Italy: Center and Periphery Lecture Series presents David Bowe, University College Cork

“Dante de-centered? Marginal voices, peripheral poets”

Dante’s ‘hypercanonical’ Commedia exerts enormous forces on medieval Italian literature, both centrifugal—driving other texts to the periphery of our studies—and centripetal—drawing texts into its orbit as sources in our study of Dante’s poema sacro. These forces, orchestrated by Dante himself, were part of the construction of his own literary authority and afterlife. This paper will push back against these forces by exploring some categories and key examples of marginalized voices and texts before and around the Commedia, with a particular focus on the representations of feminine voices in medieval texts, including the work of first known woman to write Italian poetry, the Compiuta Donzella di Firenze. In exploring these sources, I will ask whether and how we can productively de-center Dante.
 

David Bowe holds a PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Oxford and he is currently an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Cork.  He previously has held lectureships and fellowships at the Universities of Leeds, Oxford, and York. His first book, Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante is moving into production with Oxford University Press, due out in early 2020. The first is focused on the representations of feminine voices and female characters in Italian texts, and has resulted in an article on the Compiuta Donzella di Firence, published in Italian Studies. The second is a more recent interest in cross-medial receptions of Dante as part of which he is currently editing a volume of Rachel Owen’s Inferno Illustrations for Bodleian Library Publishing.