The Italian Cultural Institute is pleased to present Elisa Brilli’s conference “Le retrouvailles di Dante e Beatrice e il ‘gabbo’ sventato” during the XVIII Week of the Italian Language in the World. The theme for the week of the Italian language of 2018 is “L’italiano e la rete, le reti per l’italiano“. The conference is organized under high patronage of the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella and in cooperation Prof. Andrea Falcon (Department of Philosophy, Concordia University).
Dante (1265-1321) was not a professional philosopher but was seriously engaged with philosophy, and this engagement was essential to his work as a whole. With the help of three guest speakers, we will explore various aspects of Dante’s engagement with philosophy from the Convivio to the Commedia.
Friday, October 19, 5pm
Istituto Italiano di Cultura
1200, Avenue du Docteur Penfield
Event in Italian
This canto is well known to critics by virtue of the rewriting of the Apocalypse in the allegorical procession created by Dante, the canto 32 of Purgatory opens with an enigmatic scene. After Beatrice’s very difficult indictment against his adept and the ritual of confession, repentance and purification of the Pilgrim, the allegorical Virtues invited him to contemplate the unveiled and now rediscovered face of Beatrice but, in so doing, Dante falls into a sort of alienation love from which the same Virtues awaken him shouting “Troppo fiso!”. Immediately thereafter, and as by executing a pre-established score, the procession resumed its course and made a slow and solemn inversion on the holy land of the Edenic garden. But why contemplate Beatrice, ten years after her earthly departure, should it constitute a danger? And what is the use of this staging and immediately aborted in the economy of the poem?
This conference will try to answer these questions by offering an unprecedented inter-textual reading of this song which will report to the first and, at the beginning of the fourteenth century readers, the most famous work of the young Dante, Vita Nova.
Elisa Brilli is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, Department of Italian Studies and Center for Medieval Studies. She studied at the University of Rome, “La Sapienza” (M.A., 2004) and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (joint PhD in Italian Studies and Medieval History, 2009). Before joining University of Toronto, Professor Brilli worked as post-doctoral fellow and junior professor in several institutions: the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence – Max Planck Gesellschaft in 2010-2011; the Université du Québec à Montréal in 2012; the Laboratoire d’étude sur les monothéismes, École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris in 2013 with a fellowship “Fernard Braudel”, awarded by the Fondation de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme; at the Romanisches Seminar, University of Zurich as Ambizione project leader founded by the Swiss National Foundation for scientific research in 2014-2017. Her research interests include Dante, Medieval Italian Literature, Medieval receptions of Augustine’s De civitate Dei, Medieval Cultural History, Text-Image Studies, Manuscript Studies. She is the author of Firenze e il Profeta. Dante fra teologia e politica. Rome: Carocci 2012. She is the co-editor (with P.O. Dittmar and B. Dufal) of Faire l’Anthropologie Historique du Moyen Âge. Paris: Atelier du CRH, 2010, and (with L. Fenelli and G. Wolf) Images and Words in Exile. Avignon and Italy during the first half of the 14th century. Firenze: SISMEL 2015. She is also the main editor of the critical edition Arnold de Liège, Alphabetum Narrationum. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015.
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