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Practices of Commentary

SSHRC Insight Grant, University of Toronto (2020–2025)

Practices of Commentary

Notes About Notes: A 19th Century Ismaʿili Personal Manuscript From India

By Verena Klemm, Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Leipzig)

In this blogpost, we browse through a unique personal manuscript belonging to the eminent Ismaʿili scholar Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī (1249–1315 AH / 1833–1898 CE). He was a prominent member of the Daʾudi Ṭayyibī Bohras, an old Ismaʿili Muslim community in Northwest India and other regions around the Indian Ocean, that prospered through maritime trade. The Bohras trace their origin back to the Fatimids, today numbering more than 1 million worldwide.

The manuscript in focus here (Ms. 1662) is part of the Hamdani Collection, a library that migrated with its owner from Yemen to Gujarat in India around in the late 18th century CE. The Collection was transmitted and enlarged through many generations until Prof. Abbas Hamdani (Univ. of Wisconsin, d. 2019), the last heir of the manuscripts, donated it in two stages (2007 and 2014) to the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London (IIS).

Front cover of Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānīʾs personal notebook [MS. London,  Institute of Ismaili Studies, Ms. 1662]

The Ms. 1662 contains 105 numbered folios and measures 19 x 14.5 cm. A British watermark embossed on the paper provides a terminus post quem of 1861 CE. Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī, the owner of the manuscript, apparently used it as a repository for excerpts and extracts from a broad spectrum of disciplines and fields of knowledge. It is brimming with multi-graphic elements such as text snippets, tables, diagrams, sketches, lists, and more. Moreover, he intensively engaged with his notes, as many further notes revolving around his primary notes clearly prove. His marginal commentaries wind like streamers across the pages, in all directions—at the top and at the bottom, in the margins of the page, or even interlinearly.

Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī belonged to a specific environment of scholarly Bohras who experienced a flourishing of their religious culture from the early 19th century until the first quarter of the 20th century under British patronage (according to the colonial “divide and rule”  policy that suppressed the majority and protected selected religious minorities). In order to establish and emphasize their identity as the true successors and heirs of the Fatimids (909-1171 CE), the Bohra scholars passionately copied and collected manuscripts of works produced in Fatimid times. Al-Hamdānī´s personal manuscript bears witness to this prosperous and productive period, which he was able to experience and participate in throughout his life.

Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī probably called his personal notebook majmūʿa, his collective or multiple-text manuscript. As this unique manuscript documents, he was interested in many topics. He filled it with excerpts, quotes, and paraphrases from the following disciplines and periods: biblical history as well as historical events in antiquity (Greece, Roman Empire, Iran); Fatimid and Ṭayyibī religious philosophy and doctrine; history; Quran and Hadith; Islamic law; Prophet’s biography; and early Islam. Moreover, we often find him engaging with the fields of mathematics (trigonometry and geometry), chronometry, physics, geography, astronomy and astrology, as well as the secret sciences and magic. For example, we find magical squares and recipes in Gujarati, a regional Indo-Aryan language, evolved from the Sanskrit. In the 19th century, the Bohra scholars opened their native language for Islamic vocabulary in Arabic language and sometimes authored and copied their scientific and religious works in this specific style and in Arabic script.

I have been working with the notebook over the past year and have submitted my findings for publication. My research questions mainly focused on ownership, material, textual practices, and the milieu to which al-Hamdānī belonged. My initial questions, though, were obvious: How do I research such a personal manuscript—one with an overabundance of different texts, numbers, symbols, and forms, created over the course of time, with crumpled as well as blank pages? For its owner, this notebook was certainly more or less well-organized, manageable, and self-evident, but not necessarily for me as a reader and researcher from a completely different time and place. How, then, can I productively use it for my research on Ismaʿili manuscripts, manuscript cultures, and manuscript histories? Furthermore, what does this manuscript tell us about its owner who took on so many roles—namely, collector, compiler, copyist, and commentator? In what follows, I will present some of the insights and ideas I was able to gain during my research.

Private notebooks are not often researched in Arabic Studies since these manuscripts have only rarely been handed down and documented. In contrast, disciplines such as Medieval, Renaissance, and early modern Enlightenment Studies can draw on an abundance of comparable manuscripts like notebooks, miscellanies, scrapbooks, excerpt books, collectanea, and adversaria (there are many names depending on the discipline) that have been produced and kept in literary and scholarly contexts and libraries. Thus, it proved to be very helpful and inspiring to open my research to a broader spectrum of philological disciplines, such as comparative literature and interdisciplinary manuscript studies.

We hardly find any literary or contextual anchor points for research on the role and function of al-Hamdānī’s personal manuscript for his own writings. A few of his epistles (rasāʾil) on religious-political issues, which were topical and important in his community at the time, are stored in private Bohra libraries in India and the IIS. The IIS also houses two copies of al-Hamdānī’s Dīwān, a collection containing poems written during a long stay in Arabia, the Ottoman Empire, and North Africa. His memoirs in Gujarati remain in the possession of his family.

Despite this void of possible biographical or intellectual references, the autographic commentarial activities in this notebook turned out to be substantial sources of knowledge about al-Hamdānī´s scholarly interests and working methods, providing us with answers as to why, with what interest, and how he reflected and commented upon his surely carefully selected primary texts.

Notes about Notes: First page of a two-page list of the Ismaʿili Imams, with  marginal and interlinear commentaries with complementary biographical information (and references to various sources from the Fatimid and Tayyibi literary tradition) [MS. London, Institute of Ismaili Studies, Ms. 1662, fol. 29r]

Indeed, Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī studied many of his copied texts with great interest in their transmission and variance. His readings and comments prove that he approached the written tradition—as manifested in the materiality of the manuscripts—with a decidedly critical and historically-oriented approach. His marginal and interlinear commentaries show that he checked and verified the transmission of a text and studied ownership statements and colophons in the manuscripts he used, often documenting alternative content and variants from other manuscript sources. He even states in some of his commentaries that he discovered interesting manuscripts in other collections, such as in the library of the leader of the congregation (Khizānat kutub al-daʿwa) in Surat. One manuscript he scrutinized was once brought to India from Yemen and contained, as he notes, impressive ownership notes from two prominent religious and political leaders from the 5th century AH (11th century CE) of the close Ismaʿili partner congregation in Yemen.

In this manner, Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī expanded and enriched his primary texts with complementary knowledge from other sources. Additionally, he made the practice of explaining and specifying the diverse content of his primary notes with marginal notes. Some of the short notes in the margins obviously had a merely practical function, intending, for instance, to enable quick orientation in the excerpt by repeating certain keywords of the primary text. Thus, al-Hamdānī´s excerpts, when read together with his commentaries, clearly document his intellectual interests, scholarly engagement, and working methods in the world of manuscripts in which he operated.

A meaningful constellation—Circular diagram: Conquests and battles in the history of mankind from Adam until the beginning of Islam; excerpt on the right: Animals complain about the cruelty of man (Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Risālat al-Ḥayawānāt) [MS. London, Institute of Ismaili Studies, Ms. 1662, fol. 27r]

However, there remains a difficult question: Can we grasp traces of his personal thinking somewhere in his notes and commentarial activities in the manuscript? When I was examining and scrutinizing the manuscript, I came across a possible example. On folio 27 recto, we find a probable constellation or “textual community”—the relationship of two notes in close vicinity. Here, one note might refer to the other; the secondary note may have been generated to express an attitude or an opinion regarding the content of the first note. 

How does this possible constellation of the two notes look? The rectangular folio is used here in landscape format. First, filling the center and most of the space of the page, al-Hamdānī has drawn a circular diagram of the pre-Islamic history of wars and conquests as told in the Old Testament and the Gospels, as well as in the historiography of ancient Iran and Arabia, until the life and death of the prophet Muḥammad. This circle is surrounded by another circle in which the chronological distance (in years) between the hijra (the exodus of the prophet Muḥammad from his hometown Makkah, which marks the beginning of the Islamic time calculation) and specific, individual events is noted.

The quotation in the immediate vicinity of this diagram is the possible secondary note, an excerpt from the famous “Epistle of the Animals” (Risālat al-Ḥayawānāt)contained in the rich and syncretistic Islamic proto-encyclopedia “Epistles of the Brethren of Purity” (Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Safāʾ) from the 4th  century AH / 10th CE. As Prof. Abbas Hamdani mentions in his summary of the history of the Hamdani Collection, his great-grandfather Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī must have had a great affinity for the scientific and philosophical concepts and spirit of the group of authors (probably Shiʿi or even Ismaʿili). This empathy for the anonymous Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (“Brethren of Purity,” as they called themselves) is confirmed and mirrored by a considerable number of excerpts and shorter quotes from the Rasāʾil in the notebook. The epistle in focus here, part of a group of epistles on zoology, is about a court hearing in which animals bring humans to trial before the court of Bīwarāsp the Wise, the king of the jinn. In the excerpt that has been selected by al-Hamdānī, they complain in detail about the cruelty with which humans not only treat each other, but also animals—despite the fact that animals constitute a meaningful and indispensable part of creation. In the excerpt, the spokesman of the predators says that they are not aggressive and cruel by nature but that they learned their behavior from none other than the humans, who have defeated each other in various modes of brutality every single day in history. Here he recalls more than twenty names of kings and conquerors known for war, violence, and bloodshed. All of these personalities took center stage in ancient Iran, Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, Palestine, or Arabia—the same ancient empires whose historical disruptions and breaks are represented in the neighboring circle diagram. There is even an overlap of the two notes regarding the names copied within the circle diagram, with Iskandar and Bukht Naṣṣar (Alexander the Great and Nebuchadnezzar, respectively) appearing in each one.

According to my interpretation, the excerpt at the bottom right-hand part of the folio can be read as a commentary on the content of the circle diagram in its immediate vicinity; of course we never will know this with certainty. But if so, we can assume that Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī mindfully copied his excerpt from the “Epistle of the animals” beside the circle diagram in order to express a personal idea about the major role of violence and martiality in the course of human history.

Thus, as this little portrait of this eminent Bohra scholar and his notebook might show, his dual role as a copyist as well as an annotator can offer glimpses not only into his intellectual interests, but also into his working environment—namely, the specific libraries he once visited and the manuscripts to which he referred. Moreover, we learn something about his working practices and methods. Perhaps a spatial proximity and a meaningful thematic relation between two different notes even reveals a small fragment, or an impression, or an idea, of his thinking and opinion.

Verena Klemm

(vklemm@saw-leipzig.de)

Primary Sources

Epistles of the Brethren of Purity: The case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn. An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistle 22., ed. and transl. Lenn E. Goodman and Richard McGregor. Foreword by Nader El-Bizri (London: Oxford University Press, in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2009).

al-Hamdānī, Muḥammad ʿAlī b. Fayḍ Allāh: MS 1662: No title (personal notebook). Manuscript Collection of the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London.

Secondary Sources (Selection)

Blair, Ann M., Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2010).

De Blois François, Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts: The Hamdani Collection in the Library of the Institute of Ismaili Studies (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011).

Durand-Guédy, David and Jürgen Paul, eds.: Personal Manuscripts: Copying, Drafting, Taking Notes (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023). (Studies in Manuscript Cultures, 30).  https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111037196.

El-Bizri, Nadir, ed., Epistles of the Brethren of Purity: The Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ and their Rasāʾil. An Introduction. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2008).

Hamdani, Abbas, “History of the Hamdani Collection of Manuscripts.” In Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts: The Hamdani Collection in the Library of the Institute of Ismaili Studies, edited by François de Blois, xxv–xxxiv. London: I.B. Tauris, 2011.

Klemm, Verena: “At the High End of learning – Note taking and Commentary Practices of a Nineteenth Century Ismaili Scholar in India.” In: Marginal Matters: Explorations into Commenting and Glossing Techniques in Arabic Manuscript Cultures, edited by Stefanie Brinkmann. The volume is expected to be published 2025.

–––. “A Library in One Volume – The Notebook of the Ismaʿili Scholar Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī from Surat.” Forthcoming in Die Welt des Islams.

Qutbuddin, Tahera. “Bohras.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, edited by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Devin J. Stewart. Online: Brill, 2013. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_25156.

–––. “The Daʾudi Bohra Tayyibis: Ideology, Literature, Learning, and Social Practice.” In A Modern History of the Ismailis. Continuity and Change in a Muslim Community, edited by Farhad Daftary, 331–354. London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011 (Ismaili Heritage Series, 13).

Commentary from the Dali Kingdom: The Scripture for Humane Kings

by Megan Bryson, University of Tennessee

Manuscript of the Scripture for Humane Kings, Yunnan Province Library, http://www.ynlib.cn/Category_529/Index.aspx.

Among the various technologies that circulated in the medieval world were Buddhist modes of statecraft that promised to strengthen rulers’ power over their territory. One of the key manuals for strengthening Buddhist statecraft in the Sinosphere, meaning the parts of Asia that adopted Chinese script, was the Scripture for Humane Kings (full title: Perfection of Wisdom Scripture for Humane Kings to Protect Their States). This text was probably composed in northern China during the fifth century, and then revised in the Tang dynasty (618–907) by the tantric Buddhist master Amoghavajra (Bukong in Chinese; 704–774).

Both versions of the scripture generated commentaries, subcommentaries, ritual texts, and visual art in Tang China, Koryŏ Korea (918–1392), Heian Japan (794–1185), the Khitan Liao dynasty (907–1125), and the Tangut Western Xia dynasty (1038–1227). The Tang court sponsored recitations of the scripture to dispel invasions; in Heian Japan, maṇḍalas based on the scripture and its ritual texts became the foundation for state protection rites; and in the Western Xia monastic ordinands had to master the recitation of the Scripture for Humane Kings whether they read Sinitic script, Tangut, or Tibetan.

The Scripture for Humane Kings also found favor in the kingdom of Dali (937–1253), centered in what is now southwest China’s Yunnan province and surrounded by the Song dynasty (960– 1279), Tibet, Pāla India (750–1174), Bagan (1044–1287), and Đại Việt (1010–1225). Dali’s location suggests cultural hybridity, and Buddhist visual and material culture circulated in Dali across multiple routes. Though several Dali-kingdom manuscripts include mantras and syllables in Sanskrit Nāgarī script (some of which indicate direct contact with northeast India), the Dali kingdom’s textual corpus shows a stronger orientation toward Sinitic Buddhism. In encounters with the Song-dynasty court or its emissaries, Dali representatives repeatedly sought to trade their prized horses for texts, including many Buddhist scriptures.

Most of the Buddhist texts that survive from the Dali kingdom were discovered in 1956 at Dharma Treasury Temple, located to the southeast of Er Lake in the Dali plain. Dharma Treasury Temple had been the family temple of the Dong clan who served as Buddhist ritual masters at the Dali court. In addition to preserving seven unique Dali-kingdom texts, Dharma Treasury Temple also includes manuscripts of Tang-era Sinitic translations of widely known scriptures as well as commentaries.

Map of the Dali Kingdom and surrounding polities in the 12th century. Seasonsinthesun, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Amoghavajra’s version of the Scripture for Humane Kings was among the most important texts for the Dali court: two partial manuscripts of the scripture survive with commentary and subcommentary; a 1052 abridged copy of a tenth-century subcommentary known as the Compass for Protecting the State Subcommentary has only been found in Dali; there is an extended section on the “State-Protecting Prajnā Buddha Mother” in the 1136 ritual text Rituals for Inviting Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Vajra Beings, Etc. found only in Dali; and the 1170s Painting of Buddhist Images (Ch. Fanxiang juan) includes multiple scenes based on the scripture.

Images of the Sixteen Kings from the Scripture for Humane Kings at the end of the 1170s Painting of Buddhist Images. Collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Of the various ways in which Dali court Buddhists mobilized the Scripture for Humane Kings, the commentary and subcommentary have stuck with me the most because of their illegibility. The two partial manuscripts, now both housed in the Yunnan Province Library, feature two kinds of annotation and subcommentary that defy easy interpretation: some of the characters abbreviate established characters, but others appear to be unique to the Dali region. How do we make sense of this commentary when we can’t make sense of this commentary?

I’ll start with an example from the second partial manuscript of the Scripture for Humane Kings, which is in the scroll format and measures 30.2 cm tall by 10.35 m long. Though the manuscript’s material has not been recorded, it is likely made of mulberry paper, the most common substance for Dali-kingdom texts. This section of the text discusses the five bodhisattvas who protect kings who follow the scripture.

Manuscript of the Scripture for Humane Kings, Yunnan Province Library, http://www.ynlib.cn/Category_529/Index.aspx.

The scripture text (marked in green) is written in larger, regular script; Liangbi’s commentary text (marked in blue) is slightly smaller and more calligraphic; and the subcommentary (unmarked) is even smaller and more “cursive.” This aligns with practices of commentary in Tang-dynasty Buddhism, which shows the strong connections between Dali manuscript culture and Chinese manuscript culture more broadly.

Manuscript of the Scripture for Humane Kings with scripture text highlighted in green and commentary highlighted in blue. Yunnan Province Library. http://www.ynlib.cn/Category_529/Index.aspx.

Here the scripture text, excluding the red annotations, states, “Great king! I will command the bodhisattva-mahāsattvas of the five directions to assemble and go to protect any state wherever and whenever in the future the kings of states establish the Correct Teaching and protect the Three Jewels.” Bodhisattva-mahāsattvas are beings who have decided to postpone their final awakening to save others first; the Correct Teaching and Three Jewels both refer to Buddhism.

Manuscript of the Scripture for Humane Kings with annotations circled in purple and yellow. Yunnan Province Library, http://www.ynlib.cn/Category_529/Index.aspx.

The red annotations to the right of the main text add two different kinds of information. Some, like the terms circled in purple, seem to introduce grammatical markers. The first purple circle includes a character that often appears after locations; the second purple circle includes a character that appears after people (here, kings). Other annotations, like the terms circled in yellow, expand or change the meaning of the words. For example, the original text reads “protect the Three Jewels,” and the added character, “king,” changes the meaning to “protect the king’s Three Jewels.”

A line of Liangbi’s commentary follows the scripture text, though Liangbi is actually discussing the previous line in the scripture. The commentary here concerns the scripture’s structure rather than the specific contents: “From here, the second part illuminates the methods for protecting the state, which are divided into three sections.” The extensive subcommentary that follows is not fully legible to me, but it follows Liangbi’s focus in outlining the different sections of the current chapter, “Receiving and Keeping This Scripture.” The subcommentary also calls back to a previous section of the scripture and commentary that blames the country’s misfortunes on the people’s lack of respect for their parents, teachers, rulers, and officials.

Manuscript of the Scripture for Humane Kings with abbreviated characters circled in red and blue. Yunnan Province Library. http://www.ynlib.cn/Category_529/Index.aspx.

The two kinds of “irregular” characters are on display in this section. Instead of giving the full character for “country,” which is usually written as a box with the character for “territory” inside of it 國, the subcommentary usually writes only the box: 囗 (circled in red). This kind of abbreviation appears frequently throughout the subcommentary and interlinear annotations; it is still fairly legible for readers who are proficient in Chinese script. Another kind of abbreviation found in this manuscript involves combining parts of two characters to form one single character. For example, the name of the historical Buddha is Śākyamuni, and the first part of this, Śākya, is usually written with the two Chinese characters 釋迦 (Shijia in Mandarin). In this manuscript, however, the two characters become the single character 米加 (circled in blue).

For the Dali court Buddhists who copied and read these manuscripts, the subcommentary’s abbreviations would have operated like a shorthand. Even for those of us far removed from the Dali court, proficiency in reading Chinese script and familiarity with Buddhist texts allows us to fill in most of the gaps. This is not the case, however, for the other kind of unusual script we find in these manuscripts.

Manuscript of the Scripture for Humane Kings with distinctive characters circled in orange and brown, and “dialect” circled in green. Yunnan Province Library. http://www.ynlib.cn/Category_529/Index.aspx.

The subcommentary in the partial manuscripts of the Scripture for Humane Kings contains many characters that resemble standard Chinese characters, as well as some that do not correspond to any known character (including variants). Many of these characters appear to fulfill grammatical functions, such as the character resembling 欠 (circled in brown) that appears after references to people (perhaps as a counter), or the final character 电 (circled in orange) that ends sentences. In two places the subcommentary includes the label “dialect” (circled in green), but, given the widespread use of these characters, it remains unclear why the “dialect” label only appears twice.

Dali-kingdom scriptures’ unusual characters have generated scholarly debate: some scholars read these characters as mere abbreviations of more complex characters, while other scholars treat the unusual characters as early evidence for writing the language of the Bai ethnic group, which is centered in the Dali region. Unlike other polities that existed at the same time as the Dali kingdom, such as the empires of the Jin, Liao, and Tangut Xia, the Dali court did not develop its own script. When a writing system called “Bai script” does show up in the mid-fifteenth century, it uses and adapts established Chinese characters to the local language. While it would be anachronistic to refer to the unusual characters in Dali-kingdom scripture subcommentaries as “Bai,” given the lack of ethnic discourse circulating at the time, the subcommentary script does appear to represent a different language than classical Chinese.

What, then, do the Dali-kingdom subcommentaries on the Scripture for Humane Kings tell us about practices of commentary?

First, the act of sponsoring and composing subcommentaries demonstrates a strong commitment to understanding the scripture itself as well as its commentary. The Dali court sponsored an array of materials related to the Scripture for Humane Kings, including ritual texts and visual art. The commentary and subcommentary remind us that Dali Buddhists also needed to know what the scripture meant.

Second, the scribes who copied the Scripture for Humane Kings distinguished formally between scripture, scriptural annotations, commentary, and subcommentary, using abbreviated and otherwise nonstandard characters only for the scriptural annotations and subcommentary. This suggests a need to preserve the scripture and commentary text in their original form, and to make the different textual registers clear for the reader.

Third, these manuscripts would have only been completely legible to Dali court Buddhists familiar with the local writing system. Considering the common premodern practice of reading aloud, it seems likely that the scriptural annotations and subcommentary were related to orality in some way, even if they do not represent the local vernacular. For example, these markings could be similar to the kundoku readings that allow for readings of classical Chinese texts in Japanese.

New Publication: Hadith Commentary: Continuity and Change

Edited by
Joel Blecher & Stefanie Brinkmann

Congratulations to Joel Blecher and Stefanie Brinkmann on publishing their volume on hadith commentary with Edinburgh University Press. See the book’s publication page at Edinburgh University Press.

This publication explores key texts and critical themes of hadith commentary:

  • Represents a milestone for the field: the first-ever edited volume on the important subject of hadith commentary
  • Presents diverse case studies of hadith commentaries across time, place and sect
  • Delivers new insights into themes of Islam and politics, Islamic mysticism, Islamic law, Islamic philosophy and the digital humanities
  • Offers cross-disciplinary models of cutting-edge methods in textual studies from a group of international scholars

Hadith commentary has been a central site of Islamic intellectual life for more than a millennium, across diverse periods, regions and sects. This is the first volume of scholarly essays ever collected on the key texts and critical themes of hadith commentary. The book unfolds chronologically from the early centuries of Islam to the modern period, and readers will discover continuities and changes as a group of international experts offer illuminating studies of Sunnis, Shi‘i and Sufis who interpret and debate the meaning of hadith that spans a wide terrain: Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, India, and further. The volume also models a variety of methodological approaches, including social history, intellectual history, the study of religion, and digital history. By highlighting both differences and commonalities as the practice of hadith commentary circulated across distant eras and lands, this volume sheds new light on the way Muslims have historically understood the meaning of Muhammad’s example.

The Other Sister: New Research on Non-Cloistered Religious Women (1100-1800).

University of Toronto. May 18–20, 2023

In order to attend the conference via Zoom or in person, please email us at tos2023conference@gmail.com. Check our blog for the final schedule  https://othersisters.hypotheses.org/

Throughout Christian history, there have been groups of women who lived recognizably religious lives but outside of traditional monastic structures. Despite leaving a substantial documentary and (in some cases) visual record, they are conspicuously absent from the dominant scholarly tradition. By defining and contextualizing the experiences of these women, we can begin to understand the ways they fit into the ecclesiastical and lay landscape of the worlds in which they lived. Our conference focuses on new research on non-cloistered women religious including (but not limited to) beguines, bizzoche, tertiaries, pinzochere, canonesses, and house ascetics. By looking beyond the limitations generally imposed by geography or time period, we can begin to think of the connections that existed between these women and society, cloistered nuns, or clerics. 

The conference will take place at the University of Toronto, in person, May 18–20, 2023. Those who cannot be present in Toronto on these days may attend the conference virtually and ask questions through chat. 

Zoroastrian Exegetical Literature

by Miguel Ángel Andrés-Toledo and Enrico G. Raffaelli, Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto

Introduction

Zoroastrian communities have provided interpretations of their sacred corpus, the Avesta, since the early phase of their history. The Avesta itself contains commentaries on some of its passages. After the period when Avestan ceased being a living language, and Avestan texts were not composed anymore (around the 4th century BCE), Zoroastrians produced translations and commentaries of their sacred texts to facilitate their understanding.

This blog illustrates the characteristics of the exegetical passages of the Avesta, and of the main corpus of the Pahlavi literature of the pre-Islamic and early Islamic times, the most extensive literary corpus of Zoroastrian pre-modern literature.

[Read more…] about Zoroastrian Exegetical Literature

Notes on Demons and Illness from Antiquity to the Early-Modern Period

by Katarina Pejovic, Doctoral Candidate, Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

Nov. 2022

I was very delighted to be able to share some intriguing readings with the Practices of Commentary discussion group, and to reflect on and learn alongside such a robust community of erudite scholars. I prepared a short presentation on two papers, both from the same anthology:

[Read more…] about Notes on Demons and Illness from Antiquity to the Early-Modern Period

The Thrill of the Find: Subkī’s Qur’an commentary in Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 2052 (Cod. Mixt. 780)*

by Shuaib ALLY

I am fairly certain I found a copy Ibn Ḥajar had come across of Subkī’s Qur’an commentary. I am excited about this lucky discovery because it is tangible evidence for a network of readership, and also because it establishes Subkī as a known Qur’anic exegete. It is these types of discoveries that are the most gratifying and keep the process of scholarship interesting, so I will tell you all about it.

I was working on an article about the reception of a Qur’an commentary by Zamakhsharī in Mamluk Cairo and Damascus, around the thirteenth to sixteenth century. Zamakhsharī was an early twelfth century Persian scholar who wrote a Qur’an commentary called The Unveiler of the Realities of Revelation and Selected Opinions on Aspects of Interpretation (Arabic: al-Kashshāf ʿan ḥaqāʾiq al-tanzīl wa ʿuyūn al-aqāwīl fī wujūh al-taʾwīl). This book was met with wide acclaim across the Islamic world because it adapted methods of language interpretation from the fields of Arabic linguistics and literary theory to the study of the Qur’an. This allowed a deeper analysis of the language and style of the Qur’an than the commentary tradition had previously engaged in.

[Read more…] about The Thrill of the Find: Subkī’s Qur’an commentary in Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 2052 (Cod. Mixt. 780)*

Commentary as Cultural Technique. Relationality – Mediality – Resonance

Call for papers for Conference of the Wolfenbüttel Arbeitskreis Frühneuzeitforschung in 2023 (July 12–14, 2023)

Proposals (title, potential section reference, 300-word abstract) from all disciplines with a reference to the early modern epoch should be sent by July 31, 2022 to forschung@hab.de.

The symposium intends to address the practice of commenting as a cultural technique in its various thematic, medial and historical aspects. This comprises, but is by no means restricted to, the specific text type of the ‘commentary’. Long before manifesting itself in philological and other types of commentary, the practice of commenting can be seen as a basic anthropological activity. Man/woman seems to be the commenting animal. Man/woman’s relation to the world and the self has always been mediated through language, hence has been dependent on language which, in its arbitrariness and openness to misunderstandings, is characterized by negativity and, consequently, has to be continuously supplemented. When Rilke in his first Duinese elegy speaks of us humans as “groping animals” that “realize that we are not all too reliably at home | in the interpreted world”, he focuses the beginning of a practice of commenting, continuously accompanying mankind in a gesture of compensation for the need of having to rely on the arbitrariness of language to make up for the lack of an immediate understanding. Even language accquisition, a child’s successive introduction to the world as mediated through language, can be seen as taking place through a continuous complementation of what is given by the child’s partners in dialogue, with its reference on the one hand being on the facts of the surrounding world but, on the other hand, even more so on language itself. This dialogical commenting of the world in the process of acquiring language unfolds as an activity of contextualizing facts and expressions, and it establishes norms.

[Read more…] about Commentary as Cultural Technique. Relationality – Mediality – Resonance

Studying and Teaching the Georgics in Medieval Northern France: Evidence from the Twelfth-Century Cathedral Schools

by Anthony FREDETTE and Simon WHEDBEE

Many surviving twelfth-century Latin commentaries associated with the influential cathedral schools of northern France have in common the focus, treatment, and scope of the ars grammatica: the philological exegesis of texts for grammatical, logical, and rhetorical instruction. One medieval commentary on the Georgics of Virgil demonstrates the wide application of philological exegesis in medieval scholastic thought, branching out from studies of the poem’s language along the lines of the Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) into the natural sciences. An Aeneid commentary appearing to have the same provenance as this Georgics commentary recalls the teaching of Anselm of Laon (1050-1117). Modern scholars attribute its authorship to a slightly later figure who may have learned from Anselm or his disciples: Hilary of Orleans (first half of the twelfth century). Based on numerous similarities between the commentaries, we may tentatively attribute the Georgics commentary to Hilary as well, though only future studies can confirm this.

[Read more…] about Studying and Teaching the Georgics in Medieval Northern France: Evidence from the Twelfth-Century Cathedral Schools

New Publication: Commenting and Commentary as an Interpretive Mode in Medieval and Early Modern Europe *Online now*

Edited by
Christina Lechtermann & Markus Stock

Congratulations to Christina Lechtermann and Markus Stock on the newly published special issue of Glossator, titled Commenting and Commentary as an Interpretive Mode in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. The papers in this special issue reflect how various social, literary, and religious practices involving the act of commenting intersect the genre of commentary as a stable phenomenon in select European cultures of the Middle Ages and the early modern era. The print volume is also available.

Read the text in full on the Glossator website.

Introduction: Commenting and Commentary as an Interpretive Mode in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,
by Christina Lechtermann and Markus Stock
The Pro-Active Scribe: Preparing the Margins of Annotated Manuscripts,
by Erik Kwakkel
Thinking from the Margins: Opening and Closing Illuminations and their Commentary Functions around 1000,
by Kristin Böse
Reading Texts within Texts: The Special Case of Lemmata,
by Andrew Hicks
The In-/Coherences of Narrative Commentary: Commentarial Forms in the Anegenge,
by Christina Lechtermann
Dante’s Self-Commentary and the Call for Interpretation
by Elisa Brilli
Spiritualizing Petrarchism, “Poeticizing” the Bible: Two Counter-Reformation Self-Commentaries,
by Christine Ott and Philip Stockbrugger
The Power of Glosses: Francesco Fulvio Frugoni’s Self-Commentary and Literary Criticism in the Tribunal della Critica,
by Andrea Baldan
Commenting on a Purged Model: The M. Valerii Martialis Epigrammaton libri omnes novis commentariis illustrati of the Jesuit Matthäus Rader (1602),
by Magnus Ulrich Ferber

Upcoming and Past Lectures

For information about upcoming and past lectures, please email Project Manager Jonathan Brent (jonathan.brent “at” mail.utoronto.ca).

08. November 2024: Commenting on Commentaries: The History, Development, and Diversity of the Chinese Commentarial Tradition.

A talk by James Robson, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University; Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute

Scheduled for Friday, November 8, from 2:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. ET.

Abstract: Jonathan Z. Smith once wrote:  “Where there is a canon we can predict the necessary occurrence of a hermeneute, of an interpreter whose task it is to continually extend the domain of the closed canon over everything that is known or everything that is.” This focus on meaning and the way the commentarial tradition opens up a text by revealing its hidden aspects or adds new meanings for a new age, is of course one fruitful approach, but it has the potential danger of masking the complex variety and function of commentaries that exist within a tradition. This talk seeks to lay new a foundation for studying Chinese commentaries by providing an account of the full range and diversity of the commentarial tradition in China. Rather than focus on commentaries within a single tradition—as much previous scholarship has tended to do—this talk aims to look across traditions to discuss the variety of commentarial styles and formats in classical Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist commentaries. What different forms (mise en page) did those commentaries take? How were form and content related? How did commentaries solidify the meaning of a classic text and/or how did it breathe new life into it? How might commentaries invite—or even force—a radical reinterpretation of the original text? The history of how commentaries have traditionally be treated as subordinate to the main text is now well known, but there remains much to say about how commentaries were not only significant in the role they played in understanding a text, but also played a variety of different functions. Many Chinese texts, for example, only survive in so far as they were transmitted along with a commentary. These are some of the issues I plan to address in this talk that will approach the Chinese commentarial tradition from a broad perspective that aims to integrate new insights from recent studies on commentaries across different Chinese religious traditions. This remains a necessary step in our understanding of Chinese commentaries since we still have an inadequate grasp of the different genres of commentary and their historical evolution and development. 

27. September 2024: Philodemus’ On the Good King According to Homer and the Homeric Commentary Tradition.

A talk by Jeffrey Fish, Associate Professor of Classics at Baylor University

Scheduled for Friday, September 27, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. ET.

Abstract: Odysseus forestalls Eurycleia’s gloating over the slain suitors in Odyssey 22.407-11. According to the usual reading of 22.411, Odysseus tells her that “it is not piety to glory (euchetaasthai) over slain men.” In light of Odysseus’ triumphal behavior in the Iliad, the Homeric scholia instead understand euchetaasthai to mean “to pray.” Accordingly, Odysseus was not making a comment about the immorality of boasting over a defeated foe but rather about ritual purity. The Epicurean Philodemus of Gadara appears to take a different approach in On the Good King According to Homer, a treatise preserved among the Herculaneum papyri. The proper placement of fragments suggests that Philodemus thought that Odysseus learned from his foolish gloating over the Cyclops.

01. March 2024: Hang Time: Thinking about the Future in the Medieval Mediterranean.

A talk by James A. Redfield, Assistant Professor of Biblical and Talmudic Literatures at Saint Louis University.

Scheduled for Friday, March 01, from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. ET.

Abstract: How did rabbis of Roman Palestine (c. 200–400 CE) use their legal tradition to think about culture? This question has been limited by a scholarly preoccupation with the boundaries of Jewish identity. In their Roman environment, following two disastrous revolts, Jews were a weak minority whose ancient law and its interpretive heritage remained a mark of distinction. Their rabbinic elite’s success at preserving that tradition in fundamental works of Jewish law to this day, such as the Mishnah and its commentary, has thus understandably been treated as a defense of Jewish identity against assimilation to Greco-Roman culture. But it might be more than this.

This talk unpacks examples of three more things that it might be. We will do so by examining the chronological and theoretical development of precisely those laws that seem to be about resistance to assimilation: idolatry (avodah zarah). First, in literary form, we will see how rabbis use commentary to subvert Deuteronomy’s unequivocal condemnation of idolatry and rethink the category from a Roman perspective, reflecting not simply knowledge but interpretation of Roman culture. Second, in normative terms, we will see where those interpretations yield new lines of Jewish/Roman difference and new prohibitions, with more or less “wiggle room,” implying a new theory of the relationship between culture and religion in Jewish life. Finally, in wider historical context, we will situate these developments among new research on ancient ethnography and challenge the view that Jews were sui generis in terms of how they represented, inquired about, and theorized cultural difference.

26. January 2024: Hang Time: Thinking about the Future in the Medieval Mediterranean.

A talk by Karla Mallette, Professor of Mediterranean Studies at the University of Michigan.

Scheduled for Friday, January 26, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. ET. Attendees are welcome to join us in person (3rd Floor, Lillian Massey, 125 Queen’s Park) or via Zoom – but please note that to attend online you must register (registration link here).

Abstract: How do human beings think about, talk about, and prepare for contingency? How do we think about the future – events to come, good or ill? This talk looks to the late medieval Mediterranean to survey emergent ways of rationalizing risk. Economic historians, sociologists and anthropologists have studied the new financial products that allowed medieval men and women to protect themselves from catastrophe and to share in the risks of investments that might bring profit or loss. At the same time, new vocabulary emerged in late medieval contracts and literary works: words that stared down the future and named contingency with precision. This talk uses philology and literary history to build on the work of social scientists and to describe the strategies that medieval men and women used to bet on the future.

01. December 2023: The Daode Jing (The Scripture of the Way and Its Virtues) and Its Diverse Commentaries

A talk by James Robson, James C. Kralik, and Yunli Lou Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations (Harvard University)

Abstract: The Daode jing is traditionally regarded as one of the main sacred books of Daoism, written in the 6th century BCE by the religion’s venerable old founder Laozi (“The Old Master”). Over the past two thousand years, the Daode jing has attracted the attention of a multitude of scholars and exegetes in China and spread throughout the rest of East Asia, where it has had a prodigious influence.

This talk focuses on the diverse afterlives of the Daode jing that become accessible to us through a consideration of its diverse commentaries. This talk will be less concerned with the life of the purported author or the nebulous meanings of the Daode jing and more the lives that the book itself has lived. Through a discussion of a selection of influential early commentaries on the Daode jing we can demonstrate that in ancient China there was not a single way to read, interpret, or put into practice the brief and mysterious work, and through a consideration of later commentaries we can see how those interpretations further shifted over time. It is the surprising diversity found in commentaries on the Daode jing that this talk aims to explore.

27. October 2023: The Bodley Glossaries: The Glossaries in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 730

A talk by Dr. Claudio Cataldi, Adjunct Professor of Germanic Philology at Università Kore di Enna

Abstract: The Bodley Glossaries represent the last outcome of the rich tradition of early medieval English glossography. At the same time, the four glossaries in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS 730 bear witness to the multi-lingual environment of early thirteenth-century England. On the occasion of the first full edition of the Bodley Glossaries (PIMS, 2023), this talk is devoted to their contents: lexical interpretamenta, long commentary glosses, batches of Biblical entries, animal sounds, and glosses to a Hiberno-Latin poem. This presentation of the Bodley Glossaries will be set in the context of the development of early English lexicography, from its beginnings to the post-Conquest period.

28. April 2023: Langton’s Biblical Commentaries and the Formation of Preachers

A talk by Dr. Alessia Berardi, assistant professor of medieval history at Christendom College

Abstract: Stephen Langton was one of the most renowned professors of theology in Paris at the end of the twelfth century before becoming archbishop of Canterbury in 1207 and being one of the main protagonists of the ‘Magna Charta’ affair. He taught on the entire Bible, and we possess multiple versions of his lectures under the form of commentaries. By looking at some examples from his lectures on the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah, I argue that Langton not only aimed at interpreting and explaining the theological meaning of the Scriptures to his students, but that his teaching activity should be understood in a wider effort of reform promoted by the Church, which culminated in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). In particular, I argue that Langton, similarly to some of his contemporaries in Paris and England, was interested in forming moral preachers and prelates, and in teaching them how and what to preach about. In this way, his lectures can also be seen as – and were used as – tools for the aid of preachers.

Readings:

  • Phyllis B. Roberts. “Master Stephen Langton Preaches to the People and Clergy: Sermon Texts from Twelfth-Century Paris.” Traditio 36 (1980): 237-268.
  • Goering, Joseph. “Literal and Spiritual Morality in the Scholastic Sermon: an old distinction recovered.” In Preaching and Society in the Middle Ages: ethics, values, and social behaviour, 119-128. Padova Centro Studi Antoniani, 2002.

31. March 2023: Sanskrit Commentaries as Early Modern Archives

 A talk by Dr. Kashi Gomez, lecturer in Sanskrit in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Abstract: In the 1730s, a court minister named Ghanaśyāma wrote a set of literary commentaries alongside his two wives, Sundarī and Kamalā. This scholastic household operated under the patronage of the Maratha rulers of Tanjavur in South India. The Marathas were one among several newly established royal families in the Karnatak and Coromandel Coast region. In this talk, I examine the methodological possibilities for reading early modern Sanskrit commentaries as productive historical archives. I argue that Ghanaśyāma, Sundarī, and Kamalā record Brahminical social anxieties about gender, sexuality, and local politics in the trappings of grammatical minutiae. In an unusual interpretive move, this commentarial family turns a non-event into an event. They concoct a charged reference to an incident of adopted heirship in a literary text that obliquely recalls the anxieties that preceded their Maratha patron’s rise to power.

Readings:

  • Stoler, Ann Laura. “The Pulse of the Archive.” In Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common, 2009.
  • Narayana Rao, Velcheru, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmaniyam. “Introduction: A Palette of Histories.” In Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600-1800, 2003.

17. February 2023: Stories Unfold: How Cree Laws, Values, and Language Inform Lifelong Learning and Practices of Commentary

 A talk by Dr. Angela Van Essen, assistant lecturer in English and specialist in Indigenous Literature at the University of Alberta

Abstract: How do nehiyaw (Plains Cree) laws, values, language, and worldview inform Cree practices of commentary? Drawing on the work of maskwacîs scholar Walter Lightning, Dutch Canadian scholar Angela Van Essen explores how in nehiyaw (Plains Cree) culture stories function as bundles that unfold over time, and that this unfolding takes place over a lifetime. Applying this knowledge and approach to nehiyaw poet Louise Halfe’s epic poem The Crooked Good, we can see how this text functions as a kind of commentary on a very old nehiyaw sacred story: cihcipistikwân âtayôhkêwin (the sacred story of The Rolling Head).

Readings:

  • McLeod, Ida. “Cihcipistikwân âtayôhkêwin.” In Nehiyaw A-Tayōkā-We-Na: Stories of Wesakechak, 1977.
  • Lightning, Walter. “Compassionate Mind: Implications of a Text Written by Elder Louis Sunchild.” Canadian Journal of Native Education 19, no.2 (1992): 215-253.

27. January 2023: Illusions of Novelty in Early Modern India: Raghunātha Śiromaṇi on Time, Existence and Distinctness

A talk by Dr. Nilanjan Das, associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto-Mississauga

Abstract: This talk will be about a Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika philosopher, Raghunātha Śiromaṇi, active in Bengal in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Traditionally, Raghunātha has been regarded as an unorthodox and (to some extent) iconoclastic figure in the history of Nyāya-Vaiśeika. But, more recently, a number of authors—such as Jonardon Ganeri (2011) and Samuel Wright (2021)—have argued that his bold theoretical innovations inaugurated a new era in Sanskrit philosophy, an era where Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika philosophers explicitly represented themselves as questioning and breaking away from the received doctrines of their text-tradition. Ganeri uses this observation to argue that Raghunātha’s work—along with that of others who were influenced by him—should be treated as a “moment of rupture”: the origin of a distinctive kind of philosophical modernity in South Asia. This, according to Ganeri, undermines the view that modernity is indigenous to Europe, and clears room for the view that it is a polycentric phenomenon, i.e., a phenomenon with many centres across the globe.

In this talk, I won’t be able to address the entirety of this argument. Rather, I will present some reasons to be sceptical of the interpretation of Raghunātha that Ganeri and Wright put forward. While interpreting Raghunātha, these authors focus exclusively on his monograph, An Inquiry into the Nature of the Ontological Categories (Padārthatattvanirūpaṇa), largely ignoring his commentarial works, especially his extensive commentary Splendour (Dīdhitī) on Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya’s The Wish-Granting Jewel of Truth (Tattvacintāmaṇi). Reading the Inquiry and the Splendour together, I will show that many of Raghunātha’s central theses in the Inquiry about existence, time, and distinctness—which Ganeri and Wright regard as theoretical innovations—are in fact concessions to earlier criticisms of Nyāya epistemology and Vaiśeṣika ontology and metaphysics presented by the 12th century philosopher and poet, Śrīharṣa. This, in turn, explains why Raghunātha’s theses often met with resistance from his own Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika commentators. Presumably, these commentators saw what Ganeri and Wright take to be novelty merely as an admission of defeat. This, I shall argue, should motivate us to rethink Ganeri’s claim that Raghunātha’s work inaugurated an era of philosophical modernity in South Asia.

Readings:

  • Preisendanz, Karin. “The Production of Philosophical Literature in South Asia During the Pre-Colonial Period (15th to 18th centuries): the case of the NyāYasūtra commentarial tradition.” Journal of Indian Philosophy33 (2015): 55-94.
  • Ganeri, Jonardon. “Raghunātha Śiromani and the Origins of Modernity in India.” Nagoya Studies in Indian Culture and Buddhism: Saṃbhāśā30 (2013): 55-78.

16. December 2022: The First Philosophical Impulses in the Medieval West

A talk by Professor John Magee, University of Toronto, Centre for Medieval Studies and Department of Classics

Abstract: The texts comprising the “Old Logic” – Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s Categories and De interpretatione – disappear from view in the Latin West ca. 560-80 and resurface at about the turn of the 9th c. Aristotle, who was to be the driving force behind so much of medieval philosophy, initially appears only in a body of commentary lemmata which form an incomplete text of his De interpretatione. A standard account of his reappearance intersects with a traditional narrative about the Carolingian “Renaissance,” the philosophical portion of which in turn revolves around a particular manuscript now housed at the Vatican Library (Pagès 1). A redating of that manuscript and revised assessment of its origins undercut the traditional narrative and suggest that the first philosophical movement in the medieval West originated with an anonymous body of scholars working earlier and further East than has been imagined rather than in Lyon or at the court of Charlemagne. The focus of this study is the textual tradition of Boethius’ elementary De interpretatione commentary and its implications for our understanding of how Aristotle’s thought resurfaced in the later 8th c.

Readings:

  • Magee, John. “Chapter 1: The Codex Pagesianus and the Early Textual Tradition of Boethius’ First De Interpretatione Commentary.” In The Codex Pagesianus (BAV, PAGÈS 1) and the Emergence of Aritotile in the Medieval West, 11-20. Città Del Vaticano: Biblioteca Spostolica Vaticana, 2022.
  • Magee, John. “Chapter 2: The Extant Tradition.” In The Codex Pagesianus (BAV, PAGÈS 1) and the Emergence of Aritotile in the Medieval West, 21-38. Città Del Vaticano: Biblioteca Spostolica Vaticana, 2022.
  • Magee, John. “Chapter 3: Edited Passage.” In The Codex Pagesianus (BAV, PAGÈS 1) and the Emergence of Aritotile in the Medieval West, 39-48. Città Del Vaticano: Biblioteca Spostolica Vaticana, 2022

25. November 2022: Byzantine Commentary between Past and Present

Dr. Baukje van den Berg, Associate Professor of Byzantine Studies in the Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University.

Abstract: In my talk, I intend to address broader issues in the study of Medieval Greek commentary through the case studies of two prolific twelfth-century scholars, Eustathios of Thessalonike and John Tzetzes. Both were active as teachers in Constantinople in the time of the Komnenian emperors, when commentary production flourished and took new forms. Both composed various commentaries on ancient authorities in dialogue and competition with ancient predecessors and contemporary colleagues. The talk will explore how Eustathios and Tzetzes carve out a space for themselves within centuries-long traditions, how they redefine canonical texts to suit twelfth-century needs, and how they use their commentaries to build their own identities as intellectuals and literati.

Readings:

  •  B. van den Berg and D. Manolova (2022) “Byzantine Commentaries on Ancient Greek Texts: Introduction,” in Byzantine Commentaries on Ancient Greek Texts, 12th-15th Centuries, ed. B. van den Berg, D. Manolova, P. Marciniak, 1-40. Cambridge.
  • A. Kaldellis (2009) “Classical Scholarship in Twelfth-Century Byzantium,” in Medieval Greek Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics, ed. C. Barber and D. Jenkins, 1–43. Leiden–Boston.

29. April 2022: The Ancient Quarrel between Text and Commentary

A talk by Dr. Christina Kraus, Thomas A. Thacher Professor of Latin at Yale University

Abstract: Commentary in Greco-Roman antiquity seems to have begun with criticism, with objections to how Homer portrayed the gods. Not all commentaries were critical of their source texts but some ancient critics apparently made enough of a business of criticism that they got the nickname “mastix” – whip or scourge; so in the 4th century BCE Zoilos was the “Homeromastix”. And in response to the whipping came the defending, a commentarial process now known as “charity”. Moreover, ancient commentators were as aggressive toward other scholars as modern ones are—an aggression that on the surface operates in search of the “truth” but works primarily to enhance a commentator’s prestige. Commentary, whether critical or charitable, became part not only of the exegesis but also of the transmission of ancient texts. Roman poets read their precursors through commentaries and responded not only to the Greek authors but also to the commentaries on them. In this talk, I will explore some interpretative modes that this dynamic took – allegorical reading, surface reading, etymology and textual criticism, and historical contextualization—focusing on the death of Priam in the Aeneid and the prologue to Lucan’s Bellum civile, in an effort to further elucidate the ancient quarrel between text and commentary.

Readings:
  • Christina, Shuttleworth Kraus. ‘Introduction: Reading commentaries/Commentaries as reading.’ In The Classical Commentary, 1-27. BRILL, 2002.
  • Glenn W. Most. ‘Allegoriesis and etymology.’ In Canonical texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach, edited by Anthony Grafton and Glenn W. Most, 52-74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
  • Ineke, Slutier. “Obscurity.” In Canonical texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach, edited by Anthony Grafton and Glenn W. Most, 34-51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

25. March 2022: The first commentaries on Dante’s Commedia: myths, conflicts, heritages

To celebrate the (belated) 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, Dr. Luca Fiorentini from Sapienza University of Rome delivered a talk about commentaries on Dante’s Commedia.

Abstract: The seminar focused on the main challenging issues concerning the early tradition of commentaries on Dante. Firstly, we have addressed the ancient ‘origin myth’ transmitted by the Epistle of friar Ilaro, relevant in that it contains a legend concerning the very first commentator of Dante’s Inferno. Secondly, on the basis of the interpretation of this legend, we analyzed the cultural and ideological context in which the Commedia knew its first diffusion. During the Fourteenth Century, the early humanists developed an idea of poetry conflicting with Dante’s poem; indeed, they embraced the devaluation of vernacular language promoted by Petrarch – highly influential over the main intellectuals of his time –, which implied a negative judgment on Dante’s linguistic choice, thus on his main literary work. The statements in support of Dante’s poem elaborated by the early interpreters of the Commedia followed different paths, with different consequences. We, therefore, considered the – at times conflicting – goals of Dante’s commentators in the Fourteenth Century – defending Dante’s language and poetic work, deeply understanding its meanings, celebrating it as a classic, in order to evaluate their impact on the following and more recent exegetical tradition

Readings:
  • Fiorentini, Luca. Petrarch and Boccaccio in the First Commentatries on Dante’s ‘Commedia.’ London: Routledge, 2020.
  • Fiorentini, Luca. “Commentary (Both by Dante and on Dante).” In Oxford Handbook of Dante, edited by Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden, 79-95. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

25. February 2022: Lines of Thought: A Conversation with Prof. Ayelet Even-Ezra

A special conversation between Prof. Kara Gaston (University of Toronto) and Prof. Ayelet Even-Ezra (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) about Prof. Even-Ezra’s new book, Lines of Thought: Branching Diagrams and the Medieval Mind.

Abstract: We think with objects—we conduct our lives surrounded by external devices that help us recall information, calculate, plan, design, make decisions, articulate ideas, and organize the chaos that fills our heads. Medieval scholars learned to think with their pages in a peculiar way: drawing hundreds of tree diagrams. Lines of Thought is the first book to investigate this prevalent but poorly studied notational habit, analyzing the practice from linguistic and cognitive perspectives and studying its application across theology, philosophy, law, and medicine. These diagrams not only allow a glimpse into the thinking practices of the past but also constitute a chapter in the history of how people learned to rely on external devices—from stone to parchment to slide rules to smartphones—for recording, storing, and processing information. Beautifully illustrated throughout with previously unstudied and unedited diagrams, Lines of Thought is a historical overview of an important cognitive habit, providing a new window into the world of medieval scholars and their patterns of thinking.

Readings:
  • Even-Ezra, Ayelet. “Introduction.” In Lines of Thought: Branching Diagrams and the Medieval Mind, 3-12. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021
  • Even-Ezra, Ayelet. “The Habit: on What, Where, Who, When and How Often.” In Lines of Thought: Branching Diagrams and the Medieval Mind, 50-83. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021.

28. January 2022:
Commentaries and the Questions We Didn’t Want Answered

A talk by Dr. Adam Talib, Durham University.

Abstract: The commentary has become a litmus test for historians of thought, culture, and society. Sophisticates know that commentaries are generally of greater empirical and analytical interest than the texts that instantiated them, even if the so-called originals provide a more engaging, meaningful, and edifying reading experience. We understand that this is largely because we learned to read by reading texts like those originals, but there are other affective reasons for our feelings of immediacy and comfort when encountering them. After all many scholars of our grandparents’ generation would have encountered commentaries in their formative schooling, but that didn’t lead them to think about these texts with more nuance or enthusiasm than most people today. Why is an individual’s original easier to relate to than a network’s commentary on it? There are undoubtedly many reasons, but I want to reflect on just one of these from the perspective of a historian of the pre-modern Islamicate episteme. The commentary concretizes the cultural exclusion of women that we recognize, but do not yet know.

Readings:
  • Johan Östling, “Circulation, Arenas, and the Quest for Public Knowledge: Historiographical Currents and Analytical Frameworks.” History and Theory58 (2020): 111–126.

26. November 2021:
Multilingualism and the Role of ‘Classical’ Languages in Indic and Chinese Commentarial Traditions

A panel discussion, featuring grad students Anusha Rao and Tony Scott, and professors Amanda Goodman and Alessandro Graheli, all from U of T

Readings:
  • Trent Walker, “Indic-Vernacular Bitexts from Thailand: Bilingual Modes of Philology, Exegetics, Homiletics, and Poetry, 1450–1850.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 140, no.3 (2020): 675-699.

29. October 2021:
The Value of Obscurantism: Reading an Indecipherable Text in Medieval and Early Modern China

A talk by Dr. Nathan Vedal, University of Toronto

Abstract: This talk examines the reception history of Fan Zongshi (fl. 793–824), a prolific Tang dynasty prose stylist famed for the impossibly difficult and obscure nature of his writing. Very little of Fan’s work remains extant; yet given its impenetrability, the fact that any of his writing was preserved at all is remarkable. New commentaries on one short text in particular continued to be produced through the eighteenth century. While most admitted that Fan’s writing was ultimately unreadable, commentators and readers continued to propose new interpretations. This talk considers what value they saw in attempting to decipher the obscure.

Readings:
  • Sluiter, Ineke. “Obscurity.” In Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices: A Global Comparative Approach, edited by Anthony Grafton and Glenn W. Most. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

1–2. October 2021:
Practices of Commentary October Symposium

October Symposium ProgramDownload

29-30. September 2021:
Forms of Commentary in Literature Virtual Workshop

Hybrid Commentary in Paul Claudel: Au milieu des vitraux de l’Apocalypse between Tradition and Ekphrasis
A presentation by Philip Stockbrugger.

Sie varn durch ein Wolken: Frauenlob and Integumentum
A presentation by Walker Horsfall.

Maeren Prologues and Epilogues
A presentation by Florian Müller & Jennifer Gerber.

Examining Prefaces – The Commentators’ Voices
A presentation by Stefanie Brinkmann & Nadine Löhr.

A Late Medieval German Magnificat Commentary and the Question of Commentarial Authorship
A presentation by Christina Lechtermann & Markus Stock.

Moshe da Rieti’s Little Temple – A “Hebrew Dante” and its Reception
A presentation by Elisabeth Hollender & Saskia Dönitz.

Anecdote, Poetry, Commentary: Adab and the Commentarial Gesture
A presentation by Jeannie Miller.

29. April 2021:
Translation and Glossing in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls

A talk by André Babyn, University of Toronto.

Readings:
  • Minnis, J. Alastair. “Absent Glosses: the Trouble with Middle English Hermeneutics.” In Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular, 35-55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

26. March 2021:
What’s In a Genre Defining hadīth Commentary

A talk by Dr. Stefanie Brinkmann, Bibliotheca Arabica.

Readings:
  • L.W.C. (Eric) Van Lit.  “Commentary and Commentary Tradition. The Basic terms for Understanding Islamic Intellectual History.” In Mélanges de l’Institut dominicain d‘études orientales (MIDÉO) 32 (2017): 3-26.

26. February 2021:
Religious Dimensions of the Homeric Scholia

A talk by Dr. Kenneth Yu, University of Toronto.

29. January 2021:
Veda-viplāvanam, or the Limits of Exegesis in Early Modern India.

A talk by Jonathan Peterson, University of Toronto.

Abstract: The chapter is titled “Veda-viplāvanam, or the Limits of Exegesis in Early Modern India.” It may be technical in some places, but the gist of the paper is exploring how the fourteenth century progenitor of Mādhva Vedānta used the Ṛg Veda to establish his writings as divine revelation; how Madhva’s reference to the Ṛg Veda was explained by his early commentators; and how those explanations were viciously attacked by critics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Floating around these technical debates is a larger question of scholarly practice and community formation––a problem that my dissertation tries to get at through a number of different angles in other chapters. Ultimately the stakes of recovering these internecine debates is that assertions like the kind Andrew Nicholson and others make about an emergent unified Brahmanism in the late medieval and early modern periods predicated on a shared sense of the Veda’s authority is demonstrably untenable.

27. November 2020:
Cairo as a New Center of Qur’an Commentary: Is there a social history for commentary?

A talk by Dr. Walid Saleh, University of Toronto.

Readings:
  • Saleh, Walid. “Medieval Exegesis: The Golden Age of Tafsīr.” In The Oxford Handbook of Qur’anic Studie, edited by Mustafa Shah and Muhammad Abdel Haleem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
  • O’Keefe, John. “Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. By Francis M. Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. Xiv 325 £37.50.”, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 7, no. 2 (1999): 310-12.
  • Louth, Andrew. “Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. By Frances M. Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. Xiv 325 £37.50.” Scottish Journal of Theology 54, no. 2 (2001): 247–48. doi:10.1017/S0036930600051395.
  • Kelly, Joseph F. “Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. By Frances M. Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. Xiv 325 £37.50.” Church History 68, no. 2 (1999): 418–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/3170865.
  • Jordan, William Chester. “L’ambiguïté du livre: Prince, pouvoir, et peuple dans les commentaires de la Bible au moyen âge. By Philippe Buc. Paris: Beauchesne, 1994. Paper.  Pp. xvi, 427. F 270.” Speculum 71, no. 3 (1996): 704–5. https://doi.org/10.2307/2865812.

30. October 2020:
Visual Forms of Ritual Commentary in Chinese Buddhist Traditions

A talk by Dr. Amanda Goodman, University of Toronto.

25. September 2020:
Facets of Chinese Commentary: Form, Function, Style, and Intent

A talk by Dr. Lo Yuet Keung, National University of Singapore.

Readings:
  • Lo, Yuet-Keung, “To use or not to use: the idea of ming in the Zhuangzi,” Monumenta Serica, 47 (1999), 149-168.
  • Lo, Yuet-Keung, “Persuasion and entertainment at once: Kumārajīva’s Buddhist storytelling in his commentary on the Vimalakīrti-sūtra,” Bulletin of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy (Academia Sinica) 21 (2002), 89-116.
  • Hon, Tze-Ki. 2012. “Wennei Wenwai: Zhongguo Sixiang Shi Zhong de Jingdian Quanshi (Intratextual and Extratextual: Interpretations of Chinese Classics in Chinese Intellectual History).By Lo Yuet-Keung . (Taipei:Taida Chuban Zhongxin, 2010. Vii, 427 Pp. Paperback, ISBN 978-986-02-3705-4.).” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 1 (2012): 160–62. https://doi.org/10.1163/15406253-03901013.

News from Outside the Project: WHAT IS COMMENTARY? Ethical Reading Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Hilary Term 2022

Wednesdays 5:00-6.30 PM (GMT)

Convenors: Constanze Güthenke & Hindy Najman (Oxford)

Registration Link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/223170989437

For inquiries, please contact Stefania Beitia (stefania.beitia@oriel.ox.ac.uk)

Week 1 (19 January)

Chris Kraus (Yale) — The Ancient Quarrel Between Text and Commentary

Week 2 (26 January)

Tobias Reinhardt (Oxford) — Commenting on What is There and What is Not: The Case of Cicero’s Academica

Week 3 (2 February)

Glenn Most (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, External Scientific Member; Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago, Visiting Professor) and André Lake (Sorbonne/Universidad Panamericana) — Applying the Principle of Charity: I. Charity and Allegoresis, II. Charity and Plato’s Laws

Week 4 (9 February)

Judith Schlanger (Oxford) — What Do Jewish Commentaries Look Like? Page Layouts in Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts

Week 5 (16 February)

Chris Minkowski (Oxford) — Outlandishness in Sanskrit Commentary

Week 6 (23 February)

Olivia Lester-Stewart (Loyola University, Chicago) — “I, write this greeting with my own hand”: Pseudepigraphy as Commentary in 2 Thessalonians and the Task of the New Testament Commentator

Week 7 (2 March)

Jeremiah Coogan (Oxford) — Doubled Recycling in Late Ancient Gospel Commentary

Week 8 (9 March)

Il-Kweon Sir (Cambridge) — Commenting on the Lesbian Poets: What’s It All For?

Practices of Commentary October Symposium

October 1st-2nd, 2021

At the beginning of next month the Institute for Advanced Study will host a two-day symposium on commentarial practices from across the globe. During the symposium, members of the Global Commentaries working group, along with others, will present papers. They will be joined by a special guest, Dr. Jesús Velasco, who will give the symposium’s keynote lecture.

Please see the programme and abstract book here or visit our Contact Us page for further details.

Forms of Commentary in Literature Virtual Workshop

The Commentarial Forms in Literature working group is delighted to announce that they will host a virtual workshop from Wednesday September 29th to Thursday September 30th 2021. The theme of the workshop is centred on forms of commentary in literature from a range of literary traditions—German, French, Arabic, and Hebrew. For more information, please see the schedule events below and register to participate through Zoom at the registration link here. Any questions regarding general information and accessibility can be directed to Sloane Geddes at kathryn.geddes@mail.utoronto.ca.

29. September
9:00-13:30 [EDT] // 15:00-19:30 [CEST]

9:00 – 9:15
Welcome
9:15 – 10:00
Philip Stockbrugger: Hybrid Commentary in Paul Claudel: Au milieu des vitraux de l’Apocalypse between Tradition and Ekphrasis
10:05 – 10:50
Walker Horsfall: sie varn durch ein wolken: Frauenlob and Integumentum
11:00 – 12:00
Florian Müller & Jennifer Gerber: Maeren Prologues and Epilogues
12:30 – 1:30
Stefanie Brinkmann & Nadine Löhr: Examining Prefaces – The Commentators’ Voices

30. September
09:00-11:45 [EDT] // 15:00-17:45 [CEST]

9:00-10:00
Christina Lechtermann & Markus Stock: A Late Medieval German Magnificat Commentary and the Question of Commentarial Authorship
10:00-10:45
Elisabeth Hollender & Saskia Dönitz: Moshe da Rieti’s Little Temple – A “Hebrew Dante” and its Reception
11:00-11:45
Jeannie Miller: Anecdote, Poetry, Commentary: Adab and the Commentarial Gesture

Featured image: Frauenlob, as depicted in the Codex Manesse.
Source: Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg.

Talking to Yourself: Commentary as Fatnotes

by Libbie MILLS, Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

Introduction

For a paper presented at the 2019 Edinburgh meeting of the American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA), I worked through a range of Sanskrit texts

Aṃśumatkāśyapa chapter 96; Aṃśumadāgama 56; Agnipurāṇa 67 and 103; Ajitāgama 73 and 94; Aparājitapṛcchā 49, 50, 52, 109, 110 and 111; Īśvarasaṃhitā 19; Kāmikāgama P32, P58, U33, U34, U35, and U45; Kāśyapajñānakāṇḍa 104; Kiraṇa 63; Tantrasamuccaya 11; Dīptāgama 59; Devyāmata 64; Piṅgalāmata 12; Pratiṣṭhālakṣaṇasārasamuccaya 21; Prāsādamaṇḍana 8; Bṛhatkālottara jīrṇoddhārapaṭala; Mayamata 5 and 35; Mayasaṃgraha 5, along with the accompanying Bhāvacūḍāmaṇi commentary by Bhaṭṭa Vidyākaṇṭha; Mohacūrottara 5; Rauravāgama 44; Vimānārcanakalpa 62, 64, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, and 77; Viṣṇusaṃhitā 24; Śilparatnākara 5; Samarāṅgaṇasūtradhāra 44 and 45; Suprabhedāgama 54, 55 and 56 ; Somaśambhpaddhati kriyāpāda 10.

on jīrṇoddhāra,  the removal (uddhāra) [and replacement] of the old (jīrṇa), for temples and icons.

While the term jīrṇoddhāra clearly implies a renovation, I veer away from translating it in that way, in order to respect the meaning held by the compound itself, which is that of a removal of what is old. The emphasis on the removal side of renovation, as opposed to the replacement side, holds sense when one reads accounts of the great harm that comes from an old object if it is not removed and disposed of. Of course, replacement will follow removal, and much attention is paid in jīrṇoddhāra literature to how that is carried out, but it is the removal of the corrupting force of an old item that is given principal importance in the labelling of the procedure.

[Read more…] about Talking to Yourself: Commentary as Fatnotes

Blog Submission Guidelines

We are currently soliciting blog posts from individuals working on any aspect of premodern commentary. The blog’s audience consists of scholars who may not be specialists, but are interested in learning more. We are open to submissions on any topic related to commentary and are also eager to work with you on ideas that are not yet fully formed.

Blog posts should be between 500 and 2,000 words in length, though this is only a guideline. Images are encouraged. Please provide captions with the image source and alt-text for accessibility.  Please include any links that you wish. Footnotes are optional, but if you would like to include them, we request that you follow the Chicago Manual of Style.

For more information or to submit, please email us at practicesofcommentary@utoronto.ca.

Image above: Text of colophon from Sanskrit Manuscript on medicine. Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Stanislav of Znojmo’s Commentary on John Wyclif’s Philosophy

by Stephen LAHEY

J ohn Wyclif (d.1384) is remembered primarily as a British forerunner of the Protestant reformation, under whose supervision the Bible was translated into English. His writings so angered the fourteenth-century church that his bones were exhumed and burned in 1428, in part because his words inspired the Czech reform movement associated with Jan Hus. Most of Wyclif’s admirers today associate him with the Bible translation; indeed, the Wycliffe Bible Society continues to translate the work into every known language. When I gave a presentation on Wyclif’s philosophy several years ago, a colleague later told me that he hadn’t even known that Wyclif wrote philosophy.

[Read more…] about Stanislav of Znojmo’s Commentary on John Wyclif’s Philosophy

New Publication: Practices of Commentary Special Volume *Online now*

If we consider commentary as a historical practice and a quotable gesture in this way, not only the operativity of the (very tangible) commentary on the page could come into view, but also the ways in which its operational core is used in a multiplicity of polemic, subversive, or creative ways that extend from a very personal dispute to questions of status and even—in a broad sense—to premodern forms of textual politics.”

Lechtermann and Stock, 2020, pg. 4.

Congratulations to Christina Lechtermann and Markus Stock on the publication of their volume, “Practices of Commentary,” published in the Zeitsprünge series. This book arose out of a conference held at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main, in December 2018, as part of a working group on Commentarial Practices at the Jackman Humanities Institute in Toronto. At this conference, scholars from both the University of Toronto and the Goethe University convened to consider the boundaries of commentary. The introductory chapter of this volume (by Christina Lechtermann and Markus Stock) presents a number of questions about the nature of commentary and leads into a series of premodern case studies in the fields of Arabic, English, German, Jewish, Latin, and Romance studies. Read the text in full below.

© Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2020. The print version can be purchased from Vittorio Klostermann or through book stores.

Download the articles from the Practices of Commentary special volume by clicking on the titles below:

Front matter & contents
Introduction,
by Christina Lechtermann and Markus Stock
Marginal Commentaries in Ḥadīṯ Manuscripts,
by Stephanie Brinkmann
The Place of the Medieval in Qur’an Commentary: A Survey of Recent Editions,
by Walid Saleh
Commentary and Text Organization in al-Jāḥiẓ’s Book of Animals,
by Jeannie Miller
The Pedagogy of Twelfth-Century Cathedral School Biblical Commentaries Peter Comestor’s Lectures on the Gospel of Luke,
by Simon Whedbee
Medieval Commentary on the ‘Thebaid’ and its Reception: Preliminary Observations,
by Anthony J. Fredette
Ekphrasis and Commentary in Walter of Chatillon’s ‘Alexandreis‘,
by Suzanne Conklin Akbari
About Form and Function of German Vernacular Commentaries,
by Jennifer Gerber
Commentary as Literature: The Medieval ‘Glossenlied,’
by Christina Lechtermann
Performing Commentary: Preaching the Apocalyptic Drama in Early Modern England,
by Daniel Dornhofer
Veils and Naked Words: Girolamo Benivieni’s Self-Commentaries,
by Christine Ott
Mirroring Authorization in Torquato Tasso’s ‘Rime Amorose‘,
by Philip Stockbrugger
Letters as Comment on Commentary: The Annotationes in ‘Hymnos Callimachi’ by Nicodemus Frischlin (1577) and Bonaventura Vulcanius (1584),
by Magnus Ulrich Ferber and Philipp Knüpffer
Supplement 1—
Magnus Ulrich Ferber and Philipp Knüpffer
Supplement 2—
Magnus Ulrich Ferber and Philipp Knüpffer
Abstracts
Notes on Contributors

New Publication: Dante, Des Vies Nouvelles

Congratulations to Elisa Brilli (University of Toronto) on the recent publication of her new book, co-authored with Guiliano Milani (Université Gustave Eiffel).

In this book, Elisa Brilli and Giuliano Milani construct a biography of Dante Alighieri, delving into various documents and literary works to shed light on this famous author’s life. For more information, see the book’s publication page at Fayard.

“Écrire une biographie de Dante est un défi auquel se sont confrontés nombre de chercheurs. Tandis que les archives se taisent le plus souvent sur la vie du Florentin ou sont d’interprétation délicate, son œuvre contient tant de passages personnels qu’elle pourrait aisément se lire comme une autobiographie. Mais naïve serait la démarche qui prendrait Dante pour un témoin fidèle de sa vie. Dans une enquête conduite à quatre mains, où documents et œuvre littéraire se font écho, Elisa Brilli et Giuliano Milani renouent les fils de ce destin singulier. Celui d’un homme aux prises avec les bouleversements politiques de son temps, à la charnière des xiiie et xive siècles, et dont les expériences, horizons et réactions changent en fonction des contextes qu’il traverse (municipal, seigneurial, impérial, courtisan)  ; celui d’un homme qui tenta à plusieurs reprises de façonner sa vie par l’écriture, inventant une forme de récit de soi, aux contenus toujours changeants, entre mémoire individuelle et universelle. Là est sans doute la contribution essentielle de Dante à la culture occidentale.”

Fayard.