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.

"Dante and Epicurus seem poles apart. Dante, a committed Christian, depicted in the Commedia a vision of the afterlife and God's divine justice. Epicurus, a pagan philosopher, taught that the soul is mortal and that all religion is vain superstition. And yet Epicurus is, for Dante, not only the quintessential heretic but an ethical ally. The key to this apparent paradox lies in the heterodox dualism - between man's two goals of secular felicity and spiritual beatitude - at the heart of Dante's ethical, political and theological thought. Corbett's full-length treatment of Dante's reception and polemical representation of Epicurus addresses a major gap in the scholarship. Furthermore the study's focus on fault lines in Dante's vision of the afterlife- where the theological tensions implicit in his dualism surface - opens a new way to read the Commedia as a whole in dualistic terms."

In the fall of 1373, the city of Florence commissioned Giovanni Boccaccio to give lectures on Dante for the general population. These lectures, undeniably the most learned of all the early commentaries, came to be known as the Expositions on Dante's Divine Comedy. Though interrupted at Inferno XVII, they provide profound, near-contemporary interpretations of Dante's poem and contain, in many ways, some of the most beautiful aspects of Boccaccio's admirable literary production: narrative vignettes worthy of the best pages of the Decameron, insights on the rapidly changing approach to literary commentary, and a heartfelt belief that poetry is the most faithful guardian of history, philosophy, and theology. Michael Papio's excellent translation finally makes the entirety of Boccaccio's often overlooked masterpiece accessible to a wider public and supplies a wealth of information in the introduction and notes that will prove useful to specialists and general readers alike.

By systematically analyzing Dante's attitudes toward the poets who appear throughout his texts, Teodolinda Barolini examines his beliefs about the limits and purposes of textuality and, most crucially, the relationship of textuality to truth. 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.

Presents a verse translation of Dante's "Inferno" along with ten essays that analyze the different interpretations of the first canticle of the "Divine Comedy."

Despite the persistence and popularity of addressing the theme of eating in Paradise Lost, the tradition of Adam and Eve’s sin as one of gluttony—and the evidence for Milton’s adaptation of this tradition—has been either unnoticed or suppressed. Emily Stelzer provides the first book-length work on the philosophical significance of gluttony in this poem, arguing that a complex understanding of gluttony and of ideal, grateful, and gracious eating informs the content of Milton’s writing. Working with contextual material in the fields of physiology, philosophy, theology, and literature and building on recent scholarship on Milton’s experience of and knowledge about matter and the body, Stelzer draws connections between Milton’s work and both underexamined textual influences (including, for example, Gower’s Confessio Amantis) and well-recognized ones (such as Augustine’s City of God and Galen’s On the Natural Faculties).

This work is a guide to the reading of Dante's great poem, intended for the use of students and laymen, particularly those who are approaching the Inferno for the first time. While carefully pointing out the uniqueness, tone, and color of each of Dante's thirty-four cantos, Fowlie never loses sight of the continuity of the poet's discourse. Each canto is related thematically to others, and the rich web of symbols is displayed and disentangled as the poem's unity, patterns, and structures are revealed. What particularly distinguishes Wallace Fowlie's reading of the Inferno is his emphasis on both the timelessness and the timeliness of Dante's masterpiece. By underlining the archetypal elements in the poem and drawing parallels to contemporary literature, Fowlie has brought Dante and his characters much closer to modern readers.

‘And by now, mind, it’s too late to redeem your debts by giving up guzzling.’ Dante's poetic correspondence (or tenzone) with Forese Donati, a relative of his wife, was rife with crude insults: the two men derided one another on topics ranging from sexual dysfunction and cowardice to poverty and thievery. But in his Commedia, rather than denying this correspondence, Dante repeatedly acknowledged and evoked the memory of his youthful put-downs. Dante's Tenzone with Forese Donati examines the lasting impact of these sonnets on Dante's writings and Italian literary culture, notably in the work of Giovanni Boccaccio. Fabian Alfie expands on derision as an ethical dimension of medieval literature, both facilitating the reprehension of vice and encouraging ongoing debates about the true nature of nobility. Outlining a broad perspective on the uses of literary insult, Dante's Tenzone with Forese Donati also provides an evocative glimpse of Dante's day-to-day life in the twelfth century.

This volume is comprised of a selection of revised and expanded papers presented at “Table Talk: Perspectives on Food in Medieval Italian Literature,” a panel held at the 40th annual convention of the Northeast Modern Langauge Association (Boston, February 26–March 1, 2009). Taken together, these essays explore the multifaceted role of food within medieval Italian culture through a variety of literary genres, from the poetry and prose of Dante and Boccaccio to the medical and religious writings of Michele Savonarola and Catherine of Siena. By examining the complexity of food consumption and distribution in the late medieval cultural imagination, the authors seek to advance the recent movement of food studies from the margins of social history to a fertile cross-section of the humanities and social sciences. The four sections into which the work is divided reflect the medical, religious, social and political circumstances that placed Italy at the vanguard of late medieval Europe’s dynamic foodways. In embracing the interdisciplinarity that distinguishes food studies as an area of scholarly interest, the essays collected in this volume aim to stimulate further inquiry into the fertile field of food in medieval Italian literature.