As one of the enduring masterpieces of world literature, Dante’s Divine Comedy continues to speak to us today, some seven centuries after its composition. We marvel at the Poet’s power to engage us in the Pilgrim’s journey through the three realms of the afterlife, to enlighten us on the operation of Divine Justice, to appeal both to our emotions and to our mind, to inform us about the earth and universe which we inhabit, and to present us with the great diversity of humankind as seen within the eschatological landscape. Dante’s encyclopedic poem has been the source of poetic and artistic inspiration over the past seven centuries and continues to exert a powerful effect across a wide range of scholarly disciplines. Indeed, it is a virtually inexhaustible locus of scholarly interest and continues to offer itself for new interpretations. Reading Dante is always a pleasurable, but hardly an easy task, for the poet expects his readers to have a good knowledge of the literary, historical, artistic, cultural, and scientific contexts of the medieval world in which he wrote. In recent years scholars have realized that much work still remains to be done in the area of contextualizing the Comedy within the various traditions of medieval culture and civilization.
In the course of our four-week Seminar we will examine the Comedy through close interdisciplinary readings and discussions of its one-hundred cantos in order to understand the poem within these various contexts. This combination of approaches to and readings of the poem, complemented by several full-day excursions to relevant sites of Dantean interest, will greatly enrich our collective intellectual experience and enhance our research capacity and pedagogical effectiveness. For each Seminar session we will read and discuss specific cantos with constant reference to the three major areas of concern: literature, history, and art. I hope that you will want to participate in the Seminar and explore the Comedy from these various interdisciplinary perspectives, and I encourage you to apply.
Setting of the Seminar
The Seminar will take place from June 15 to July 10, 2009, in the Monash University Centre in Prato and is sponsored by The Medieval Academy of America. By taking maximum advantage of the remarkable literary, historical and artistic resources present in Prato and nearby cities in Italy – Florence, Lucca, Pisa, Siena, San Gimignano, Ravenna – the Seminar will provide us with an exceptional experience, for we will come to a knowledge and interdisciplinary understanding of the multiple medieval cultural contexts and their influence on Dante in his conception and composition of the Divine Comedy. Given its broad relevance to humanities research and teaching, the Seminar topic should be attractive to scholars in a variety of disciplines who may wish to incorporate Dante both in courses and in research or who may wish to gain a more extensive knowledge of Dante’s Comedy as a way of shaping and enriching their own teaching and research.
Florence
We believe that the study of Dante’s poem offers great rewards to everyone and not just to specialists or medievalists. Consequently, the Seminar is open to scholars in a wide variety of areas and should be of particular interest to those of you in literature, history, and art history. While all instruction and readings will be in English, some knowledge of Italian and/or Latin would be useful, particularly for engaging in your individual research projects. We will read the Comedy in a bilingual edition so as to encourage your engagement with the original Italian text.
Our four-week Seminar will meet three days per week (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday) for presentations on and discussions of the cantos in question, typically from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., in dedicated classroom space in Palazzo Vaj, the Monash University Centre in Prato. There will also be an occasional afternoon session from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. Over the course of the Seminar we will have approximately forty hours of direct interaction in scheduled sessions, as well as four full-day excursions (on Wednesdays). On the first day there will be a general orientation to the facilities in Palazzo Vaj and an introduction to Dante’s medieval world, as well as a walking tour of the city of Prato with visits to important sites (the Duomo and the Duomo Museum, the Datini Archive, the Castle of Frederick II, and the Churches of San Francesco and San Domenico). These activities will be followed by an opening reception.
Duomo
The seminar room will also serve us both as a gathering place, where we can engage in more informal discussions, and as a mini-reference library, where materials relevant to the Seminar – books (editions/translations of the poem, criticism) and selected essays – will be on reserve. You will also have access to a wide range of electronic resources (web sites, data bases) helpful for the study of Dante and the Middle Ages. While no translation can truly capture all the nuances of the Comedy, the one in verse by Allen Mandelbaum (Bantam Books) is certainly adequate and contains both the standard Italian text (on the facing page) and a set of satisfactory notes. You may use whatever edition/translation you wish, but our discussion will be based on the Mandelbaum text. For background reading the required text will be the revised second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Dante (ed. Rachel Jacoff; Cambridge, 2007), which has important and useful essays by leading Dante scholars.
As participants in the Seminar, you will have one free day each week to pursue your individual research projects (plus Saturdays, when certain facilities are open). Prior to the Seminar, I will be in contact with all of you regarding your projects, and I will be available for extensive consultation with you during our four weeks in Italy. You will have an opportunity to give a short presentation on your research topic at appropriate moments during the four-week period. If possible, we will arrange these presentations to coincide with discussions of similar topics either in class or on-site during one of the excursions.
Structure of the Seminar
Each Seminar session will be devoted to a close reading and examination of a certain number of cantos in the Comedy with special attention to the three principal themes: 1) Dante and the literary tradition; 2) Dante and the historical context, and 3) Dante and the artistic environment. These thematic threads will be interwoven over the four-week period, in which we will read and discuss the entire Divine Comedy, as well as selected critical essays. Since the amount of material to be covered will not allow detailed examination of every canto in the poem, sessions will focus on specific cantos and on a limited number of secondary materials. Each session will have a particular topic or point of departure for the general discussion, and you will receive a list of questions and points to consider in advance of each meeting. (See the detailed day-to-day schedule.)
1. Literary Contexts
We will examine Dante’s poem within various literary contexts and traditions, considering its dynamic intertextual relationship not only with the Bible and classical literature (esp. Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses) but also with various strands of medieval literature, such as lyric poetry, courtly romance, the allegorical and allegorizing tradition. For example, in the first week the Seminar will examine the well known episode in Inferno 5 – Dante the Pilgrim’s meeting with the two condemned lovers, Paolo and Francesca – within the related traditions of the love lyric, Arthurian romance, and Andreas Capellanus’s treatise, De amore, in order to understand the subtle ways in which Dante organizes his material to produce a rich, multi-layered scene. Similarly, in the second week the Seminar will consider the episode in the last division of the eighth circle (Inf. 30) – Dante the Pilgrim’s involvement in the coarse verbal exchange between the counterfeiter Master Adam and the liar Sinon – studying it within the broader context of popular, jocose poetry in Italy, and specifically the tenzone, an exchange of sonnets, often crude in style and content. The nature and power of poetry, its influence, and the sources of poetic inspiration are major themes in the Comedy, and in the third week the Seminar will examine the significance of Pilgrim’s encounters with a wide range of poets – Statius, Forese Donati, Bonagiunta da Lucca, Guido Guinizzelli, and Arnaut Daniel – in what have come to be called the “cantos of the poets” (Purg. 21-26).
2. Artistic Contexts
In addition to considerations of the poem’s literary context, we will investigate its artistic milieu and shaping effect on Dante’s conception and presentation of the other world and the operation of Divine Justice. The artistic context includes representations of religious themes (e.g., the afterlife, the Last Judgment, biblical narratives, saints’ lives) and secular subjects (e.g., the labors of the months of the year, courtly scenes) in various media – mosaics, frescoes, panel paintings, and sculptures. For example, in the first week Seminar we will study how the Last Judgment mosaics in the cupola of the Florentine Baptistery shaped Dante’s conception of the punishment (the contrapasso) for particular sins in the Inferno. Other artistic representations of the Last Judgment in a variety of media in other churches will be examined on site during the excursions (e.g., the pulpits of Nicola Pisano in the Sienese cathedral and the Pisan Baptistery will be seen in the second and third weeks respectively). Equally important are the compositional strategies governing the artistic presentation of these subjects. For example, during our visit to the Florentine Baptistery, we will examine the four biblical narratives presented in the cupola mosaics: the history of the world from Creation to the Flood and the lives of Joseph, Jesus, and John the Baptist. Arranged in four separate bands, these stories can be read and understood both horizontally (i.e., linearly and chronologically) and vertically (i.e., typologically and allegorically), thus allowing, through this spatial organization and alignment, the meaning of one scene or episode to enhance and explicate that of another. Dante’s narrative mode and organizational strategy in the Comedy appears to follow this sort of parallel structure, such that the poem can be read not only horizontally (i.e., the story of the journey recounted linearly through the hundred cantos), but also vertically (i.e., each canticle holding up foil-mirrors to the others: for example, in each canticle the sixth canto treats the theme of politics, moving from the particular condition of Florence in Inf. 6 to the larger geographic entity of Italy in Purg. 6 and, finally, to the universal Empire in Par. 6). This and similar organizational principles are also found in other fresco and mosaic cycles of Dante’s time and will be examined during the excursions.
3. Historical Contexts
We will also consider the historical context of the Comedy, focusing on political and social structures, the culture of the trade guilds, the rapid growth of Florence in the thirteenth century, the conflict between Church and Empire, the history of individuals and families, and the development of religious and secular institutions in the Italian city-states, among other things. Of particular interest is the identity of the souls Dante meets in his journey through the afterlife, many of whom are Florentine. These characters and their cities often become emblematic of particular vices. For example, in the first week of the Seminar we will examine how the glutton Ciacco (Inf. 6) and the wrathful soul of Filippo Argenti (Inf.8; also his family, the Adimari, in Par. 16), both Florentines, epitomize certain sinful aspects of the poet’s native city. Similarly, in the second week we will consider the same phenomenon with the Bolognese pander Venedico Caccianemico (Inf. 18) and the Pistoian thief Vanni Fucci (Inf. 24-25). Another rich subject for investigation are the usurers (Inf.17) who are identified by their family coat of arms emblazoned on the money pouches that hang around their neck. This depiction leads naturally to considerations of the role of heraldry, social mobility, the nature of usury, and the operation of guilds in medieval Florence, topics that will be discussed by the visiting scholar (George Dameron) at this point in the second week. Visits to specific sites will make their history and relevance to the Comedy come alive for us. For example, the trip in the second week to the battlefield at Montaperti, where on September 4, 1260, the Florentine Guelfs were defeated by the combined army of the Sienese and the exiled Florentine Ghibellines, will provide the visual context for that disastrous event in the history of Florence, the “havoc and great slaughter that dyed the Arbia [river] red” (Inf. 10:85f). Similarly, the full-day excursion to Florence during the first week will explore the many physical remnants of the medieval city, which render Dante’s poem vivid and palpable. These and other visits will enable us to understand and appreciate how Dante transformed historical events and powerful associations of time and place not only into memorable poetic descriptions in the Comedy, but also into emblematic representations of larger issues and concerns, higher (and lower) truths, and ethical conduct (and its sinful opposite).
Dante's House
The Seminar Director
My interests in Italian literature and in Italy more generally date back more than four decades to my undergraduate days at Indiana University and, then, to a Fulbright year in Italy as a teaching fellow in a high school outside of Naples and as a researcher in the Neapolitan libraries. This immersion in Italian language and culture was very important for my future course, both in graduate school and in the academic profession. Over the years my teaching and research on Italian literature have focused primarily on Dante and the early Italian lyric tradition, and I have been fortunate to have made numerous trips to Italy, both for business and for pleasure. My courses and seminars at the University of Wisconsin-Madison centered on medieval Italian literature (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, palaeography and codicology) and on the relationship of text and image in the medieval world. I am particularly interested in the multiple influences operating on Dante as he composed the Comedy and, in particular, his deep knowledge of the Bible and biblical commentaries, his vast familiarity with the classical Latin and medieval vernacular literary traditions, his appreciation of the visual arts, his acute awareness of history and politics, and his informed views on science, philosophy and theology. My interests also extend to the transmission of Dante’s poem through the centuries and its impact on the literary and artistic traditions, specifically the manuscript illuminations and book illustrations of the Comedy and the many representations of the “other world” in the visual arts. These interests will inform to a certain degree our seminar discussions.
My practical experience in Italy has included teaching on and directing study-abroad programs in Bologna, Florence, Rome, and Perugia, as well as organizing and leading many international seminars to Italy for the outreach division of the University of Wisconsin and for the Wisconsin Alumni Association. I look forward to directing this NEH Summer Seminar on Dante and to introducing you to Dante’s Italy. This should be a memorable experience for me and, I hope, for you.
Special Guests and Excursions
Four distinguished colleagues in fields related to Dante will participate in the Seminar. Art history professor Josephine Rogers Mariotti (Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin in Florence) will lead us on our tour of medieval Florence, leading discussions in the churches, art galleries, and public buildings. Medieval history professor George Dameron (Saint Michael’s College) will lead the seminar discussion on religious and secular institutions and their interaction in medieval Florence. Medieval history professor William R. Cook (SUNY-Geneseo) will join us in Siena where he will introduce us to the interaction of the social, political and artistic spheres of that medieval city, the arch-rival of Florence. My colleague at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, art history professor Thomas E. A. Dale, will meet the Seminar in Ravenna, where his on-site presentations will focus on the mosaics in those churches that had a profound impact on Dante’s imagery in Paradise. We are also arranging special excursions to San Gimignano, Lucca (Duomo and San Frediano), and Pisa (Duomo, Baptistery, Camposanto, and the Duomo museum), which are rich in materials related to Dante.
Prato, the Monash University Centre, and Other Resources
We have chosen Prato and the Monash University Centre in Palazzo Vaj as the location for the Seminar for a number of reasons. As participants, you will have full use of the resources at the Centre, which is located near the center of the medieval city. Moreover, you will be designated as “Visiting Fellows” at that institution, which will facilitate your access to research collections. Annamaria Pagliaro, the Academic Director, and members of her dedicated staff will assist you with logistical questions including housing and local travel. The Centre’s meeting rooms are equipped with the latest in audio-visual equipment, a computer laboratory with internet capabilities and access to important databases, common rooms for informal discussion among yourselves, and other amenities.
Ponte Vecchio, Florence
Prato is an attractive location for the Seminar for other practical considerations. Its proximity to Florence will allow you easy and inexpensive access by train or bus, thus facilitating your independent research projects through use of resources in the major libraries and archives there (e.g., the Società Dantesca Italiana, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, the Biblioteca Riccardiana, the Archivio di Stato, the Kunsthistorisches Institut, etc.). Prato itself has remarkable and generally underutilized resources including the Datini Archive, the Biblioteca Roncioniana, and the Biblioteca Comunale “Alessandro Lazzerini”, all of which offer easy access to important primary and secondary materials supporting a wide variety of projects.
Since Prato is not on the tourist circuit, it provides less expensive accommodations and meals, as well as a more tranquil environment in which to work. Prato is well situated on both the main train lines and the super highway system, thus affording convenient, rapid transportation to sites of Dantean interest (e.g., Florence, Bologna, Padua, Pistoia, Lucca, Pisa, Ravenna, etc.). Finally, with its some 170,000 inhabitants, Prato offers all the amenities of a medium-sized Italian city in terms of shops, restaurants, and cultural activities.
Housing
The Monash University Centre in Prato is arranging various options for housing in apartments and hotel rooms (B&B). Even though Prato is not on the main tourist route, good, inexpensive housing is not easy to come by, especially during the summer season. Some of the accommodations are for one person; others are large enough to be shared, either with family members or with another Seminar participant. At the current rate of exchange and for the four-week period, the apartments will cost between $1,250 (single occupancy) and $2,100 (two rooms) or $2,500 (three rooms). Hotel rooms (B&B) will cost between $60/85 (single) and $115 (double). For participants staying in hotels inexpensive meal plans at local restaurants can be arranged.
Given the necessity of confirming the accommodations in Prato, we will ask successful applicants to make a commitment to the housing they prefer shortly after notification in late March or early April. At that time, you will need to let us know if you will be coming alone, with a partner or family member(s). By then we will have more specific details about prices and options, and we will help you make housing arrangements based on your needs. (Arrangements for people who may be coming to visit you for short periods of time will be your responsibility.)
Stipend
The NEH provides a stipend of $3200 to help defray the costs of your participation in the Seminar, such as food, housing, and travel. A check for the stipend will be sent to you before departure. Because of new and stringent controls on finances, participants should have easy access to sources of cash via ATM cards, which are valid in Italy.
Application Procedure and Deadline
Application materials are available from the NEH web site and are also included with this letter. A completed application consists of three copies of the following collated items:
- the completed application cover sheet, which must be filled out online at this address: http://www.neh.gov/online/education/participants/,
- a detailed résumé (not to exceed five pages),
- an application essay (no more than four double spaced pages), and
- two letters of recommendation.
See the section
NEH SUMMER SEMINARS & INSTITUTES FOR COLLEGE & UNIVERSITY TEACHERS APPLICATION INFORMATION AND INSTRUCTIONS on this web site for more complete information on the application procedure.
Your completed application should be postmarked no later than March 2, 2009, and should be sent to:
Paul E. Szarmach
ATTN: 2009 NEH Summer Seminar
Medieval Academy of America
104 Mt. Auburn St., 5th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02138
617/491-1622
Seminar web site: http://www.medievalacademy.org/neh2009
Please note that perhaps the most important part of the application is the essay that must be submitted as part of the complete application. This essay should include any personal and academic information that is relevant; reasons for applying to the particular project; your interest, both intellectual and personal, in the topic; qualifications to do the work of the project and make a contribution to it; what you hope to accomplish by participation, including any individual research and writing projects; and the relation of the study to your teaching.
We will notify successful applicants of their selection on April 1, 2009.
We believe that this Seminar will be a very exciting program, and we hope you will be able to join us in Prato this summer.
Sincerely,
Christopher Kleinhenz
Director
