Project MUSE®: Dante Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/549
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Dante Studies.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 133 (2015) through current issueLatest Articles: Dante StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Dante Studies2470-427X2470-4261Latest articles in Dante Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®'Inna wi own Jama tongue': Lorna Goodison's Jamaican Inferno
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984862
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In April 2025, Carcanet Press and Véhicule Press published what The Guardian immediately hailed as an "epoch-making" Caribbean poem: Lorna Goodison's new translation of Dante's Inferno.1 It is "epoch-making" precisely in the way it transcends mere linguistic transfer: Goodison translates Dante's underworld into a uniquely Jamaican landscape rich with local sights, smells, and sounds, repatriating the exiled poet's work into a new national framework. Goodison's deepest engagement with Dante emerges through her unwavering commitment to the Jamaican vernacular and its unique idioms, a linguistic and aesthetic conversion that becomes a mirror refracting transnational experiences through a local lens. Her translation
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/549/image/coversmall'Inna wi own Jama tongue': Lorna Goodison's Jamaican Inferno2026-03-11text/htmlen-US'Inna wi own Jama tongue': Lorna Goodison's Jamaican Inferno2026-03-112026TWOProject MUSE®1155882026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-11"A Tree We Found in the Middle of the Path" (Purg. 22.131): Dante, the Edenic Trees, and the Estoire del Saint Graal
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984863
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"Thus, the language of oïl adduces on its own behalf the fact that, because of the greater facility and pleasing quality of its vernacular style, everything that is recounted or invented in vernacular prose belongs to it: such as compilations from the Bible and the histories of Troy and Rome, and the beautiful tales of King Arthur, and many other works of history and doctrine."References in Dante's works to stories and heroes from medieval Arthurian legends have been the subject of a relatively discrete area of investigation in scholarship. Existing studies generally focus on the few unequivocal places in the Commedia and in Dante's other writings in which the author mentions scenes and names from the Matter of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/549/image/coversmall"A Tree We Found in the Middle of the Path" (Purg. 22.131): Dante, the Edenic Trees, and the Estoire del Saint Graal2026-03-11text/htmlen-US"A Tree We Found in the Middle of the Path" (Purg. 22.131): Dante, the Edenic Trees, and the Estoire del Saint Graal2026-03-112026TWOProject MUSE®1252072026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-11Loving Wisdom or Women? Matteo Romani's Symbolic Interpretation of Beatrice in Dante's Three Autobiographical Works (1858–1862)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984864
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Apart from a brief and rather misleading entry in the Enciclopedia Dantesca, the Dante scholarship of Matteo Romani (1806–1878) has been neglected, and none of it has been translated into English heretofore.1 Bringing to light Romani's commentaries on the Inferno (1858), Purgatorio (1859), Paradiso (1860), and Convito (1862), this article analyzes his interventions in the debates about the epistemological status of Beatrice and the appropriate hermeneutical approach to Dante's three autobiographical works in the mid-nineteenth century. First, I situate Romani's clerical and symbolic reading of Beatrice as potentially a specific (albeit unidentified) target of what Alessandro D'Ancona (1835–1914) assesses more
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/549/image/coversmallLoving Wisdom or Women? Matteo Romani's Symbolic Interpretation of Beatrice in Dante's Three Autobiographical Works (1858–1862)2026-03-11text/htmlen-USLoving Wisdom or Women? Matteo Romani's Symbolic Interpretation of Beatrice in Dante's Three Autobiographical Works (1858–1862)2026-03-112026TWOProject MUSE®1228862026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-11What is Beatrice asking for? Dante and the Poetics of the Vow
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984865
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That Dante-the-pilgrim is confronted in Paradiso 3–5 with the question of broken vows may seem a puzzling beginning for his journey through the heavenly spheres. Indeed, in the heaven of the moon, the pilgrim's encounter with the first two blessed souls on his way to the godhead, Piccarda and Costanza, results in an extensive discussion of the excusability or compensability of this particular fault, a somewhat peculiar introduction to the realm of the blessed. This article reconsiders the question of broken vows, its position in the trajectory of the final cantica, and the radical poetics it entails. Underscoring lines of continuity in Dante's lifelong meditation on human will, this essay draws attention to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/549/image/coversmallWhat is Beatrice asking for? Dante and the Poetics of the Vow2026-03-11text/htmlen-USWhat is Beatrice asking for? Dante and the Poetics of the Vow2026-03-112026TWOProject MUSE®1713212026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-11Personal Immortality, Lyric Averroism, and Dante's Transhumanism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984866
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This article examines Dante's exploration of the body-soul nexus in the context of his larger philosophical and poetic formation so as to understand the poet's expression of apparently contradictory ideas about the nature of human intellect at different places in his literary corpus and in the Commedia. Much ink has been spilled over Dante's treatment of the twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd, known in the Latin West as Averroës, whose Long Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima, translated by Michael Scot from Arabic into Latin in the fourteenth century, suggested that the human individual is doomed to pass away and that only the separable universal intellect is eternal.1 Dante surprisingly places this
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/549/image/coversmallPersonal Immortality, Lyric Averroism, and Dante's Transhumanism2026-03-11text/htmlen-USPersonal Immortality, Lyric Averroism, and Dante's Transhumanism2026-03-112026TWOProject MUSE®1860432026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-11"Mature Poets Steal": Allegorie della scrittura e allusione nella bolgia dei ladri
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984867
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Che la Commedia esibisca una marcata componente metatestuale e metanarrativa è un dato che la critica dantesca ha riconosciuto sin dai commenti trecenteschi di Jacomo della Lana e Benvenuto da Imola: la Commedia è insieme testo e riflessione sul testo. È la stessa prassi auto-esegetica di Dante (Vita nova, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia, Epistola a Cangrande) ad anticipare e, anzi, esplicitamente sollecitare questa lettura. L'istanza metatestuale che commentatori antichi e moderni identificano come cifra distintiva della scrittura dantesca si nota, in filigrana, sin dalla prima terzina del poema, come parte integrante dei suoi sovrasensi: il verso incipitario della Commedia segnala immediatamente la qualità
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/549/image/coversmall"Mature Poets Steal": Allegorie della scrittura e allusione nella bolgia dei ladri2026-03-11text/htmlen-US"Mature Poets Steal": Allegorie della scrittura e allusione nella bolgia dei ladri2026-03-112026TWOProject MUSE®1500422026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-11Urban Real Estate and the Roman Barons in Inferno 18–19
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984868
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Upon arriving to the first bolgia of Malebolge in Inferno 18, Dante compares the bidirectional movement of the sinners to that of pilgrims crossing the Ponte Sant'Angelo in Rome during the year of the Jubilee (Inf. 18.25–33). The use of a topographically and temporally precise urban landscape in the vehicle of this simile has led many readers to speculate that the poet was present in Rome during the Jubilee of 1300, and to suggest that his description of the phenomenon of two-way traffic amounts to an eyewitness account.2 Of course, Dante need not have been present in Rome during the holy year in order to refer to what was surely one of the largest gatherings of people in the medieval world. He could have heard of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/549/image/coversmallUrban Real Estate and the Roman Barons in Inferno 18–192026-03-11text/htmlen-USUrban Real Estate and the Roman Barons in Inferno 18–192026-03-112026TWOProject MUSE®1030442026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-11Against or According to Nature: Money as Circulating Humor or Aposteme in Dante's Representation of the Medieval Financial Revolution
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984869
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Dante's reflection on money, or, perhaps more precisely, on the significance of economic relations between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in a rapidly developing financial Italy, cannot be reduced to a purely moral or religious stance in the modern sense of the term. Rather, one must examine the linguistic organization of Dante's corpus and the rhetorical figures it contains to trace the depth of his economic discourse beyond his ideological position.1 To fully understand the economic thought and imagery in Dante's work—especially his evident tendency to depict money as a liquid and flowing entity—it is essential to first consider the discursive framework of the culture in which he lived, particularly the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/549/image/coversmallAgainst or According to Nature: Money as Circulating Humor or Aposteme in Dante's Representation of the Medieval Financial Revolution2026-03-11text/htmlen-USAgainst or According to Nature: Money as Circulating Humor or Aposteme in Dante's Representation of the Medieval Financial Revolution2026-03-112026TWOProject MUSE®1463992026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-11Rachel Jacoff (1938-2025)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984870
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In the spring of 2019, Mario Mignone, then director of Forum Italicum, was very glad when I told him that Rachel was joining me in preparing a special issue of the journal to commemorate the 700th anniversary of Dante's death. Sadly, Mario did not live to see the result of his initiative, as in September of that year he suddenly passed away. However, the volume took shape rapidly. Rachel and I worked well together and, having established a list of contributors, we started reading articles as they came in, discussing them on the phone and occasionally in person. Rachel's health was declining, but she enjoyed the reading and our conversations. When the volume was almost complete, knowing that neither she nor I were
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/549/image/coversmallRachel Jacoff (1938-2025)2026-03-11text/htmlen-USRachel Jacoff (1938-2025)2026-03-112026TWOProject MUSE®154992026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-11