Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) has traditionally been viewed through the lens of his poetic masterpiece, the Commedia. While his so-called “minor” works, including the overtly political book four of Convivio and the treatise Monarchia, have been studied, much of this work tends to read Dante through the theologized, over-determined hermeneutic of the narrative of his poetic journey through the afterlife. Also, because of the overwhelming temptation to associate Dante’s place in intellectual history with his clerical contemporaries in Paris and Bologna, a similar trend (often combined with the first) reads Dante as merely an idiosyncratic but minor epigone of the scholastics in his non-poetic work. The latter vein of interpretation is very common and tends to generate interpretations of Dante’s political thought which see it as a predominantly abstract encounter with scholastic theology and philosophy in the context of the high medieval church-state conflicts, particularly in the contentious age of Popes Boniface VIII, Clement V, and John XXII and their bloody disputes with claimants to the Holy Roman throne and French and Aragonese monarchies over political control of northern Italian territories. While this kind of reading is not unwarranted—for Dante’s Monarchia does make strong claims in the late medieval church-state conflict and deploys a philosophical lexicon current with scholastic intellectuals of the time—many scholars have read Dante’s monarchical theory in Convivio and Monarchia exclusively as a response to and dialogue with the major scholastic and juridical writers, particularly of the “mirrors of princes genre,” on both sides of these political conflicts between Church-State claims to authority. This is not completely wrong, but in so doing many have, conversely, failed to understand that Dante is making a coherent and unique normative argument. Such readings fail to read Dante 1) as a real Florentine politician, 2) as an enthusiastic follower of Aristotelian paradigms (not merely a scholastic Aristotelian), 3) as a committed political secularist, and 4) as contextualized within the rich municipal, social, economic, and political histories of Florence and Medieval Italy. This study thus moves away from previous approaches to Dante’s political thought and does a close re-reading of Convivio and Monarchia in a properly historicized framework, inspired by the work of Ernst Curtius and modern historicist methodology, contextualizing it in 13th and 14th century history. In particular, the study departs from Dante’s denunciation of greed in his lyrics, Commedia, Convivio, and Monarchia to establish the fact —through extensive research in economic history, commercial development, economic thought, political history, social history in medieval Italy etc.— that far from being a merely abstract denunciation of mammon or usury, like that found in the Bible and other theological writings, it is a unique and acerbic response to broad changes that can only be construed, on the basis of historical scholarship, in terms of the emergence of early capitalism in Florentine society around the early to mid 13th century. Chapter 1 serves as an initial overview of the whole study, also positioning it in relation to debates within the field of Dante studies; chapter 2 examines the international and political situation of Florence and Italy during Dante’s time; chapter 3 proposes a new historiography of this history and examines it as the development of “political economy”; chapter 4 explores the emergence of capitalism in Florence and Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries (also motioning to debates about the nature and definition of “political economy” and “capitalism”); finally, chapter 5 examines Aristotle’s critique of political economy in the Ethics and Politics, then pivots to Dante’s deployment of such Aristotelian paradigms in Convivio and Monarchia to both denounce the injustices generated by the intertwinement of politics and acquisitive monetary wealth-getting and to articulate a monarchical political model for stopping the deleterious effects of greed.

In this study of Dante and the religious orders and institutions of his time, I argue that the poet embeds histories of the religious orders into the Commedia. I demonstrate that Dante’s historical vision, as it pertains to the religious orders, is one of parallel decline, whereby the virtuous intentions of religious institutions are corrupted as time moves forward. By taking Dante’s own historical scheme, which is best articulated through the character of St. Benedict of Nursia in Paradiso 22, I propose a reading of the Commedia that excavates and traces the histories that Dante tells of the papacy, cardinals and bishops, monasticism, and the mendicant fraternal orders. The first chapter identifies the scriptural foundations of apostolic succession as they are articulated in the Commedia, and how the historical tribulations of the early church, especially the Donation of Constantine, is depicted by Dante through his early papal history. The second chapter posits that Dante’s “modern popes” are a useful category for understanding how the papal history of the Commedia intersects with issues of conversion and political theory. My third chapter focuses on Dante’s history of cardinals and bishops and has two goals: to explore the ways in which the twinning of the figures of Peter and Paul create the backbone of the Commedia’s program for apostolic renewal and to examine and historicize Dante’s critiques of the Decretalists. The next chapter, on the history of monasticism, focuses on Benedict of Nursia and the origins of Western monasticism as depicted in the Commedia, the history of monastic reform traced by Dante in his poem, and the ways in which he stages issues of compulsion on the backdrop of religious life. In my fifth and final chapter I turn to Dante’s histories of the mendicant fraternal orders (the Order of Friars Minor and the Order of Preachers) and the lives of their two founders (Francis and Dominic) as told in Paradiso. By tracing the histories of religious orders that are sutured into the fabric of his Commedia, this dissertation proposes a new way of examining Dante’s historical imagination and narrative craft.

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This thesis focuses on three plays written by Samuel Beckett: Play, Not I and Footfalls. Corporeality is the central theme of these works, which also connects them to an important and celebrated source of study and inspiration for the dramatist, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri. The influence played by Dante's descriptions of the body, particularly in the cantica of Inferno, is visible in Beckett's works for the ways in which the organs of perception and expression are treated at both textual and theatrical level. In the three plays the activities of mouth, eyes, ears (and less relevantly, nose) constitute the narrative focus of the text, while the sensorial aspects derived by their presence on stage determine the kind of exchange at play between actors and spectators. Staging immobilized, constricted and barely visible characters who, narrating obscure, uncertain stories, obsessively try to make a sense of their existential and physical conditions, the author gives life to a metatheatrical language rooted on instability and doubt. After the introductory opening chapter, the second chapter looks at the language of Dante's Inferno and at its thematization of corporeality, introducing the continuities between the poem and Beckett's drama. The third chapter juxtaposes the characters and the uncertain...

This study examines the ways that Dante uses concepts of the masculine in his early work to offer an analysis of the masculine ideals which lie at the basis of Dante's construction of himself as an author in the lyric poems and in his discussions of Latin and Italian. I describe ideals and conceptions of masculinity current in Dante's era, particularly the socially-adjudged behaviors and attitudes that underpin honor-culture, in order to delineate the ways in which Dante uses these conventions in lyric poems to make the poems themselves entries in an honor exchange among men. I also examine the opposed qualities coded as masculine and feminine in the classical literary and philosophical tradition, particularly mutability and constancy, and transmitted as a code of masculine ethical superiority in the Latin pedagogy of Dante's day, to define how masculine ideals determine Dante's initial definition of Latin as the nobler language in Convivio, as well as his reversal of that language hierarchy in De vulgari eloquentia.

Thèse Doctorat : Berlin : 1997. / Bibliogr. p. 194-220.

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Thesis (M.M.)--Conservatory of Music. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2005. / Song cycle for tenor voice, French horn, and piano, based on the love story of Dante Alighieri and Beatrice. "A thesis in music composition." Advisor: Chen Yi. Text taken primarily from Dante's La vita nuova. Typescript. Includes text of poems in Italian with English translation. Vita. Title from "catalog record" of the print edition Description based on contents viewed Nov. 12, 2007. Online version of the print edition.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Princeton University, 1935. / Bibliography: p. 155-158.

Texte remanié de: th. doct.--Mannheim--Universität, 1996. / Bibliogr. p. 157-166.