Vertical Readings in Dante's Comedy: Volume 2

There are many fine monographs from 2016, but one work that stands out for its comprehensiveness and boldness is the second volume of "vertical readings” of Dante’s Comedy. […] Its innovative approach to understanding the whole of Dante’s Comedy encourages readers to take stock of the intentio operis and autoris, to begin to consider how, as the Letter to Cangrande has it, "the purpose of the whole and the part could be multiple that is both remote and proximate” 

Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy is a reappraisal of the poem by an international team of thirty-four scholars. Each vertical reading analyses three same-numbered cantos from the three canticles: Inferno i, Purgatorio i and Paradiso i; Inferno ii, Purgatorio ii and Paradiso ii; etc. Although scholars have suggested before that there are correspondences between same-numbered cantos that beg to be explored, this is the first time that the approach has been pursued in a systematic fashion across the poem.

This collection – available in three volumes – offers an unprecedented repertoire of vertical readings for the whole poem. As the first volume exemplifies, vertical reading not only articulates unexamined connections between the three canticles but also unlocks engaging new ways to enter into core concerns of the poem. The three volumes thereby provide an indispensable resource for scholars, students and enthusiasts of Dante. Volume 1 and Volume 3 can also be read for free.

The volume has its origin in a series of thirty-three public lectures held in Trinity College, the University of Cambridge (2012-2016) which can be accessed at the Cambridge Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy website.

The series would not have been possible without the generosity of our sponsors: Trinity College, Cambridge; Selwyn College, Cambridge; the Italian Department, University of Cambridge; the Cambridge Italian Research Network (CIRN); and Keith Sykes.

Click here to purchase all three volumes of Vertical Readings in Dante's Comedy at a discounted rate.

Vertical Readings in Dante's 'Comedy': Volume 2
George Corbett and Heather Webb (eds) | December 2016
xiv + 290 | 1 b&w illustration | 6.14" x 9.21" (234 x 156 mm)
ISBN Paperback: 9781783742530
ISBN Hardback: 9781783742547
ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781783742554
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781783742561
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781783742578
ISBN Digital (XML): 9781783746118
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0100
Subject codes, BIC: DS (Literature: history and criticism), DSC (Literary studies: poetry and poets); BISAC: LIT004200 (Literary criticism: Italian), LIT011000 (Literary criticism: Medieval); OCLC Number: 931108343.

George Corbett is Lecturer in Theology, Imagination and the Arts in the School of Divinity, University of St Andrews. Prior to this, he was Junior Research Fellow of Trinity College and Affiliated Lecturer of the Department of Italian, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Dante and Epicurus: A Dualistic Vision of Secular and Spiritual Fulfilment (2013), and was the co-organiser, with Heather Webb, of the Cambridge Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy lecture series (2012–16).

Manuele Gragnolati is Full Professor of Medieval Italian Literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, Associate Director at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry and Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. He has authored two monographs, Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture (2005) and Amor che move. Linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante, Pasolini e Morante (2013). He has also co-edited several volumes and published many essays on medieval and modern authors from Bonvesin da la Riva and Guido Cavalcanti to Giacomo Leopardi, Cesare Pavese, Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Giorgio Pressburger.

Tristan Kay is Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Bristol. He is the author of the monograph Dante’s Lyric Redemption: Eros, Salvation, Vernacular Tradition (2016) and the co-editor of the volumes Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages (2012) and Dante in Oxford: The Paget Toynbee Lectures (2011). He has also published a number of articles on Dante, especially in relation to medieval vernacular literary culture and the poet’s modern reception.

Catherine M. Keen is Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at University College London. She is the author of Dante and the City (2003), and of articles on Dante relating especially to the themes of politics and exile. She has also published on the early Italian lyric tradition, with a special interest in Cino da Pistoia, and on the reception of classical authors, notably Ovid and Cicero, in Duecento and Trecento Italian vernacular poetry and prose. She is currently Senior Co-Editor of the journal Italian Studies.

Giuseppe Ledda is Associate Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Bologna. His main research field is Dante and medieval literature. His publications include the books La guerra della lingua: Ineffabilità, retorica e narrativa nella ‘Commedia’ di Dante (2002); Dante (2008); and La Bibbia di Dante (2015). He has also recently edited a series of volumes for the Centro Dantesco of Ravenna: La poesia della natura nella Divina Commedia (2009); La Bibbia di Dante (2011); Preghiera e liturgia nella ‘Commedia’ di Dante (2013); and Le teologie di Dante (2015). He is an editor of the peer-reviewed journal L’Alighieri.

Anne C. Leone is Research Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Italian Studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame. Her publications have focused on intersections between theological, metaliterary and medical issues in Dante’s works. She is currently finishing a monograph, Dante and Blood in the Medieval Context.

Corinna Salvadori Lonergan is Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin and Cavaliere all’Ordine della Repubblica Italiana. She is the author of Yeats and Castiglione: Poet and Courtier (1965), the editor of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Selected Writings (1992), the co-editor of Italian Culture: Interactions, Transpositions, Translations (2006), the co-ordinating editor of Insularità e cultura mediterranea nella lingua e nella letteratura italiana (2012). Her verse translations include Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Rappresentazione (1992), Ambra (2004) and Poliziano’s Orfeo (2013). She has published on Dante and Beckett, on William Roscoe and Lorenzo de’ Medici.

Simone Marchesi is Associate Professor of French and Italian Studies at Princeton University. His main research interests are medieval classicism and translation studies. He is the author of two monographs on medieval Italian authors: Stratigrafie decameroniane (2004)and Dante and Augustine: Linguistics, Poetics, Hermeneutics (2011). Recently, he has edited and translated into Italian Robert Hollander’s commentary to Dante’s Commedia (2011 and 2016).

Christian Moevs is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Notre Dame. His interests include Dante, medieval Italian literature, lyric poetry and poetics, and the intersection between literature and philosophy. He is the author of The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy (2005).

Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja is the current Keith Sykes Research Fellow in Italian Studies at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he completed his PhD as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. He is the author of Vita di Alessandro (2016), Dante & the MedievalAlexander (2017) and articles on Dante, medieval political thought, medieval magic and satire. He has directed and edited the video documentary Frames from a RoundTable: Paradiso XV (2015).

Claudia Rossignoli is Lecturer in Italian at the University of St Andrews. Her work focuses on Medieval and Renaissance literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on Dante and the Comedy’s commentary tradition, on the transmission and application of Aristotelian notions in literary theories, on Humanism and exegesis, and on the codification and dissemination of linguistic and literary models. She is the co-organiser, with Robert Wilson, of the Lectura Dantis Andreapolitana series, started in 2009 (http://lecturadantisandreapolitana.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk).

Heather Webb is University Lecturer in Italian at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Selwyn College. She is the author of The Medieval Heart (2010), Dante’s Persons: An Ethics of the Transhuman (2016) and articles on Dante, Catherine of Siena and others. She was co-organiser, with George Corbett, of the Cambridge Vertical Readings in Dante’s ‘Comedy’ lecture series (2012–16). She is co-editor, with Pierpaolo Antonello, of Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel: René Girard and Literary Criticism (2015).

Robert Wilson is Lecturer in the Italian Department at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Prophecies and Prophecy in Dante’s Commedia (2008), and has written articles on Dante and Ovid, inspiration in Dante, and Dante’s early commentators’ responses to their author’s ‘mistakes’. He is the co-organiser, with Claudia Rossignoli, of the Lectura Dantis Andreapolitana series, started in 2009 (http://lecturadantisandreapolitana.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk).

© 2016 George Corbett and Heather Webb. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapter’s author.

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