The Dante Working Group presents:
A talk by Prof. Francesco Marco Aresu Assistant Professor of Italian and Medieval Studies, Wesleyan University
Dante’s Vita Nova between Text and Book
Books are recursive figures in Dante’s corpus and images of the book are disseminated in poetically significant and hermeneutically decisive places of his works. This talk combines a thematic inquiry into the imagery of books and book production in the Vita Nova with a material approach to the textual tradition of the libello [booklet]. First, it highlights how references to the materiality of the book serve as metatextual elements that guide interpretation, in that they convey information on the book format, the typology of expected readership, and the expository order of the text. Then, it compares these references and their interpretive indications with the actual renditions of specific early witnesses of the Vita Nova.