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Notwithstanding an impressive amount of secondary literature, an exhaustive study has been never devoted to the twelve letters written by Dante Alighieri after his banishment from Florence (1302–1315). This book answers to this important need of Dante Studies, offering an important tool for the increasing community of specialists interested in Dante’s works and posterity linked to the seventh centenary of his death (2021). A section is devoted to study in depth the theory and practice of the dictamen of the age in relationship with the concrete style of Dante’s texts. A preliminary overview is provided by Latin Philologists and Paleographers on the subject of the manuscript trasmission envisaging the problems dealing with the critical editions of the texts. Example of political communication realized by a layman, the papers gathered in this volume intend to offer a new reading and interpretation of these important letters, studying them in their socio-cultural context.

The subject of this work is the morphosyntactic analysis of a corpus of Latin documentary papers which were written in the centre and the north of the Italian peninsula between the 7th and the 8th century. The study focuses on the competition, in the nominal phrase, between synthetic and analytical encoding of the dependent name, which is the result of the grammaticalization process of the phrase starting by the preposition “de”, which in the Romance phase replaced the genitive case. This change is interpreted on a semantic basis, making use of the functional domain of possession. The volume also analyses nominal morphology which, although characterized by polymorphism and inconsistency, manifests phenomena such as the levelling of random oppositions and the reconstruction of inflectional paradigms, two inverse processes which find their cause in the principle of animacy.