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The article has two main aims. First, it assesses recent developments in Dante scholarship and calls into question the validity of some of the critical, historical, and methodological premises that these trends have fostered. Second, it proposes ways in which the study of the poet ought to be historically and methodologically more sensitive to the nuances and specificities of medieval culture than is generally the norm in Dante studies. To illustrate how such an approach might be articulated, the article focuses on the poet’s intellectual formation in Florence, especially around 1295, paying particular attention to Dante’s self-presentation inConvivioII. xii, to the nature of his possible relationship to the institutions of the mendicant orders, to his ties to Brunetto Latini, and to his knowledge of the Boethian and Aristotelian traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the nineteenth century, Dante studies have been dominated by variations on a contextualizing philological and historicist critical method. The article examines the implications, and especially several of the shortcomings and blind spots, of this approach. It focuses on two closely inter-related areas of investigation that hold positions of prominence in modern-day dantismo: the study of Dante's literary and doctrinal sources and of his intellectual formation. Rather than a rebuttal of historicist scholarship, the article proposes ways in which this might be refined, in particular by paying greater attention to the practical realities of medieval (Florentine) culture, including education and scholastic institutions, the circulation of manuscripts and modes of reading, and contacts between clerici and laici. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]