The City of Poetry
The City of Poetry
What did it mean to be a poet in fourteenth-century Italy? What counted as poetry? In an effort to answer these questions, this book examines the careers of four medieval Italian poets (Albertino Mussato, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio) who wrote in both Latin and the Italian vernacular. In readings of defenses of poetry, speeches and letters on public laurel-crowning ceremonies, and other theoretical and poetic texts, this book shows how these poets viewed their authorship of poetic works as a function of their engagement in a human community. Each poet represents a model of the poet as a public intellectual - a poet-theologian - who can intervene in public affairs thanks to his authority within texts. The City of Poetry provides a new historicized approach to understanding poetic culture in fourteenth-century Italy which reshapes long-standing Romantic views of poetry as a timeless and sublimely inspired form of discourse.
- Unites the major authors of the medieval Italian literary canon in a single analytical frame that includes both canonical and often-overlooked texts
- Clarifies key aspects of medieval literary culture that have been obfuscated by national literary histories and by Romantic notions of poetry and the poet
- Makes difficult and often-obscure texts accessible to readers interested in the history of the public intellectual
Awards
Winner, 2019 Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies, Modern Language Association
Reviews & endorsements
‘David Lummus' new book offers the first full-scale study of how four major poet-intellectuals from the fourteenth century – Mussato, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio – understood and represented their roles as poets within a civic context and engaged with imagined and real audiences communities. Lummus argues that these figures used their writings, above all their Latin poetry and other writings in defence of poetry, both to construct and to authorize their public and civic roles. A major scholarly achievement, Lummus' elegant book provides for the first time lucid and detailed accounts in English of the civic concerns of the four poets considered, and of their major Latin works, and of the dialogues, differentiations, and rewritings that we find in and between them.' Simon Gilson, Magdalen College, Oxford University
Product details
December 2020Hardback
9781108839457
300 pages
150 × 230 × 20 mm
0.56kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1. Albertino Mussato, Poet of the City
- 2. Dante Alighieri, Poet without a City
- 3. Francesco Petrarch, Poet beyond the City
- 4. Giovanni Boccaccio, Poet for the City
- Epilogue: Coluccio Salutati and the Future of the City of Poetry.
