Using McHale’s notions of “epistemological” and “ontological” dominants, this article analyzes three historical crime novels that have real historical characters as their protagonist: Marco Malvaldi’s Odore di chiuso (2011), featuring Pellegrino Artusi as the detective, and Giulio Leoni’s I delitti del mosaico (2004) and La crociata delle tenebre (2007), with Dante Alighieri as the sleuth. The article shows how the hybridization of crime fiction, history, and biography may be a fertile ground for the representation of the different ways of “knowing” in their respective historical periods and the construction of a dialogue between past and present constructed around depictions of social and political diversity, language issues, and ideas of “Italy.”

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Cicioni, M., (2025), "Narratives of Murder and Knowledge: Pellegrino Artusi and Dante Alighieri as Sleuths", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Cicioni, Mirna. "Narratives of Murder and Knowledge: Pellegrino Artusi and Dante Alighieri as Sleuths." Quaderni d'italianistica 37 (1): 2017. 55-72. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v37i1.28278. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.