Steven Botterill - Böcker

In this study, Steven Botterill explores the intellectual relationship between the greatest poet of the fourteenth century, Dante, and the greatest spiritual writer of the twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux. Botterill analyses the narrative episode involving Bernard as a character in the closing cantos of the Paradiso, against the background of his medieval reputation as a contemplative mystic, devotee of Mary, and, above all, a preacher of outstanding eloquence. Botterill draws on a wide range of materials to establish and illustrate the connections between Bernard's reputation and his portrayal in Dante's poem. Botterill's fresh approach to the analysis of the whole episode will provoke the reader to re-evaluate the significance and implications of Bernard's presence in the Commedia.

De vulgari eloquentia, written by Dante in the early years of the fourteenth century, is the only known work of medieval literary theory to have been produced by a practising poet, and the first to assert the intrinsic superiority of living, vernacular languages over Latin. Its opening consideration of language as a sign-system includes foreshadowings of twentieth-century semiotics, and later sections contain the first serious effort at literary criticism based on close analytical reading since the classical era. Steven Botterill here offers an accurate Latin text and a readable English translation of the treatise, together with notes and introductory material, thus making available a work which is relevant not only to Dante's poetry and the history of Italian literature, but to our whole understanding of late medieval poetics, linguistics, and literary practice.

De vulgari eloquentia, written by Dante in the early years of the fourteenth century, is the only known work of medieval literary theory to have been produced by a practising poet, and the first to assert the intrinsic superiority of living, vernacular languages over Latin. Its opening consideration of language as a sign-system includes foreshadowings of twentieth-century semiotics, and later sections contain the first serious effort at literary criticism based on close analytical reading since the classical era. Steven Botterill here offers an accurate Latin text and a readable English translation of the treatise, together with notes and introductory material, thus making available a work which is relevant not only to Dante's poetry and the history of Italian literature, but to our whole understanding of late medieval poetics, linguistics, and literary practice.