February 28: Dante and the process of nation-making in Italy, by Beatrice Arduini

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Dante and his works, especially The Divine Comedy, seem to be inevitably present in writers and readers of Italian literature, from the fourteenth century to the present, even in those periods of time when the appreciation for his style was feeblest, most notably in the seventeenth century. Cultural memory is, however, highly selective, and later readers and writers responded to Dante and his legacy by tailoring him to their own contexts, especially in relation to issues of national identity, since Dante’s language was early recognized in Italy as the foundation of what Italian culture had become.
For this reason, in my presentation I will explore some episodes of Dante’s reception and how they are defined by interpretative frameworks and filters through which readers and scholars have approached his work and life.

About the speaker: 

Beatrice Arduini is Associate Professor of Italian and current Chair of the Department of French and Italian Studies at the University of Washington. Her research centers on Medieval Italian literature, Dante studies, manuscript culture, and textual studies. Her book, Dante’s Convivio: the Creation of a Cultural Icon, examines the tradition of this work in manuscripts and early printed editions. Her projects include a book manuscript on the lyric production of a 13th-century Tuscan poet, Monte Andrea da Firenze, and a study on representations of domestic slavery in medieval and early modern Italy. Dr. Arduini has published on these and other topics in Mediaevalia, Heliotropia,
Romance Philology, Textual Cultures, and Medioevo Letterario d’Italia.