Topics in Medieval Italian Literature and Culture: Writing Latin in Late Medieval Italy

The course focuses on the close reading in the original Latin of a wide selection of 13th and 14th Century Italian writers of hagiographic texts, Church documents, scientific inquiries, epic poetry, as well as of treatises about linguistics, poetics, ethics, and historiography. The course affords an opportunity to explore a representative selection of writings from Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, three canonical medieval Italian writers, whose success as vernacular authors often effaces their remarkable and remarkably successful Latin works.