2022 Lenten Lectures: Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy

We are delighted to announce the launch of the first Dublin Dante Summer School (DDSS) which will run for three years, June 2019-June 2020-June 2021. 2021 will then mark the anniversary of Dante’s death with a special edition of our School. The project has received collaboration and financial support from Dublin Unesco City of Literature, the Italian Institute of Culture and the Italian Embassy in Dublin, The National University of Ireland, TCD Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, TCD School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation, Trinity Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCD School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, UCD College of Arts and Humanities, The UCD Foundation for Italian Studies. The launch of the first Irish Dante Summer School based in Dublin is meant to attract national and international attention to the Italian language, literature and culture through the study and teaching of Dante’s Divine Comedy , one of the poetic masterworks of Western culture. The Summer School will consist of 4 days with morning lectures and afternoon workshops held by internationally renowned scholars in the field of Dante studies and IIC, TCD, UCD members of staff. Students and scholars from Ireland, the UK, Europe and the US will participate, too. The theme of this year is Dante’s Inferno: The Medieval Text and its Afterlife

2021

On the occasion of the seven hundred year anniversary of the death of Dante on 14 September this year this work of homage poetry is a translation/rewrite/extension of Canto 1 of the Inferno. A draft translation into Italian is also uploaded.

Today we are going to introduce and so to speak to taste Dante’s Commedia. The poem opens with a poet, also named Dante, who finds himself lost in a wood. The ghost of the ancient Latin poet Vergil appears, and offers to guide him on the first part of a journey that will take him through all the cosmos, starting in Hell, going up through Purgatory, and finally, ascending into skies, with another guide. The poem tells the journey of the poet himself throughout the 3 realms, with the many encounters and dialogues. According to Genette’s definitions, then, its narrator may be defined "intradiégétique" et "homodiégétique".  We will focus on his cosmology, which plays a large part in the poem. To this end, we must compare the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems, while also reading a literary account of the unpredictable consequences of the new cosmology.  Going on we will see which is the origin of Hell, according to Dante, and comparing it with the modern/ancient view in Milton’s Paradise Lost.  We shall clarify the structure of Dantean Hell: before from a physical after from a moral point of view. With the prior expression, I mean its orography and hydrology, and even its architectural parts (walls of Ditis’ town, Malebolge).  With the latter one, I mean the ethical criterion for the discernment of sin, in comparison with that which divides the sins in Purgatory. Again, I will explain you an annotated list of many, but not all, sinners and some of their pains.  At the end, if we have time, we will read one of the most famous and relevant episode of Inferno.

Bibliotheca Dantesca, 2022

Departing from the enigmatic 2006 Chinese-oil-painting-turned-digital-curio _Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante_, this essay defines the conceptual framework behind _Dante Today_, a crowdsourced but curated digital archive that catalogs references to Dante and his works across contemporary global cultures. In our efforts to track the resonance of Dante's works across times and spaces, we have turned to crowdsourcing as the principal mechanism behind collection development. This choice has advantages and pitfalls. On the one hand, crowdsourcing enables the participation of large and diverse publics in collection development, engaging the "crowd" in scholarly practice. On the other hand, outsourcing collection development to the “crowd” threatens to replicate the center-periphery model that Dante’s works are often accused of perpetuating. Although crowdsourcing aspires to democratize participatory heritage projects such as ours, I interrogate the limits of such claims, particularly from the perspective of transcultural and de-colonial scholarly practice. In my conclusion, I articulate our plans for future initiatives that aim to remedy this imbalance.

Dante's ‘Divine Comedy’ was the subject of vivid illustrations from its earliest circulation and, when book making transitioned into the new medium of print in the late 1400s, it became the source of inspiration for new visual traditions. Seeking to see some of these early printed Dantes in more detail and to explore the meanings these books may still hold for us today, two University of Oxford specialists in Dante Studies and Book History, Rebecca Bowen and Simon Gilson, invited the artist and printmaker Wuon Gean-Ho to examine and respond to Renaissance editions of the Commedia held in the special collections of the University of Oxford’s Taylor Institution Library. The result is a body of work called ‘Looking for Dante’, a collection of artwork, film, and essays that explores universal themes in Dante’s text and considers their relevance today. Moving from morality and condemnation through love and redemption, ‘Looking for Dante’ offers a modern reading of the ‘Divine Comedy’ and the historical books that preserve it, reflecting on the universal appeal of ink on paper. Access the full, open-access publication here: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:43ea410b-2e64-4c81-8a97-5348d8c004d6/files/s3484zj61t

Approaches to Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy, second edition, 2020

For those numerous courses taught in En glish we highly recommend duallanguage editions for the fa cil i ty they offer those instructors who wish to note certain aspects of the Italian text. In par tic u lar, we would note the translations with commentary by Allen Mandelbaum; Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander; and Robert Durling and Ronald L. Martinez; as well as those by Robin Kirkpatrick and Stanley Lombardo for their readability, valuable notes, and sometimes extended commentary on points of interest. We recognize the appeal that some earlier versions have for many instructors (e.g., those by Mark Musa, John D. Sinclair, Charles S. Singleton, John Ciardi, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow). We also would note that, among the many recent translations, those by Robert Pinsky, Anthony Esolen, Clive James, and Mary Jo Bang have been used to good effect by instructors. Madison Sowell's essay on evaluating En glish versions of the Comedy discusses the vari ous ele ments involved in choosing translations for a course on Dante. Readings from Dante's minor works are also used profitably in many courses. At times, the entire Vita nuova is assigned and relevant sections of the Monarchia, the Letter to Can Grande, Convivio, and De vulgari eloquentia are incorporated to provide background material for the study of the Comedy or to highlight their intrinsic importance in the more general medieval context. John Took provides a fine overview of these writings in Dante: Lyric Poet and Phi loso pher. Therefore, in addition to the editions and versions of the Comedy noted above, we call attention to several recent En glish translations of Dante's minor works that are impor tant additions to class syllabi. The most frequently used text in classes is the Vita nuova, often read in its entirety, and instructors should note the debate concerning its division and presen ta tion, even though these considerations do not affect its meaning vis-à-vis the Comedy. 2 Generally, earlier En glish translations of the Vita Nuova-those of Musa and Barbara Reynolds-still enjoy great popularity, although the more recent versions by Anthony Robert Mortimer and by Andrew Frisardi have received favorable comments. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's nineteenth-century version is also available in a 2002 edition. Small but representative se lections from the other minor works often find their way into course syllabi and can be impor tant additions. For investigations of Dante's views on language and lyric poetry, readings from De vulgari eloquentia are very impor tant, and two translations have recently appeared by Marianne Shapiro and Steven Botterill, respectively. Similarly, for Dante's ideas about the proper relationship between church and state, the Monarchia is the crucial document, and some recent translations include those by Richard Kay and by Shaw, although for classroom purposes the latter is more manageable.

In The Routledge History of Italian Americans (Routledge, 2018), pp. 91-104.