"In Understanding Dante, Scott goes beyond simply explaining Dante's works and provides a detailed discussion of the medieval poet's writings. John A. Scott has given readers a comprehensive account of Dante's work that will be useful to new readers and Dante scholars alike. It contains a helpful chronology of the events in the poet's life and a short glossary of poetic forms." --Magill Book Reviews
Using Dan Brown's book as a jumping off point, Inferno Revealed will provide readers of Brown's Inferno with an engaging introduction to Dante and his world. Much like the books on Leonardo that followed the release of the Da Vinci Code, this book will provide readers with more information about the ever-intriguing Dante. Specifically, Inferno Revealed explores how Dante made himself the protagonist of The Divine Comedy, something no other epic poet has done, a move for which the ramifications have not yet been fully explored. The mysteries and puzzles that arise from Dante's choice to personalize the epic, along with his affinity for his local surroundings and how that affects his depiction of the places, Church, and politics in the poem are considered--along with what this reveals about Brown's own usage of the work. The authors will focus on and analyze how Dan Brown has repurposed Inferno in his newest book--noting what he gets right and what errors are made when he does not. Of course, Dan Brown is not the first author to base his work on Dante. The Comedy has elicited many adaptations from major canonical writers such as Milton and Keats to popular adaptations like David Fincher's Se7en and Tim Burton's Beetlejuice-- all of which will be discussed in detail within Inferno Revealed.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Before The Dante Chamber, there was The Dante Club: “an ingenious thriller that . . . brings Dante Alighieri’s Inferno to vivid, even unsettling life.”—The Boston Globe “With intricate plots, classical themes, and erudite characters . . . what’s not to love?”—Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code and Origin Boston, 1865. The literary geniuses of the Dante Club—poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields—are finishing America’s first translation of The Divine Comedy. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing the infiltration of foreign superstitions to be as corrupting as the immigrants arriving at Boston Harbor. But as the members of the Dante Club fight to keep a sacred literary cause alive, their plans fall apart when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only this small group of scholars realizes that the gruesome killings are modeled on the descriptions of Hell’s punishments from Dante’s Inferno. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante’s literary future in the New World at stake, the members of the Dante Club must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret. Praise for The Dante Club “Ingenious . . . [Matthew Pearl] keeps this mystery sparkling with erudition.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Not just a page-turner but a beguiling look at the U.S. in an era when elites shaped the course of learning and publishing. With this story of the Dante Club’s own descent into hell, Mr. Pearl’s book will delight the Dante novice and expert alike.”—The Wall Street Journal “[Pearl] ably meshes the . . . literary analysis with a suspenseful plot and in the process humanizes the historical figures. . . . A divine mystery.”—People (Page-turner of the Week) “An erudite and entertaining account of Dante’s violent entrance into the American canon.”—Los Angeles Times “A hell of a first novel . . . The Dante Club delivers in spades. . . . Pearl has crafted a work that maintains interest and drips with nineteenth-century atmospherics.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Dante's Divine Comedy is widely considered to be one of the most significant works of literature ever written. It is renowned not only for its ability to make truths known but also for its power to make them loved. It captures centuries of thought on sin, love, community, moral living, God's work in history, and God's ineffable beauty. Like a Gothic cathedral, the beauty of this great poem can be appreciated at first glance, but only with a guide can its complexity and layers of meaning be fully comprehended. This accessible introduction to Dante, which also serves as a primer to the Divine Comedy, helps readers better appreciate and understand Dante's spiritual masterpiece. Jason Baxter, an expert on Dante, covers all the basic themes of the Divine Comedy, such as sin, redemption, virtue, and vice. The book contains a general introduction to Dante and a specific introduction to each canticle (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso), making it especially well suited for classroom and homeschool use.
The two volumes of Reviewing Dante's Theology bring together work by a range of internationally prominent Dante scholars to assess current research on Dante's theology and to suggest future directions for research. Volume 1 considers some of the key theological influences on Dante. The contributors discuss what 'doctrine' might have meant for Dante and consider the poet's engagement with key theological figures and currents in his time including: Christian Aristotelian and scholastic thought, including that of Thomas Aquinas; Augustine; Plato and Platonic thought; Gregory the Great; and notions of beatific vision. Each essay offers an overview of its topic and opens up new avenues for future study. Together they capture the energy of current research in the field, test the limits of our current knowledge and set the future study of Dante's theology on firm ground.
Christopher Ryan's study of Dante and Aquinas, touching on issues of nature and grace, of explicit and implicit faith, and of desire and destiny, is intended to mark the difference between them in key areas of theological sensibility. Re-shaped and revised by John Took on the basis of papers made available to him from Christopher Ryan's estate, it seeks to deepen our understanding of one of the great cultural encounters in European letters.
Dante put Muhammad in one of the lowest circles of Hell. At the same time, the medieval Christian poet placed several Islamic philosophers much more honorably in Limbo. Furthermore, it has long been suggested that for much of the basic framework of the Divine Comedy Dante was indebted to apocryphal traditions about a “night journey” taken by Muhammad. Dante scholars have increasingly returned to the question of Islam to explore the often surprising encounters among religious traditions that the Middle Ages afforded. This collection of essays works through what was known of the Qur’an and of Islamic philosophy and science in Dante’s day and explores the bases for Dante’s images of Muhammad and Ali. It further compels us to look at key instances of engagement among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.
This volume contains an unprecedented meeting of two major traditions, each of which are forms of careful engagement with Dante's Commedia: the Lectura Dantis, and the illustrations of this work. The Lectura Dantis, initiated by Giovanni Boccaccio in the fourteenth century, consists of a canto by canto study of Dante's poem. The history of Commedia illustration has equally deep roots, as illuminated manuscripts of the text were being produced within decades of the work's completion in 1321. While both of these traditions have continued, mostly uninterruptedly, for more than six hundred years, they have never been directly brought together. In this volume, Dante scholars take on a single canto of the Commedia of their choosing, reading not just the text, but also exploring the illustrations of their selected text to form multifaceted and multi-layered visual-textual readings. In addition to enlivening the Lectura Dantis, and confronting the illustrated tradition of the poem in a new fashion, these studies present a variety of approaches to studying not just the Commedia but any illustrated literary work through a serious inquiry into the words themselves as well as the images that these words have inspired.
The best and most eloquent introduction to Dante for our time. Prue Shaw is one of the world's foremost authorities on Dante. Written with the general reader in mind, Reading Dante brings her knowledge to bear in an accessible yet expert introduction to his great poem. This is far more than an exegesis of Dante’s three-part Commedia. Shaw communicates the imaginative power, the linguistic skill and the emotional intensity of Dante’s poetry—the qualities that make the Commedia perhaps the greatest literary work of all time and not simply a medieval treatise on morality and religion. The book provides a graphic account of the complicated geography of Dante's version of the afterlife and a sure guide to thirteenth-century Florence and the people and places that influenced him. At the same time it offers a literary experience that lifts the reader into the universal realms of poetry and mythology, creating links not only to the classical world of Virgil and Ovid but also to modern art and poetry, the world of T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney and many others. Dante's questions are our questions: What is it to be a human being? How should we judge human behavior? What matters in life and in death? Reading Dante helps the reader to understand Dante’s answers to these timeless questions and to see how surprisingly close they sometimes are to modern answers. Reading Dante is an astonishingly lyrical work that will appeal to both those who’ve never read the Commedia and those who have. It underscores Dante's belief that poetry can change human lives.
