Studies on Medieval Italian Literature in North America: Past, Present, and Future

Christopher Kleinhenz, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of recent trends in scholarship in any area are by their very nature selective and incomplete. By the same token, predictions of future areas of research are ultimately subjective and, hence, suspect. We can see where we have been; we think we know where we are; we hope we can make educated guesses about the course of future scholarship. In this brief essay I have taken my charge to be, first of all, to present, as economically as possible, an overview of the published scholarship in medieval Italian literature, not to render a critique of it, and then to suggest future directions of research. For practical reasons I have chosen to limit my remarks to those contributions that have appeared over the past twenty-five years, from 1980 to 2004.