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book: Dante’s Performance
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Dante’s Performance

Music, Dance, and Drama in the “Commedia”
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2024
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Mimesis
This book is in the series
Volume 116 | Mimesis

About this book

Open Access

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).

Author / Editor information

Francesco Ciabattoni is Full Professor and Term Professor in Italian Literature, and Director of Global Medieval Studies Program at Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA.

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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
August 6, 2024
eBook ISBN:
9783111406497
Hardcover published on:
August 6, 2024
Hardcover ISBN:
9783111405544
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Front matter:
13
Main content:
269
Coloured Illustrations:
18
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111406497
eBook ISBN: 9783111406497
Hardcover ISBN: 9783111405544
Keywords for this book
Dante Alighieri; Italian literature; medieval literature; musicology
Audience(s) for this book
Literary scholars, Dante scholars, medievalists, Italianists, musicologists, scholars of early drama and theater
Creative Commons
BY-NC-ND 4.0
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