Dante, Peter of Trabibus, and the ‘Schools of the Religious Orders’ in Florence

Abstract

ABSTRACT Based on Dante’s declaration that he attended ‘the schools of the religious orders’ and the ‘disputations of the philosophizers’ (Cvo II. xii. 7), this article sheds light on the unedited disputations of a Franciscan theologian, Peter of Trabibus, in the Florentine convent of Santa Croce (1295–96) and analyses the information available to a layman who attended these disputations as an auditor. The article then argues that, beginning in the Vita nova, Dante resemanticised commonplaces contemporaneously discussed and cited in these ‘schools’. More precisely, it examines Dante’s quotation of an Aristotelian sententia in VN XLI considering this quotation’s use in the Santa Croce environment (including in Trabibus’s disputations). This analysis helps show how Dante attempted to provide his prosimetrum with a specific theological substratum and chose to apply a theological concept discussed in the scholastic environment of Florence to a literary work in the vernacular.