Dante's unfinished work Il Convivio is often overlooked. In this volume, it is reconsidered in a different light, as Dante's first attempt to reassemble and reshape the remains of his Florentine past in order to construct a new way of defining himself as a writer after his exile in 1302.

Dante's Gluttons: Food and Society from the Convivio to the Comedy explores how in his work medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) uses food to articulate, reinforce, criticize, and correct the social, political, and cultural values of his time. Combining medieval history, food studies, and literary criticism, Dante's Gluttons historicizes food and eating in Dante, beginning in his earliest collected poetry and arriving at the end of his major work. For Dante, the consumption of food is not a frivolity, but a crux of life in the most profound sense of the term, and gluttony is the abdication of civic and spiritual responsibility and a danger to the individual body and soul as well as to the collective. This book establishes how one of the world's preeminent authors uses the intimacy and universality of food as a touchstone, communicating through a gastronomic language rooted in the deeply human relationship with material sustenance.

An uncompleted manuscript that combines lyric poetry and prose commentary, the Banquet (or Convivio) is one of Dante Alighieri’s most important and least understood philosophical texts. As Maria Luisa Ardizzone shows, its language and logic are deeply connected to medieval culture and the philosophical debates of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In Reading as the Angels Read, Ardizzone reconstructs the cultural and socio-political background that provided the motivation for the Banquet and offers a bold new reading of this ambitious work. Drawing on a deep knowledge of Dante’s engagement with biblical, Augustinian, Neoplatonic, and Aristotelian philosophy, she suggests that the Banquet is not an encyclopedia of learning as many have claimed, but Dante’s attempt to articulate a theory of human happiness in which perfect knowledge is the natural basis for a well-organized political community.

Available for the first time in paperback, this essential resource presents a systematic introduction to Dante's life and works, his cultural context and intellectual legacy. The only such work available in English, this Encyclopedia: brings together contemporary theories on Dante, summarizing them in clear and vivid prose provides in-depth discussions of the Divine Comedy, looking at title and form, moral structure, allegory and realism, manuscript tradition, and also taking account of the various editions of the work over the centuries contains numerous entries on Dante's other important writings and on the major subjects covered within them addresses connections between Dante and philosophy, theology, poetics, art, psychology, science, and music as well as critical perspective across the ages, from Dante's first critics to the present.

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