Workshop: Rethinking the Lyric in Premodern Italy

The Center for Italian Studies is pleased to announce the workshop Rethinking the Lyric in Premodern Italy organized by Prof. Laura Banella as part of her course on premodern Italian lyric poetry.  While this workshop is primarily intended for graduate students, all scholars with an interest in the subject are warmly invited to attend. 

Schedule

2:00pm
Francesco Feriozzi (Notre Dame Rome Global Gateway) “The Birth of Vernacular Authority: The Troubadours and Early Italian Lyric”

This lecture will discuss the role played by the Occitan troubadours in the canonisation of lyric poetry in the vernacular in the twelfth and the thirteenth century, as well as the forms in which their work circulated in Medieval Italy, inspiring and influencing Italian lyric poetry from the Sicilians to Dante and Petrarch.

3:00pm
Nicolas Longinotti (Freie Universität Berlin), “Commentaries and Communities: Competing Figures of Petrarch from the Quattrocento Exegesis on the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta”

Petrarca’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta was subject to much commentary as early as the 15th century all across Italy. While recent scholarly accounts have claimed the irrelevance of 15th-century commentaries for the understanding of Petrarch’s lyric collection, these works represented a vast array of competing cultural and political communities: Barzizza and Filelfo from the Milanese court; Patrizi and Acciapaccia from the Neapolitan court; and the first printed commentaries by Da Tempo and Squarciafico from the North Italian urban centres. Commentators present multiple – and divergent – readings of Petrarch’s community identified in the Fragmenta.

4:00pm
Francesco Giusti (University of Oxford), “Lyric Gestures: A Transhistorical Approach”

Lyric poetry has emerged as closely intertwined with community formation and its politics, from the exchange of sonnets in the Middle Ages to the dissemination of poems through social media in recent years, especially in the context of episodes of collective action and political resistance. Memorability, shareability and repeatability are interrelated characteristics often ascribed to lyric poetry in current theory, sometimes with an emphasis on the transnational potential of its circulation. The talk will discuss questions of transmediality, performance, authorship, and the active response of readers/spectators.

If you are interested in participating, contact Prof. Laura Banella 

This workshop is made possible by support from the Henkels Lecture Fund, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, the College of Arts and Letters, and the Center for Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Originally published at italianstudies.nd.edu. Please check their website for the most up-to-date information about this event.