Author: Gary Cestaro<br />File Type: pdf<br />Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body takes a serious look at Dantes relation to Latin grammar and the new mother tongue -- Italian vernacular -- by exploring the cultural significance of the nursing mother in medieval discussions of language and selfhood, Inspired by Julia Kristevas meditations on the maternal semiotic, Cestaros book uncovers ancient and medieval discourses that assert the nursing bodys essential role in the development of a mature linguistic self.The opening chapters locate traces of the nursing motif in Dantes minor works and particularly in his Latin treatise on the mother tongue, De vulgari eloquentia. Cestaro argues that a primal scene of suckling motivates the poets musings on language and brings the work to its premature end. Subsequent chapters explore the evolution of the nursing body in the Comedy from the parodic anti-nurse of Inferno (archetypically Circe with her poison milk), to the Christian deconstruction and reconstruction of selfhood in intimateassociation with female nursing on the mountain of Purgatorio. The book ends in Paradiso with a dramatic metaphorical celebration of the nursing body as a site of eternal truth and emblem of the resurrected body promised by medieval Christianity.