CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
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Practices of rewriting and mouvance are central to medieval culture, but have been neglected by contemporary scholarship. This paper highlights how collaborative forms of writing such as religious song engage with complex theological thought, opening up a discourse from which the laity had previously been excluded. Using forms which defy conventional author-based aesthetic norms, these songs explore poetic practices which are both collective and inclusive.
This essay interprets Dante's "Commedia" as an 'open work' (Eco). It grounds its open-endedness in its representations of interruption: from fictional obstacles in the protagonist's path in the "Inferno" to the narrator's anxiety over unfinishedness in the "Paradiso". Taking its cue from Boccaccio's creative rewriting of Dante's life, the essay resists the pressure of 'total coherence' embedded in (and often projected onto) the "Commedia", in order to reclaim the material vulnerability of the text and of its author.