About

Filippo Gianferrari is an Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, specializing in Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature, History, and Culture. He holds a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the University of Notre Dame, along with an M.A. and B.A. from the same university, and an M.A. and B.A. from the University of Bologna. His academic background includes teaching positions at Vassar College and Smith College prior to his current appointment. His research focuses on Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature, History, and Culture, with particular interests in Medieval Philosophy and Theology, the History of Education during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Paleography, and the History of the Book. He has authored the recent book 'Dante's Education: Latin Schoolbooks and Vernacular Poetics,' published by Oxford University Press in 2024, which investigates Latin school texts' influence on Dante's vernacular poetics. His upcoming project explores debates on the common good among the laity in late medieval Italian city-states, examining the intersections of political theory and theological controversies. Gianferrari is also involved in organizing scholarly events such as the webinar 'Project Paradiso: Exploring Dante’s Heaven' and is a co-editor of the forthcoming volume 'Dante's Paradiso: A Reader's Guide.' His work contributes significantly to the understanding of Dante, medieval education, and the cultural history of Italy.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Computer Science
• Humanities
• Literature
• Theology
• Art
• Law
• Physics
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Dante's Education

  2024-07-09 · 4 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The book analyzes manuscript and archival evidence to reconstruct the contents, practice, and readings of Latin instruction in the urban schools of fourteenth-century Florence and gauges Dante Alighieri’s debts toward and involvement with these elementary forms of language instruction in his vernacular works. It shows Dante’s continuous engagement with this culture of teaching in his poetics, thus revealing his contribution to the expansion of vernacular literacy and education. The book argues that to achieve his unprecedented position of authority as a vernacular intellectual, Dante conceived his poetic works as an alternative educational program for laypeople, who could read and write in the vernacular but had little or no proficiency in Latin.

  PublisherDOI

• An Introduction to Literacy and Education in Dante’s Florence

  2024-07-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract How did Dante hope to promote his classicizing poetics to an audience of vernacular, lay readers, whose classical culture was often wanting? To answer this question, we need to reconstruct the culture of literacy shared by Dante and his contemporary readers. Thus, this introductory chapter surveys the extant evidence of literacy levels and grammar instruction in thirteenth-century Florence. Whereas the Florentine milieu in which Dante was educated featured high level of literacy among the laity and a well-developed network of private schools, the increasing pursue of literacy instruction for vocational and social aims coincided with a shrinking of the curriculum of Latin readings. A handful of minor Latin poems was consistently read for acquiring literacy in both the vernacular and Latin, as well as to prepare a few pupils for more advanced training in Latin grammar. Hence, the chapter argues for that minor Latin school texts provided the basic literary culture shared by the poet and most of his contemporary readers. The last section of the chapter discusses Dante’s earliest schooling in light of the extant contextual and textual evidence. Finally, the proposed analysis suggests that Dante’s silence concerning the minor Latin poems should be interpreted as reticence rather than ignorance. Such contrived silence reflects his intention to establish a direct link between his poetics and the major Latin tradition. Dante’s indirect engagement with the Ilias Latina is briefly discussed as evidence of the poet’s covert intertextual dialogue with the Latin school models in his oeuvre.

  PublisherDOI

• “Be Silent, Ovid” (You, Too, Statius and Claudian)

  2024-07-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter 7 highlights the extensive intertextual allusions to both the Achilleid and the De raptu Proserpinae in the first two cantos of Paradiso. While rewriting Ovid in the opening of the Commedia’s last cantica, Dante also engages with the models of Ovidian emulation established by Statius and Claudian. Dante’s intertextual dialogue creates a poetic genealogy that begins with Ovid, outdoes the epic poems endorsed by contemporary teachers, and culminates in the Commedia. Paradiso thus emerges as an alternative to these didactic models and the new standard for vernacular epic poetry. This evidence also suggests a new understanding of Dante’s distinctive emulative stance toward his poetic models as a legacy of his Latin education rather than simply a peculiar feature of his vernacular poetics.

  PublisherDOI

• Dante’s Political Eschatology: Resurrecting the Social Body in Paradiso 14

  Humanities · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Art
  • Literature

  This article investigates Dante’s engagement with one of the key and most controversial academic questions of the late Middle Ages: the beatific vision after the general resurrection. This essay focuses on Paradiso 14, where the character of King Solomon explains that the souls’ vision of God will increase after reuniting with their resurrected bodies. After briefly reconstructing the theological debate engaged by Dante’s treatment of the general resurrection, and discussing the prevailing tendencies in the scholarship on Paradiso 14 and the body–soul relationship in the Commedia, this essay provides a new interpretation of this canto from a social and political perspective. It argues that in Dante’s eschatological vision, the resurrected body appears to be essential for the ultimate fulfillment of humanity’s social nature.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• <i>Dante’s New Life of the Book: A Philology of World Literature</i>. Martin Eisner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 259.

  Modern Philology · 2022-07-07

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Stranded on purgatory island : a Dantean reflection on the ecological disaster of isolation (and why we are not in hell)

  2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A ‘Whirlwind of Eloquence’: Sources for a Moral Reading of Ulysses’s ‘turbo’ (<i>Inf</i>. <scp>XXVI</scp>, 137)

  Italian Studies · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Literature
  • Art

  The article investigates the significance of the ‘turbo’ imagery that Dante adds at the end of Ulysses’s tale (Inferno xxvi) as a possible key to decoding the nature of this character’s sin. It argues that, in the style of the ancient fable, Dante devised the end of Ulysses’s story in order to make its moral message understandable to a lay, non-academic, readership. To achieve such broad, Gospel-like communication, the poet probably relied on moral interpretations of the turbo imagery that would have been popular in his time. Through an intertextual discussion of several medieval sources available to the poet, the article shows that the turbo would have been a fitting contrapasso for the sin of the evil counsellor, and shows the relevance of this moral category to describe the sin of intellectual curiositas as well.

  PublisherDOI

• Poca favilla, gran fiamma seconda (Par. I 34) : un proverbio d'autorità

  2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Humanities
  PublisherDOI

• ‘Ritornerò profeta’:

  UCL Press eBooks · 2019-06-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Evaluation of a New Wearable Technology for Kinematic Analysis During Perturbed Posture

  2019-06-01 · 1 citations

  article

  In this study a validity evaluation of a sensorized, full-body suit for kinematic measurement during perturbed upright stance task was proposed. Subjects underwent to a series of translational perturbations of the base of support in backward direction, with fixed speed and space (20 cm/s, 15 cm), The ankle joint angular displacement were simultaneously acquired by the full-body suit and an optoelectronic system, considered as the gold-standard for kinematics measurement. The two devices showed a good correspondence between measures, with absolute biases not higher than 0.8 degrees for both ankle joint range of motion and peaks amplitude. Results suggest the possibility to use the proposed wearable technology for assessing human body angular kinematics during perturbed posturography trials, in order to analyze balance strategies employed for external disruption withstanding and balance recovery.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Justin Steinberg

  49 shared

• Nicolò Crisafi

  49 shared

• Elena Lombardi

  49 shared

• Ronald Martinez

  49 shared

• Catherine Keen

  49 shared

• Trans By

  Institute for Cultural Inquiry

  49 shared

• Claire E. Honess

  49 shared

• Giulia Gaimari

  49 shared

Labs

• Filippo Gianferrari LabPI

Awards & honors

• ISSNAF Award for Young Investigators (2023)
• University of California EVC Writing Fellow (AY 2022-2024)
• Puknat Literary Endowment (AY 2021 & 2023)
• The Humanities Institute Faculty Research & Publication Gran…
• University of California Humanities Institute Grant for Conf…