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Dante and the Limits of the Law
Justin Steinberg
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In Dante and the Limits of the Law, Justin Steinberg offers the first comprehensive study of the legal structure essential to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Steinberg reveals how Dante imagines an afterlife dominated by sophisticated laws, hierarchical jurisdictions, and rationalized punishments and rewards. He makes the compelling case that Dante deliberately exploits this highly structured legal system to explore the phenomenon of exceptions to it, crucially introducing Dante to current debates about literature’s relation to law, exceptionality, and sovereignty.

Examining how Dante probes the limits of the law in this juridical otherworld, Steinberg argues that exceptions were vital to the medieval legal order and that Dante’s otherworld represents an ideal “system of exception.” In the real world, Dante saw this system as increasingly threatened by the dual crises of church and empire: the abuses and overreaching of the popes and the absence of an effective Holy Roman Emperor. Steinberg shows that Dante’s imagination of the afterlife seeks to address this gap between the universal validity of Roman law and the lack of a sovereign power to enforce it. Exploring the institutional role of disgrace, the entwined phenomena of judicial discretion and artistic freedom, medieval ideas about privilege and immunity, and the place of judgment in the poem, this cogently argued book brings to life Dante’s sense of justice.
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Dante’s Volume from Alpha to Omega
Edited by Christiana Purdy Moudarres and Carol Chiodo
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2020
Dante’s Volume from Alpha to Omega brings together essays written by internationally recognized scholars to explore the poet’s encyclopedic impulse in light of our own frenzied information age. This comprehensive collection of essays, coedited by Carol Chiodo and Christiana Purdy Moudarres, examines how Dante’s spiritual quest is powered by an encyclopedic one, which has for more than seven centuries drawn a readership as diverse as the knowledge his work contains. The essays investigate both the intellectual and spiritual pleasures that Dante’s Commedia affords, underscoring how, through the sheer breadth of its knowledge, the poem demands collective and collaborative inquiry. Rather than isolating the poetic or theological strands of the Commedia, the book acts as a bridge across disciplines, braiding together the well-worn strands of poetry and theology with those of philosophy, the sciences, and the arts. The wide range of entries within Dante’s poetic summa yield multiple opportunities to reflect on their points of intersection, and the urgency of the convergence of the poem’s aesthetic, intellectual, and affective aims. 
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Danteworlds
A Reader's Guide to the Inferno
Guy P. Raffa
University of Chicago Press, 2007

One of the greatest works of world literature, Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy has, despite its enormous popularity and importance, often stymied readers with its multitudinous characters, references, and themes. But until now, students of the Inferno have lacked a suitable resource to guide their reading.

Welcome to Danteworlds, the first substantial guide to the Inferno in English. Guy P. Raffa takes readers on a geographic journey through Dante’s underworld circle by circle—from the Dark Wood down to the ninth circle of Hell—in much the same way Dante and Virgil proceed in their infernal descent. Each chapter—or “region”—of the book begins with a summary of the action, followed by detailed entries, significant verses, and useful study questions. The entries, based on a close examination of the poet’s biblical, classical, and medieval sources, help locate the characters and creatures Dante encounters and assist in decoding the poem’s vast array of references to religion, philosophy, history, politics, and other works of literature.

Written by an established Dante scholar and tested in the fire of extensive classroom experience, Danteworlds will be heralded by readers at all levels of expertise, from students and general readers to teachers and scholars.

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Drama, Poetry and Music in Late-Renaissance Italy
The Life and Works of Leonora Bernardi
Virginia Cox and Lisa Sampson
University College London, 2023
The first-ever study of Leonora Bernardi’s life along with a modern edition of her recently discovered literary corpus.

Leonora Bernardi (1559–1616), a gentlewoman of Lucca, was a highly regarded poet, dramatist, and singer. She was active in the brilliant courts of Ferrara and Florence at a time when creative women enjoyed exceptional visibility in Italy. Like many such figures, she has since suffered historical neglect. Drama, Poetry and Music in Late-Renaissance Italy presents the first-ever study of Bernardi’s life along with a modern edition of her recently discovered literary corpus, which mostly exists in manuscripts. Her writings are presented in the original Italian with new English translations, scholarly notes, and critical essays. Based on new archival research, the substantial opening section reconstructs Bernardi’s unusually colorful life. The second major section presents her pastoral tragicomedy Clorilli, one of the earliest secular dramatic works by a woman. The third section presents Bernardi’s secular and religious verse, which engaged with new trends in lyric and poetry for music, and was set by various key composers across Italy. The volume thus firmly positions Leonora Bernardi as a distinctive voice and dynamic player in the extraordinarily rich social, cultural, and geo-political networks of late-Renaissance Italy.  
 
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Duchess and Hostage in Renaissance Naples
Letters and Orations
Ippolita Maria Sforza
Iter Press, 2017
This volume presents in translation 100 previously unknown letters of Ippolita Maria Sforza (1445–1488), daughter of the Duke of Milan, who was sent at age twenty to marry the son of the infamously brutal King Ferrante of Naples. Sforza’s letters display the adroit diplomacy she used to strengthen the alliance between Milan and Naples, then the two most powerful states in Italy, amid such grave crises as her brother’s assassination in Milan and the Turkish invasion of Otranto. Still, Ippolita lived as a hostage at the Neapolitan court, subject not only to the threat of foreign invasion but also to her husband’s well-known sexual adventures and her father-in-law’s ruthlessness. Soon after Ippolita’s mysterious death in 1488, the fraught Naples-Milan alliance collapsed.
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