LyrA has investigated lyric collections as repositories of meaning and larger cultural discourses, thereby situating the reception and institutionalisation of Dante’s figure in a wide and complex context of cultural and textual practices. The project was constructed around four main objectives.
1. LyrA has deepened our understanding of how modern author-figures were born between the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance and how they were used in crafting diverse identities by scribes, editors, readers, intellectuals, and poets. The project has carried out the analysis of several anthologies/miscellanies from the fourteenth, the fifteenth, and the sixteenth century, both manuscripts and the earliest printed editions of Dante’s lyric poetry (produced between 1491 and 1532). It has also explored the relationship between disorganic series and organized sequences of lyric poems in these books.
2. Through the analysis of the books in which they circulated and were read, LyrA has delineated the relationship of Dante’s lyric poetry and its history with Humanism and Renaissance cultural movements, such as in particular the birth of Petrarchism. In order to fulfill this objective, a strand of the project has focused on Venetian Humanism in the fifteenth century. In particular, it has analysed the impact of the the Paduan Humanist Sicco Polenton (1375/76-1446/47), who included Dante in his Scriptores illustres, the first history of Latin literature.
3. Innovatively tying together theoretical concerns and actual books, LyrA has broadened our understanding of the early marketing processes concerning the politics of literature. Embracing codices and printed editions produced in the same period, LyrA has further investigated the links between manuscript culture and the early phase of printing. A strand of the project has focused on annotations on early printed books: a survey of reader notes in copies of the 1527 Giunti anthology of early lyric poetry has shed light on the ways in which Renaissance readers approached Dante and his fellow poets in the first half of the sixteenth century.
4. LyrA has deepened our understanding of the role of different environments, both geographical and social. In particular, building on the studies dedicated to the evident pre-eminence of Florence and Venice, the role of Milan, which had attracted far less attention, has been reconsidered.
