Ne plus ultra?: Rereading magnanimity in Dante Alighieri's 'Convivio' and 'Divine Comedy' and courage in Torquato Tasso's 'Jerusalem Delivered

My dissertation, "Ne plus ultra?: Rereading Magnanimity in Dante Alighieri's Convivio and Divine Comedy and Courage in Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered " begins by documenting a significant ethical shift that occurred in twentieth-century Western culture: namely a post-Romantic movement away from a well-established conception of morality based on the Aristotelian and Christian ethical mean towards a "modern" ethical vision grounded in notions of excess. In chapter one I employ a philological approach that seeks to analyze the evolution of the Italian term audacia (the English "audacity", that was traditionally employed to define the concept of courage) from ancient Greece up to present-day Italy. Although this chapter studies the influences that led to a significant yet heretofore unrecognized semantic and ideological shift in the culture of a single European country, Italy, its conclusions have broader applications in terms of understanding how and why notions of youth, wealth and excess have become and remain central components of contemporary Western culture as a whole.;I then employ the conclusions reached in chapter one towards close readings of specific passages in the works of one medieval author, Dante Alighieri, and one Renaissance author. Torquato Tasso, to better define the exact nature of the manner in which they conceived of and employed notions of courage in the works under investigation. By focusing on both minute semantic shifts within a specific lexical tradition of ethical terminology, and studying the employment of the terms related to notions of courage in the works of Dante and Tasso, my dissertation marks out normally imperceptible semantic and ideological shifts that better historicizes the manner in which these two thinkers conceived of and depicted courage and the manner in which they struggled to utilize traditional notions of courage (as defined by Aristotle and his followers) in specific scenarios as depicted in their poetic masterpieces, the Divine Comedy and the Jerusalem Delivered.