Description: Shows how medieval Italian poets viewed their authorship of poetry as a function of their engagement in a human community.
Brief description: 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).
Review Quotes: 'David Lummus' new book offers the first full-scale study of how four major poet-intellectuals from the fourteenth century - Mussato, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio - understood and represented their roles as poets within a civic context and engaged with imagined and real audiences communities. Lummus argues that these figures used their writings, above all their Latin poetry and other writings in defence of poetry, both to construct and to authorize their public and civic roles. A major scholarly achievement, Lummus' elegant book provides for the first time lucid and detailed accounts in English of the civic concerns of the four poets considered, and of their major Latin works, and of the dialogues, differentiations, and rewritings that we find in and between them.' Simon Gilson, Magdalen College, Oxford University