VERTEXCULT | Vernacular Textual Cultures in Dante’s Tuscany: Education and Literary Practices in Context (ca. 1250 - ca. 1321)

Summary
The project undertakes the first systematic investigation of the vernacular literary texts used for the intellectual education of secular people in north-western Tuscany between the half of the 13th and the first twenty years of the 14th century in order to clarify the cultural context of Dante’s formation in Florence, on which almost nothing is known yet. While the lyrical poetry in late-medieval vernacular has been much studied, the doctrinal literature (both in poetry and prose) flourished in Italy in the same years is often unpublished and almost never made the object of critical studies, nor its function was connected to the formation of secular intellectuals such as Dante. The project aims to define as accurately as possible the vernacular, namely, the non-Latin, cultural context and texts circulation in Florence and north-western Tuscany during the span of about seventy years, between the death of the empereor Frederick II (1250), which ideally marks the end of the Sicilian Poetic School and the displacement of the fulcrum of the Italian vernacular literature in the “municipal” Tuscany, and the death of Dante Alighieri (1321). The chronological limits depend on the crucial role of the Florentine poet, who within this historical context had reached the highest cultural dignity of the vernacular as the literary language of the legal-notary ruling class before Petrarch and Humanism marked a radical return to the Latin, indeed parallel to the decline of the figure of the “municipal intellectual” (Dante himself and other distinguished members of this specific secular and bourgeois environment as the mercant Chiaro Davanzati, the banker Monte Andrea, the judge Bono Giamboni, the notary Brunetto Latini, and the public officials Guido Cavalcanti and Dino Compagni).
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More information & hyperlinks
Web resources: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/846958
Start date: 01-09-2019
End date: 30-11-2022
Total budget - Public funding: 255 768,00 Euro - 255 768,00 Euro
Cordis data

Original description

The project undertakes the first systematic investigation of the vernacular literary texts used for the intellectual education of secular people in north-western Tuscany between the half of the 13th and the first twenty years of the 14th century in order to clarify the cultural context of Dante’s formation in Florence, on which almost nothing is known yet. While the lyrical poetry in late-medieval vernacular has been much studied, the doctrinal literature (both in poetry and prose) flourished in Italy in the same years is often unpublished and almost never made the object of critical studies, nor its function was connected to the formation of secular intellectuals such as Dante. The project aims to define as accurately as possible the vernacular, namely, the non-Latin, cultural context and texts circulation in Florence and north-western Tuscany during the span of about seventy years, between the death of the empereor Frederick II (1250), which ideally marks the end of the Sicilian Poetic School and the displacement of the fulcrum of the Italian vernacular literature in the “municipal” Tuscany, and the death of Dante Alighieri (1321). The chronological limits depend on the crucial role of the Florentine poet, who within this historical context had reached the highest cultural dignity of the vernacular as the literary language of the legal-notary ruling class before Petrarch and Humanism marked a radical return to the Latin, indeed parallel to the decline of the figure of the “municipal intellectual” (Dante himself and other distinguished members of this specific secular and bourgeois environment as the mercant Chiaro Davanzati, the banker Monte Andrea, the judge Bono Giamboni, the notary Brunetto Latini, and the public officials Guido Cavalcanti and Dino Compagni).

Status

TERMINATED

Call topic

MSCA-IF-2018

Update Date

28-04-2024
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Horizon 2020
H2020-EU.1. EXCELLENT SCIENCE
H2020-EU.1.3. EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
H2020-EU.1.3.2. Nurturing excellence by means of cross-border and cross-sector mobility
H2020-MSCA-IF-2018
MSCA-IF-2018