Public Seminar: "Mendicant Schools and Philosophy in Dante’s Florence" by Anna Pegoretti (Warwick)
Thursday April 3 at 11am in Special Collections Seminar Room
The aim of this paper is to look at the so-called “scuole de li religiosi” e “disputazioni de li filosofanti” (Conv. II, XII, 7), which Dante declares to have attended after Beatrice’s death in 1290. According to existing scholarship, these schools are those of Florentine Mendicant friars, allegedly the only religious schools in Florence at that time. The paper will focus particularly on the Franciscan studium of Santa Croce, on its structure, teachers and didactic programmes, and it will do so relying on recent massive improvements in history of medieval education, and on the analysis of some items of the earliest core of the convent's library. A further aim is to discuss the controversial reference to the filosofanti, whose meaning will be reconsidered in the context of the late medieval educational system and practices.
Anna Pegoretti is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Warwick in the AHRC-funded Project "Dante and Late Medieval Florence: Theology in Poetry, Practice and Society," co-led by the Universities of Leeds and Warwick. Within this project, she is investigating Florentine Mendicant schools and libraries in the age of Dante (1280-1300 c.). Anna graduated from the University of Bologna and took her PhD at the University of Pisa in 2009. She was the Frances A. Yates short-term fellow at the Warburg Institute in 2010 and the British Academy Newton International Fellow at the University of Leeds in 2011 and 2012. Her first monograph, Dal “lito diserto” al giardino: la costruzione del paesaggio nel “Purgatorio” di Dante has been published in 2007 by Bononia University Press. Her second one, Indagine su un codice dantesco. La “Commedia” Egerton 943 della British Library, devoted to a prominent 14th century illuminated MS of Dante's Commedia, is forthcoming this year.