LECTURE: “COURTESY AND COURTLINESS IN THE TIME OF DANTE”

This talk revisits the notion of Courts, Courtliness and Courtesy in Dante Alighieri’s work, and how these play an important function when it came to writing the Divine Comedy. Beginning with a selection of texts from the immediate post-exile period Dr. Daragh O’Connell (University College Cork, Ireland) will map Dante’s own experiences of various courts in central and northern Italy onto his conception of the courtly in Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.

Daragh O’Connell is an Associate Professor of Italian at University College Cork in Ireland and Director of the Centre for Dante Studies in Ireland (CDSI). He is Senior Editor (Pre-1700) of the journal Italian Studies. He researches across three distinct areas: Dante Studies, Vico and Eighteenth-century Neapolitan Culture, and Modern and Contemporary Sicilian Literary Culture.
He is currently working on a book project tentatively titled: Courting Dante: Love and Politics in the ‘Divine Comedy’ which seeks to revisit Dante’s conception of the medieval court, both as a locus for articulations of love and as a site for political positioning.

He has edited four volumes on Dante: Dante e lo spazio: Luoghi reali nella vita e nell’opera dantesca (Cesati, 2024), Nature and Nature in Dante (Dublin: Four Courts, 2013); War and Peace in Dante (Dublin: Four Courts, 2015) and Dante and the Seven Deadly Sins (Dublin: Four Courts, 2017).

1. Thursday, March 5, 2026
2. from 6:00 PM
3. Italian Cultural Institute
4. In English

Free admission upon reservation on our Eventbrite website

Image: Dante legge la Divina Commedia alla corte di Guido Novello, Andrea Pierini (1840-1850) (Palazzo Pitti)

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Host or Publisher Istituto Italiano di Cultura