Seminar Structure

Our seminar structure is an ambitious one: we will typically meet four times a week in three-hour sessions to discuss our reading of the Commedia. (No reading needs to be done in advance of the seminar.) Our seminar’s sessions will meet in a centrally-located classroom in the heart of the city. The facility has a small library of its own, and NEH Summer Scholars will have access to the research library of the Università di Siena which includes a large collection of books in English. Email and Internet services are available in our classroom, which has high-speed DSL, several desktop computers, and wireless internet for those who bring their own laptops. 

We also will take advantage of being in Italy by going to see many parts of Dante’s world at first hand. On one afternoon each week, we will take in-town field trips to Sienese cultural and artistic sites. We will take day-long field trips by public transportation to Florence (three times), and San Gimignano (a well-preserved medieval city where Dante spoke as an ambassador of the Florentine Republic).   We will take chartered bus trips to four other sites important to our studies. On one of these, we will bus into the Tuscan countryside to see examples of medieval art and architecture which, because of their relative inaccessibility, are rarely seen or studied by students of the Commedia. On this trip, we will go to the eleventh-century abbey of S. Antimo, a medieval pilgrimage church where the monks continue the tradition of celebrating the Mass in Latin, allowing us to see something akin to the religious liturgy of Dante’s lifetime. Our second bus trip will be to Orvieto, a city favored by many thirteenth-century Popes and therefore one with many artistic monuments of importance to Dante. In addition, we will go to the San Brizio chapel in Orvieto’s Duomo, whose frescoes by Luca Signorelli are the most important Renaissance depiction of Dante’s Commedia on public view. On the third of these day trips, we will go to Ravenna, the city where Dante spent the last years of his life and where he composed the Paradiso. Ravenna is a city with an extensive array of late antique and Byzantine mosaics, and the influence of these works on Dante's vision as he concluded his poem can best be understood by being there. Our final trip by chartered bus will be to Assisi, hometown of St. Francis, a thirteenth-century figure important for the study of Dante and his poem. Finally, we are also planning an overnight trip to Rome to study medieval monuments and sites important to Dante. (Our trips as planned are subject to change because of either negative or positive developments beyond our control or anticipation.)

We will do considerable writing throughout the seminar, though not of the formal research type. Rather, we will ask participants to develop a continuing written account of their responses to a series of cantos, assigned near the beginning of the seminar. This will allow each participant to deepen an understanding of the poem by incorporating a growing body of detail into the analysis of the canto as the seminar goes on. This writing will also be a part of a small-group experience for the participants. As the two of us have discovered over the years, collaborative learning is a great pleasure, one that everyone in the group should experience. Participants, therefore, will be assigned to small groups to work on these cantos. They will collaborate on coming to understand their section of the poem, and they will decide together on how to lead our seminar discussion on the day assigned for those cantos. Their doing so will inform and enliven our discussion, as participants develop and share the connections between their cantos, and the cultural monuments from which Dante has drawn. Each participant will also complete a final project which may or may not grow from this collaborative experience. This can vary from the informal (some have submitted Dante-related journals maintained during seminar) to the formal (some have written traditional research papers for presentation at academic conferences).

We will be available to Summer Scholars on an ongoing basis, before and after seminar meetings, on bus trips, in each other’s apartments, in various venues around the city of Siena. One of the great joys of these seminars is that work and play tend to merge. Members of our group--seminar participants and directors--will be spending a great deal of time together, a situation likely to blur the usual distinctions between academic and non-academic pursuits. Studying Dante in this city, in this context, is likely to become a seamless experience.