Dante and late Medieval Florence: Theology in Poetry, Practice and Society

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This project will: (a) recover the multiple experiences of theology in late-medieval Italy, focusing on Florence in the 1280s and 1290s; (b) examine the way in which Dante engages with the forms of these experiences in his Commedia. The project therefore casts light on the ways in which medieval theology was mediated and experienced within a specific historical and geographical context, paying close attention to its varieties and their effects upon different publics; in doing so, it will re-evaluate a key dimension of a fundamental work of world literature, a work which is increasingly recognised not only as being central within the European literary tradition, but also as a distinctive and unique theological voice in its own right.The project, based in the Leeds Centre for Dante Studies in the University of Leeds, and in the Department of Italian in the University of Warwick, draws on a well-established link with the leading North American centre for Dante studies, the Devers Program at the University of Notre Dame, and benefits from the multidisciplinary expertise of an advisory board of internationally pre-eminent scholars. It builds upon a process of collaborative intellectual preparation which has already helped re-define its field, and which has firmly established the project's research context and questions. The project will, moreover, draw on a very rich, underexamined body of archival resources held in Florentine libraries. Over recent years, Dante's engagement with theology has come to be seen as an increasingly important aspect of his work; and his poetic voice is increasingly prized by theologians as a singular contribution to theological debate. Recent scholarship has shown not only that he engages with particular theological ideas, but that his poetry - itself among the most daringly original in world literature - borrows and alters many of the forms in which theology would have been encountered in the late middle ages. These forms range from scholastic forms of argumentation to less "learned" realms of religious practice such as visual art and liturgy. Yet research into Dante's theology has tended to treat the theological tradition as though it were a single set of ideas and debates, divorced from the precise forms and contexts in which it would have been encountered. At the same time, there is a real danger of scholarship on Dante's theology becoming disparate, as specialised research focuses on particular aspects of Dante's theology. This project therefore proposes to bring together a team of researchers, supported by a strong and established international network, to develop a holistic understanding of the ways in which theology was experienced in Florence in the 1280s and 1290s - the time when, by Dante's own account, he was engaged in theological study. Instead of seeing Dante's theological interests as consisting primarily of a set of ideas, the project asks how theology would have been experienced by Dante and his contemporaries in this specific context. The two primary strands of the project will examine respectively the nature of "high" theology as practised and received in the centres of theological learning, and the nature of forms of religious practice outside those learned milieux. Two secondary strands of the project will deepen and develop the findings of the first two strands, to explore particular aspects of this connection between theology and its social and cultural context: one examines the way in which the identity of theologians is presented in the Commedia and in late medieval Florence; the other will consider the manner in which theology shaped how Dante and his contemporaries thought about society.