Dante's Comedy and the Ethics of Invective in Medieval Italy: Humor and Evil

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Dante's Comedy and the Ethics of Invective in Medieval Italy proposes a new approach to invective and comic poetry in Italy during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and opens the way for an innovative understanding of Dantes masterpiece. The Middle Ages in Italy offer a wealth of vernacular poetic invectivespolemical verses aimed at blaming specific wrongdoings of an individual, group, city or institution that are both understudied and rarely juxtaposed. No study has yet provided a scholarly examination of the connection between this medieval invective tradition, and its elements of humor, derision, and reprehension in Dantes Comedy. This book argues that these comic texts are rooted in and actively engaged with the social, political, and religious conflicts of their time. Political invective has a dynamic ethical orientation that is mediated by a humor that disarms excessive hostility against its individual targets, providing an opening for dialogue. While exploring medieval comic poems by Rustico Filippi (from Florence), Cecco Angiolieri (from Siena), and Folgore da San Gimignano, this study unveils new biographical data about these poets retrieved from Italian state archives (most of these data are published here in English for the very first time), and ultimately shows what the medieval invective tradition can add to our understanding of Dantes Comedy.

Reviews

In a time when speech, particularly comedic speech, is called out as a form of violence, Nicolino Applauso aims to uncover something deadly serious underneath the jokes of the so-called jokester-poets (poeti giocosi) contemporary with Dante: Rustico Filippi, notorious misogynist, Cecco Angiolieri, of the lengthy rap sheet, and Folgore da San Gimignano, political activist. Applauso stakes out a third way between the nave realism of the Romantics and the strict literariness of the New Critics to consider how real, historical events do in fact have something to do with documented poetic production and inform their meaning. Applauso provides us with a deep and wide literary history of humor and invective and a reinterpretation, revealing newly unearthed archival evidence, of each of his chosen poeti giocosi. This historically and literarily well-researched study aims to recover the ethical value of these poets barbed humor and thereby also the comedic context of Dantes Divine Comedy. -- Alison Cornish, New York University
Taking humor 'seriously,' namely as an ethical performance, Applauso provides an erudite analysis of the invective tradition as a mode of civic communication by considering its reinvention in the hands of Dante and his contemporaries. Wide-ranging in its scope, this book highlights the ethical, theoretical, and historical implications of the interplay of humor and political commentary, one which bears relevance for our times. -- Kristina Olson, George Mason University

Author Bio

Nicolino Applauso is visiting assistant professor of Italian at Loyola University Maryland.