarterly

"Interpreting Dante is an extremely valuable and timely contribution to scholarship on the Dante commentary tradition. Such a collection, devoted both to methodological problems and to single cases, is a novelty. Additionally, as the first comprehensive volume on the topic in English, it will serve as an invaluable resource for students and scholars." --Anna Pegoretti, University of Warwick

"Interpreting Dante presents a genuinely top-notch collection of essays written by some of the most innovative and influential scholars in the field, on both sides of the Atlantic. A joy to read, from beginning to end, this volume will make a lasting impact on the study of Dante's reception." --Michael Papio, University of Massachusetts Amherst

"Just as the University of Notre Dame has become the central point in American Dante studies, its press is now recognized as the most vital current source of publications dealing with the Florentine poet. These fifteen essays, composed by Italian, American, and British scholars, gather to form an essential companion to such collections of the early commentaries as that found in the Dartmouth Dante Project." --Robert Hollander, Princeton University (emeritus)

"This volume draws on a diversity of critical perspectives to reevaluate the Dante commentary tradition not as a monolithic entity but as one embodying, in the rich plurality of its exegetical practices, the perennial challenges and rewards of 'interpreting Dante.' . . . the book leaves us with a sense of the commentary tradition as an animate entity, which continues to evolve and grow into the body of Dante scholarship as we know it today, If 'a text is also the history of its reception, ' then Interpreting Dante confirms that the Comedy continues to enjoy a prolific afterlife." --Speculum

". . . this is a welcome initiative, as wide-ranging as it is brimming with expertise and as amply provided bibliographically as it is beautifully illustrated." --Modern Language Review

"As Dante scholarship and medieval textual studies evolve, this volume will surely be a guide for the next decade and more . . . this book should be found in every college library and will prove indispensable to a wide circle of scholars." --Sixteenth Century Journal

"Paola Nasti and Claudia Rossignoli's erudite volume . . . has the potential to initiate not only further research on the commentaries but also to inspire Dane scholarship more broadly. Composed with great care, executed with methodological rigor, and mindful of philological concerns, as well as cultural and historical contexts, the essays follow a maxim that has been adapted for the Devers series from Aldus Manutius, but is all too often forgotten in academic life today: festina lente." --Medievalia et Humanistica

"With the high level of expertise of its contributors and the high level of scholarship in their essays, it will be no surprise when the volume becomes essential reading for the study of Dante commentary . . . . This volume offers an enticing foray into the complex study of Dante commentary with its well-curated and well-chosen collection of essays." --Comitatus

About the Author

Claudia Rossignoli is lecturer in Italian at the University of St. Andrews.