Interpreting Dante

Paola Nasti is associate professor in Italian Studies at the University of Reading.Claudia Rossignoli is lecturer in Italian at the University of St. Andrews.

"Paola Nasti and Claudia Rossignoli's erudite volume . . . has the potential to initiate not only further research on the commentaries but also to inspire Dane scholarship more broadly. Composed with great care, executed with methodological rigor, and mindful of philological concerns, as well as cultural and historical contexts, the essays follow a maxim that has been adapted for the Devers series from Aldus Manutius, but is all too often forgotten in academic life today: festina lente." —Medievalia et Humanistica"As Dante scholarship and medieval textual studies evolve, this volume will surely be a guide for the next decade and more . . . this book should be found in every college library and will prove indispensable to a wide circle of scholars." —Sixteenth Century Journal". . . this is a welcome initiative, as wide-ranging as it is brimming with expertise and as amply provided bibliographically as it is beautifully illustrated." —Modern Language Review"With the high level of expertise of its contributors and the high level of scholarship in their essays, it will be no surprise when the volume becomes essential reading for the study of Dante commentary . . . . This volume offers an enticing foray into the complex study of Dante commentary with its well-curated and well-chosen collection of essays." —Comitatus". . . editors Paola Nasti and Claudia Rossignoli have crafted a volume that offers broad coverage while focusing on two periods of particular vitality: the earliest commentaries of the fourteenth century, and the sixteenth-century commentaries, which recast Dante's poem in the period of the Counter-Reformation. The meticulously researched and footnoted essays offer an entry point into the study not of Dante's Commedia, but of the most important commentaries that have accompanied the poem." —Renaissance Quarterly"This volume draws on a diversity of critical perspectives to reevaluate the Dante commentary tradition not as a monolithic entity but as one embodying, in the rich plurality of its exegetical practices, the perennial challenges and rewards of 'interpreting Dante.' . . . the book leaves us with a sense of the commentary tradition as an animate entity, which continues to evolve and grow into the body of Dante scholarship as we know it today, If 'a text is also the history of its reception,' then Interpreting Dante confirms that the Comedy continues to enjoy a prolific afterlife." —Speculum"Interpreting Dante presents a genuinely top-notch collection of essays written by some of the most innovative and influential scholars in the field, on both sides of the Atlantic. A joy to read, from beginning to end, this volume will make a lasting impact on the study of Dante's reception." —Michael Papio, University of Massachusetts Amherst"Interpreting Dante is an extremely valuable and timely contribution to scholarship on the Dante commentary tradition. Such a collection, devoted both to methodological problems and to single cases, is a novelty. Additionally, as the first comprehensive volume on the topic in English, it will serve as an invaluable resource for students and scholars." —Anna Pegoretti, University of Warwick"Just as the University of Notre Dame has become the central point in American Dante studies, its press is now recognized as the most vital current source of publications dealing with the Florentine poet. These fifteen essays, composed by Italian, American, and British scholars, gather to form an essential companion to such collections of the early commentaries as that found in the Dartmouth Dante Project." —Robert Hollander, Princeton University (emeritus)