In this book, Teodolinda Barolini explores the sources of Italian literary culture in the figures of its lyric poets and its 'three crowns': Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Barolini views the origins of Italian literary culture through four prisms: the ideological/philosophical, the intertextual/multicultural, the structural/formal, and the social. Moving from the lyric origins of the Divine Comedy in 'Dante and the Lyric Past' to Petrarch’s regressive stance on gender in 'Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature'—and encompassing, among others, Giacomo da Lentini, Guido Cavalcanti, and Guittone d’Arezzo—these sixteen essays by one of our leading critics frame the literary culture of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Italy in fresh, illuminating ways that will prove useful and instructive to students and scholars alike.
