The first comprehensive English translation and commentary on Dante's early verse to be published in almost fifty years, Dante's Lyric Poetry includes all the poems written by the young Dante Aligheri between c. 1283 and c. 1292. Essays by Teodolinda Barolini guide the reader through the new verse translations by Richard Lansing, illuminating Dante's transformation from a young courtly poet into the writer of the vast and visionary Commedia. Barolini's commentary exposes Dante's lyric poems as early articulations of many of the ideas in the Commedia, including the philosophy and psychology of desire and its role as motor of all human activity, the quest for vision and transcendence, the frustrating search for justice on earth, and the transgression of boundaries in society and poetry. A wide-ranging and intelligent examination of one of the most important poets in the Western tradition, this book will be of interest to scholars and poetry-lovers alike.

A very close and clear description of Dante's style in those lyric poems, which can be dated with reasonable confidence. Dr Boyde explains the nature and objective of his analyses in the substantial introduction which does not assume any previous knowledge of the poems or of modern stylistic theory. He has three principal aims: first, to relate the style of the poems to medieval rhetorical teaching; secondly, to assess the degree of Dante's stylistic originality by comparison with the style of earlier medieval authors; and thirdly, to provide an accurate detailed description of the many developments in Dante's style over a period of twenty years. Close attention is paid throughout to the frequency and distribution of the features described, and there is abundant quotation of examples. The book will have a considerable theoretical interest to all those concerned with the analysis of the style of literature from the past.

This translation of Dante's lyrics follows the Barbi format and contains 118 poems. It seeks to follow the central issue of Dante's aesthetic: championing vernacular poetry. Dante relied on his vernacular and so these translations rely on the common language of today's speech, free verse, and open form, so as to give English readers an experience of Dante that is as contemporary to us as his poetic moment was to him. The original Italian appears on the facing pages of the text.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was the author of the famous Divine Comedy. Less well known today, however, are Dante's lyric poems and treatises. His lyric production comprised more than 120 poems in diverse forms (canzoni and sestine, sonnets, and ballads, written between around 1283 and 1315). He gathered 31 of his poems in his Vita Nuova (The New Life, early 1290s) and then commented on three of his canzoni in the unfinished Convivio (The Banquet, ca. 1304-1305). These works represent the first, fundamental stage of his literary career. Not only these 'minor' works made Dante well-known as a vernacular poet before he began writing the Commedia, but for two centuries they were also among the most read works in Italian literature. The rich holdings of Oxford libraries allow us to reconstruct the main channels through which Dante's lyric production has circulated from the fourteenth century to the contemporary era. The wide variety of books in the collections belonged to a diverse set of readers throughout the whole of Europe. In Oxford we can find preserved not only unique objects, but also the legacies of scholars such as Edward Moore and Paget Toynbee who studied Dante and gathered precious manuscripts and early printed editions. The digital exhibition Dante's Lyric Poetry in Oxford (https: //www.cabinet.ox.ac.uk/dantes-lyric-poetry-oxford), prepared by Laura Banella within the MSCA project LyrA - Lyric Authority: Editing and Rewriting Dante's Lyric Poetry (14th-16th c.), shows the 'other Dante' - the vernacular Dante outside of the Commedia - as portrayed by manuscripts, and early modern and contemporary editions preserved in Oxford. It presents to a broad public all the manuscripts (from the 14th to the 16th century) and the early printed editions (1491-1727) preserved at the Bodleian Library and at the Taylor Institution Library which contain Dante's lyric poems. A third section, dedicated to the editions of Dante's lyric poetry spanning the period from the 1820s to the 1930s, is but a selection of works from the Taylor Institution Library's vast collection of modern Dantean editions. What is more, the exhibition displays books owned by Oxonian scholars, along with materials testifying to their work as curators of Dante's oeuvre. This catalogue accompanying the exhibition collects the entries describing each manuscript and each printed edition, along with a presentation of the selection of modern editions. Each section of the catalogue is introduced by a short educational essay.