Dante’s Lyric Poetry and his Florentine Intellectual Formation

Wed 22 April 2015

Pembroke College

This year marks the 750th Anniversary of Dante’s birth.To celebrate the poet and his legacy, Zygmunt G. Baranski, Notre Dame Professor of Dante and Italian Studies and Emeritus Serena Professor of Italian, University of Cambridge, will be giving a lecture entitled:

«Questo è secondo che l’Etica dice» [«This is, as the Ethics states»]. Dante’s Lyric Poetry and his Florentine Intellectual Formation

Where did Dante learn the things that he knew? At first glance the question may seem trivial, even 'useless'. Yet, it is the question that, in recent years, Dante scholars have been asking themselves with increasing insistence. The lecture takes into account issues such as Dante’s education, the cultural landscape of Florence at the end of the thirteenth century, the relationship between Dante and Bologna and the effects of exile.

Professor Baranski is among the world's leading authorities on Dante, medieval Italian literature, medieval poetics, and modern Italian literature, film, and culture. His publications include Petrarch and Dante. Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition (Co-editor Theodore Cachey. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009); "Chiosar con altro testo". Leggere Dante nel Trecento (Florence: Cadmo, 2001); Dante e i segni. Saggi per una storia intellettuale di Dante (Naples: Liguori, 2000); Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture (Co-editor Rebecca West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Pasolini Old and New. Surveys and Studies (Ed. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999); "Sole nuovo, luce nuova". Saggi sul rinnovamento culturale in Dante (Turin: Scriptorium, 1996).

The event was made possible thanks to the Keith Sykes Research Fund, Pembroke College.

Cost: Free