Nicolino Applauso is visiting assistant professor of Italian at Loyola University Maryland.

• Chapter 1: The Invective Genre in Dante and His Contemporaries: An Introduction Chapter 2: The Role of Invective in Medieval Tuscany Chapter 3: Rustico Filippi of Florence and the Guelph and Ghibelline Wars Chapter 4: Cecco Angiolieri of Siena: Blame and Parody under the Governo dei Nove Chapter 5: War Propaganda, Activism, and Knighthood in Folgore da San Gimignano Chapter 6: Humor and Evil in Dante’s Global Invective Chapter 7: Conclusion

In a time when speech, particularly comedic speech, is called out as a form of violence, Nicolino Applauso aims to uncover something deadly serious underneath the “jokes” of the so-called jokester-poets (poeti giocosi) contemporary with Dante: Rustico Filippi, notorious misogynist, Cecco Angiolieri, of the lengthy rap sheet, and Folgore da San Gimignano, political activist. Applauso stakes out a third way between the naïve realism of the Romantics and the strict literariness of the New Critics to consider how real, historical events do in fact have something to do with documented poetic production and inform their meaning. Applauso provides us with a deep and wide literary history of humor and invective and a reinterpretation, revealing newly unearthed archival evidence, of each of his chosen poeti giocosi. This historically and literarily well-researched study aims to recover the ethical value of these poets’ barbed humor and thereby also the comedic context of Dante’s Divine Comedy.