De Vulgari Eloquentia - Structure

Structure

Dante interrupted his work at the fourteenth chapter of the second book, and though historians have tried to find a reason for this, it is still not known why Dante so abruptly aborted his essay. Indeed it is an unfinished project, and so information about its intended structure is limited. Though at some point, Dante mentions a fourth book in which he planned to deal with the comic genre and the "mediocre" style, nothing at all is known about the third book. It is thought, however, that the first book was meant to be a sort of preface to the following three books, and so shorter than the others.

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