DANTE’S COMEDY AND THE ETHICS OF INVECTIVE IN MEDIEVAL ITALY HUMOR AND EVIL NICOLINO APPLAUSO LITERARY CRITICISM • MEDIEVAL STUDIES Studies in Medieval Literature Series Editor: Albrecht Classen, University of Arizona “In a time when comedic speech is called out as a form of violence, Nicolino Applauso aims to uncover something deadly serious underneath the ‘jokes’ of the so-called jokester-poets (poeti giocosi) contemporary with Dante: Rustico Filippi, notorious misogynist, Cecco Angiolieri, of the lengthy rap sheet, and Folgore da San Gimignano, political activist. Applauso stakes out a third way between the naïve realism of the Romantics and the strict literariness of the New Critics to consider how historical events do in fact have something to do with documented poetic produc- tion. Applauso provides us with a deep and wide literary history of humor and invective and a reinterpretation, revealing newly unearthed archival evidence, of each of his chosen poeti giocosi. This historically and literarily well-researched study aims to recover the ethical value of these poets’ barbed humor and the comedic context of Dante’s Divine Comedy.” —Alison Cornish, New York University “Taking humor ‘seriously,’ namely as an ethical performance, Applauso provides an erudite analysis of the invective tradition as a mode of civic communication by considering its reinvention in the hands of Dante and his contemporaries. This book highlights the ethical, theoretical, and historical impli- cations of the interplay of humor and political commentary, bearing relevance in our times.” —Kristina Olson, George Mason University Dante’s Comedy and the Ethics of Invective in Medieval Italy: Humor and Evil proposes a new approach to invective and comic poetry in Italy during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and opens the way for an innovative understanding of Dante’s masterpiece. The Middle Ages in Italy offer a wealth of vernacular poetic invectives—polemical verses aimed at blaming specific wrongdoings of an individual, group, city, or institution—that are both understudied and rarely juxtaposed. No study has yet provided a scholarly examination of the connection between this medieval invective tradition, and its humor, derision, and reprehension in Dante’s Comedy. Political invective has a dynamic ethical orientation that is mediated by a humor that disarms excessive hostility against its individual targets, providing an opening for dialogue. While explor- ing medieval comic poems by Rustico Filippi, Cecco Angiolieri, and Folgore da San Gimignano, this study unveils new biographical data about these poets retrieved from Italian state archives, with most of this data published here in English for the very first time. NICOLINO APPLAUSO is visiting assistant professor of Italian at Loyola University Maryland. DANTE’S COMEDY AND THE ETHICS OF INVECTIVE IN MEDIEVAL ITALY APPLAUSO LEXINGTON BOOKS An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield 800-462-6420 • www.rowman.com Front cover by Felice Applauso