filippo gianferrari

Reconstructs the kind of education Dante received and how this informed his literary production and interactions with his contemporary readers.
Studies the surviving manuscripts and glosses; shows how differently medieval readers approached classical texts compared to how we interpret them today.
Explores the influence of medieval school texts on Dante, which has never been systematically studied before

This article investigates Dante’s engagement with one of the key and most controversial academic questions of the late Middle Ages: the beatific vision after the general resurrection. This essay focuses on Paradiso 14, where the character of King Solomon explains that the souls’ vision of God will increase after reuniting with their resurrected bodies. After briefly reconstructing the
theological debate engaged by Dante’s treatment of the general resurrection, and discussing the prevailing tendencies in the scholarship on Paradiso 14 and the body–soul relationship in the Commedia, this essay provides a new interpretation of this canto from a social and political perspective. It argues
that in Dante’s eschatological vision, the resurrected body appears to be essential for the ultimate fulfillment of humanity’s social nature.

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY

ABSTRACT The article investigates the significance of the ‘turbo’ imagery that Dante adds at the end of Ulysses’s tale (Inferno xxvi) as a possible key to decoding the nature of this character’s sin. It argues that, in the style of the ancient fable, Dante devised the end of Ulysses’s story in order to make its moral message understandable to a lay, non-academic, readership. To achieve such broad, Gospel-like communication, the poet probably relied on moral interpretations of the turbo imagery that would have been popular in his time. Through an intertextual discussion of several medieval sources available to the poet, the article shows that the turbo would have been a fitting contrapasso for the sin of the evil counsellor, and shows the relevance of this moral category to describe the sin of intellectual curiositas as well.

«Great fire leaps from the smallest spark» (Par. i 34): A Proverb of Authority · This essay investigates the meaning of the lines « Poca favilla, gran fiamma seconda : / forse di re-tro a me, con miglior voci / si pregherà perché Cirra risponda » (Par. i 34-36), and argues that they constitute a pivotal locus in Dante’s articulation of the Comedy’s poetics and ethical aims. The object of the poet’s wish in these lines has proved particularly elusive to critical scrutiny, eliciting contrasting interpretations. Paradoxically, however, the groundbreaking implications of the poet’s words have been mostly overlooked until recent reassessments by Robert Hollander and by Enrico Malato. Moving from these recent contributions, the present study argues that the key to deciphering Dante’s hope in these lines is lodged in the poet’s nuanced rewriting of the proverbial image of the small spark that ignites a great fire. Contrary to what is generally asserted, Dante’s rewriting here appears far from con-ventional when compared to traditional versions of the sententia. Moreover, as the article endeavours to demonstrate, Par. i 34 represents only one among several instances of the poet’s utilization of the proverb in his oeuvre. Indeed, its meaning can only be fully grasped within this larger system of references. Therefore, when read in its textual and cultural con-text, Dante’s use of the image of the « poca favilla, gran fiamma seconda » acquires a central role in the poet’s claim about the revolutionary nature of his Comedy, and of his prophetic and poetic authority.

When we talk about Dante's classical formation we almost never consider the Latin poems that were most popular at his time and were often used for educational purposes. In this short note, I offer some insights on this promising subject of research and provide one example of how these then-popular texts may help us reconstruct Dante's classical culture and interpret his poem.

https://thi.ucsc.edu/event/from-levi-to-dante-redefining-humanity-from-the-margins/
“Primo Levi and Dante. Cosmologies,” by Robert Gordon (University of Cambridge): Primo Levi famously drew on Dante to map the distant and incomprehensible ‘concentrationary universe’ that he encountered at Auschwitz. Perhaps less well known is Levi’s deep fascination, shared with Dante, for astronomy and for the mapping of the cosmos as a tool for understanding man’s place in the wider universe, and thus also mankind’s own history. This lecture explores Levi and Dante in parallel as two cosmologists, both in their different ways scientists and poets of the stars.

“Black Limbo: Dante, Boccaccio, and Global Ethnic Studies” by Martin Eisner (Duke University): This talk uses a fifteenth-century illumination of Dante’s limbo that portrays pagan poets with black skin to explore the relationship between medieval reflections on pagans and modern ethnic studies. Highlighting how Dante’s concern with cultural difference in both temporal and spatial terms informs Boccaccio’s elaboration of these ideas, it shows how this accommodation of past and present pagans contrasts with earlier reflections of Augustine and Jerome, contemporary ideas of Petrarch, and later Fascist uses of Dante to which Primo Levi responds.

Register here: https://ucsc-expghost.imodules.com/controls/email_marketing/view_in_browser.aspx?sid=1069&gid=1001&sendId=3195341&ecatid=65&puid=567b1ed9-bef1-4255-a845-063b7139f320

During Dante’s lifetime, the maritime city-states of northern Italy consolidated their position at the center of Mediterranean transit and trade. Thanks to broader trends in the centuries before his birth – the Crusades, increasing trade in essential foods and luxury goods, and swift advances in naval architecture and financial supports for trade, for instance – Genoa and Venice became important hubs for trade and travel between western Europe and the greater Mediterranean world. Florence grew dramatically during the thirteenth century, but it wasn’t yet the dynamic financial and artistic center that it would become after Dante’s death. Dante’s exile exposed him to cultural trends and technologies reaching northern Italy from the broader Mediterranean world that were still little known in Florence. The works he wrote after his exile – especially the Commedia – reveal his fascination with the technological and intellectual innovations that he learned about as he traveled through northern Italy. This talk addresses Dante’s discovery of the material culture of the Mediterranean – like the shipyards in Venice, which he may or may not have visited in person; paper and watermarks; dice and dice games; and carpets from the east – and intellectual trends, like Islamic teachings and legends about the afterlife, after his exile from Florence.

African American culture has been attentive to Dante Alighieri, the man and his writing, since the mid-19th century. Dante's Divine Comedy has proved to be an effective primer on issues of justice for the broader community. This talk will present the work of African American authors from the 19th century to today who have turned to Dante and amplified his voice that speaks truth to power, that calls out for justice without compromise, that seeks a better community for us all.  Recording available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q5cf8n4vPQ&ab_channel=UCSantaCruzArts%2CLectures%2CandEntertainment

Dottrina:
Poetics of Vernacular Learning In and After Dante
Call for Papers
Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, March 30 – 2 April 2022
Panel Sponsored by the Dante Society of America


In his unfinished Convivio, Dante captures the cultural revolution implied by writing a commentary in vernacular in Italy at the turn of the fourteenth century. Like “a new light and a new sun,” the vernacular will soon shed new light where Latin once illuminated the path of learning. The author presents himself as a conduit between high Latin learning and popular vernacular culture—not merely as a translator, but as the architect of an alternative vernacular program of instruction.
Dante’s language also betrays his excitement about the momentous transformation taking place as he was writing: a vernacular readership of primarily laypeople—both men and women—was becoming a sociological reality. As Erich Auerbach famously noted, Dante molded, as potential readers of his poem, a community that was scarcely in existence. How Dante educated and nurtured an expanding vernacular readership against the grain of the official Latin culture is a fascinating and largely unexplored field of inquiry.
In particular, it remains crucial to appreciate how Dante’s pedagogic ambitions informed his vernacular poetics. This investigation may yield fascinating evidence for reconstructing: 1) the poet’s role in empowering a new vernacular culture and 2) his legacy in the development of late-medieval and early-modern literary cultures conceived as forms of vernacular learning. This panel, therefore, discusses Dante’s contribution to the development of vernacular poetics and literary cultures that endeavored to promote forms of alternative learning.
We invite papers and ongoing research projects on different disciplinary and methodological perspectives, included but not limited to:

● Poetics of teaching and learning in the wake/as a reaction to/or alternative to Dante’s;
● Discussions of Dante’s pedagogic stance in the commentary tradition on the Commedia;
● Female authorship and audience as/and alternative forms of learning;
● Gendered reading and learning;
● Vernacular poetics as forms of anti-academic and anti-Scholastic learning;
● Teaching classical poetry and wisdom in vernacular;
● Vernacular Humanism;
● Vernacular philosophy and theology;
● Vernacular liturgy;
● Poetics of Moral, civic, and ethical instruction;
● Early modern rewritings of Dante, with a focus on educating vernacular readers.



The panel is open to scholars and researchers from various disciplines and at different career stages (as per RSA policy, graduate students who are currently working on completing their final degree program will be considered as well, if their materials are directly related to their advanced degree, i.e., not term papers).

Please send your proposals to Filippo Gianferrari, fgianfer@ucsc.edu by June 30th.

In your submission please include: paper title (15-word maximum); abstract (150-word maximum); curriculum vitae; PhD or other terminal degree completion date (past or expected).

The development of vernacular cultures cannot be described simply in terms of translation. It entailed a complex process of cultural diffusion rather than a transmission of contents between two languages. Vernaculars were not an alternative language to Latin, but, rather, only one element in a vast--and slow--cultural realignment that transformed institutions, social and political networks and, ultimately, daily life. Vernacular translations were the most obvious product of this transformation, but therefore easily mistaken for an effect rather than a cause. As the sheer variety of language changed--and the access to Latin that vernaculars made possible also played a part--so too did the register, range of audience, and the implicit powers of texts as such. Language itself slowly undermined the privileges that had been a monopoly of the clergy and enlarged the sphere of action of the laity.

Questo contributo si propone di riscattare l’importanza degli autori minori come fonti dantesche. In quest’ottica, si mostreranno i debiti contratti da Dante in due importanti snodi purgatoriali (Pg. XXI e XXVIII) con due testi di scuola, ossia l’Achilleide di Stazio e il De raptu Proserpinae di Claudiano. Si tenterà di spiegare il silenzio dantesco su quest’ultimo autore, anche alla luce dei riferimenti indiretti a entrambi nei primi due canti del Paradiso.

Nella mia relazione, presenterò due possibili modelli, uno formale l’altro ideologico, per gli esempi di Purgatorio XII. Anzitutto, discuterò l’unicità del modello dell’Ecloga Theoduli come fonte per la strutturazione e composizione formale degli esempi di umiltà e superbia. In secondo luogo, mostrerò come i paragrafi 20 e 21 dell’ottavo libro del Policraticus di John of Salisbury offrano un interessante modello per la selezione e disposizione degli esempi biblici di superbia. Il capitolo del Policraticus apre un’interessante prospettiva per un’interpretazione politica di questo gruppo di esempi, sulla quale non si è ancora riflettuto approfonditamente.
In fine, rifletterò sull’importanza di rivalutare la rappresentazione dantesca del Purgatorio alla luce dell’educazione medievale, e in particolare di quella grammaticale. L’Ecloga Theoduli apparteneva infatti al canone delle prime letture scolastiche e la sua interazione con il modello del Policraticus nel procedimento dell’inventio di Purgatorio XII conferma il valore etico che questa prima educazione ebbe agli occhi di Dante e dei suoi primi lettori.

Scholars have discussed the importance of Boccaccio’s Buccolicum Carmen as a key to his poetics, his life, and his relationship to Dante and Petrarch. At the same time, they have normally underestimated the pioneering contribution of Boccaccio’s bucolic experiments for the re-absorption of pagan antiquity into Christian poetics and spirituality. Such a process would play a vital role in humanist culture. Hence, it is essential to examine Boccaccio’ Buccolicum Carmen in order to appreciate Boccaccio’s contribution to humanist poetics.
My paper aims to examine the apologetic discourse of Boccaccio’s eclogues, first, by reassessing the historical and cultural importance of his eclogue 14, Olympia, in the context of medieval and early-humanist education, and second, by comparing it to Petrarch’s poetic and intellectual construction of his bucolic works.
Since Pupils in medieval grammar schools learned Latin and their first rudiments of bucolic poetry from the 10th-century Ecloga Theoduli, Boccaccio thus most likely knew it. The poem shows a Christian and a pagan shepherd holding a poetic context based on Biblical and Ovidian wisdom; the winner is not difficult to guess. Although the setting of the poem is bucolic, its content is, in fact, strongly apologetic. Similarly, Boccaccio’s Olympia presents the encounter between a pagan shepherd and the spirit of his dead Christian daughter. This time, however, the pagan is invited to be part of the Christian world. Olympia significantly is placed at the center of Boccaccio’s last eclogues, 12-16, which discuss the value of poetry and celebrate a “religion” of poetry.
Petrarch is the model and main interlocutor of Boccaccio’s bucolic apology for pagan poetry. My paper will reconstruct Boccaccio’s dialogue with Petrarch’s Bucolicum Carmen, particularly looking at Petrarch’s eclogues Argus and Parthenias, Fam. 10.4, Sen. 2.1. My analysis will show how Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s bucolic experiments aimed to create a space where pagan and Christian wisdom could coexist, albeit in tension, and find ways of harmonizing. Petrarch revised allegory in the wake of Servius’s hermeneutic and gave Boccaccio the key to this poetic space.

Yesterday’s Hangover and the Oak-Tree: Boccaccio Stays in the Countryside.

Boccaccio, as well as Petrarch, expressed the belief that a poet should live alone, surrounded by a bucolic countryside, on the outskirts of human society. Boccaccio in fact attests to a career-long fascination with the green spaces of the world, and his widespread use of the countryside topos has made it difficult for scholars to ascribe specific allegorical or metapoetical meanings to it.
One important element that can help us understand Boccaccio’s use of this topos in his poetics is that his works increasingly show the countryside in opposition to the city. While the urban environment came to embody the cradle of all corruption, where lucrative arts were carried out at the expense of the studia humanitatis, the countryside constituted to be the place of literary activity and reflection. This paper argues that through this idealized locus Boccaccio meant to symbolize the space of his intended poetic and cultural reform.
In the first instance, my paper argues that, in the prologue of the Decameron and in the opening of Book Fourteen of the Genealogie Deorum Gentilium, Boccaccio represents the countryside as the place where the moral and intellectual reform of society can take place. The paper then traces the progressive articulation of this symbolic locus in the two versions of Boccaccio's Faunus from the Buccolicum carmen. In the second version of the Faunus, Boccaccio engages both Petrarch’s and Dante's eclogues claiming a different conception of the poet’s civic role. My paper argues that here Boccaccio refers implicitly to Virgil’s Bucolica 6 to create his anti-epic character of the poet, who lives remote from society, but nonetheless masters a unique type of wisdom. Finally, the paper argues that in the second version of the Faunus the character of the poet decides to remain in the countryside in order to reflect a deliberate change in his poetics.

Dante scolaro: educazione medievale e nuove prospettive critiche sulla Commedia. Il caso dei Disticha Catonis.
Abstract
Gli studiosi interessati alla formazione intellettuale di Dante si sono per lo più cimentati nella ricostruzione della biblioteca del poeta e dei suoi milieus culturali. Poco, o non sistematicamente, si è riflettuto sul ruolo che in questo processo ebbero le letture fatte da Dante a scuola per imparare a leggere e scrivere il latino.
Nella mia relazione, offrirò un esempio dei possibili rapporti intertestuali tra la Commedia e il medievale canone scolastico degli autori latini. Discuterò il significato simbolico del Catone dantesco alla luce della ricezione medievale dei Disticha Catonis. Questo testo di uso scolastico fu impiegato lungo tutto il medioevo come introduzione alla lingua latina, e fu studiato e memorizzato dalla maggior parte degli scolari europei. I Disticha Catonis presentavano ai lettori un modello di uomo virtuoso tradizionalmente associato con il nome di Catone. Nella mia lettura evidenzierò elementi di continuità e discontinuità tra il Catone dei Disticha e quello del Purgatorio dantesco.
In ultimo, dopo aver notato che diversi luoghi della seconda cantica presentano richiami a opere di uso scolastico quale l’Ecloga Theoduli, l’Achilleide, e il De Raptu Proserpinae, rifletterò sul l’interpretazione di Catone come “maestro” e del Purgatorio come “scuola.”

https://culturalstudies.ucsc.edu/2022/03/29/may-4-filippo-gianferrari-dante-and-boccaccio-vs-medieval-education-a-lesson-in-cross-cultural-pastoral/
Readers have always been fascinated by Dante’s distinctive habit of placing episodes from Scripture side by side with ancient pagan myths, as though the latter had a comparable authority. As my reading shows, a popular medieval school text, known as the Eclogue of Theodulus (Ecloga Theoduli), supplied a fitting precedent and model for this practice and might have suggested some specific series of examples that Dante stages in his Purgatorio. By constructing a system of parallel mythological and biblical examples, the Ecloga Theoduli featured a syncretic account of universal history that suggested mythology was a prefiguration of the events recounted in the Bible. Whereas the Ecloga depicts a clash between Christian and pagan cultures, however, dismissing the latter as a lie, Dante harmonizes the two traditions, providing a syncretic program for the moral instruction of the Christian reader. Although the Purgatorio’s syncretic discourse constituted a remarkable innovation, which exerted long-lasting influence on later authors, it nonetheless retained some of the cultural limitations imposed by the Ecloga—as, for instance, in the representation of Virgil’s inability to cross the river Lethe in Eden. The chapter goes on to argue that first in Paradiso 19 and then in his last work, the second Egloga to Giovanni del Virgilio, Dante obliquely criticizes the Ecloga Theoduli’s condemnation of ancient poetic wisdom. The case of the Ecloga, therefore, well encapsulates Dante’s conflicting attitude toward his own education. The paper ends by showing that Boccaccio’s eclogue Olympia (Buccolicum Carmen 14) provides a sophisticated parody and refutation of the Ecloga Theoduli that takes as its model and interlocutor Dante’s wrestling with the same text in his own oeuvre.