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Dante as a Jurist – Dante and Homer

Webinar by Diego Quaglioni and Sonia Gentili

700th Anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s Death

21st Week of Italian Language in the World

On the occasion of the 21st Week of Italian Language in the World, organized every year around the world under the auspices of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, the Italian Cultural Institute of Sydney and the Department of Italian of the University of Sydney have organized a series of four webinars, which will take place over two separate days, aimed at celebrating the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri death.

The first two webinars (in Italian) will take place on Wednesday, 13 October 2021, at 5.30 pm:

de monarchiaDante as a Jurist. A Reading of Monarchia
Diego Quaglioni, University of Trento

How much did Dante really know about law? In the past there was no lack of studies on Dante and the legal culture of his time. This concerns not only the Convivio or the Monarchia, but also the De vulgari eloquentia, the Epistles and the Commedia itself. Recent studies have emphasized the intimate relationship between Dante’s literary and moral world in the Commedia and the very structures of law and of his juridical language and time. If it is true that Dante, in reproducing the general knowledge of his time in each of his writings, offers a surprisingly new perspective on every question, to the point that any evidence of his dependence on other sources only serves to underline the novelty of his attitude and of its solutions, this is all the more true with regard to law and juridical doctrines. The problem, therefore, is not that of knowing whether or not Dante studied law, which is not entirely improbable, but of knowing what contribution he made to the developments in the legal science of his time. From this point of view, a renewed reading of the Monarchia, his most famous doctrinal writing, can still reveal important aspects of Dante’s personality and the fortune of his work.

Diego Quaglioni (1951) is professor of the history of medieval and modern law at thediego quaglioni University of Trento. He has given courses and series of lectures and seminars at the Universities of Paris I, Frankfurt, Salzburg, Lyon and elsewhere in Europe, the United States, Canada and China. He has directed several international research projects and edited editions of classic works of medieval and modern legal and political thought. In 2011 he announced the discovery, in London, of the oldest testimony of the Monarchia, the manuscript Additional 6891 of the British Library, which he used in 2014 to publish a new edition with notes of the Monarchia for the Opere di Dante directed by Marco Santagata for the prestigious Mondadori «Meridiani» series, an edition which was later reprinted as an independent volume in the «Meridiani paperack» (2015) and now, with a bibliographic update, also in the Mondadori «Oscar Classici» (2021).

Ulysses and the natural desire to know from the Convivio to the Comedy
Sonia Gentili, University of Rome “La Sapienza”

Through recently discovered Homeric sources, Prof. Gentili will propose a new reading of Dante’s Ulysses as a figure driven by the natural desire to know and as an image of the magnanimous solitude of the classical man, accompanied by virtue and knowledge in a fascinating but deserted and godless world.

sonia gentili sitoSonia Gentili teaches Italian literature at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. She is an essayist (L’uomo aristotelico alle origini della letteratura italiana, Carocci, 2005; Cultura della razza e cultura letteraria nell’Italia del Novecento, Carocci, 2008; Novecento scritturale. La letteratura Italiana e la Bibbia, Carocci, 2016) and a writer. She has published four books of poetry (L’impero e la Gorgone, Perrone, 2007; Parva naturalia, Aragno, 2012; Viaggio mentre morivo, Aragno, 2015, Viareggio Prize 2016 and Pisa Prize 2016; I quattro gesti della creazione, Aragno, 2020) and the novel I filosofi (Castelvecchi 2019). In 2020, together with videomaker Ambrogio Palmisano, she created the visual poetry artistic collective L’uomo che non guarda (https://www.luomochenonguarda.com/). She collaborates with the newspaper «Il Manifesto». For the years 2021-22 she is a Reserach Fellow at the Institut d’études avancées (Paris).

Join online via Zoom

Meeting ID: 830 6276 7552
Password: 710807

 

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