The Rose and Geryon: The Poetics of Fraud and Violence in Jean de Meun and Dante

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments When I began writing my PhD dissertation under the direction of Marian Papahagi, a renowned scholar of Romance languages, I could not foresee that I would eventually finish my dissertation, but not the same one, and not with the same director. The premature death of Marian Papahagi put an end to my dream of becoming a Romance philologist but, at the same time, opened for me venues that I had never envisioned before. The intellectual addiction to old literary texts that he had instilled in me, along with my personal interest in religious studies due to my Christian upbringing, led me to another PhD program, at the University of Pittsburgh. The present book is a distant relative of the dissertation on transgressive speech in the Romance of the Rose and the Divine Comedy that I wrote and defended at Pitt under the direction of two of the finest medievalists there are: Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Dennis Looney. They are part of a small but extraordinary department that keeps fighting worldly adversities to ensure the prestigious Romance cultures the exalted station they deserve. Their exceptional expertise in their professional field is paralleled only by their outstanding human qualities. I am equally indebted to Yves Citton, this formidable éminence grise of my professional decisions, who has supported my work with interest and heart-warming enthusiasm. Diana Mériz, my favorite scholar of Old Provençal, and colleagues from the department of Humanities and Communication at Florida Institute of Technology, Anna Montoya and Robert Shearer in particular, have kindly read, and commented on, sections of this book. I am also grateful to my Italian colleagues, Simone Tarud Bettini xi xii    Acknowledgments from the University of Bologna, and Mauro Zanchetta from the University of Padua, who for the last year have kept me updated on the research on Domenico Cavalca in Italy and have clarified some of my questions. Over the course of the last three years, Christopher Kleinhenz has generously accepted excerpts from this project as paper presentations in the Dante sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo. Reinhold Glei, editor in chief of Medievalia et Humanistica, and Gianni Cicali, editor in chief of Quaderni d’italianistica, have kindly allowed me to incorporate into this book my essays on Faus Semblant and Ulysses, respectively . Thus, the section on “Bilinguium” appeared in a slighly different version in Medievalia et Humanistica 35 (2009): 15–32, and the section on “Evil counselors in the Inferno” was published in an earlier version in Quaderni di italianistica, no. 2 (2011): 5–26. My humblest thanks go to Trevor Lipscombe, director of the Catholic University of America Press, whose editorial flair, availability, and effectiveness have made possible the publication of my manuscript and, thereby, the fulfillment of a dream. I owe to Carol A. Kennedy an attentive and meticulous copyediting of my manuscript. Last but not least, I thank my family, my daughter especially, who has grown up with this project (and many times fiercely competed with it), and who represents my constantly renewed source of energy, hope, and love. THE ROSE AND GERYON ...