The three central chapters of the book each examine a different type of error or anomaly: a mismeasured giant, a self-defeating experiment, an erring citation of Virgil. These apparently trivial discrepancies are linked, the author suggests, to much larger questions. What is the status of mimetic realism in Dante's poem? By what right does a poet pretend to represent the order of God's mind? Where does aggressive allegoresis cross over into interpretive error? Through the study of error, the author offers an alternative account of Dante's poetic project, one that gives priority to wit and self-irony rather than didactic seriousness.

Dante's metaphysics--his understanding of reality--is very different from our own. To present Dante's ideas about the cosmos, or God, or salvation, or history, or poetry within the context of post-Enlightenment presuppositions, as is usually done, is thus to capture only imperfectly the essence of those ideas. The recovery of Dante's metaphysics is essential, argues Christian Moevs, if we are to resolve what has been called "the central problem in the interpretation of the Comedy ." That problem is what to make of the Comedy 's claim to the "status of revelation, vision, or experiential record--as something more than imaginative literature." In this book Moevs offers the first sustained treatment of the metaphysical picture that grounds and motivates the Comedy , and of the relation between those metaphysics and Dante's poetics. He carries this out through a detailed examination of three notoriously complex cantos of the Paradiso , read against the background of the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian tradition from which they arise. Moevs finds the key to the Comedy 's metaphysics and poetics in the concept of creation, which implies three fundamental insights into the nature of reality: 1) The world (finite being) is radically contingent, dependent at every instant on what gives it being. 2) The relation between the world and the ground of its being is non-dualistic. (God is not a thing, and there is nothing the world is "made of") 3) Human beings are radically free, unbound by the limits of nature, and thus can find all of time and space within themselves. These insights are the foundation of the pilgrim Dante's journey from the center of the world to the Empyrean which contains it. For Dante, in sum, what we perceive as reality, the spatio-temporal world, is a creation or projection of conscious being, which can only be known as oneself. Moevs argues that self-knowledge is in fact the keystone of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic philosophical tradition, and the essence of the Christian revelation in which that tradition culminates. Armed with this new understanding, Moevs is able to shed light on a series of perennial issues in the interpretation of the Comedy . In particular, it becomes clear that poetry coincides with theology and philosophy in the poem: Dante poeta cannot be distinguished from Dante theologus .

At the heart of the book is Mordred, King Arthur's incestuous son, shown by Guerin to be an integral part of the Arthurian tradition from the very beginning. Mordred is seen as the tangible proof of the king's sin, committed in all innocence in his youth but resulting in a living incarnation of evil who will kill his father on Salisbury Plain, putting an end to the Arthurian world. But in the early stages of Arthurian romance, because this story cannot be told without the death of Arthur, it cannot be told at all, for Arthur's existence is the necessary condition of the genre: the story of his death would entail authorial suicide and the impossibility of further literary creation. Guerin argues that the authors of the texts examined in this study - Chretien de Troyes's Le Chevalier de la Charrete and Le Conte du Graal and the anonymous Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - deliberately use the medieval reader's extra-textual knowledge of the Mordred story to create a second level of reading: behind Lancelot, Perceval, and Gawain is the shadowy figure of Mordred (never explicitly mentioned), and the modern reader must learn to see this shadow in order fully to appreciate the authors' purpose. Taking into account this hidden framework not only sheds a surprising new light on these texts, it also gives a convincing solution to the much-discussed question of why Chretien left two of his romances, Le Chevalier de la Charrete and Le Conte du Graal, unfinished. The first chapter, which deals with Arthurian tragedy in the thirteenth century Prose Cycle, is particularly timely as it coincides with the publication of the first English translation of the cycle, to which Guerin's study serves as an excellent introduction.

A fresh reading of Dante's major literary works - the Divine Comedy and the Vita nuova - that combines central tenets of incarnational theology and dialectical thought to challenge a dominant paradigm in Dante criticism.

Dante's Comedy is a puzzling poem because the author wanted to lead his readers to understanding by engaging their curiosity. While many obscure matters are clarified in the course of the poem itself, others have remained enigmas that have fascinated Dantists for centuries. Over the last thirty-five years, Richard Kay has proposed original solutions to many of these puzzles; these are collected in the present volume. Historical context frames Kay's readings, which relate the poem to such standard sources as the Bible, Aristotle, Aquinas, and the Latin classics, but he also goes beyond these Scholastic sources to exploit Dante's use of less familiar aspects of Latin clerical culture, including physiognomy, Vitruvian proportions, and optics, and most especially astrology. Kay explores new ways to read the Comedy. For instance, he argues that Dante has embedded references to his authorities in a continuous series of acrostics formed by the initial letters of each tercet. Again, he shows how Dante returns to the theme of each infernal canto and develops it in the parallel cantos of Purgatorio and Paradiso. Particularly worthy of note are four essays on the poem's finale in the Empyrean.

"In Dante and the Orient, Schildgen argues that Dante's treatment of the East enabled him to use the rhetoric employed in crusade narratives and other travel literature to oppose the military and polemic goals of the Crusades and to plead for the reformation of both church and state."--BOOK JACKET.