Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“In this bravura study of Dante’s material culture, social inclusion and exclusion, philosophical heterodoxy, and problematic thinking, one size does not fit all. Barolini’s painstaking philological analyses show that Dante’s competing claims disrupt the tyranny of extreme conclusions. Their lesson is at once nonnormative and supportive of productive difference.” —William J. Kennedy, author of Petrarchism at Work
"Teodolinda Barolini’s Dante’s Multitudes is a must-read for any student of literary criticism who is learning to apply historicist ideology to the literary pillars of our civilization." —VoegelinView
Table of ContentsNote on Editions and Translations
Preface
Part I. Social and Cultural Difference
1. “Only Historicize”: History, Material Culture (Food, Clothes, Books), and the Future of Dante Studies
2. Dante’s Sympathy for the Other, or the Non-Stereotyping Imagination: Sexual and Racialized Others in the Commedia
3. Contemporaries Who Found Heterodoxy in Dante: Cecco d’Ascoli, Boccaccio, and Benvenuto da Imola on Fortuna and Inferno 7.89
4. Dante’s Limbo and Equity of Access: Non-Christians, Children, and Criteria of Inclusion and Exclusion, from Inferno 4 to Paradiso 32
Part II. Metaphysical Difference
5. Toward a Dantean Theology of Eros: From Dante’s Lyrics to the Paradiso
6. Amicus eius: Dante and the Semantics of Friendship
7. Paradiso and the Mimesis of Ideas: Realism versus Reality
8. Dante Squares the Circle: Textual and Philosophical Affinities of Monarchia and Paradiso (Solutio Distinctiva in Mon. 3.4.17 and Par. 4.94–114)
9. Difference as Punishment or Difference as Pleasure: From the Tower of Babel in De vulgari eloquentia to the Death of Babel in Paradiso 26
Part III. Aristotelian Disruptions 1: Wealth and Society
10. Aristotle’s Mezzo, Courtly Misura, and Dante’s Canzone Le dolci rime: Humanism, Ethics, and Social Anxiety
11. Dante and Wealth, Between Aristotle and Cortesia: From the Moral Canzoni Le dolci rime and Poscia ch’Amor through Convivio to Inferno 6 and 7
Part IV. Aristotelian Disruptions 2: Love and Compulsion
12. Archeology of the Donna Gentile: The Importance of Disconversion in Conversion Narratives
13. Dante and Cecco d’Ascoli on Love and Compulsion: The Epistle to Cino, Io sono stato, the Third Heaven
14. Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete, A Dramatization of “utrum de passione in passionem possit anima transformari”: Conflict, Compulsion, Consent, Conversion
Part V. Critical Philology and Italian Cultural History
15. The Case of the Lost Original Ending of Dante’s Vita Nuova: More Notes Toward a Critical Philology
16. Critical Philology and Dante’s Rime
