Mold and Miracle: Dante’s Hand, Boccaccio’s Collection, and the Prehistory of the Literary Field

Annual Dante Lecture, Elisa Brilli, University of Toronto In the Trattatello, Boccaccio recounts how the missing cantos of the Paradiso were recovered: Dante appeared to his son in a dream and revealed where his scritte lay mouldering. The anecdote reproduces a hagiographic pattern, the inventio reliquiarum, except that the relic here is not a body but a text, the author’s hand. From this far from innocent tale, the lecture reconstructs how the vernacular literary field emerged from the transposition into lay terms of ecclesiological devices of authority. Part of Brilli’s project The Author’s Two Bodies. Elisa Brilli is Professor of Italian and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Her publications include the monograph Firenze e il Profeta (Carocci, 2012); the critical edition of the Alphabetum Narrationum by the Dominican Arnold of Liège for the Corpus Christianorum (Brepols, 2015); the biography co-authored with Giuliano Milani, Dante: Des vies Nouvelles (Fayard, 2021, translated into Italian for Carocci in 2021, and into English for Reaktion Books in 2023); four co-edited volumes – on Faire l’Anthropologie Historique du Moyen Age (Atelier du CRH, 2010), Images and Words in Exile (Sismel, 2015), Agostino, Agostiniani e Agostinismi (Longo, 2018), and The Dominicans and the Making of Florentine Cultural Identity (Florence University Press, 2020); and more than fifty peer-reviewed articles and essays.