Periodic Reporting for period 2 - VERTEXCULT (Vernacular Textual Cultures in Dante’s Tuscany: Education and Literary Practices in Context (ca. 1250 - ca. 1321))
Berichtszeitraum: 2021-09-01 bis 2022-08-31
VERTEXCULT has achieved 4 objectives. 1) to develop an analytical and historical framework, with Florence and other leading cities in the production of vernacular texts in western Tuscany as an exemplary case study, within which to investigate the bourgeois’ intellectual formation outside the ecclesiastical schools, its engagement with the medieval culture and the correlation between its literary activity and the parallel civil commitments. 2) to map out and examine the foundations of Dante’s and his contemporaries’ knowledge of doctrinal literature through the study of the vernacular manuscripts produced between the XIII-XIV centuries in western Tuscany. 3) to provide a new overarching account of Florentine and western Tuscany lay culture, literature, and intellectual life in the late Middle Ages. Most existing accounts concentrate narrowly on lyric poetry making only passing reference to other genres, as the doctrinal poetry and prose, which were often more prolific and substantial. Poetic and prose texts disseminating philosophical, rhetorical, scientific, political, chronicle, and practical subjects in vernacular are being classified, analyzed, and edited within the project. 4) to reshape the understanding of Dante’s intellectual education in the light of the doctrinal texts examined. They were brought to light unedited documents never approached by critics to Dante’s work. VERTEXCULT has detailed the influence of the doctrinal literature on Dante’s early works through intertextual findings so far never brought to light. It allowed to make rethinking the provenance of Dante’s philosophical pattern, traditionally brought back to his attendance in the religious schools of Florence, while VERTEXCULT clarified the contribution provided by the lay environment of the city.