Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Elizabeth Coggeshall, "On Amistà : Negotiating Friendship in Dante’s Italy" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
Description: Although we often think of friendship today as an indisputable value of human social life, for thinkers and writers across late mediaeval Christian society friendship raised a number of social and ethical dilemmas that needed to be carefully negotiated. On Amistà : Negotiating Friendship in Dante’s Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2023) analyses these dilemmas and looks at how Dante’s strategic articulations of friendship evolved across the phases of his literary career as he manoeuvred between different social groups and settings.Dr. Elizabeth Coggeshall reveals that friendship was not an unequivocal moral good for the writers of late me...