Topic: Literature and Truth in Medieval Literature
Abstract:
Medieval stories are full of miraculous or wonderful events. It’s easy for a contemporary reader to quickly dismiss the truthfulness of the narrative and attribute naivety to the narrators. How do we deal, however, with statements such as Dante’s, who swore on the “notes of [his] Comedìa” (Divine Comedy, Inferno 16, 127-8) that what he wrote was literally true? Why does it matter? What can we still find in medieval stories of the strange? In this paper I will analyze the meaning of truth-telling in the stories that I work on, the Latin exempla (short stories) told and collected by Cistercian monks in the 12th and 13th centuries.
Biography:
Stefano Mula is Professor of Italian at Middlebury College, VT. He has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Cagliari, Italy, and a DEA in Histoire et Civilization from the EHESS in Paris, France. Before joining the Middlebury faculty, he taught at the University of Chicago and at Northwestern University. He has also been Visiting Professor in the Humanities at the University of Cagliari, Italy, in 2009/2010. His research interests are medieval narrative structures; the intersection of literature, ethics, and religion; philology; Cistercian exempla; hagiography; and Arthurian literature.
Stefano has collaborated to the French translation of James of Voragine’s Golden Legend: Jacques de Voragine, Legende Dorée, under the direction of A. Boureau, with M. Goullet and P. Collomb, L. Moulinier and S. Mula (Paris, 2003). Among his publications are ‘Muhammad and the Saints: The History of the Prophet in the Golden Legend,’ Romance Philology 101.2 (2003): 175-188; ‘Looking for an Author: Alberic of Trois Fontaines and the Chronicon Clarevallense’, Cîteaux. Commentarii Cistercienses 60 (2009): 5-25; ‘Les exempla de Pierre Damien et leur diffusion aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles,’ Le Tonnerre des exemples. Exempla et médiation culturelle dans l’Occident. M.A. Polo de Beaulieu, P. Collomb, and J. Berlioz, eds. (Rennes, 2010), 161-174; ‘Narrative Structure in Medieval Italian Arthurian Romance.’ In The Arthur of the Italians, Regina Psaki and Gloria Allaire, eds. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014, 91-104; ‘Exempla and Historiography. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines’ reading of Caesarius’ Dialogus miraculorum.’ In La Persuasion cistercienne, M.A. Polo de Beaulieu, V. Smirnova, eds, Leiden: Brill, 2015, 143-159.
Recent published include the critical edition of Herbert of Torres’ Liber visionum et miraculorum Clarevallensium (Turnhout: Brepols, CCCM 227, 2017) in collaboration with Dom Giancarlo Zichi and Graziano Fois. He also translated, with Maura Favero, David Areford’s book La nave e lo scheletro. Le stampe di Jacopo Rubieri alla Biblioteca Classense di Verona (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph on early Cistercian exempla, tentatively called Between Literature and History: The Medieval Cistercian exemplum (12th -13th C.).
At Middlebury College Stefano has taught a variety of courses in Italian language and literature at all levels, including “La Divina Commedia di Dante” and surveys of Medieval and Modern Italian Literature. He has had the great pleasure to act as Interim Faculty Head for Cook Commons in 2011-2012 and of Brainerd Commons in 2014-2015. He regularly teaches “Introduction to World Literature” courses, and has been Director of the Comparative Literature Program and of the Linguistics Program.