On amistà: The Practice of Friendship in Dante’s "Commedia"

A lecture by Prof. Dr. Elizabeth Coggeshall within the framework of the German Dante Society’s Summer School

We tend to think about friendship as a universal value, an unambiguous good. But for Dante and his interlocutors the many forms of friendship raised a number of social and ethical dilemmas that needed careful attention and negotiation. This presentation will attend to these dilemmas: how they emerge from the conflicting views espoused by classical and Christian authorities, and how those views are then integrated into a variety of strategic practices, which would permit vernacular writers a flexibility to profess different forms of “amistà” depending on the social field in which they were writing. The talk will focus not on what friendship is to Dante and his peers, but rather what it does, how it is used, what ends it serves. An analysis of these dilemmas reveals how the messy negotiations of the late medieval Italian writers paved the way for the wholesale recuperation of friendship – in its many and varied forms and expressions – among the early humanists.

As part of an international summer school organized by the German Dante Society on the theme “Dante and Friendship”, Professor of Italian Dr. Elizabeth Coggeshall (Florida State University) will speak on the theme of friendship in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Starting from the rich and sometimes conflicting traditions of friendship found in ancient and Christian thought, her lecture explores how Dante and his fellow vernacular poets cultivated various forms of amistà.

Elizabeth Coggeshall is Associate Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University. Her publications include the monograph On Amistà: Negotiating Friendship in Dante’s Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2023). Together with Arielle Saiber, she curates the website Dante Today: Citings & Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture, a digital archive that documents the ongoing presence of Dante in 20th- and 21st-century culture. She also serves as Director of Education and Outreach for the Dante Society of America.

The lecture will be held in English.
Welcome and introduction by Dr. Reinhard Laube (Herzogin Anna Amalia Library) and PD Dr. Karl Philipp Ellerbrock (German Dante Society).
Moderated by Prof. Dr. Franziska Meier (University of Göttingen).

An event in the series “Konstellationen – Neue Sichten der Bibliothek”.