Leading scholar Albert Russell Ascoli traces the metamorphosis of Dante Alighieri minor Florentine aristocrat, political activist and exile, amateur philosopher and theologian, and daring experimental poet into Dante, author of the Divine Comedy and perhaps the most self-consciously 'authoritative' cultural figure in the Western canon. The text offers a comprehensive introduction to Dante's evolving, transformative relationship to medieval ideas of authorship and authority from the early Vita Nuova through the unfinished treatises, The Banquet and On Vernacular Eloquence, to the works of his...