While the structure and themes of the Divine Comedy are defined by the narrative of a spiritual pilgrimage guided by Christian truth, Winthrop Wetherbee's remarkable new study reveals that Dante's ...engagement with the great Latin poets Vergil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius constitutes a second, complementary narrative centered on psychological and artistic self-discovery. This fresh, illuminating approach departs from the usual treatment of classical poets in Dante criticism, which assigns them a merely allegorical function. Their true importance to Dante's project is much greater. As Wetherbee meticulously shows, Dante's use of the poets is grounded in an astute understanding of their historical situation and a deeply sympathetic reading of their poetry. Dante may have been motivated to correct pagan thought and imagery, but more pervasive was his desire to recreate classical style and to restore classical auctoritas to his own times. Dante's journey in the Commedia, beginning with the pilgrim's assumption of a tragic view of the human condition, progresses with the great poetry of the classical past as an intrinsic component of—not just a foil to—the spiritual experience. Dante ultimately recognizes classical poetry as an essential means to his discovery of truth. A stunning contribution by one of the nation's leading medievalists, Wetherbee's investigation of the poem's classicism makes possible an ethical and spiritual but non-Christian reading of Dante, one that will spur new research and become an indispensable tool for teaching the Commedia.
A work of considerable importance both for and teachers and students of Dante studies, Dante's Hermeneutics of Salvation will also prove useful to scholars working in medieval studies, philosophy, ...and literary theory.
Leading scholar Albert Russell Ascoli traces the metamorphosis of Dante Alighieri – minor Florentine aristocrat, political activist and exile, amateur philosopher and theologian, and daring ...experimental poet – into Dante, author of the Divine Comedy and perhaps the most self-consciously 'authoritative' cultural figure in the Western canon. The text offers a comprehensive introduction to Dante's evolving, transformative relationship to medieval ideas of authorship and authority from the early Vita Nuova through the unfinished treatises, The Banquet and On Vernacular Eloquence, to the works of his maturity, Monarchy and the Divine Comedy. Ascoli reveals how Dante anticipates modern notions of personalized, creative authorship and the phenomenon of 'Renaissance self-fashioning'. Unusually, the book examines Dante's career as a whole offering an important point of access not only to the Dantean oeuvre, but also to the history and theory of authorship in the larger Italian and European tradition.
Originally published in 1974. This book on comparative literature represents the first extended attempt to relate Dante's major allegorical mode to classical and medieval interpretations of epic ...poetry rather than to patristic biblical exegesis. Dante's Epic Journeys is also the first comprehensive explanation of Dante's enigmatic Ulysses. Thompson strives to shed new light not only on Dante's allegory—and thus upon the whole troubled question of exactly what an allegory was thought to be—but also on the intricate relationship between poet and poem and between Dante's spiritual journeys and his written representation of those itineraries.
Simon Gilson's new volume provides the first in-depth account of the critical and editorial reception in Renaissance Italy, particularly Florence, Venice and Padua, of the work of Dante Alighieri ...(1265–1321). Gilson investigates a range of textual frameworks and related contexts that influenced the way in which Dante's work was produced and circulated, from editing and translation to commentaries, criticism and public lectures. In so doing he modifies the received notion that Dante and his work were eclipsed during the Renaissance. Central themes of investigation include the contestation of Dante's authority as a 'classic' writer and the various forms of attack and defence employed by his detractors and partisans. The book pays close attention not only to the Divine Comedy but also to the Convivio and other of Dante's writings, and explores the ways in which the reception of these works was affected by contemporary developments in philology, literary theory, philosophy, theology, science and printing.
The biblical Dante Benfell, V. Stanley
The biblical Dante,
c2011, 20111216, 2017, 2011, 2011-01-01, 2011-11-26
eBook
"Dante Alighieri cited the Bible extensively in his Commedia, but also used his epic poem to meditate on the meaning of the Scriptures as a 'true' text. The Biblical Dante provides close readings of ...passages from the Commedia to explore how Dante's concept of Biblical truth differs sharply from modern notions."
"V. Stanley Benfell examines Dante's argument that the truth of the sacred text could only be revealed when engaged with in a transformative manner - and that a lack of such encounters in his time had led to a rise in greed and corruption, notably within the Church. He also illustrates how the poet put forth a vision for the restoration of a just society using Biblical language and imagery, revealing ideas of both earthly and eternal happiness. The Biblical Dante provides an insightful analysis of attitudes towards both the Bible and how it was read in the Medieval period."--pub. desc.
Dante & the unorthodox Miller, James
Dante & the unorthodox,
c2005, 2006, 2005, 2006-01-01
eBook
During his lifetime, Dante was condemned as corrupt and banned from Florence on pain of death. But in 1329, eight years after his death, he was again viciously condemned—this time as a heretic and ...false prophet—by Friar Guido Vernani. From Vernani's inquisitorial viewpoint, the author of the Commedia "seduced" his readers by offering them "a vessel of demonic poison" mixed with poetic fantasies designed to destroy the "healthful truth" of Catholicism. Thanks to such pious vituperations, a sulphurous fume of unorthodoxy has persistently clung to the mantle of Dante's poetic fame. The primary critical purpose of Dante & the Unorthodox is to examine the aesthetic impulses behind the theological and political reasons for Dante's allegory of mid-life divergence from the papally prescribed "way of salvation." Marking the septicentennial of his exile, the book's eighteen critical essays, three excerpts from an allegorical drama, and a portfolio of fourteen contemporary artworks address the issue of the poet's conflicted relation to orthodoxy. By bringing the unorthodox out of the realm of "secret things, " by uncensoring them at every turn, Dante dared to oppose the censorious regime of Latin Christianity with a transgressive zeal more threatening to papal authority than the demonic hostility feared by Friar Vernani.
Waking to find himself shipwrecked on a strange shore before a dark wood, the pilgrim of the Divine Comedy realizes he must set his sights higher and guide his ship to a radically different port. ...Starting on the sand of that very shore with Dante, John Freccero begins retracing the famous voyage recounted by the poet nearly 700 years ago. Freccero follows pilgrim and poet through the Comedy and then beyond, inviting readers both uninitiated and accomplished to join him in navigating this complex medieval masterpiece and its influence on later literature. Perfectly impenetrable in its poetry and unabashedly ambitious in its content, the Divine Comedy is the cosmos collapsed on itself, heavy with dense matter and impossible to expand. Yet Dante's great triumph is seen in the tiny, subtle fragments that make up the seamless whole, pieces that the poet painstakingly sewed together to form a work that insinuates itself into the reader and inspires the work of the next author. Freccero magnifies the most infinitesimal elements of that intricate construction to identify self-similar parts, revealing the full breadth of the great poem. Using this same technique, Freccero then turns to later giants of literature- Petrarch, Machiavelli, Donne, Joyce, and Svevo-demonstrating how these authors absorbed these smallest parts and reproduced Dante in their own work. In the process, he confronts questions of faith, friendship, gender, politics, poetry, and sexuality, so that traveling with Freccero, the reader will both cross unknown territory and reimagine familiar faces, swimming always in Dante's wake.
This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1, 100 titles from Penn Press's ...distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
