ALBERT RUSSELL ASCOLI. Dante and the Making of a Modern Author.

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Callimachus cursed big books. It is a pity that he did not have a chance to read this big book, for it would surely have caused him to say that perhaps only most big books are a curse. This book's central concern is to provide a contextualised and sustained analysis of Dante's negotiation of the medieval discourse of auctoritas. The field of medieval studies has seen an explosion in scholarship on theories of authorship in recent years. The foundational work of Smalley, Minnis and Copeland is now so regularly cited and has become so familiar as to be taken almost for granted. Over the past fifty years much research has been done on the early commentary traditions surrounding the work of Dante, in particular those on the Commedia (ranging from Mazzoni to Baranski). The beginnings of literary subjectivity and authorial self-consciousness are no longer sought in the early modern period. The middle ages are rightly considered fertile ground for such inquiry and that ground extends widely across a range of texts and commentaries. The late thirteenth–early fourteenth-century Italian poet Dante Alighieri is, as everyone knows, a supremely self-aware and self-conscious writer. So self-evident and obvious is this that as a subject of coherent and systematic study, it has been somewhat neglected; it is this neglect that Ascoli's book aims to address. It must be seen as a very significant contribution to Dante studies, but also to medieval studies more generally. It provides an essential theoretical and analytical framework within which to consider the fourteenth-century critical tradition in and around Dante.