The rationale for organizing a session on this topic is both scholarly and disciplinary. Dante's hybridity has long been acknowledged as a feature of his work, but it has rarely been treated as a sustained object of analysis in its own right. Too often the discussion is absorbed into broader accounts of his style or his sources, without attention to the specific mechanisms and implications of the mixing itself. This panel seeks to address that gap, bringing together papers that treat hybridity as a productive analytical category and situate Dante's practice within the broader landscape of medieval vernacular literature.
Scholarship on this topic ranges from Ernst Robert Curtius's foundational account of medieval literary genres to more recent work on multilingualism, heteroglossia, and vernacular experimentation by scholars such as Zygmunt Barański, Maria Corti, and Teodolinda Barolini. The papers in this session engage with and extend these conversations, while also bringing in perspectives from translation studies, philosophy of language, and reception history that open new avenues of inquiry.
The session will operate across a 90-minute slot. Each of the four presenters will speak for approximately 15 minutes, leaving a minimum of 30 minutes for open discussion. Presenters have been asked to foreground questions as well as arguments, in order to facilitate genuine dialogue across the papers.
Max Matukhin (Università degli studi di Bergamo) examines the term sotil/soutil in the Occitan troubadour tradition and argues for Dante's stylistic and linguistic debt to the sirventes lineage that he conspicuously omits from the De vulgari eloquentia. The paper reveals a hybrid poetic line running from Giraut de Bornelh and Raimbaut d'Aurenga through key thirteenth-century figures active in Italy, reframing Dante's claim to "subtleness" as an inheritance he chooses not to acknowledge.
Savannah Cooper-Ramsey (Community College of Philadelphia) traces the fictive female voice in the medieval Italian lyric tradition from the Sicilian School through Dante, arguing that women's voices in the lyric (both courtly and vituperative) are fundamental to Dante's ethical development and to the formation of the vernacular literary tradition more broadly. The paper concludes with a chart of speaking female characters across the Commedia.
Camilla Canonico (University of Notre Dame) investigates the complex generic and theoretical stratification of the Vita nova, focusing on its early reception among Dante's contemporaries and followers, who largely failed to grasp its novelty. The paper shows how the dominance of traditional models conditioned and flattened early readings of Dante's stilnovo, and argues that Dante himself remained the sole true precursor to his own literary project until the circulation of the Paradiso.
Laura DiNardo (Columbia University) reassesses the state of scholarship on Dante and language, identifying persistent interpretive limitations in existing frameworks and proposing that possibility studies, a subfield bridging literary studies and the philosophy of language, offers a productive new pathway for understanding what Dante's language theory actually does in the Commedia.
The panel brings together scholars at different stages of their careers and across a range of institutional contexts, from a European research university to a community college. It includes both North American and international perspectives, and reflects a range of methodological approaches, historical, philological, philosophical, and reception-oriented, within a shared commitment to close engagement with Dante's texts.