Presentation Schedule
The Philologist on Stage: Bridging the Gap Between Archive and Performance in Dante Studies (106645)
Session Chair: Uttiya Chattopadhyay
Saturday, 11 July 2026 12:40
Session: Session 3
Room: UCL Torrington, G12 (Ground Floor)
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation
This paper sits between Literary Studies and Performance—an uncomfortable position for traditional Dante scholarship, which has mostly treated the Commedia as something to be read silently on the page. I want to challenge that assumption. The poem wasn't written for silent reading. It demands voice, breath, the physical effort of speaking tercets aloud. My research uses Practice-as-Research methods to explore what happens when you treat the Commedia as performance rather than just text. I work both as a philologist and as a trained actor, which gives me an unusual vantage point. The project creates a digital "hermeneutic audio-edition"—basically a recording that tries to reconstruct how a fourteenth-century Florentine might have performed Dante. This isn't just illustration. Performance becomes the research itself: when you actually have to speak a line, questions about metre, phonetics, emphasis suddenly have concrete answers that don't emerge from textual analysis alone. Moving some of the interpretative work from the library to the rehearsal room reveals things. Timing matters. Acoustic patterns matter. The affective weight of certain sounds—these aren't accessible when you're working only with the written text. I present several case studies to argue that embodied performance generates legitimate philological insights, not just aesthetic ones. There's also a broader implication here about how we make medieval literature accessible in digital formats. We don't have to rely exclusively on images of manuscripts or critical editions. Sound and physical gesture carry meaning too, and they were part of how these texts originally lived in the world.
Authors:
Giuseppe Christian Distefano, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
About the Presenter(s)
Giuseppe Christian Distefano is a PhD candidate in Literary Studies at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid
See this presentation on the full schedule – Saturday Schedule
Conference Comments & Feedback
Place a comment using your LinkedIn profileShare this Presentation
Comments
Powered by WP LinkPress