Review
"Dante and the Making of a Modern Author is a major work of scholarship, the result of many years of reflection and research. Its subject ― the poet’s profound, shifting, and self-centred obsession with 'authority' ― is certainly among the most vital in present-day Dante studies; and, for a long time to come, Ascoli’s book will stand as the definitive analysis of the question. Fittingly, Ascoli has written the authoritative account of Dante’s lifelong engagement with auctoritas."
-Zygmunt Baranski, University of Cambridge
"In the long history of Dante studies, this is the book that was missing: an intellectual and literary biography of Dante as the first modern, vernacular 'author' of the Western tradition. A new and original book, scholarly, rigorous, and fully engaged with both Dante’s culture and our own, it combines depth with breadth and, while reconstructing the complex process through which Dante achieves his position as a supreme 'author,' builds its own enduring authority."
- Lino Pertile, Harvard University
"Ascoli (Italian studies, Univ. of California, Berkeley), who has authored numerous books and articles on Dante, Machiavelli, and Ariosto, offers a magisterial treatment of Dante's evolving conception of author...Thoroughly grounded in the primary and secondary literature, Ascoli's text is accessible even to the interested nonspecialist. An important contribution to Dante studies; highly recommended..."
-T.L. Cooksey, Library Journal
"This innovative, brilliantly constructed work examines how Dante Aligheri self-consciously presented himself as an authoritative poet, theologian, literary critic, and canonical giant. Ascoli argues that Dante strove to control how others regarded him and interpreted his work, and he achieved this so effectively that generations of even the most skeptical readers have approached him a little too reverentially to be wholly objective in their criticism. Drawing on works by Hannah Arendt and Roland Barthes, Ascoli deconstructs and historicizes Dante's work, presenting a modern way of reading him that neither disregards the spirit of the Commedia nor causes it to be considered ahistorically...Summing Up: Essential."
-M. E. DiPaolo, Alvernia College, Choice
“In three decades of teaching and writing about Dante, I do not recall a more meticulously researched study, at least in English, of the Florentine poet's total oeuvre….Though wide-ranging in the Latin and Italian texts treated, this extended study nevertheless focuses tightly on the related but complicated medieval concepts of author (auctor or autore) and authority (auctoritas or autoritade)…. Ascoli never shies away from presenting conflicting views or divergent scholarly interpretations of key Dantean passages. He never tires of noting how ‘complex’ the issues are that he himself raises. He is not afraid to pose a question and then respond that ‘there are plural answers’…this book is definitely required reading for all earnest scholars of Dante's opera omnia.”
-Renaissance Quarterly
"Ascoli has produced a study that is narrow in its focus but very broad in its implications. It is the product of long rumination and the most serious of scholarship."
- The Review of English Studies
"...outstandingly erudite."
-H-Italy
"The argument throughout is rigorous and persuasive, and the book is unquestionably a major contribution to our understanding of Dante’s quest and the various paths that led to its fulfillment. Indeed, it mirrors that achievement inasmuch as Ascoli can fairly claim to be the first to have taken the full measure of Dante’s ambitions as hemoves fromwork to work. ‘Paene neminem ante nos’' (Almost no one before us) could be the book’s epigraph."
-Modern Philology
Book Description
The first comprehensive study of Dante's evolving, transformative relationship to medieval ideas of authorship and authority.
About the Author
Albert Russell Ascoli is Gladys Arata Terrill Distinguished Professor in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
