Laura Banella

Assistant Professor of Italian

Education

• PhD in Romance Studies, Duke University
• PhD in Italian Literature, University of Padua
• M.A. in Humanities, Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa
• M.A. in Italian Literature, University of Pisa
• B.A. in Humanities, University of Pisa

Research and Teaching Interests

Medieval Italian Literature; Dante and Boccaccio; lyric poetry; manuscript studies and history of the book; Renaissance literature.

 

Biography

Laura Banella is an assistant professor in Italian. Her research interests lie in medieval Italian literature. Her research has focused on Dante and Boccaccio and on the ways in which the books transmitting their works construct 'authority' and 'canonicity' (13^th-16^th c.). She has also worked on reception, the history of literary criticism, Renaissance literature, and the female auctor.

Her current research project explores the physical act of copying, editing, and printing Dante’s lyric poetry from the 14^th to the early 16^th century in Italy through the study of multi-text and multi-author volumes, both manuscripts and early printed editions. Through the privileged case study of Dante’s reception and ‘canonization’, her work explores the specific kinds of poetic authority and the conditions for canon creation at the passage from the Middle Ages to modernity. It investigates the ways in which ‘national poets’ are born through editing and rewriting, and how major authors influence cultural development.

Professor Banella is a Research Fellow of the University of Oxford, and co-coordinates the premodern section of the international research project Rethinking Lyric Communities.

Before coming to Notre Dame, she pursued her postdoctoral research and taught in Italy (University of Padua, University of Milan) and the UK (University of Oxford).

 

Representative Publications

Research monographs

Rime e libri delle rime di Dante tra Medioevo e primo Rinascimento (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2020).

La ‘Vita nuova’ del Boccaccio. Fortuna e tradizione (Rome-Padua: Antenore, 2017).

Co-Edited volumes

Oltre la ‘Commedia’. ‘L’altro Dante’ e il canone antico della lirica (1450-1600), eds. Laura Banella and Franco Tomasi (Rome: Carocci, 2020).

 Critical editions

Sicco Polenton, Vite dei moderni. Dante, Mussato, Petrarca, Boccaccio, ed., trans. and comm. by Laura Banella and Rino Modonutti (Padua: CLEUP, 2020).

 Selected Articles and Essays

“Le correzioni alla ‘Vita nuova’ di un derivato della Raccolta Aragonese e il Toledano del Boccaccio nel primo Cinquecento,” Studi sul Boccaccio 49 (2021): 227-83.

“Come attualizzare un classico: le forme del ‘canzoniere di Dante’ tra XVI e XIX secolo,” Prassi ecdotiche della modernità letteraria 6 (2021) DOI https://doi.org/10.13130/2499-6637/16365

 “Scrittura letteraria ed ermeneutica: le Rime di Dante negli anni ’30 del Novecento,” Critica letteraria 49/192-193 (2021): 1063-82.

“Fiammetta and Héloïse: Boccaccio’s Female Auctor and Women Intellectuals,” Mediaevalia 42 (2021): 227-267.

“The Lyric Dante in the Twentieth Century: Hermeneutics and Editorial Forms.” Italian Studies 75/3 (2020): 307-325.

“Autorità volgare e creazione del canone tra Aï faus ris e il De vulgari eloquentia,” Medioevo Letterario d’Italia 16 (2019): 21-44.

 “Dioneo lettore di Dante: la tenzone con Forese, le ‘malmaritate’ e l’etica della letteratura.” In Intorno a Boccaccio/Boccaccio e dintorni: atti del Seminario internazionale di studi (Certaldo Alta, Casa di Giovanni Boccaccio, 6-7 settembre 2018) (Florence: Firenze UP, 2019), 59-76.

“Boccaccio’s Anthologies and the Dawn of Editorial Auctoritas.” Mediaevalia 39 (2018) [special issue Authority and Materiality in the Italian Songbook: From the Medieval Lyric to the Early-Modern Madrigal, O. Holmes, P. Schleuse, eds.]: 273-96.

“Dante, la nascita dell’Italia e della letteratura italiana: il racconto delle origini nelle storie della letteratura risorgimentali.” Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana 194 n° 647 (2017): 321-59.

“The ‘Dante Canon’: Collecting Dante’s Lyric Poetry in the Fourteenth Century.” Dante Studies 134 (2016): 169-94.

“«In persona d’alcuno passionato»: il ‘ritratto d’autore’ nei manoscritti del Filostrato.” Studi sul Boccaccio 41 (2013): 129-54.

“La scrittura di Benvenuto Cellini: tra pluristilismo, espressivismo e realismo.” Filologia e critica 37 (2012): 169-211.

“Su alcuni manoscritti illustrati del Filostrato.” Studi sul Boccaccio 39 (2011): 315-66