On Grammar and Justice: Notes on Convivio, II. xii. 1–7

Dante’s ideas about education and learning can be traced primarily in the first two books of his Convivio. Here the poet develops a specific programme of dissemination of knowledge in the vernacular, presents a description of disciplines and provides autobiographical details concerning his own learning experience. The treatise clearly sets out its aims from the beginning, where Dante offers a rather peculiar elaboration of two themes that were topical in medieval philosophical writing: the desire for knowledge and the impediments to its fulfilment. The incipit of the Convivio notoriously quotes an Aristotelian adage, recurrent also in discourses in praise of