OVI-UND Seminar Series: Linguistic, Philological, and Literary Developments in the Italian Middle Ages

Each Spring semester since 2016, in partnership with the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, the Center for Italian Studies sponsors a series of video conference seminars conducted in Italian on various topics regarding early Italian literature, philology, and lexicography. The seminars are held via Zoom with connections from OVI in Florence, from Notre Dame’s Global Gateway in Rome. In 2022, the seventh series of seminars focuses on the linguistic, philological and literary features of a variety of early Italian texts. The OVI-UND Seminar series is delivered in Italian.

“Per lo studio di geografia e cartografia nella Commedia di Dante”

While the cosmology of the Comedy has enjoyed considerable critical attention over time, the terrestrial geography present in the poem has scarcely been explored in terms of textual procedures, the multiplicity of meanings, and the innovative scope in the history of territorial representation. The verbal mappings created by the poet therefore open wide questions relating on the one hand to the composition and contextualization of his geographical culture, and on the other to the metapoetic functions they perform.

Giovanna Corazza carries out her research activity at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She has focused on the relationship between geography and literature in medieval Italian production, in particular in the work of Dante. She has dedicated several essays to these topics.

“Sulla lingua del diritto: il quinto libro della Somma del Maestruzzo”

The “Somma del Maestruzzo” is an adaptation in the vernacular of the “Summa de casibus conscientiae” by the Dominican Bartolomeo da San Concordio (1262-1347), a doctrinal text and at the same time a compendium of canon law and partly civil law. The vernacular, composed at the end of the fourteenth century, is divided into five books and is attributed to the blessed Giovanni dalle Celle, abbot of Vallombrosa. The seminar discusses the fifth book of the work, which constitutes the first known doctrinal treatment of law written in the vernacular.

Maria Fortunato collaborates with the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, where she currently works as a permanent researcher. Her main research subjects are language and lexicon of eighteenth-century poetry, in particular by Parini; suffixation and alterative processes in the original Italian language (13th-14th century); and phonology and morphology of medieval Italo-Romance varieties.

“‘Uno accidente in sustanzia’ (Vn XXV, 1)”

As the Convivio recounts, some time after Beatrice’s death Dante encounters with Philosophy. However, the philosophical competence that Dante demonstrates in his works from the 1290s is still scarce and immature. Is it really like this? The purpose of the intervention is, on the one hand, to investigate the ways through which the poet could have acquired a basic philosophical knowledge and, on the other hand, to examine Dante’s philosophical lexicon in the light of the contemporary love poem and the theological disputes that they took place in the Florentine convents.

Lorenzo Dell’Oso is Research Fellow in Italian and IRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. He deals with Dante and the relationship between Italian literature and medieval thought. He is currently working on a monograph entitled “The Poet and the ‘Schools of the Religious Orders.’ Dante’s Scholastic Education in Florence (1290-1302)”.

R. Leporatti, D. Pecoraro, and T. Salvatore

The manuscript and printed tradition attributes a large number of rhymes to Petrarch absent in his Canzoniere. Starting from a complete census of the witnesses, a team of researchers from the University of Geneva is working on the critical edition of this corpus, born from an original nucleus of poems rejected by the author, then enriched and contaminated with texts of heterogeneous origins, to reconstruct its history and reception. The seminar presents the methodological criteria of the research and the results already published on the site created in collaboration with the OVI, with particular attention to the digitization and methods of interrogation of the critical text of the rhymes.

Roberto Leporatti has been full professor of Italian literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance at the University of Geneva since 2006. His main interests are Italian literature from its origins to the Renaissance, modern and contemporary poetry, and the history of tradition and philology.

Dario Pecoraro is chargé d’enseignement at the University of Geneva. He has dealt with textual criticism applied to the tradition of vernacular texts of the 14th-16th centuries and with the history of Italian philology between the 19th and 20th centuries.

Tommaso Salvatore carries out postdoc research at the University of Geneva in the framework of an ‘Ambizione’ grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. He has dealt with Italian poetry of the fourteenth century, philology of the vernacular Petrarch, Dante’s fortune in the visual arts.

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