Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers. Steinberg<|

Accounting for DanteUrban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy\nAuthor(s): Justin Steinberg\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: University of Notre Dame Press, United States\nImprint: University of Notre Dame Press\nISBN-13: 9780268182021, 978-0268182021\nSynopsis\nIn Accounting for Dante, Justin Steinberg reexamines Dante's relation to his contemporary public, an audience that included those poets who responded to Dante's early work as well as the readers who first copied, preserved, and circulated his poetry. Based on original research of manuscripts and documents, Steinberg's study reveals in particular the importance of professional, urban classesnamely, merchants and notariesas cultivators of early Italian poetry.\n\n Although not officially trained as glossators or scribes, these newly educated readers were full participants in an emergent vernacular literature, demonstrating at times a marked degree of sophistication in their choices of which lyric poems to include in their pe.