Dante's Persons explores the concept of personhood as it appears in Dante's Commedia and seeks out the constituent ethical modes that the poem presents as necessary for attaining a fullness of persona. The study suggests that Dante presents a vision of 'transhuman' potentiality in which the human person is, after death, fully integrated into co-presence with other individuals in a network of relations based on mutual recognition and interpersonal attention. The Commedia, Heather Webb argues, aims to depict and to actively construct a transmortal community in which the plenitude of each individual's person is realized in and through recognition of the personhood of other individuals who constitute that community, whether living or dead. Webb focuses on the strategies the Commedia employs to call us to collaborate in the mutual construction of persons. As we engage with the dead that inhabit its pages, we continue to maintain the personhood of those dead. Webb investigates Dante's implicit and explicit appeals to his readers to act in relation to the characters in his otherworlds as if they were persons. Moving through the various encounters of Purgatorio and Paradiso, this study documents the ways in which characters are presented as persone in development or in a state of plenitude through attention to the 'corporeal' modes of smiles, gazes, gestures, and postures. Dante's journey provides a model for the formation and maintenance of a network of personal attachments, attachments that, as constitutive of persona, are not superseded even in the presence of the direct vision of God.

Prominent Dante scholars from the United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom contribute original essays to the first critical companion in English to Dante’s “other works.” Rather than speak of Dante’s “minor works,” according to a tradition of Dante scholarship going back at least to the eighteenth century, this volume puts forward the designation “other works” both in light of their enhanced status and as part of a general effort to reaffirm their value as autonomous works. Indeed, had Dante never written the Commedia, he would still be considered the most important writer of the late Middle Ages for the originality and inventiveness of the other works he wrote besides his monumental poem, including the Rime, the Fiore, the Detto d’amore, the Vita nova, the Epistles, the Convivio, the De vulgari eloquentia, the Monarchia, the Egloge, and the Questio de aqua et terra. Each contributor to this volume addresses one of the “other works” by presenting the principal interpretative trends and questions relating to the text, and by focusing on aspects of particular interest. Two essays on the relationship between the “other works” and the issues of philosophy and theology are included. Dante’s “Other Works” will interest Dantisti, medievalists, and literary scholars at every stage of their career. Contributors: Manuele Gragnolati, Christopher Kleinhenz, Zygmunt G. Barański, Claire E. Honess, Simon Gilson, Mirko Tavoni, Paola Nasti, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., David G. Lummus, Luca Bianchi, and Vittorio Montemaggi.

This is the first account of Dante's reception in English to address full chronological span of that process. Individual authors and periods have been studied before, but Dante's British Public takes a wider and longer view, using a selection of vivid and detailed case studies to record and place in context some of the wider conversations about and appropriations of Dante that developed in Britain across more than six centuries, as access to his work extended and diversified. Much of the evidence is based on previously unpublished material in (for example) letters, journals, annotations and inventories and is drawn from archives in the UK and across the world, from Milan to Mumbai and from Berlin to Cape Town. Throughout, the role of Anglo-Italian cultural contacts and intermediaries in shaping the public understanding of Dante in Britain is given prominence - from clerics and merchants around Chaucer's time, through itinerant scholars, collectors and tourists in the early modern period, to the exiles and expatriates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The final chapter brings the story up to the present, showing how the poet's work has been seen (from the fourteenth century onwards) as accessible to 'the many', and demonstrating some of the means by which Dante has reached a yet wider British public over the past century, particularly through translation, illustration, and various forms of performance.

In Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry, an international group of theologians and Dante scholars provide a uniquely rich set of perspectives focused on the relationship between theology and poetry in the Commedia. Examining Dante's treatment of questions of language, personhood, and the body; his engagement with the theological tradition he inherited; and the implications of his work for contemporary theology, the contributors argue for the close intersection of theology and poetry in the text as well as the importance of theology for Dante studies. Through discussion of issues ranging from Dante's use of imagery of the Church to the significance of the smile for his poetic project, the essayists offer convincing evidence that his theology is not what underlies his narrative poem, nor what is contained within it: it is instead fully integrated with its poetic and narrative texture. As the essays demonstrate, the Commedia is firmly rooted in the medieval tradition of reflection on the nature of theological language, while simultaneously presenting its readers with unprecedented, sustained poetic experimentation. Understood in this way, Dante emerges as one of the most original theological voices of the Middle Ages. Contributors: Piero Boitani, Oliver Davies, Theresa Federici, David F. Ford, Peter S. Hawkins, Douglas Hedley, Robin Kirkpatrick, Christian Moevs, Vittorio Montemaggi, Paola Nasti, John Took, Matthew Treherne, and Denys Turner.

Dante Alighieri was early in recognizing that our age has a problem. His hometown, Florence, was at the epicenter of the move from the medieval world to the modern. He realized that awareness of divine reality was shifting, and that if it were lost, dire consequences would follow. The Divine Comedy was born in a time of troubling transition, which is why it still speaks today. Dante's masterpiece presents a cosmic vision of reality, which he invites his readers to traverse with him. In this narrative retelling and guide, from the gates of hell, up the mountain of purgatory, to the empyrean of paradise, Mark Vernon offers a vivid introduction and interpretation of a book that, 700 years on, continues to open minds and change lives.

Two pioneers in holistic psychology reveal a rejuvenating approach to healing the mind and spirit, using Dante’s Divine Comedy as a metaphor to overcome suffering. Bringing a unique Western approach to the quest for emotional healing and spiritual discovery, Dante’s Pathaddresses the core human struggles—such as depression, anxiety, addiction, and other forms of suffering—and uses Dante’s Divine Comedyas a metaphor for personal transformation. Readers are taken on a journey of exploration down into the sources of our suffering (Dante’s Hell), then into a process of a growing self-awareness of our problems and how to rise above them (Dante’s Purgatory), and finally opening up to the direct benefits of our own “wisdom mind” (Dante’s Paradise). Along the way are effective, time-tested exercises and meditations for confronting life’s greatest worries, coping with episodes of trauma, and understanding feelings of unworthiness and emptiness. Drawing upon the traditional wisdom of poet-mystic Dante and the work of psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli, who created a school of self-development and practical spirituality called psychosynthesis, Bonney and Richard Schaub have used this holistic method to successfully treat hundreds of patients and have taught it to students and other health professionals internationally for more than thirty years.

This study explores ways in which Dante presents liturgy as enabling humans to encounter God. In Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante’s “Commedia,” Helena Phillips-Robins explores for the first time the ways in which the relationship between humanity and divinity is shaped through the performance of liturgy in the Commedia. The study draws on largely untapped thirteenth-century sources to reconstruct how the songs and prayers performed in the Commedia were experienced and used in late medieval Tuscany. Phillips-Robins shows how in the Commedia Dante refashions religious practices that shaped daily life in the Middle Ages and how Dante presents such practices as transforming and sustaining relationships between humans and the divine. The study focuses on the types of engagement that Dante’s depictions of liturgical performance invite from the reader. Based on historically attentive analysis of liturgical practice and on analysis of the experiential and communal nature of liturgy, Phillips-Robins argues that Dante invites readers themselves to perform the poem’s liturgical songs and, by doing so, to enter into relationship with the divine. Dante calls not only for readers’ interpretative response to the Commedia but also for their performative and spiritual activity. Focusing on Purgatorio and Paradiso, Phillips-Robins investigates the particular ways in which relationships both between humans and between humans and God can unfold through liturgy. Her book includes explorations of liturgy as a means of enacting communal relationships that stretch across time and space; the Christological implications of participating in liturgy; the interplay of the personal and the shared enabled by the language of liturgy; and liturgy as a living out of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. The book will interest students and scholars of Dante studies, medieval Italian literature, and medieval theology.