Dante’s unfinished work, the Convivio, his first book written in exile, is often overlooked. This volume, instead of promoting the idea that Dante’s career evolved continuously from the youthful Vita nova through to the Commedia, takes the Convivio as Dante’s first attempt to reassemble and reshape the remains of his Florentine past — from his love poetry to his philosophical readings — in order to construct a new way of defining himself as a writer after 1302. Contributors to the volume explore the Convivio from a variety of different angles, including the issue of genre, the relationship between poetry and prose and Dante’s concept of the reader, as well as examining the importance of ideas such as nobility, the vernacular and Roman law.
