Copyright © 2026 Éditions Pigouchet
66 Av. des Champs– Élysées 75008 Paris
ISSN digital: 2297–1874
ISSN print: 2504–2238
Cover: Graphic reworking of the three leaves stolen in 1979 from BU-TO MS E.V.5, recovered by the Comando Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale (TPC) and subsequently reintegrated into the codex.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22030856
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Editorial Board for this issue:
Maria Grazia Bonanno, Università di Roma «Tor Vergata», Italy
Romeo Bufalo, Università della Calabria, Italy
Philippe Guérin, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, France
Lucia Lazzerini, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy
Raffaele Pinto, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
Lucinia Speciale, Università del Salento, Italy
Authors retain copyright in their individual contributions. Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Compilation and editorial material © 2026 Éditions Pigouchet, the scholarly publishing imprint of the Organisation pour la Protection des Manuscrits Médiévaux (OProM).
Av. des Champs-Élysées 75008 Paris (France)
ISSN digital: 2297-1874
ISSN print: 2504-2238
CONTENTS
TITLE: From Sotheby’s to Character Assassination: The Case of Turin MS E.V.5
Provenance Research, Market Expertise, and Institutional Responsibility
AUTHOR: CARLA ROSSI
Institut d’Estudis Filològics Dantescs i Digitals Avançats
pages: 4–27
ORCID: 0000– 0001– 6557– 3684
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22045401
Abstract: This article examines the case of three illuminated leaves stolen in 1979 from manuscript E.V.5 at the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino (BU-TO) and subsequently offered at Sotheby’s London in 2013 and 2015. Through a documentary reconstruction of the case, it analyses provenance research, due diligence, and the professional responsibilities of participants in the manuscript market. The surviving foliation, the rarity of the textual tradition, and official photographic documentation made it possible to identify the leaves and return them to BU-TO in 2018. The same Sotheby’s catalogue of 2015 also included, as lots 42–44, three leaves from the Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy, a manuscript dismembered after its sale in 2009 (and digitally reconstructed by the author of this article in 2022), but not stolen. The article distinguishes these materially and legally different cases and examines how Peter Kidd’s subsequent allegations concerning the Roucy reconstruction shifted public and institutional attention away from the stolen Turin leaves. It further distinguishes independent scholarly expertise from commercial expertise exercised within a transaction and considers the conflicts that may arise when academic authority is also deployed in the service of an auction house, dealer, or commercial gallery. Finally, it examines the campaign of personal and professional delegitimisation that followed the author’s provenance investigations, together with the institutional responses of the University of Zurich and the Swiss National Science Foundation. The E.V.5 case demonstrates that protecting cultural heritage requires both effective scrutiny of the market and safeguards for researchers who document the circulation of stolen or unlawfully dismembered objects.
TITLE: Observations concernant le terme purgatoire
AUTHOR: LEENA LÖFSTEDT
Universités de Jyväskylä et d’Helsinki (Finlande)
Emerita
pages: 28-44
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22030856
Abstract: The article re-examines the lexical history of Purgatory in Old French in light of the French translation of Gratian’s Decretum, which we date to before 1170 and attribute to Thomas Becket. Whereas Jacques Le Goff regarded Marie de France’s Espurgatoire Seint Patriz as one of the earliest vernacular attestations of the term designating Purgatory, an examination of the Decretum reveals earlier occurrences of espurgatoire as an equivalent of the Latin purgatorium. This discovery therefore calls for a reconsideration of the generally accepted chronology of the term’s emergence in French.
The study analyses the entire vocabulary derived from purgare, purgatio, purgatorium, and expurgare in the Latin text and its French translation. It shows that the French lexical family (es)purgier, (es)purge, espurgement, espurgatoire, and purgatoire establishes close connections between spiritual purification, penance, divine judgement, and ordeal. Particular attention is devoted to the phrase feu de purgatoire, which occurs frequently in the translation and appears to belong to vernacular usage rather than constituting a mere calque of the Latin.
The analysis of the Espurgatoire Seint Patriz likewise highlights the semantic and lexical proximity between the medieval ordeal and Purgatory, a relationship that would have been especially perceptible to a French-speaking audience familiar with the terms espurge and espurgatoire. This linguistic context probably facilitated the assimilation of the new doctrine of Purgatory within the intellectual circles in which late twelfth-century theology was being developed.
The article thus argues that the doctrinal development of Purgatory cannot be studied solely through scholastic Latin. Vernacular French also played an active role in shaping and disseminating this new conception of the Christian afterlife.
TITLE: La tecnica di variazione di Chiaro Davanzati: una proposta di indagine
AUTHOR: MARCO CUCCU
Università di Cagliari
pages: 45–63
ORCID: 0009-0003-0220-6547
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22030856
Abstract: Chiaro Davanzati’s canzoni represent an exception to the norms of early Italian lyric poetry, bearing witness to a phase of experimentation and instability. This article offers a preliminary investigation of a single poem, Donna, ciascun fa canto (IV), in order to analyse the interstrophic metrical variations produced by Chiaro’s distinctive technique. Through a methodology combining metre, rhythm, and syntax, the analysis reveals a carefully constructed lyric form that experiments with the cohesion and internal articulation of the stanza and appears to establish a relationship between argumentation and form. This study is intended as a preliminary step towards an examination of Davanzati’s entire corpus of canzoni, with the aim of testing the hypothesis that the Florentine poet’s ‘anomalies’ reflect a systematic compositional strategy: a principle of variation, perhaps original to Chiaro himself or derived from related poetic practices.
TITLE: Dante, Panikkar e Gaudì tra simbolo e ricerca triadica del mistero
(II parte)
AUTHOR: GIANNI VACCHELLI
Seminario Internazionale di Studi Danteschi
pages: 64-74
ORCID: 0009-0004-1993-4054
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22030856
Abstract: This contribution, divided into two parts published respectively in the previous and the current issue of the journal, explores the profound convergences between Dante, Antoni Gaudí, and Raimon Panikkar—figures widely separated by period, language, and discipline, yet united by a sapiential, symbolic, and transformative vision of reality. Structured around a series of fundamental keywords—experience, sacred space, truth, beauty, wisdom, cosmotheandric intuition, harmony, non-duality, work, Christophany, and politics—the essay highlights a shared relational conception of existence that offers an alternative to the fragmentations of modernity.
The first part shows how, in all three authors, art, thought, and life tend to be reintegrated within a unified perspective in which the symbol does not simply refer to something beyond itself, but brings together the cosmic, human, and divine dimensions of experience. Sacred space, the word, wisdom, and the triadic-Trinitarian structure of reality are interpreted as expressions of a cosmotheandric vision that permeates, in different forms, the Commedia, Gaudí’s architecture, and Panikkar’s thought.
The second part examines more closely the spiritual, anthropological, and historical-political implications of this perspective. Harmony is presented as a living relationship between differences and as an alternative both to monism and to fragmentation; non-duality (advaita) as the overcoming of absolute separations between the human, the cosmos, and the divine; and the work as creative participation in reality, distinct from the modern conception of labour. Particular emphasis is also placed on the themes of the Cosmic Christ and Christophany, which make it possible to reinterpret the visions of Dante, Gaudí, and Panikkar within a unified framework. The discussion culminates in a reflection on the political dimension, poverty, the critique of dominant systems, and peace, understood as the fruit of a reconciliation between the human being, the cosmos, and the divine mystery. The resulting hermeneutic proposal identifies in all three authors a shared aspiration towards a sapiential and transformative form of knowledge, capable of bringing together mysticism, art, thought, and historical engagement within a relational and integral vision of reality.
TITLE: Lucifero, il verme e la scala
AUTHOR: MIRCO CITTADINI
Seminario Internazionale di Studi Danteschi
pages 75-84
ORCID: 0009-0009-2201-8352
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22030856
Abstract: This contribution offers an archetypal and mystical, non-Manichaean reinterpretation of the figure of Lucifer in Inferno XXXIV, engaging critically with an exegetical tradition that has largely emphasised his inertia and monstrosity. Through the lexical and structural parallel with Geryon («scala», Inf. XVII and XXXIV, 82), the article reconstructs the vertical and Christological significance of the ladder in the religious imagination, interpreting Lucifer as an axis mundi and as a paradoxical ladder/cross. A second keyword, «vermo» (Inf. XXXIV, 108), opens onto a further network of regenerative associations through the Dionysian rhetoric of turpitudo per dissimilia. Lucifer thus emerges as a necessary stage, rather than a merely punitive presence, in Dante’s initiatory journey: the caput mortuum of an Opus in Nigredo, whose deformity corresponds, in inverted polarity, to the power of the divine.
TITLE: A scuola dal femminile: per una teoria antilupesca dell’amore
AUTHOR: MIRCO CITTADINI
Seminario Internazionale di Studi Danteschi
pages: 85-105
ORCID: 0009-0009-2201-8352
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22030856
Abstract: This essay explores, through a series of selected passages from the Commedia and the Vita nova, the integration of a sacred and archetypal feminine as one of the strategies underlying the Dantean protagonist’s process of individuation and growth. Beginning with Hugh Capet’s invocation of Mary (Purgatorio XX), read in opposition to the she-wolf and cupiditas, the article traces two parallel genealogies: a masculine one, that of Capet, marked by disastrous consequences, and a feminine/maternal one, embodied by Virgil as “poet-mother” and by Statius. These converge in the rhyme fiamma : mamma and in the maternal imagery of fire associated with Mary and Beatrice.
The episode of the donne gentili in the Vita nova is interpreted as presenting a model of love founded not on possession, in opposition to a “lupine” logic ante litteram. The twofold baptism by fire and water in the Earthly Paradise, Beatrice as the warmth that melts the frost of an unresolved masculine principle, and finally the incandescent father-figure Bernard together delineate a path towards the integration of the contrasexual principle within the pilgrim’s psyche, leading to a conception of love as gift rather than domination.
TITLE: Dante e l’attualità inattuale della Vita Nuova: tra poesia, mistica e politica
AUTHOR: GIANNI VACCHELLI
Seminario Internazionale di Studi Danteschi
pages: 106-133
ORCID: 0009-0004-1993-4054
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22030856
Abstract: This essay offers a reinterpretation of the Vita Nuova through the lens of its “untimely relevance”: it is precisely the distance of Dante’s libello from the dominant logic of the present—fragmentation of knowledge, individualism, utilitarianism, and the reduction of the word to mere communication—that reveals its transformative power. The work is interpreted as a germinal laboratory in which poetry, mysticism, philosophy, and politics constitute inseparable dimensions of a single experience, shaped by a simultaneously mystical, critical, and political impulse. Dante’s word is, indeed, not merely poetic but poietic: it does not simply represent reality, but acts upon it, transforms it, and leads from potentiality to actuality.
At its core thus emerges a poetic-poietic anthropology that is relational, triadic, and cosmotheandric, founded not on the self-sufficiency of the individual but on the encounter with otherness, culminating in the formula amamus ergo sumus. Beatrice—at once a historical woman, a symbolic figure, and an initiatory guide—becomes a principle of awakening of the feminine and of progressive Christophany, while poetry takes shape as a form of knowledge capable of integrating image, symbol, reason, eros, and openness to mystery. The political dimension of the Vita Nuova is likewise reconsidered in anthropological, hermeneutic, and critical terms: the libello generates a community founded upon the word, love, and interpretation, and points towards a transformation of the polis that begins with the transformation of the human being. Its most radical legacy therefore lies in its invitation to a “new life”: a transformation of vision, consciousness, and the very forms of communal existence—a genuinely new anthropological mutation.
TITLE: Dall’amore introverso all’amore perverso
AUTHOR: LUIGI TASSONI
University of Pécs
pages: 134-146
ORCID: 0000-0002-1720-542X
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22030856
Abstract: This article investigates the configuration of desire and the discourse of love in Dante’s Rime, beginning with the relationship between beauty, goodness, truth, and knowledge. Taking as its point of departure Diotima’s reflections in Plato’s Symposium and bringing them into dialogue with categories developed by Lacan and subsequently reconsidered, among others, by Moroncini and Recalcati, the analysis approaches the woman of courtly and Stilnovist poetry not as a mere object or a pure sign of absence, but as a referent produced and continually redefined within the very materiality of poetic language.
The discussion focuses in particular on two sonnets, Volgete gli occhi a veder chi mi tira and Due donne in cima della mente mia. In the first, the conflictual dynamics of the experience of love unfold through a system of gazes, voices, presences, and references in which Love, the poetic subject, the woman, and the community of interlocutors construct a complex scene of desire. The concluding «voce sottile» thus assumes the function of an interrogating alterity, both internal and external to the subject, making perceptible the tension between lack, desire, and the persistence of the beloved object.
In the second sonnet, Beauty and Virtue instead appear as complementary figures within an “open allegory”: not rigidly separate entities, but constellations of meaning in which courtesy, worth, prudence, honour, grace, and nobility converge. What emerges is a conception of «amor perfetto» founded on the possibility of harmonising pleasure and action, the aesthetic and ethical dimensions, beauty and virtue. In this process, poetry becomes both the locus and the gift of mediation: it renders materially perceptible what would otherwise remain invisible, unsayable, or unnameable.
REVIEWS
Abstract: The review discusses Pietro G. Beltrami’s Invito al Roman de la Rose (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2025)
AUTHOR: LUCIANO ROSSI
University of Zurich
pages: 174-190
ORCID: 0000-0002-2020-6423
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22030856