Please join us for this talk in our 2021-2022 Lecture Series! This event, as with all the lectures in our annual series, is free and open to the public.
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Abstract: The lexicon of belts and girdles — cintola, cingere — pervades the Commedia and enters into Dante’s lyric poetry as well. Like the essential function that physical belts serve in a wardrobe, linguistic and allegorical belts hold together Dante’s material afterlife. Dante’s poetic language integrates the linguistic etymology and iconography of the belt and its unifying function to form the topography of his afterlife, from the infernal gironi to the heavenly spheres. Belts, cords and girdles unite what they contain, resting at the midpoint of infernal and heavenly creatures and bodies. The centaurs, the Furies, and Lucifer, cinched at the point where their hybrid natures meet, or where their bodies merge with the infernal landscape, are among those whose bodies are divided, demarcated.
These sartorial objects belong to Dante’s presentation of civic and moral division and unity that undergirds the political and metaphysical vision of his afterlife. Dante includes belts, cords, and the scriptural perizoma as key symbols in the appearance of those souls whose stories treat political strife, papal corruption, and linguistic differentiation: Farinata, Guido da Montefeltro, and Nimrod. In a contrapunctal key, women’s belts and girdles belong to the visual language of embodiment and integrity such as Beatrice and the metaphysical spheres of Paradise. The pilgrim himself, who wears a cord and is later girded by Vergil, brings this contrast into relief. These objects evoke a constellation of literary and iconographic antecedents, imbuing an allegorical significance to their canti that has been unexplored. Together with those verbal and visual traditions, these items come to Dante from their literary appearances and, clearly, from the empirical knowledge he would have had of fashion praxis.
Bio: Kristina Olson researches the works of medieval Italian authors, namely the "tre corone" (the "three crowns") of Italian literature: Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. She reads their works through the lens of history and especially matters of politics and gender. Many of her articles explore the reception of Dante in 20th and 21st century art and literature.
Her current book project, Dante's Sartorial Poetics, examines dress and ornamentation in Dante's works as an essential part of his poetic project. By approaching the Divine Comedy in terms of the key elements of the medieval wardrobe, Dante's Sartorial poetics incorporates the rich literary and iconographies of dress from ancient and medieval periods into our reading of his poem.
Courtesy Lost: Dante, Boccaccio and the Literature of History (University of Toronto Press, 2014), her first monograph, reads Dante’s influence on Boccaccio through the lens of "cortesia" (chivalry, courtesy) in the late medieval period.
Together with Christopher Kleinhenz (Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison), she edited a new edited volume, Approaches to Teaching Dante's Divine Comedy, with the Modern Language Association's Approaches to Teaching World Literature series (2020).
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