Review of Maria Luisa Ardizzone, Dante: Il paradigma intelletuale. Un'"inventio" degli anni fiorentini (original) (raw)
Related papers
Recension in English on Claudia Di Fonzo's volume entitled "Dante tra diritto, teologia ed esegesi antica" (Napoli: EdiSES, 2012), in: Quaderni d'Italianistica (vol. XXXIV), 2/2013, pp.169-171. (An Italian version of this recension was published in L'Alighieri, no.42 /2013/, pp.170-173.)
Claudia Di Fonzo. Dante tra diritto, teologia ed esegesi antica. Napoli: Edises, 2012. Pp. 188. ISBN 9788879597449. € 15.* In her new volume (Dante between jurisprudence, theology and ancient exegesis) Claudia Di Fonzo-who in 2008 edited the L'ultima forma dell'Ottimo commento -discusses the legacy of the Supreme Poet with an innovative approach. Di Fonzo analyzes some important traits of Alighieri's work by inserting it in a context in which she intends to reconstruct the connections between jurisprudence, eschatology, hermeneutics and poetry in Dante's political-theological conception. The author re-reads Dante's texts not only in function of some new results in philological investigations, but also in an attempt to reveal new ways in Dante's interpretation. As Di Fonzo sustains, the Comedy and Dante's treatises are special synthesis of certain "roving concepts" ("motivi vaganti") of the European Middle Ages, reformulated by the poetic power of the man who is considered by Eliot as the greatest among the poets of modern languages (p.4).
Critical Philology and Dante's Rime
Philology, rpt. Dante's Multitudes, Notre Dame U.P., 2022, 298-319., 2015
This essay examines the insufficient critical vigilance and transparency with which we monitor the porous boundaries between philology and interpretation, with special attention to the Due and Trecento. The claims of philologists are unfortunately not always truly philological, but rather are hermeneutic arguments masquerading as, and claiming the authority of, philological arguments: weak interpretation made illegitimately strong by being presented as philology. After looking at earlier examples of this non-critical practice (the acceptance as factual of E. H. Wilkins’ conjectural nine forms of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, the invention of a non-existent “original” ending of the Vita Nuova, the use of culturally-freighted nomenclature like “rime estravaganti”, the reification of a conjectural relation between Boccaccio’s canzoni distese and the unwritten books of the Convivio), I consider the recent “discovery” of a new Dantean text, the so-called “libro delle canzoni di Dante”, viewed as a moment when we can track the violation of the boundary between philology and hermeneutics in real time.
The Oxford Handbook of Dante contains forty-four specially written chapters that provide a thorough and creative reading of Dante's oeuvre. It gathers an intergenerational and international team of scholars encompassing diverse approaches from the fields of Anglo-American, Italian, and continental scholarship and spanning several disciplines: philology, material culture, history, religion, art history, visual studies, theory from the classical to the contemporary, queer, post- and de-colonial, and feminist studies. The volume combines a rigorous reassessment of Dante's formation, themes, and sources, with a theoretically up-to-date focus on textuality, thereby offering a new critical Dante. The volume is divided into seven sections: 'Texts and Textuality'; 'Dialogues'; 'Transforming Knowledge'; Space(s) and Places'; 'A Passionate Selfhood'; 'A Non-linear Dante'; and 'Nachleben'. It seeks to challenge the Commedia-centric approach (the conviction that notwithstanding its many contradictions, Dante's works move towards the great reservoir of poetry and ideas that is the Commedia), in order to bring to light a non-teleological way in which these works relate amongst themselves. Plurality and the openness of interpretation appear as Dante's very mark, coexisting with the attempt to create an all-encompassing mastership. The Handbook suggests what is exciting about Dante now and indicate where Dante scholarship is going, or can go, in a global context.
Critical Philology and Dante's Commedia. Addenda et corrigenda (july 8th, 2021)
Not only literary students, but also well-known scholars share the idea that the reconstruction of a text is a routine job which leaves little room for creativity. After some 40 years during which I have edited or prepared the edition of works of Machiavelli (Discorso intorno alla nostra lingua), Pietro Aretino (Cortegiana), Torquato Tasso (Aminta) and 17 years devoted to the textual transmission and the text of Dante's Commedia, I think that, except for the first phases of the job, textual editing requires almost constant critical thought and interpretation. I shall present a little series of examples, mostly from Dante's Commedia, with cases ranging from decisions in the realm of accidentals to rather complicated choices among competing substantial readings and to the risky enterprise of emendation against all the witnesses of the work. While these examples can give an idea of the novelty of some solutions of my forthcoming edition (the introduction and Inferno will appear in the first months of 2021), in my view, they seem to confirm the opinion of the great classical philologist Giorgio Pasquali, for whom textual criticism isn't mechanical; it is methodical.