Christopher Kleinhenz, Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, Volume 1, Routledge, 2004, ISBN 0-415-93930-5, p.360. Italy's first dreadnought battleship was completed in 1913 and named Dante Alighieri in honor of him. [65] Slade, Carole; Cecchetti, Giovanni, eds. (1982). Approaches to teaching Dante's Divine comedy. New York, N.Y.: Modern Language Association of America. ISBN 978-0873524780. OCLC 7671339. Farrell, Jane (8 September 2021). "The Divine Comedy in sculpture: Timothy Schmalz". The Florentine. Dante’s Divine Comedy has flourished for more than 650 years and has been considered a major work since Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a biography of Dante in 1373. By 1400, at least 12 commentaries had already been written on the poem’s meaning and significance. The work is a major part of the Western canon, and T.S. Eliot, who was greatly influenced by Dante, put Dante in a class with only one other poet of the modern world, Shakespeare, saying that they ”divide the modern world between them. There is no third.”

Dante by John Took | Waterstones

The poem discusses "the state of the soul after death and presents an image of divine justice meted out as due punishment or reward", [4] and describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. [5] Allegorically, the poem represents the soul's journey towards God, [6] beginning with the recognition and rejection of sin ( Inferno), followed by the penitent Christian life ( Purgatorio), which is then followed by the soul's ascent to God ( Paradiso). Dante draws on medieval Catholic theology and philosophy, especially Thomistic philosophy derived from the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. [7] Consequently, the Divine Comedy has been called "the Summa in verse". [8]

In the Purgatorio, Virgil leads Dante in a long climb up the Mount of Purgatory, through seven levels of suffering and spiritual growth (an allegory for the seven deadly sins), before reaching the earthly paradise at the top. The poet’s journey here represents the Christian life, in which Dante must learn to reject the earthly paradise he sees for the heavenly one that awaits. Dante meets and converses with several great saints of the Church, including Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Saint Peter, and St. John. The Paradiso is consequently more theological in nature than the Inferno and the Purgatorio. However, Dante admits that the vision of heaven he receives is merely the one his human eyes permit him to see, and thus the vision of heaven found in the Cantos is Dante's personal vision. The structure of the poem is also quite complex, with mathematical and numerological patterns distributed throughout the work, particularly threes and nines. The poem is often lauded for its particularly human qualities: Dante's skillful delineation of the characters he encounters in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise; his bitter denunciations of Florentine and Italian politics; and his powerful poetic imagination. Dante's use of real characters, according to Dorothy Sayers in her introduction to her translation of the Inferno, allows Dante the freedom of not having to involve the reader in description, and allows him to "[make] room in his poem for the discussion of a great many subjects of the utmost importance, thus widening its range and increasing its variety." [42]

Dante and The Divine Comedy: He took us on a tour of Hell - BBC Dante and The Divine Comedy: He took us on a tour of Hell - BBC

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview. Ronnie H. Terpening, Lodovico Dolce, Renaissance Man of Letters (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p.166. Picone, Michelangelo. "Bernard, St." (trans. Robin Treasure). In: Lansing (ed.), The Dante Encyclopedia, 99-100. One of the foremost twentieth-century historians of medieval philosophy, Étienne Gilson took a lifelong interest in Dante, publishing Dante et la philosophie in 1939 (the translation Dante the Philosopher was published in 1946). The book is Gilson’s magisterial attempt to situate Dante’s thought in relation to the competing intellectual currents of his time. The first printed edition was published in Foligno, Italy, by Johann Numeister and Evangelista Angelini da Trevi on 11 April 1472. [40] Of the 300 copies printed, fourteen still survive. The original printing press is on display in the Oratorio della Nunziatella in Foligno.

What a gift to Dante lovers! The book is divided into two sections, with essays by past and living poets on personal and artistic views of Dante and Dante's influence. Those of us who read and study Dante are often asked, 'Why Dante?' Now you can recommend this book and let WH Auden and Seamus Heaney answer. Have a pen handy: this should inspire lots of follow-up reading. 9. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Not much is known about Dante's education; he presumably studied at home or in a chapter school attached to a church or monastery in Florence. It is known that he studied Tuscan poetry and that he admired the compositions of the Bolognese poet Guido Guinizelli—in Purgatorio XXVI he characterized him as his "father"—at a time when the Sicilian School ( Scuola poetica Siciliana), a cultural group from Sicily, was becoming known in Tuscany. He also discovered the Provençal poetry of the troubadours, such as Arnaut Daniel, and the Latin writers of classical antiquity, including Cicero, Ovid and especially Virgil. [27] In 2008, the Municipality of Florence officially apologized for expelling Dante 700 years earlier. [73] [74] [75] [76] They’re concerned with Dante’s impact on the English-speaking world, giving us a substantial sampling of translation and imitation in English poetry from the Middle Ages through to the present. It does have its limitations. The long introduction is incisive but somewhat idiosyncratic, it doesn’t go into much detail with the texts in the anthology, nor very much with wider issues of reception over the centuries – but the whole volume is a very well edited and indispensable selection.

NEW BOOK: The Oxford Handbook of Dante

I think that’s right. That’s certainly a feature that several of the contributors in the anthology focus upon. For example, the essay by Amilcare Iannucci focuses on the importance of the popularisation of the Commedia. I think another quite striking instance of the continuing vitality of Inferno, particularly, is that [in April 2009] in London alone there were three different forms of Dante performance. There was the avant-garde Italian theatre-company staging an approach to all three parts of the Commedia at the Barbican, there was Roberto Benigni’s one man show at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and there was also a showing at the Barbican cinema of the 1911 silent film of the Inferno. Dante continues to be a very vigorous presence outside the academy. Bloom, Harold (1994). The Western Canon. Harcourt Brace. ISBN 9780151957477. See also Western canon for other "canons" that include the Divine Comedy. Much like Dante writing in the vernacular Italian rather than Latin. Contemporary appropriation seems to follow that trend of accessibility.

Available online at World of Dante and alongside Teodolinda Barolini's commentary at Digital Dante. There’s a similar sense of continuing conflict running through Heaney’s sense of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Another poem, ‘ The Strand at Lough Beg’, is about his cousin who was a victim, murdered during the Troubles, and in it Heaney tries in some way to politically redeem the situation by including a ritual, which Dante describes at the beginning of Purgatorio, of cleansing the filth of the Inferno from his dead cousin’s face. Heaney continues this dialogue with Dante right the way through his career, seeing him as a precedent for writing poetry out of one’s locality – in Dante’s case the strife-ridden Florence, in Heaney’s case, the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland. A series of lectures, called ‘Decentring Dante’, will take place at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, celebrating the publication of the Handbook. The lecture series will suggest ways of reading Dante’s Comedy from a less central position and with a broader, more critical perspective. How can discussions of race in the Middle Ages and the attentiveness to indigenous forms of knowledge preservation help literary scholars to rethink their understanding of ’canonicity’ and the ’canonical‘? On what basis can canonical authors such as Dante, Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan continue to be read today? In what sense and at what cost can Dante inspire other poets? What does he mean, more specifically, to a woman writer and artist in Jamaica? What changes when Dante’s Virgil is read not only as part of the Christian reception of classical authors in the Middle Ages, but also in dialogue with the practices of ancient pedagogy? Does the queer desire informing the Aeneid also flow through Dante’s poem? The first formal biography of Dante was the Vita di Dante (also known as Trattatello in laude di Dante), written after 1348 by Giovanni Boccaccio. [59] Although several statements and episodes of it have been deemed unreliable on the basis of modern research, an earlier account of Dante's life and works had been included in the Nuova Cronica of the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani. [60] Everyone's favourite abomination had some Dantesque inspiration. There are more colourful similarities to Dante besides the consequences of transcending our natural limits. For instance, the artist/creator's dysfunctional relationship with friends, teachers and women. 10. The Vision of Dante Alighieri by Henry Francis Cary

Inferno by Dante Alighieri | Goodreads

The Divine Comedy can be described simply as an allegory: each canto, and the episodes therein, can contain many alternative meanings. Dante's allegory, however, is more complex, and, in explaining how to read the poem(see the Letter to Cangrande) [41] he outlines other levels of meaning besides the allegory: the historical, the moral, the literal, and the anagogical. The structure of the three realms of the afterlife follows a common pattern of nine stages plus an additional, and paramount, tenth: nine circles of hell, followed by Lucifer’s level at the bottom; nine rings of purgatory, with the Garden of Eden at its peak; and the nine celestial bodies of heaven, followed by the empyrean (the highest stage of heaven, where God resides). Moore, Edward. Studies in Dante, First Series: Scripture and Classical Authors in Dante, Oxford: Clarendon, 1969 {1896}, pg. 4. Your second choice is Peter Hawkins’s Dante: A Brief History(2006), which explores Dante’s impact on artists and scholars alike. Does this make for a good introduction?Dante’s wandering poet seems almost to be a proto-detective of the Philip Marlowe ilk – flawed and lost. Does that influence contemporary authors such as Naylor? They provide a perspective of impact that goes in several important further directions. The essays deal with what the editors call ‘intermedial cultural practices.’ They’re not only concerned with illustrations and paintings on Dantean subjects from the Middle Ages through to Salvador Dalí, they’re also interested in the traditions of bringing the Inferno and the Commedia to life by embodying Dante’s poem in performance, in recitation, in theatrical, cinematic and even televisual adaptation.