Allegory and the Matter of Poetics: Dante as a Case Study in Giovanni Boccaccio’s and Leonardo Bruni’s Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The question of whether or not to read poetry through an allegorizing lens had significant implications in the Middle Ages. The identification of allegories in a poetical text was highlighted by early supporters of poetry as the primary means of legitimizing the craft; regardless of whether a poet quoted a pagan god or a mythological figure, the true challenge was to find the real meaning beneath the surface. This approach—one embraced by Giovanni Boccaccio—offered a wealth of samples to the earliest readers of Dante’s Divine Comedy. At the end of the fourteenth century, some humanists started to call into question the theological stance on which the allegorical interpretations were based. In order to promote the autonomous status of poetry, literati of the calibre of Leonardo Bruni maintained that allegory was a double-edged sword. Inspired by Plato’s refusal of allegory, Bruni encouraged the reading of literary texts free from the restrictions of a theoretical superstructure. For proponents of these opposing tendencies, Dante represented a true case study, for he was both a theorist and a poet in his own right and could therefore nourish the reflections formulated by both camps.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".