Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė

Gemma Loquax: The Victorian Afterlives of Dante Alighieri's Wife, Visiting Early Career Research Fellow 2024/2025

Aistė is a medievalist who examines Dante and the transcultural and transmedial reception of premodern Italian literature from the perspectives of cognitive literary studies, sensory history, and affect studies. 

After completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge (2022), she worked as a Research Fellow at Vilnius University and Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Aistė co-directs the Centre for Dante Studies in Ireland at University College Cork. Her research interests include dream and visionary literature, the illuminations and illustrations of Dante's Comedy, and the interconnections between English and Italian literary traditions. You can get in touch with Aistė at akiltinaviciute@ucc.ie

Aistė's project at JRRI will examine 19th-century and early 20th-century Anglophone literary representations and biographies of Dante Alighieri's wife Gemma Donati in order to understand how they can expand our understanding of the English reception of Dante during a period when a major shift in the British intellectual approach to the poet was taking place (Coluzzi, Dante beyond Influence 2021). These fictional accounts, which regularly focus on the supposedly antagonistic relationship between Gemma and the poet's muse Beatrice, are interesting not so much for what they tell us about Dante's lived reality, but because of how they illuminate shifting attitudes toward conjugal affection and the role of women in Victorian England. The project argues that the sparseness of historical record makes Dante's wife a convenient tabula rasa that allowed later writers to give a largely forgotten medieval woman a voice, test out alternative models of womanhood and wifehood, and reimagine the Italian Middle Ages for their respective societies.