David Bowe is interested in medieval Italian literature and the ways it travels beyond Italy and beyond the middle ages. He is working on the roles of gender and visual culture in understanding medieval literature and Dante’s works. He completed his DPhil at St Hilda’s College, Oxford before beginning his postdoctoral research as Victoria Maltby Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. He enjoys teaching a range of Italian and medieval literature and is involved in two collaborative research projects, ‘Re-reading Dante’s Vita nova’ (https://rereadingdantesvitanova.wordpress.com) and ‘Seeing (with) Dante’. Outside work, David is a keen singer and cook. You can find him on Twitter as @NotQuiteZiggy.

Outline of Project
David Bowe is interested in medieval Italian literature and the ways it travels beyond Italy and beyond the middle ages. He is working on the roles of gender and visual culture in understanding medieval literature and Dante’s works. He completed his DPhil at St Hilda’s College, Oxford before beginning his postdoctoral research as Victoria Maltby Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. He enjoys teaching a range of Italian and medieval literature and is involved in two collaborative research projects, ‘Re-reading Dante’s Vita nova’ (https://rereadingdantesvitanova.wordpress.com) and ‘Seeing (with) Dante’. Outside work, David is a keen singer and cook. You can find him on Twitter as @NotQuiteZiggy.

In many of these appearances of speaking female characters and personae, the feminine voice has authority over her male audience, or the male poet with whom she is in dialogue (real or imagined). Female characters and feminine voices seem to have a significant role in critiquing and refining male-authored poetry, a phenomenon we can trace from the sonnets of the 13th-century Tuscan poet, Guittone d'Arezzo, to the Dante's Vita nova and Divine Comedy, and beyond. My project will thoroughly investigate these representations of female figures and feminine voices in poetry and several prose texts, including the writings of Catherine of Siena, to establish what models of cultural authority were available to female authors and characters in medieval texts.

The key questions for this research project are: why do men write 'as women' in some of the debate poems? Why do female characters seem to carry a special authority in male-authored texts, and particularly in discussion of the nature and value of literature? Do feminine voices (both personae and characters) do something productively disruptive to the norms of men’s poetic practice and voice, even when they are authored by men? How do feminine voices authored by women affect and interact those feminine voices written by men and vice versa?