Romance and Novel in Medieval Italian Literature: From Dante to Boccaccio

Two hybrid lectures (presented online and in the Galbraith Seminar Room) by Gianluca Caccialupi (TCD) and Dr Igor Candido (TCD) as part of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies Seminar Series. This SLLCS research seminar features two speakers from the Department of Italian who aim to show how two of the greatest authors of medieval Italian literature, Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio, dealt with the main prose narrative genres of classical and medieval literature: the so-called ‘ancient novel’ and the Old French Arthurian romance. Arthurian romances are fundamental sources for understanding Inferno V. In this canto, Francesca Da Polenta tells Dante that her adulterous affair with her brother-in-law Paolo Malatesta began while reading the Old French romance Lancelot, third part of the cycle known as Lancelot-Graal. The book is described by Francesca as a kind of mediator that allowed her and her brother-in-law to discover their mutual feelings, and thus fall into sin. This has led many scholars to consider this episode as Dante’s condemnation of the Arthurian romances and the sinful idea of love they promoted. Gianluca Caccialupi’s paper challenges this critical view by analysing several Arthurian quotations in Dante’s works, which clearly show that the poet was familiar with the whole story of Lancelot and interpreted it as an exemplary model of conversion, perfectly in line with his Commedia. Unlike Dante, Boccaccio had the opportunity to read some ‘ancient novels’, such as Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (or Metamorphoses) and the anonymous Historia Apollonii regis Tyri. Igor Candido’s paper shows that, as part of his ambitious project to provide Italian literature with the literary genres that were still missing, Boccaccio experimented with both romance and novel. The first part of the paper will show how Boccaccio ordered his narrative works according to classical taxonomy and how, within his project, the imitation of the so called ‘ancient novel’ played the role of an ideal centre upon which all literary experiments up to the Decameron finally converged. In the second part of the paper, new hypotheses are advanced on the Filocolo and the tale of Alatiel (Decameron II, 7) through the comparative analysis of a common source, the Historia Apollonii regis Tyri. Gianluca Caccialupi is a fourth year PhD student in Italian at Trinity College Dublin. His project, supervised by Dr Igor Candido and funded by the Irish Research Council (2019-2023), focuses on Dante’s reception of Old French Arthurian romances – especially on the relationship between the Divine Comedy and the Lancelot-Graal cycle – and aims to challenge the traditional view of Dante’s condemnation of Arthurian literature. Gianluca is also working as Teaching Assistant at TCD: he has been teaching undergraduate courses on Dante’s Divine Comedy, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, and Italian language and history, and postgraduate classes on the language of Dante’s Inferno and on the Sicilian School’s reception and rewriting of Occitan poetry. He has also been School Officer of the first three editions of the Dublin Dante Summer School (2019-2021), organized by TCD and UCD. Gianluca holds a Master’s Degree in Italian Studies from the University of Bologna (2018). His Master’s thesis, supervised by Prof. Marco Veglia, was recommended for publication, and he is working to turn it into a monograph, whose provisional title is Militia Christi and Crusade in Dante’s Divine Comedy. An article drawn from his Master’s thesis has been published by the Dantean journal L’Alighieri (2022). Igor Candido is Assistant Professor/ Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin. He holds two doctoral degrees in Italian literature, a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University (2011) and a Dr.Phil. from the University of Turin, Italy (2009). In 2013-2014 he was the recipient of the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has lectured and taught in Italy, the US, Germany, Ireland, and written on Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poliziano, Pascoli, Emerson, and Longfellow. He has written a monograph on Ralph Waldo Emerson and provided the critical edition of his translation of Dante’s Vita nuova (Aragno editore, 2012), as well as a second monograph on Boccaccio as reader and imitator of Apuleius of Madauros (Boccaccio umanista. Studi su Boccaccio e Apuleio, Longo editore, 2014). He has edited a volume titled Petrarch and Boccaccio. The Unity of Knowledge in the Pre-modern World (Walter De Gruyter, 2018) and is currently working on a new commented edition of Petrarch’s The Life of Solitude (Toronto University Press). He is also editing a special issue of Digital Philology (Johns Hopkins UP). His new research project is tentatively titled The Prehistory of the Novel. Studies in the Origins and Silent Transmission of Western Narrative Fiction. He is one of the editors of: Lettere italiane and Archivio Novellistico Italiano; he is in the reading board of Griseldaonline. He collaborates with Italian and American journals, such as L'Indice dei libri del mese and Modern Language Notes. To register and receive log-in details please email Raymond Davidson at: rdavidso@tcd.ie Please indicate if you have any access requirements, such as ISL/English interpreting, so that we can facilitate you in attending this event. Contact: rdavidso@tcd.ie