Poésie, sciences et politique une génération d'intellectuels italiens (1290-1330)

Abstract

Nothing is more false than the image of Dante as an isolated genius standing out against his epoch. On the contrary he belongs to a very characteristic generation of italian intellectuals: laymen, often active in more than one domain, practicing abundantly poetic expression, engaged in political action, these scholar-citizens share equally a strong historical conscience. Their inventivity is manifested in philosophy, in medecine and in law, as well as in literary expression. Aside from these endogenous factors, a key to this phenomenon is linked to the active reception of the naturalistic knowledge elaborated in Paris, which is read in Italy outside of the control of theologians. The parallel journeys of a dozen uncommon personalities show the necessity of enlarging the habitual frames of medieval intellectual history.

Florence à l’époque de Dante

“…Ils hébergèrent surtout des « studia » conventuels de grande valeur, qui fournissaient à la communauté citadine des enseignants et des bibliothèques de prestige. Le profil intellectuel de Dante, même si ses études de jeunesse restent difficiles à reconstituer dans les détails, a certainement été marqué par un rapport spécifique aux pôles culturels de ces studia proposés par les ordres mendiants 3 .…”

The BIFLOW-Toscana Bilingue Catalogue: A Digital Representation of the Socio-cultural History of Translation in the Tuscan Middle Ages (1260–1430)

“…Identification of the regional context was natural: Tuscany is the place where vernacular writing spreads and opens up great poetic and philosophical debates, albeit in a context -or perhaps precisely because of it -in which there is no university (Coccia and Piron 2008). The most urgent need, however, was to carve out a representative corpus according to our primary historical-social interest, with the intention of escaping the hegemony of studies on translations of the classics and the birth of Humanism.…”