About the Book
First published in 1995. The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism on major figures in literature. Each volume presents the contemporary responses to a particular writer, enabling the student to follow the formation of critical attitudes to the writer's work and its place within a literary tradition. This collection of critical writings about Dante, many of them published here in English for the first time, tries to offer a balanced survey of the poet's reception in both time and space. Its scope therefore differs from that of its main predecessors in both English and Italian.
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 Dante Alighieri, letter to Cangrande della Scala; Chapter 2 Giovanni del Virgilio, epistle to Dante; Chapter 3 Giovanni del Virgilio, epitaph intended for Dante's tomb; Chapter 4 Cecco d'Ascoli, against Dante's‘poetic’ treatment of science; Chapter 5 Fra Guido Vernani, censure of Dante's Monarchia; Chapter 6 Jacopo Alighieri, notes to the Inferno; Chapter 7 Graziolo de’ Bambaglioli, Proem to his commentary on the Inferno; Chapter 8 Jacopo della Lana, commentary on Purgatory XXXII, 109–41; Chapter 9 Guido da Pisa, Prologue to his commentary on the Inferno; Chapter 10 L'Ottimo (Andrea Lancia), commentary on Inferno XIII, 103–8; Chapter 11 Pietro Alighieri, Dante's seven kinds of meaning; Chapter 12 The six early commentaries on the opening lines of Inferno III, the inscription above the gate of hell; Chapter 13 Giovanni Villani, Chronicle of Florence: the first biography of Dante; Chapter 14 Francesco Petrarca, letter to Boccaccio; Chapter 15 Giovanni Boccaccio, life of Dante; Chapter 16 Giovanni Boccaccio, commentary on Inferno X, 52–72; Chapter 17 Geoffrey Chaucer, Ugolino and gentillesse in The Canterbury Tales; Chapter 18 Benvenuto da Imola, Guido da Montefeltro ( Inferno XXVII, 25–30); Chapter 19 Francesco da Buti, the allegorical interpretation of Beatrice; Chapter 20 Filippo Villani, on the life and customs of the distinguished comic poet Dante; Chapter 21 Coluccio Salutati, appeal for a decent text of the Comedy; Chapter 22 Leonardo Bruni, censure and exaltation of Dante; Chapter 23 Francisco Imperial, the seven virtues; Chapter 24 Christine de Pizan, the path of long study; Chapter 25 Alain Chartier, the Donation of Constantine; Chapter 26 Leonardo Bruni, Life of Dante, and comparison with Petrarch; Chapter 27 St Antoninus, the Florentine poet Dante and his errors; Chapter 28 Marsilio Ficino, Preface to his translation of the Monarchia; Chapter 29 Cristoforo Landino, commentary to the Divine Comedy; Chapter 30 Hartmann Schedel, Chronicle of the World; Chapter 31 Pietro Bembo, the models for literary Italian are Petrarch and Boccaccio, not Dante; Chapter 32 Niccolo Machiavelli (attr.), Dante's hatred of Florence set against the‘Florentinity’ of his language; Chapter 33 Anon., Dante and the jester; Chapter 34 Carlo Lenzoni, Dante defended against Bembo and his followers; Chapter 35 Giovan Battista Gelli, lectures on Dante; Chapter 36 Giovanni Delia Casa, Dante's bad example; Chapter 37 Anton Francesco Grazzini ( ‘II Lasca’), sonnet against the pedants; Chapter 38 Pier Paolo Vergerio, description of the Monarchia; Chapter 39 Etienne Pasquier, Dante's slur on the royal house of France; Chapter 40 John Foxe,‘Dantes an Italian writer against the Pope’; Chapter 41 Ridolfo Castravilla, Dante's imperfections; Chapter 42 Jacopo Mazzoni, the genre to which the Divine Comedy should be ascribed; Chapter 43 Bellisario Bulgarini, the unsuitability in poetry of Dante's treatment of matters of art and science; Chapter 44 Vincenzo Borghini, reading Dante's allegory; comparison with Petrarch; Chapter 45 Galileo Galilei, the shape of Dante's hell; Chapter 46 Tommaso Campanella, Dante teaches in a popular fashion, and is not confined by rules; Chapter 47 Alessandro Guarini, an analysis of Dante's stylistic qualities, illustrated by the Francesca episode; Chapter 48 Traiano Boccalini, Dante manhandled by the pedants; Chapter 49 Paolo Beni, against the Crusca's exaltation of Dante's language; Chapter 50 Sir John Harington, an answer of Dante's; Chapter 51 Nicola Villani/Federigo Ubaldini, vehicle and tenor in a Dantean simile; Chapter 52 Gabriello Chiabrera, the need to go beyond the metrical models left by Dante and Petrarch in love poetry; Chapter 53 John Milton, the love poetry of Dante and Petrarch; Chapter 54 Emanuele Tesauro, Dante's plebeian language; Chapter 55 Ren É Rapin, Dante too tepid, too obscure, too immodest, too profound; Chapter 56 John Dryden, Dante's restoration of a‘silver age’; Chapter 57 Lorenzo Magalotti, Dante as universal genius; a short‘reading-list’; Chapter 58 Giovan Mario Crescimbeni, analysis of a sonnet by Dante; Chapter 59 Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Dante's lyric poetry worthy of attention; Chapter 60 Gian Vincenzo Gravina, Dante as poet-theologian; Chapter 61 Giambattista Vico, Dante's‘barbarousness’; three reasons for reading him; Chapter 62 Pietro Calepio, Volpi's edition of the Comedy; Chapter 63 Charles De Brosses, cannot understand the Italian preference for Dante over Ariosto; Chapter 64 Mark Akenside (attr.), Dante's place in‘The Ballance of Poets’; Chapter 65 Antonio Conti, exaltation of Dante's poem for the wealth and seriousness of its meaning; Chapter 66 Giuseppe Baretti, an‘Idea of Dante's Beauties’; Chapter 67 Fran Çois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Dante's hotchpotch; Chapter 68 Saverio Bettinelli, Virgil judges Dante to be overrated; Chapter 69 Francesco Algarotti, Virgil and Dante compared in their use of science; Chapter 70 Johann Jakob Bodmer (attr.), against anachronism in the criticism of Dante; the poet's strengths; Chapter 71 Giuseppe Baretti, resoluteness and patience needed to read the Divine Comedy nowadays; Chapter 72 Martin Sherlock, Sherlock instructs the Italians; Sherlock pronounces on Dante; Chapter 73 Thomas Warton, Dante's compounding of the classical and the Gothic; comparisons with Milton, Shakespeare, and Virgil; Chapter 74 Gian Jacopo Dionisi, the allegory of the Divine Comedy; the Divine Comedy seen in relation to Dante's other works; Chapter 75 Friedrich Schelling, Dante in relation to philosophy; Chapter 76 August Wilhelm Schlegel, for the reinstatement of Dante; Chapter 77 Francesco Torti, Dante's modernity, his unique genius; Chapter 78 Mme de Stael, Corinne's celebration of Dante; Chapter 79 William Hazlitt, Dante as‘self-will personified’; Chapter 80 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lecture on Dante; Chapter 81 Ugo Foscolo, two articles on Dante; Chapter 82 Thomas Love Peacock, Dante becoming fashionable; Chapter 83 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Defence of Poetry; Chapter 84 Karl Witte, Dante's trilogy: Vita Nuova, Convivio, Divina Commedia; Chapter 85 Thomas Babington Macaulay, Dante and Milton; Chapter 86 Ugo Foscolo, Dante's religious mission; Dante the sole protagonist of his poem; Chapter 87 Carlo Troya, Dante's allegorical greyhound; Chapter 88 G. W.F. Hegel, the Divine Comedy as the artistic epic proper of the Christian Catholic Middle Ages; Chapter 89 Giovita Scalvini, Dante and real life; Chapter 90 Gabriele Rossetti, Dante's secret language; Chapter 91 Antoine Frederic Ozanam, Dante and Catholic philosophy; Chapter 92 Cesare Balbo, Dante's life and works; Chapter 93 Thomas Carlyle, Dante as poet-hero; Chapter 94 Vincenzo Gioberti, Dante the Catholic poet; Chapter 95 Leigh Hunt, Dante's‘nightmare’ imagination; Chapter 96 Giuseppe Mazzini, Dante in history; Beatrice; the‘national aim’; Chapter 97 Margaret Fuller, translating Dante and teaching him; Chapter 98 Etienne-Jean Delecluze, Dante's poems, Platonic love, and the experimental method; Chapter 99 Julian Klaczko, against anachronistic readings of Dante; Chapter 100 C.A. Sainte-Beuve, the central role of Beatrice; Chapter 101 Francesco De Sanctis, Pier delle Vigne; Chapter 102 John Ruskin, Dante and medieval landscape; Chapter 103 Matthew Arnold, Dante and Beatrice; Chapter 104 La Festa di Dante; Il Giornale del Centenario; H.C. Barlow, The sixth-centenary celebrations of Dante's birth; Chapter 105 Francesco De Sanctis, the achievement of the Divine Comedy;
About the Author :
Michael Caesar
