Dante and Renaissance Florence

Simon Gilson examines Dante's reception in Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Simon A. Gilson (Author)

9780521841658, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 January 2005

340 pages, 3 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.67 kg

Review of the hardback: '… coherent and consistent in its methodology.' The Cambridge Quarterly

Simon Gilson explores Dante's reception in his native Florence between 1350 and 1481. He traces the development of Florentine civic culture and the interconnections between Dante's principal 'Florentine' readers, from Giovanni Boccaccio to Cristoforo Landino, and explains how and why both supporters and opponents of Dante exploited his legacy for a variety of ideological, linguistic, cultural and political purposes. The book focuses on a variety of texts, both Latin and vernacular, in which reference was made to Dante, from commentaries to poetry, from literary lives to letters, from histories to dialogues. Gilson pays particular attention to Dante's influence on major authors such as Boccaccio and Petrarch, on Italian humanism, and on civic identity and popular culture in Florence. Ranging across literature, philosophy and art, across languages and across social groups, this study fully illuminates for the first time Dante's central place in Italian Renaissance culture and thought.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction
Part I. Competing Cults: the Legacy of the Trecento and the Impact of Humanism, 1350–1430: 1. Boccaccio and Petrarch
2. Florentine humanism and vernacular culture: perspectives on Dante, 1375–1430
Part II. New Directions and the Rise of the Vernacular, 1430–1481: 3. Dante as a civic and linguistic model, 1430–1441
4. Dante and Florentine vernacular humanism: critical judgments and literary experiments
Part III. Cristoforo Landino and his Comento sopra la Comedia (1481): 5. Cristoforo Landino on Dante and Florence: the prologue to the Comento
6. Tradition and innovation in Cristoforo Landino's Comento: platonism, natural science and classicism
Conclusion
Notes
Selected bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literature: history & criticism [DS], History of art & design styles: c 1400 to c 1600 [ACN]