Teodolinda Barolini is the Lorenzo Da Ponte Professor of Italian at Columbia University and author of a number of books, including The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante and Dante's Poets: Textuality and Truth in the "Comedy."

"Teodolinda Barolini's Dante's Multitudes is a must-read for any student of literary criticism who is learning to apply historicist ideology to the literary pillars of our civilization." —VoegelinView"In this bravura study of Dante's material culture, social inclusion and exclusion, philosophical heterodoxy, and problematic thinking, one size does not fit all. Barolini's painstaking philological analyses show that Dante's competing claims disrupt the tyranny of extreme conclusions. Their lesson is at once nonnormative and supportive of productive difference." —William J. Kennedy, author of Petrarchism at Work

• Note on Editions and TranslationsPrefacePart I. Social and Cultural Difference1. "Only Historicize": History, Material Culture (Food, Clothes, Books), and the Future of Dante Studies2. Dante's Sympathy for the Other, or the Non-Stereotyping Imagination: Sexual and Racialized Others in the Commedia3. Contemporaries Who Found Heterodoxy in Dante: Cecco d'Ascoli, Boccaccio, and Benvenuto da Imola on Fortuna and Inferno 7.894. Dante's Limbo and Equity of Access: Non-Christians, Children, and Criteria of Inclusion and Exclusion, from Inferno 4 to Paradiso 32Part II. Metaphysical Difference5. Toward a Dantean Theology of Eros: From Dante's Lyrics to the Paradiso 6. Amicus eius: Dante and the Semantics of Friendship 7. Paradiso and the Mimesis of Ideas: Realism versus Reality8. Dante Squares the Circle: Textual and Philosophical Affinities of Monarchia and Paradiso (Solutio Distinctiva in Mon. 3.4.17 and Par. 4.94–114)9. Difference as Punishment or Difference as Pleasure: From the Tower of Babel in De vulgari eloquentia to the Death of Babel in Paradiso 26Part III. Aristotelian Disruptions 1: Wealth and Society10. Aristotle's Mezzo, Courtly Misura, and Dante's Canzone Le dolci rime: Humanism, Ethics, and Social Anxiety 11. Dante and Wealth, Between Aristotle and Cortesia: From the Moral Canzoni Le dolci rime and Poscia ch'Amor through Convivio to Inferno 6 and 7Part IV. Aristotelian Disruptions 2: Love and Compulsion12. Archeology of the Donna Gentile: The Importance of Disconversion in Conversion Narratives13. Dante and Cecco d'Ascoli on Love and Compulsion: The Epistle to Cino, Io sono stato, the Third Heaven14. Voi che 'ntendendo il terzo ciel movete, A Dramatization of "utrum de passione in passionem possit anima transformari": Conflict, Compulsion, Consent, ConversionPart V. Critical Philology and Italian Cultural History15. The Case of the Lost Original Ending of Dante's Vita Nuova: More Notes Toward a Critical Philology 16. Critical Philology and Dante's Rime

Teodolinda Barolini is the Lorenzo Da Ponte Professor of Italian at Columbia University and author of a number of books, including The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante and Dante's Poets: Textuality and Truth in the "Comedy."

"Teodolinda Barolini's Dante's Multitudes is a must-read for any student of literary criticism who is learning to apply historicist ideology to the literary pillars of our civilization." —VoegelinView"In this bravura study of Dante's material culture, social inclusion and exclusion, philosophical heterodoxy, and problematic thinking, one size does not fit all. Barolini's painstaking philological analyses show that Dante's competing claims disrupt the tyranny of extreme conclusions. Their lesson is at once nonnormative and supportive of productive difference." —William J. Kennedy, author of Petrarchism at Work

• Note on Editions and TranslationsPrefacePart I. Social and Cultural Difference1. "Only Historicize": History, Material Culture (Food, Clothes, Books), and the Future of Dante Studies2. Dante's Sympathy for the Other, or the Non-Stereotyping Imagination: Sexual and Racialized Others in the Commedia3. Contemporaries Who Found Heterodoxy in Dante: Cecco d'Ascoli, Boccaccio, and Benvenuto da Imola on Fortuna and Inferno 7.894. Dante's Limbo and Equity of Access: Non-Christians, Children, and Criteria of Inclusion and Exclusion, from Inferno 4 to Paradiso 32Part II. Metaphysical Difference5. Toward a Dantean Theology of Eros: From Dante's Lyrics to the Paradiso 6. Amicus eius: Dante and the Semantics of Friendship 7. Paradiso and the Mimesis of Ideas: Realism versus Reality8. Dante Squares the Circle: Textual and Philosophical Affinities of Monarchia and Paradiso (Solutio Distinctiva in Mon. 3.4.17 and Par. 4.94–114)9. Difference as Punishment or Difference as Pleasure: From the Tower of Babel in De vulgari eloquentia to the Death of Babel in Paradiso 26Part III. Aristotelian Disruptions 1: Wealth and Society10. Aristotle's Mezzo, Courtly Misura, and Dante's Canzone Le dolci rime: Humanism, Ethics, and Social Anxiety 11. Dante and Wealth, Between Aristotle and Cortesia: From the Moral Canzoni Le dolci rime and Poscia ch'Amor through Convivio to Inferno 6 and 7Part IV. Aristotelian Disruptions 2: Love and Compulsion12. Archeology of the Donna Gentile: The Importance of Disconversion in Conversion Narratives13. Dante and Cecco d'Ascoli on Love and Compulsion: The Epistle to Cino, Io sono stato, the Third Heaven14. Voi che 'ntendendo il terzo ciel movete, A Dramatization of "utrum de passione in passionem possit anima transformari": Conflict, Compulsion, Consent, ConversionPart V. Critical Philology and Italian Cultural History15. The Case of the Lost Original Ending of Dante's Vita Nuova: More Notes Toward a Critical Philology 16. Critical Philology and Dante's Rime