The City of Poetry
Imagining the Civic Role of the Poet in Fourteenth-Century Italy
Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature Series

What did it mean to be a poet in fourteenth-century Italy? What counted as poetry? In an effort to answer these questions, this book examines the careers of four medieval Italian poets (Albertino Mussato, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio) who wrote in both Latin and the Italian vernacular. In readings of defenses of poetry, speeches and letters on public laurel-crowning ceremonies, and other theoretical and poetic texts, this book shows how these poets viewed their authorship of poetic works as a function of their engagement in a human community. Each poet represents a model of the poet as a public intellectual - a poet-theologian - who can intervene in public affairs thanks to his authority within texts. The City of Poetry provides a new historicized approach to understanding poetic culture in fourteenth-century Italy which reshapes long-standing Romantic views of poetry as a timeless and sublimely inspired form of discourse.

Introduction; 1. Albertino Mussato, Poet of the City; 2. Dante Alighieri, Poet without a City; 3. Francesco Petrarch, Poet beyond the City; 4. Giovanni Boccaccio, Poet for the City; Epilogue: Coluccio Salutati and the Future of the City of Poetry.

David G. Lummus is the co-director of the Center for Italian Studies and Devers Family Program in Dante Studies and a visiting assistant professor of Italian at the University of Notre Dame. He has published on fourteenth-century Italian poetry and poetics, especially Giovanni Boccaccio, and the reception of classical culture in medieval Italy. He is the co-editor of A Boccaccian Renaissance (2019).