The Oxford Handbook of Dante

The Oxford Handbook of Dante contains forty-four specially written chapters that provide a thorough and creative reading of Dante's oeuvre. It gathers an intergenerational and international team of scholars encompassing diverse approaches from the fields of Anglo-American, Italian, and continental scholarship and spanning several disciplines: philology, material culture, history, religion, art history, visual studies, theory from the classical to the contemporary, queer, post- and de-colonial, and feminist studies. The volume combines a rigorous reassessment of Dante's formation, themes, and sources, with a theoretically up-to-date focus on textuality, thereby offering a new critical Dante. The volume is divided into seven sections: 'Texts and Textuality'; 'Dialogues'; 'Transforming Knowledge'; Space(s) and Places'; 'A Passionate Selfhood'; 'A Non-linear Dante'; and 'Nachleben'. It seeks to challenge the Commedia-centric approach (the conviction that notwithstanding its many contradictions, Dante's works move towards the great reservoir of poetry and ideas that is the Commedia), in order to bring to light a non-teleological way in which these works relate amongst themselves. Plurality and the openness of interpretation appear as Dante's very mark, coexisting with the attempt to create an all-encompassing mastership. The Handbook suggests what is exciting about Dante now and indicate where Dante scholarship is going, or can go, in a global context.

Manuele Gragnolati, Full Professor of Medieval Italian Literature, Sorbonne Universit?,Elena Lombardi, Professor of Italian Literature and Paget Toynbee Fellow, Balliol College, Oxford,Francesca Southerden, Associate Professor of Medieval Italian, Somerville College, Oxford

Manuele Gragnolati, Co-editor, is Professor of Medieval Italian Literature at Sorbonne Universit?, Associate Director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, and Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. He is the author of Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture (2005) and Amor che move. Linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante and Medieval Culture (2013), and the co-editor of several volumes, including Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages (2012) and Vita nova. Fiore. Epistola XIII (2018).

Elena Lombardi is Professor of Italian Literature at Oxford, and the Paget Toynbee Fellow at Balliol College. She is the author of The Syntax of Desire: Language and Love in Augustine, the Modistae and Dante (2007), The Wings of the Doves: Love and Desire in Dante and Medieval Culture (2012), and Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante (2018).


Francesca Southerden is Associate Professor of Medieval Italian at Somerville College, Oxford. She has written several articles on Dante and Petrarch and is author of Landscapes of Desire in the Poetry of Vittorio Sereni (2012). She is currently working on Dante and Petrarch in the Garden of Language.

Introduction. Dante Unbound: A Vulnerable Life and the Openness of Interpretation, Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden
Part I: Texts and Textuality
1. The author, Justin Steinberg
2. Memory, Lina Bolzoni
3. Reading, Mary Carruthers
4. Materiality of the text and manuscript culture, Martin Eisner
5. The manuscript tradition, or on editing Dante, Fabio Zinelli
6. Commentary (both by Dante and on Dante), Luca Fiorentini
7. Digital Dante, Akash Kumar
Part II: Dialogues
8. The Classics, Zygmunt G. Baranski
9. Roman de la Rose, Antonio Montefusco
10. Troubadours, William Burgwinkle
11. Early Italian lyric, Roberto Rea
12. Comic culture, Fabian Alfie
13. Visual culture, Gervase Rosser
Part III: Transforming Knowledge
14. Encyclopaedism, Franziska Meier
15. Medicine, Natascia Tonelli
16. Visual theory, Simon Gilson
17. The law, Diego Quaglioni
18. Politics, Tristan Kay
19. Philosophy and theology, Pasquale Porro
20. Religion, Alessandro Vettori
21. Poetry, Elena Lombardi
Part IV: Space(s) and places
22. Florence and Rome, Giuliano Milani
23. Civitas/Community, Elisa Brilli
24. The Mediterranean, Karla Mallette
25. The East, Brenda Deen Schildgen
26. Exile, Johannes Bartuschat
27. Travelling/wandering/mapping, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr.
28. Dante's other worlds, Peter Hawkins
Part V: A passionate selfhood
29. Eschatological anthropology, Manuele Gragnolati
30. Language, Heather Webb
31. The mystical, Bernard McGinn
32. Bodies on fire, Cary Howie
Part VI: A non-linear Dante
33. The master narrative and its paradoxes, Nicol? Crisafi
34. Conversion, palinody, traces, Jennifer Rushworth
35. The lyric mode, Francesca Southerden
36. Errancy: A brief history of Dante's Ferm Voler, Teodolinda Barolini
Part VII: Nachleben
37. Translations, Martin McLaughlin
38. Dante and the performing arts, Rossend Arqu?s Corominas
39. Dante on screen, John David Rhodes
40. Modernist Dante, Daniela Caselli
41. Dante and the Shoah, Lino Pertile
42. Dante in Caribbean poetics: Language, power, race, Jason Allen-Paisant
43. Queering Dante, Gary Cestaro
44. A decolonial feminist Dante: Imperial historiography and gender, Marguerite Waller