Dante Without Footnotes: Why Dante is for Everyone
Why does Dante still speak to us with great urgency and power, and how is it that he remains accessible despite the seemingly-vast distance in time and culture between his world and ours?
Dante and the “Dead White Dude” Dilemma: Exploring the Complexities of Diversity and Controversy in Medieval Literature
While literature programs should be more diversified, it is still possible to hear from marginalized voices and discuss current controversial issues through older canonical texts. Dante Alighieri does this exceptionally well in his Divine Comedy.
Dan Brown and the Case of the Wrong Dante
In Brown’s book, Professor Robert Langdon is pitted against an adversary who is a Dante fanatic. Bertrand Zobrist, a biochemist, is ‘a proponent of the Population Apocalypse Equation’, the alleged mathematical recognition that only a mass extinction event can save our planet.
Medieval Books for Christmas
It’s that time of year again – the mad scramble for the perfect Christmas gift for the historian, nerd, avid reader on your list. Here are a few suggestions for you – new releases for December and January!
Guilt and Creativity in the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer
I argue that as Chaucer develops his own expansive, questioning poetics in The House of Fame and The Canterbury Tales, he problematises the principle of allegory on which the legitimacy of literary discourse was primarily based in medieval culture and the final fragments of The Canterbury Tales see Chaucer struggling, increasingly, to reconcile the boldness and independence of his poetic vision with the demands of his faith.
Real and imaginary journeys in the later Middle Ages
For a proper understanding of the actions of men in the past it is necessary to have some idea of how they conceived the world and their place in it, yet for the medieval period there is a serious inbalance in the sources.
‘That melodious linguist’: Birds in Medieval Christian and Islamic Cosmography
“Birds,” writes Albertus Magnus, “generally call more than other animals. This is due to the lightness of their spirits.”
Avignon vs. Rome: Dante, Petrarch, Catherine of Siena
In the fourteenth century the image of ancient Rome as Babylon was transformed into the positive idea of Rome as both a Christian and a classical ideal.
The dissemination of visions of the otherworld in England and northern France c.1150-c.1321
This thesis examines the dissemination of visions of the otherworld in the long thirteenth century (c.1150-1321) by analysing the work of one enthusiast for such visions, Helinand of Froidmont, and studying the later transmission of three, contrasting accounts: the vision of the monk of Eynsham (c.1196), the vision of St. Fursa (c.656) and the vision of Gunthelm (s.xiiex).
Sylvia Plath’s Use of Dantean Structure
Many people have remarked on the genius of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. However, it has come to my attention that Plath has been grossly misunderstood by her critics, such as the famous critic, Harold Bloom who left Plath out of his book The Western Canon.
Trees of Gold. Royal Adaptations of Paradise in Dante’s Purgatory
Dante’s vision of afterlife, expressed in his masterpiece the Divine Comedy, starts in the real world: he finds himself lost in a wood, as a metaphor of his difficult position in earthly life being exiled from his patria, the city of Florence.
Death and Retribution: Medieval Visions of the End of Judas the Traitor
Although being described in the Book of Job as “the land of gloom and chaos” (“terra ubi umbra mortis et nullus ordo” Iob 10:22), Hell for Christian tradition was not a region of disorder and chaos, but a realm of well ordered justice.
The Legend of the Purgatory of Saint Patrick: From Ireland to Dante and Beyond
“Yes by Saint Patrick …. Touching this vision here It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you” (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5)
“I want what I cannot have”: Medieval Love Literature explained
Unlike today, when we expect romance to yield tangible results, bards of the Middle Ages who sang about their desires never expected their true love to reciprocate.
Dreaming in Dante’s Purgatorio
Three successive nights on the mountain of Purgatory, Dante pauses to rest, engaging in regenerative sleep. As he sleeps, he experiences three distinct morning-dreams, describing each in detail.
The Aeneid and The Inferno: Social Evolution
The similarity between Dante’s The Inferno and Book VI of Virgil’s The Aeneid is, in many cases, clear. Both stories are written as Epic journeys. The Aeneid follows the journey of Aeneas from a sacked Troy to Italy, where he begins a new life and starts to build a new city for the homeless Trojans.
The Virtuous Pagan in Middle English Literature
From the first through the fourteenth centuries, a succession of solutions to the problem of these virtuous pagans evolved. For the Early Church, an attractive solution was that Christ descended into Hell to convert the souls he found there.
The Publisher Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, Female Readers, and the Debate about Women in Sixteenth-Century Italy
Drawing on recent work on the social history of the book and the politics of reading, this essay considers the texts under question as social products, whose meaning is not just determined by the author’s initial intentions, but is further shaped in the process of production, dissemination, and reception as a result of negotiation among several parties in a given historical moment.
MyDante: An Online Environment for Contemplative and Collaborative Reading
This paper explores the tensions between individual and collaborative aspects of reading in the context of MyDante, a digital environment for the study of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Jerusalem in Medieval Christian Thought
In the prophetic tradition, the dwelling of God is understood as a spiritual one. Yet, in spite of the expressed manner in which Jerusalem was called The Holy City, an element of imperfection remained.
Why Dante damned Francesca da Rimini
The vast majority of Dante’s readers have found Francesca da Rimini an acutely sympathetic figure-a tragic heroine. Yet Dante damned her, pronouncing a stern and challenging moral judgment.
