Dante’s Latin treatise Monarchia inscribes itself within the long medieval conflict between Pope and Emperor and the debate that opposed the theorists of theocracy to the supporters of the empire. The Monarchia, traditionally assumed to be a subversive work as its tormented reception testifies – it remained listed in the Index of Prohibited Books from 1559 to the end of the 19th century – results from the strong connection Dante emphasized between politics and ethics. The bene esse of human beings is the crucial issue that the treatise discusses since its very beginning. More than focusing on power and sovereignty, the Monarchia aims to demonstrate that the government of a single universal ruler guarantees the achievement of the natural goal of human life. The central role assigned to the Emperor discloses, in fact, the importance the poet gives to earthly happiness and to the temporal dimension of humanitas. The essays in this volume are the result of the first International Symposium of the Global Dante Project of New York, a scholarly initiative committed to the systematic study of the whole of Dante’s opus. Held in 2015 and devoted to the Monarchia, this inaugural event saw the participation of scholars from Europe and the USA who investigated Dante’s political treatise addressing diverse issues and from multiple and innovative methodological perspectives. The fertile discussion generated on that occasion and the insights it produced animate this book.

Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante presents new research by international scholars on the themes of ethics, politics and justice in the works of Dante Alighieri, including chapters on Dante’s modern ‘afterlife’. Together the chapters explore how Dante’s writings engage with the contemporary culture of medieval Florence and Italy, and how and why his political and moral thought still speaks compellingly to modern readers. The collection’s contributors range across different disciplines and scholarly traditions – history, philology, classical reception, philosophy, theology – to scrutinise Dante’s Divine Comedy and his other works in Italian and Latin, offering a multi-faceted approach to the evolution of Dante’s political, ethical and legal thought throughout his writing career. Certain chapters focus on his early philosophical Convivio and on the accomplished Latin Eclogues of his final years, while others tackle knotty themes relating to judgement, justice, rhetoric and literary ethics in his Divine Comedy, from hell to paradise. The closing chapters discuss different modalities of the public reception and use of Dante’s work in both Italy and Britain, bringing the volume’s emphasis on morality, political philosophy, and social justice into the modern age of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

Marx’s Inferno reconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx’s Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than simply a critique of classical political economy, William Roberts argues that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers’ movement. Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. Placing Marx against the background of nineteenth-century socialism, Roberts shows how Capital was ingeniously modeled on Dante’s Inferno, and how Marx, playing the role of Virgil for the proletariat, introduced partisans of workers’ emancipation to the secret depths of the modern “social Hell.” In this manner, Marx revised republican ideas of freedom in response to the rise of capitalism. Combining research on Marx’s interlocutors, textual scholarship, and forays into recent debates, Roberts traces the continuities linking Marx’s theory of capitalism to the tradition of republican political thought. He immerses the reader in socialist debates about the nature of commerce, the experience of labor, the power of bosses and managers, and the possibilities of political organization. Roberts rescues those debates from the past, and shows how they speak to ever-renewed concerns about political life in today’s world.

Dissent and Philosophy in the Middle Ages offers scholars of Dante's Divine Comedy an integral understanding of the political, philosophical, and religious context of the medieval masterwork. First penned in French by Ernest L. Fortin, one of America's foremost thinkers in the fields of philosophy and theology, Dissidence et philosophie au moyen-%ge brings to light the complexity of Dante's thought and art, and its relation to the central themes of Western civilization. Available in English for the first time through this superb translation by Marc A. LePain, Dissent and Philosophy will make a supremely important contribution to the discussion of Dante as poet, theologian, and philosopher.

The essays in this volume probe current critical assumptions about the celebrated Italian poet, literary theorist, moral philosopher, political theorist.

Joan Ferrante analyzes the Divine Comedy in terms of public issues, which continued foremost in Dante's thinking after his exile from Florence. Professor Ferrante examines the political concepts of the poem in historical context and in light of the political theory and controversies of the period. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.