Elisa Brilli
Professor of Italian Literature and Medieval Studies, University of Toronto.
Director, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto.
My research deals with the interactions between history and literature, namely in the field of Dante studies, medieval exemplary literature, historiography and research methodologies. I am the author of Firenze e il Profeta, the co-author of Dante. Des vies nouvelles/Vite nuove. Biografia e autobiografia di Dante, the main editor of the Alphabetum Narrationum by Arnold of Liège, the co-editor of four volumes, and several articles in academic journals and articles in books.
I am Associate Member of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto (2015-), the Laboratoire d’études sur les Monothéismes, EPHE-CNRS-Paris IV (2012-), the Kunsthistorisches Institut-MPG in Florence (2010-), AHLoMA, EHESS (2007-), and Fellow of Victoria University in the University of Toronto (2017-2022).
I also work on the Editorial Board of Dante Studies (2015-), the Bibliographic Committee of the Dante Society of America (2018-), the Advisory Boards of Quaderni d’Italianistica (2020-2023), Studi Danteschi (2019-), and the Rivista internazionale di ricerche dantesche (2018-).
Other web-pages
https://discover.research.utoronto.ca/19450-elisa-brilli/about
University of Toronto, Italian Studies: http://italianstudies.utoronto.ca/faculty-and-staff/faculty-and-staff/prof-elisa-brilli/
University of Toronto, Centre for Medieval Studies: https://www.medieval.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/elisa-brilli
AHLOMA, EHESS (Paris): http://ahloma.ehess.fr/2017/10/18/elisa-brilli/
LEM, EPHE (Paris): https://lem-umr8584.cnrs.fr/?Membres-associes&lang=fr
Phone: +1-(416) 926-1300 ext.3390
Address: University of Toronto
Department of Italian Studies
100 St. Joseph Street - Carr Hall
MS5 1J4 - Toronto (Ontario) - Canada
Director, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto.
My research deals with the interactions between history and literature, namely in the field of Dante studies, medieval exemplary literature, historiography and research methodologies. I am the author of Firenze e il Profeta, the co-author of Dante. Des vies nouvelles/Vite nuove. Biografia e autobiografia di Dante, the main editor of the Alphabetum Narrationum by Arnold of Liège, the co-editor of four volumes, and several articles in academic journals and articles in books.
I am Associate Member of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto (2015-), the Laboratoire d’études sur les Monothéismes, EPHE-CNRS-Paris IV (2012-), the Kunsthistorisches Institut-MPG in Florence (2010-), AHLoMA, EHESS (2007-), and Fellow of Victoria University in the University of Toronto (2017-2022).
I also work on the Editorial Board of Dante Studies (2015-), the Bibliographic Committee of the Dante Society of America (2018-), the Advisory Boards of Quaderni d’Italianistica (2020-2023), Studi Danteschi (2019-), and the Rivista internazionale di ricerche dantesche (2018-).
Other web-pages
https://discover.research.utoronto.ca/19450-elisa-brilli/about
University of Toronto, Italian Studies: http://italianstudies.utoronto.ca/faculty-and-staff/faculty-and-staff/prof-elisa-brilli/
University of Toronto, Centre for Medieval Studies: https://www.medieval.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/elisa-brilli
AHLOMA, EHESS (Paris): http://ahloma.ehess.fr/2017/10/18/elisa-brilli/
LEM, EPHE (Paris): https://lem-umr8584.cnrs.fr/?Membres-associes&lang=fr
Phone: +1-(416) 926-1300 ext.3390
Address: University of Toronto
Department of Italian Studies
100 St. Joseph Street - Carr Hall
MS5 1J4 - Toronto (Ontario) - Canada
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Monographs by Elisa Brilli
Scrivere una biografia di Dante è una sfida che molti hanno già affrontato. Mentre i documenti d’archivio relativi alla sua vita sono pochi e spesso di difficile interpretazione, la sua produzione letteraria contiene così tante informazioni di carattere personale che si potrebbe essere tentati di leggerla come un’autobiografia. Sarebbe tuttavia fuori luogo farlo. In un’originale inchiesta a quattro mani, in cui documenti e opere sono esaminati distintamente ma posti in costante dialogo, Elisa Brilli e Giuliano Milani ricostruiscono l’itinerario di un uomo che ha assistito ai grandi sconvolgimenti del suo tempo, attraversando contesti politici e culturali diversi ma interconnessi (comunale, signorile, imperiale), e insieme quello di un autore che ha tentato a più riprese di dare un senso alla sua vita attraverso la scrittura, inventando nuove forme di racconto di sé dai contenuti sempre mutevoli.
Écrire une vie de Dante est un défi auquel se sont confrontés nombre de chercheurs. Tandis que les archives se taisent le plus souvent sur la vie du Florentin ou sont d’interprétation délicate, son œuvre contient tant de passages personnels qu’elle pourrait aisément se lire comme une autobiographie. Mais naïve serait la démarche qui prendrait Dante pour un témoin fidèle de sa vie. Dans une enquête conduite à quatre mains, où documents et œuvre littéraire se font écho, Elisa Brilli et Giuliano Milani renouent les fils de ce destin singulier. Celui d’un homme aux prises avec les bouleversements politiques de son temps, à la charnière des XIIIe et XIVe siècles, et dont les expériences, horizons et réactions changent en fonction des contextes qu’il traverse (municipal, seigneurial, impérial, courtisan) ; celui d’un homme qui tenta à plusieurs reprises de façonner sa vie par l’écriture, inventant une forme de récit de soi, aux contenus toujours changeants, entre mémoire individuelle et universelle. Là est sans doute la contribution essentielle de Dante à la culture occidentale.
Elisa Brilli est professeure de littérature italienne médiévale à l’université de Toronto depuis 2015. Ses recherches portent sur Dante et l’histoire culturelle médiévale. Elle a notamment publié Firenze e il profeta. Dante fra Teologia e Politica (Rome, 2012), dirigé le « Forum » sur les études biographiques de Dante (dans Dante Studies, 136 en 2018) et fondé avec J. Steinberg et W. Robins le "International Seminar on Critical Approaches to Dante" à l'Université de Toronto.
Giuliano Milani est professeur d’histoire médiévale à l’université Gustave Eiffel. Il s’intéresse à l’histoire politique et institutionnelle des communes italiennes. Il est notamment l’auteur de L’homme à la bourse au cou (Rennes, 2019) ; il a dirigé avec A. Montefusco Dante attraverso i documenti (Florence-Berlin, 2016-2020) et il a édité avec T. De Robertis, L. Regnicoli et S. Zamponi le Codice diplomatico dantesco (Rome, 2016), la collection des documents sur la vie de Dante et de la famille Alighieri.
ISBN: 2213709408
Critical Editions by Elisa Brilli
L'Alphabetum Narrationum, attribué aujourd’hui au dominicain Arnold de Liège, et composé en latin au début du XIVe siècle, est l’un des plus importants recueils, tant par
sa taille que par son originalité, de récits exemplaires du Moyen Age. Comme son titre l’annonce, il se caractérise par l’adoption d’un critère d’organisation de la matière narrative de type alphabétique: plus de huit-cents récits sont classés par les soins d’Arnold sous plus de cinq-cents entrées et ils sont normalement complétés par des renvois aux autres entrées du recueil pour lesquelles ils sont également pertinents. Ouvrage à la vocation quasi-encyclopédique, l’Alphabetum devient rapidement un ouvrage de référence, comme l’attestent la centaine de manuscrits conservés, les traductions vernaculaires précoces (en français, anglais et catalan), ainsi que l’usage de la part d’autres compilateurs. Cette édition met à la disposition des chercheurs le texte du recueil livré par le manuscrit Nouvelles Acquisitions latines 730 de la Bibliothèque nationale de France (XIVe siècle).
Edited Books by Elisa Brilli
http://www.ebook.retimedievali.it https://www.fupress.com/isbn/9788855180467
Florence, the celebrated city-republic, dominates the historiography of medieval Italy still today. The birth and growth of the Mendicant Orders paralleled the rise of urban Europe. As attention to medieval cities has increased, so too the history of the Dominican Order has constituted a major field of study, since the Dominicans were at the forefront of the cultural and religious life of Medieval cities. The combination of these two traditions of studies precipitates a particularly fruitful research field: the reciprocal influences and interactions between the activities of Dominican intellectuals and the making of Florentine cultural identity. The essays collected in this volume explore various facets of such an interaction. Without presuming to be exhaustive, these contributions restore the complexity of the relationship between the Dominicans and the city of Florence, as well as the communal society in the broadest sense of the term.
JOHANNES BARTUSCHAT – ELISA BRILLI – DELPHINE CARRON, Introduzione
PASCALE BERMON, Cinq tables inédites sur des livres de Saint Augustin attribuées à Grégoire de Rimini
FIAMMETTA PAPI, A Non-Augustinian Treatise by an Augustinian Master:
Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum and its Vernacular Reception
XAVIER BIRON-OULLET, Simone Fidati da Cascia’s Spiritual Direction in Fourteenth-Century Italy
ENRICO FENZI, Alle soglie del Mondo Moderno, in cerca della felicità:
il fondamento agostiniano dell’individualismo petrarchesco
LUCA MARCOZZI, Sulla presenza di Agostino nei Fragmenta di Petrarca: bilanci e prospettive
ERIC L. SAAK, Augustine and Augustinianisms in the Fourteenth Century: The Cases of Petrarch and Robert de Bardis
GIANNI PITTIGLIO, Invenzioni, “furti” e modulazioni iconografiche
nella propaganda eremitana: l’Allegoria di Agostino Maestro di Sapienza (Madrid, BNE, Ms. 197)
LAURENT BAGGIONI, Salutati et Augustin: le citoyen dans l’histoire
ALICE MARTIGNONI, «Quatuordeci valentissimi homini romani». Una riscrittura di Agostino nel prologo al Paradiso del commento del Falso Boccaccio (Ms. BNCF II I 47, cc. 184r-189v)
ELISA BRILLI - LORENZO TANZINI, Commentare e volgarizzare il De civitate Dei a Firenze all’alba dello Scisma
Publisher: http://www.longo-editore.it/scheda_libro.php?id=1615
At the beginning of the 14th century, far-reaching political events and social transformations rapidly changed the set-up of the Mediterranean basin and affected the Ordo universalis through which the material and symbolic space of Christianitas had been previously conceived. The essays collected in this volume discuss this historical transition by adopting the lens of “exile”, a long-lasting and intrinsically polysemic notion that experienced a new actuality in those decades. Far beyond the topos of the Avignon papacy as a new Babylonian Captivity, the volume examines practices and representations of exclusion, self-exclusion, and mobility, in their socio-historical as well as cultural and artistic manifestations, as different and yet intertwined attempts to redefine universal, local, and individual identities.
The volume collects essays from R. Alcoy, É. Anheim, X. Barral i Altet, M. A. Bilotta, D. Blume, S. Boesch Gajano, C. Bolgia, B. Bombi, E. Brilli, I. Bueno, G. Curzi, L. Fenelli, M. Ferrari, A. Fontes Baratto, M. Gagliano, T. Holler, G. Kerscher, M. Laclotte, V. Lucherini, F. Manzari, L. Marcozzi, F. Massaccesi, G. Milani, A. Montefusco, A. Paravicini Bagliani, F. Pasquale, S. Piron, F. Ricciardelli, J. Rollo-Koster, S. Romano, T. Sabater, A. Tomei, D. Vingtain, G. Wolf, S. Zanke.
Articles & Book Chapters by Elisa Brilli
Contenuti:
Il Dante istituzionale della Firenze medicea
Il Dante contestato della Firenze oligarchica
Il doppio corpus dantesco nel Trattatello di Boccaccio
Tre domande e quattro conclusioni
Sezioni:
1. Il paradosso dell'"alta selva vòta"
2. La "divisio textus" di Purgatorio XXXII
3. "Troppo fiso!"
4. "La decenne sete" e il "gabbo"
5. Trasfigurazione e visione
6. Conclusioni
Un'anteprima di questo saggio, in versione ridotta e senza inclusione delle fonti, è apparsa su L'Aligheri 54 (2019), p. 5-20 con il titolo "Un Nembroth tra la Bibbia e Cicerone". https://www.academia.edu/41808033/E._Brilli_Un_Nembroth_tra_la_Bibbia_e_Cicerone._La_rilettura_dellepopea_babelica_nel_Tresor_di_Brunetto_Latini._LAlighieri_54_2019_5-20
The essay deals with the representation of Babel in the "Livres dou Tresor" by Brunetto Latini (1260-1266) and illustrates the way in which the biblical epic is rewritten and partially overwritten by the topos of the political and speaking animal, proper to classical political thought. Indeed Brunetto's Babel provides an early and excellent example of the difficulty to articulate these two visions of history and political-anthropological models, a problem which arises in medieval western culture particularly between the 13th and the 14th century. The historical synthesis offered in the first book of the Tresor is traditional only in appearance: in fact Brunetto distanced himself from the medieval Latin and Romance traditions because of the absence of any negative moral and theological judgment about Nembroth. Not accidentally, the other two mentions of the episode, in the third book, occupy key-places in the general architecture of Brunetto's encyclopedia: here the biblical epic is gradually bent on the Ciceronian paradigm of the institution of politics and Babel becomes the place of « diversité », with no negative connotation, of languages as well as of forms of government.
Abstract
Nell'intestazione della VII epistola a Enrico VII del 17 aprile 1311, Dante si accredita quale primo mittente del testo, ricorrendo alla dicitura di «exul inmeritus», già consueta nella sua precedente produzione epistolografica, ma aggiunge il riferimento, quali secondi mittenti del testo, agli «universaliter omnes Tusci qui pacem desiderant». Ciò contrasta con il ritratto che sarà tracciato da Cacciaguida e con la sua affermazione che, a partire dal 1304 circa, Dante avrebbe fatto «parte per sé stesso» (Par. XVII, 69). Mancando peraltro attestazioni documentarie di un qualche incarico ufficiale ricoperto da Dante in questa fase politica, gli studiosi appaiono divisi tra chi immagina un'allusione ai fuoriusciti di parte bianca e ghibellina e chi pensa piuttosto che il riferimento sia ai conti Guidi favorevoli al Lussemburghese. Attraverso l'esame della totalità della documentazione storica e letteraria superstite, l'articolo scarta entrambe tali ipotesi e suggerisce invece di riconoscere in questo enigmatico riferimento la traccia del tentativo di Dante di creare una nuova comunità in sostegno di Enrico; un tentativo che, in una prospettiva di lunga durata, costituisce l'ideale punto di transizione dalle modalità di costruzione del pubblico già proprie all'autore della Vita nova a quelle che contraddistingueranno l'attitudine profe-tica dell'autore delle ultime due cantiche della Commedia. L'articolo offre inoltre una messa a punto ecdotica a proposito dell'intitulatio, archiviando la proposta ricostruttiva di E. Pistelli, passata in giudicato in tutte le edizioni posteriori.
In the superscription of his epistle VII to Henry VII (April 17, 1311), Dante validates himself as the first sender through the clause «exul inmeritus», already in use in his previous letters; he also refers to «universaliter omnes Tusci qui pacem desiderant» as second senders of the epistle. This is in conflict with the biographical portrait that will be presented by Cacciaguida, and especially with the claim that, from 1304 onwards, Dante's party would have been himself (Par. XVII, 69). Since we lack documents witnessing some official charge entrusted to Dante in this political phase, scholars are divided between those who read the clause as referring to White and Ghibelline exiles, and those who see in it a reference to the Guidi Counts, who supported Henry VII. By examining all surviving historic and literary documents, I dismiss both readings and propose to read this enigmatic reference as a witness of Dante’s attempt to create a new community in support of Henry. An attempt that, in a long-term perspective, represents an ideal moment transition in the development of Dante’s strategies for shaping his audience, from those employed in his Vita nova to those which mark the prophetical attitude of the Purgatorio and Paradiso. The article also provides a new textual reading for the letter’s superscription, thus dismissing Pistelli’s proposal, who had been accepted in all subsequent editions.