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.

Introduction. Dante Unbound: A Vulnerable Life and the Openness of Interpretation, Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden

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

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

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

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

29: Eschatological Anthropology, Manuele Gragnolati
30: Language, Heather Webb
31: The Mystical, Bernard McGinn
32: Bodies on Fire, Cary Howie

33: The Master Narrative and its Paradoxes, Nicolò 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

37: Translations, Martin McLaughlin
38: Dante and the Performing Arts, Rossend Arqués 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