Dr. Joe Luzzi

In this presentation, Professor Luzzi will explore the centuries-old unresolved question: who was Dante’s muse, Beatrice? Looking beyond Dante’s mythmaking, Luzzi considers the historical reality of the young Florentine woman Beatrice Portinari who first inspired Dante to write poetry and then sent him into a personal (and artistic) crisis when she died tragically at the age of 24, before eventually being poetically resurrected by Dante decades later in his epic The Divine Comedy. Luzzi will then discuss how this “muse” figure of Beatrice would go on to shape modern notions of female identity in later authors ranging from Petrarch and Cervantes to the English Pre-Raphaelites and James Joyce.