VERTEXCULT · Vernacular Textual Cultures in Dante’s Tuscany: Education and Literary Practices in Context (ca. 1250 - ca. 1321)

Vernacular Textual Cultures in Dante’s Tuscany: Education and Literary Practices in Context (ca. 1250 - ca. 1321)

VERTEXCULT aims to the first systematic investigation of the vernacular literary texts used for the intellectual education of lay people in western Tuscany between the half of the XIII century and the first twenty years of the XIV century in order to clarify the cultural context of Dante’s formation in Florence. While the lyrical poetry in late medieval vernacular has been much studied, the coeval doctrinal literature is often unpublished and almost never made the object of critical studies, nor its function is generally connected to the formation of lay intellectuals such as Dante. The project aims to define as accurately as possible the vernacular cultural context and texts circulation in Florence and western Tuscany during the span between the death of Frederick II (1250) and the death of Dante (1321). The main historical and methodological problem related to this research is that until the present, the general assumption has prevailed that the lay intellectuals in medieval Florence and Tuscany would have had admission to major manuscript collections and to traditional centers of higher education that in Italy related to the ecclesiastical environment and provided a cultural baggage in Latin. This anachronistic viewpoint failes to take into consideration both the realities of medieval intellectual life, in which books were few and often the preserve of religious elites, and the fact that most of the intellectuals who belonged to the legal-notarial class had only received a limited education matured in a lay environment and based on vernacular texts. VERTEXCULT has achieved 4 objectives. 1) to develop an analytical and historical framework, with Florence and other leading cities in the production of vernacular texts in western Tuscany as an exemplary case study, within which to investigate the bourgeois’ intellectual formation outside the ecclesiastical schools, its engagement with the medieval culture and the correlation between its literary activity and the parallel civil commitments. 2) to map out and examine the foundations of Dante’s and his contemporaries’ knowledge of doctrinal literature through the study of the vernacular manuscripts produced between the XIII-XIV centuries in western Tuscany. 3) to provide a new overarching account of Florentine and western Tuscany lay culture, literature, and intellectual life in the late Middle Ages. Most existing accounts concentrate narrowly on lyric poetry making only passing reference to other genres, as the doctrinal poetry and prose, which were often more prolific and substantial. Poetic and prose texts disseminating philosophical, rhetorical, scientific, political, chronicle, and practical subjects in vernacular are being classified, analyzed, and edited within the project. 4) to reshape the understanding of Dante’s intellectual education in the light of the doctrinal texts examined. They were brought to light unedited documents never approached by critics to Dante’s work. VERTEXCULT has detailed the influence of the doctrinal literature on Dante’s early works through intertextual findings so far never brought to light. It allowed to make rethinking the provenance of Dante’s philosophical pattern, traditionally brought back to his attendance in the religious schools of Florence, while VERTEXCULT clarified the contribution provided by the lay environment of the city.

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