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 this illuminating companion to Dan Brown's Inferno, historian Michael Haag sets out the truth behind the novel's myths, mysteries and locations. How do the clues unveiled in symbology professor Robert Langdon's daring quest from Florence to Venice and Istanbul overlap with history? What codes and symbols did Dante employ in the Divine Comedy and which secret religious, philosophical, and scientific themes are hidden within his work? What lies behind Botticelli's Mappa dell'Inferno? And what are the cult scientists known as transhumanists really up to? Inferno Decoded is a book that ranges as widely as Dan Brown's novel, from the terrors of the Black Death to the scientific debates around population growth and prolonging of life-spans, and from the economic, political, and religious tumult in Florence at the dawn of the Renaissance to real-life locations in Florence, Venice and Istanbul today. It is a must-read for anyone who has read Inferno and wondered just how its enigmatic questions are real or relevant.

The authors address theories, which, through the identification of hidden codes, call the authorship of Shakespeare's plays into question.

Acknowledged as the "Artist of the Century," Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) left a legacy that dominates the art world to this day. Inventing the ironically dégagé attitude of "ready-made" art-making, Duchamp heralded the postmodern era and replaced Pablo Picasso as the role model for avant-garde artists. John F. Moffitt challenges commonly accepted interpretations of Duchamp's art and persona by showing that his mature art, after 1910, is largely drawn from the influence of the occult traditions. Moffitt demonstrates that the key to understanding the cryptic meaning of Duchamp's diverse artworks and writings is alchemy, the most pictorial of all the occult philosophies and sciences.