Through an historical and philological lens, this book explores passages from Dante's Commedia which reveal elements inspired byprocessions, pageants, liturgical drama, psalm singing, or dance performance. The sacred poem finds influence in medieval theories of the performing arts as well as actual performances which Dante would have seen in churches or town squares. Dante's Performance opens a new perspective from which to consider the Commedia: Dante expected his contemporary readers to recognize references to and echoes of psalms, sacred plays, and performative practices. Twenty-first-century readers are tasked with reconstructing a cultural framework which allows us to grasp those same textual references.

From the dramatization of the harrowing of hell in Inferno IX, to Beatrice's celebratory return on top of Mount Purgatory, to the songs of the blessed, this study connects Dante's language to coeval theoretical and practical texts about performance.

If hell is the Middle Age's theatrum diaboli, purgatory stages a performed purification through songs and acting, while paradise offers the spectacle of blessed spirits within the heavenly spheres as an aid to human understanding (Par. IV 28-39).

The essays collected here join in, and contribute to, the current reflection on Dante's vitality today in a critical, multidisciplinary vein. Their intervention comes at a particularly sensitive juncture in the history of Dante's global reception and cultural reuse. Dante today is as alive as ever. A cultural icon no less than a cultural product, Dante's imaginative universe enjoys a pervasive presence in popular culture. The multiformity of approaches represented in the collection matches the variety of the material that is analyzed. The volume documents Dante's presence in genres as different as graphic novels and theater productions, children's literature, advertisements and sci-fi narratives, rock and rap music, video- and boardgames, satirical vignettes and political speeches, school curricula and prison-teaching initiatives. Each chapter combines a focused attention to the specificity of the body of evidence it treats with best analytical practices. The volume invites collective reflection on the many different rules of engagement with Dante's text.

In Dante's Journey to Polyphony, Francesco Ciabattoni's erudite analysis sheds light on Dante's use of music in the Divine Comedy. Following the work's musical evolution, Ciabattoni moves from the cacophony of Inferno through the monophony of Purgatory, to the polyphony of Paradise and argues that Dante's use of sacred songs constitutes a thoroughly planned system. Particular types of music accompany the pilgrim's itinerary and reflect medieval theories regarding sound and the sacred.

Combining musicological and philological scholarship, this book analyzes Dante's use of music in conjunction with the form and content of his verse, resulting in a cross-discipline analysis also touching on Italian Studies, Medieval Studies, and Cultural History. After moving from infernal din to heavenly harmony, Ciabattoni's final section addresses the music of the spheres, a theory that enjoyed great diffusion among the early middle ages, inspiring poets and philosophers for centuries.

The essays collected here join in, and contribute to, the current reflection on Dante's vitality today in a critical, multidisciplinary vein. Their intervention comes at a particularly sensitive juncture in the history of Dante's global reception and cultural reuse. Dante today is as alive as ever. A cultural icon no less than a cultural product, Dante's imaginative universe enjoys a pervasive presence in popular culture. The multiformity of approaches represented in the collection matches the variety of the material that is analyzed. The volume documents Dante's presence in genres as different as graphic novels and theater productions, children's literature, advertisements and sci-fi narratives, rock and rap music, video- and boardgames, satirical vignettes and political speeches, school curricula and prison-teaching initiatives. Each chapter combines a focused attention to the specificity of the body of evidence it treats with best analytical practices. The volume invites collective reflection on the many different rules of engagement with Dante's text.

Divided into ten days of ten novellas each, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron is one of the literary gems of the fourteenth century. The 'Decameron' Third Day in Perspective is an interpretive guide to the stories of the text's Third Day. For each novella, a distinguished Boccaccio scholar offers an essay that both reviews the current scholarly literature and advances new and intriguing interpretations of the work. The whole collection reflects the series's guiding principle of examining the text in perspective, revealing the connections among the novellas, the Days, and the framing narrative that holds the whole Decameron together.

The second of the University of Toronto Press's interpretive guides to Boccaccio's Decameron, this collection forms part of an ambitious project to examine the entire Decameron, Day by Day.