Aura before Petrarch

I propose reading for atmospheres in two medieval Italian texts: Dante’s Comedy and Boccaccio’s Decameron. The rationale here is that both texts strategically employ a term that is related to atmosphere, aura, in correlated narrative spaces, the Earthly Paradise in the Comedy and the Valley of the Ladies in the Decameron. But the atmospheres of these two spaces are utterly at odds with one another. Why? This talk will interrogate this question, suggesting that reading for atmospheres in medieval texts can be intensely revelatory. In this case, attention to atmospheres reveals differing attitudes to vulnerabilities, and specifically to gendered vulnerabilities, that lie at the heart of the divergence between these two texts.

Heather Webb  is a professor of Italian Studies at Yale University. She specializes in medieval literature, natural philosophy, and devotional cultures, focusing on histories of embodiment and readerly engagement. She obtained her Ph.D. at Stanford University in 2004 and, before coming to Yale, taught at The Ohio State University and the University of Cambridge, where she was Head of Italian at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and a Fellow of Selwyn College.

Webb’s current work seeks to conceptualize the creation of affective spaces and shifting atmospheres in literary and devotional texts by authors such as Dante, Clare of Assisi, Cavalcanti, Boccaccio, Catherine of Siena, Petrarch and their contiguous visual cultures. Webb is the author of The Medieval Heart (Yale, 2010), Dante’s Persons: An Ethics of the Transhuman (Oxford University Press, 2016), (translated into Italian as L’idea di persona in Dante. Corpo e identità. Tab edizioni, 2023) and Dante, Artist of Gesture (Oxford University Press, September 2022). With George Corbett, she edited Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy, 3 vols (Open Book Publishers, 2015, 2016, 2017). With Pierpaolo Antonello, she edited Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel: René Girard and Literary Criticism (Michigan State Press, 2015). With Zygmunt Baranski, she edited Dante’s Vita nova: A Collaborative Reading (University of Notre Dame Press, 2023). Her current project is a monograph provisionally entitled Medieval Atmospheres.

To read Professor Webb’s full biography, please visit her Yale University website.