Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the greatest European writers, whose untrammelled imaginative capacity was matched by a huge base in embracing the science of his era. His texts also paint compelling visual images. In Visions of Heaven, renowned scholar Martin Kemp investigates Dante's supreme vision of divine light and its implications for the visual artists who were the inheritors of Dante's vision. The whole book may be regarded as a new Paragone (comparison), the debate that began in the Renaissance about which of the arts is superior. Dante's ravishing accounts of divine light set painters the severest challenge, which took them centuries to meet. A major theme running through Dante's Divine Comedy, particularly in its third book, the Paradiso, centres on Dante's acts of seeing (conducted according to optical rules with respect to the kind of visual experience that can be accomplished on earth) and the overwhelming of Dante's earthly senses by heavenly light, which does not obey his rules of earthly optics. The repeated blinding of Dante by excessive light sets the tone for artists' portrayal of unseeable brightness.

In Canto XVIII of Paradiso, Dante sees thirty-five letters of Scripture - LOVE JUSTICE, YOU WHO RULE THE EARTH - 'painted' one after the other in the sky. It is an epiphany that encapsulates the Paradiso, staging its ultimate goal - the divine vision. This book offers a fresh, intensive reading of this extraordinary passage at the heart of the third canticle of the Divine Comedy. While adapting in novel ways the methods of the traditional lectura Dantis, William Franke meditates independently on the philosophical, theological, political, ethical, and aesthetic ideas that Dante's text so provocatively projects into a multiplicity of disciplinary contexts. This book demands that we question not only what Dante may have meant by his representations, but also what they mean for us today in the broad horizon of our intellectual traditions and cultural heritage.

In a masterly synthesis of historical and literary analysis, Giuseppe Mazzotta shows how medieval knowledge systems--the cycle of the liberal arts, ethics, politics, and theology--interacted with poetry and elevated the Divine Comedy to a central position in shaping all other forms of discursive knowledge. To trace the circle of Dante's intellectual concerns, Mazzotta examines the structure and aims of medieval encyclopedias, especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the medieval classification of knowledge; the battle of the arts; the role of the imagination; the tension between knowledge and vision; and Dante's theological speculations in his constitution of what Mazzotta calls aesthetic, ludic theology. As a poet, Dante puts himself at the center of intellectual debates of his time and radically redefines their configuration. In this book, Mazzotta offers powerful new readings of a poet who stands amid his culture's crisis and fragmentation, one who responds to and counters them in his work. In a critical gesture that enacts Dante's own insight, Mazzotta's practice is also a fresh contribution to the theoretical literary debates of the present. Originally published in 1992. 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.

The popular and critically acclaimed translation of Dante's Divine Comedy into English was carried out by the Anglican Reverend H. F. Cary. He has an honoured place in the rediscovery of Dante's masterpiece in Romantic Britain. Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth and Coleridge lavished praise upon his translation and it was through Cary's The Vision of Dante that the beauty and intricacies of the Italian poem. The book examines crucial aspects of British culture in the 19th Century and throws light on the manifold transformations of Dante's imagery into English poetry.

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.

This essential and widely used collection of visions of heaven and hell, the first in English, presents new translations of two visions and newly edited versions of previously translated ones. Describes the place of these works in medieval literature and provides a helpful resource for studying elements of medieval religion. Includes: St. Peter's Apocalypse, St. Paul's Apocalypse, St. Brendan's Voyage, St. Patrick's Purgatory, and the Visions of Furseus, Drythelm, Wetti, Charles the Fat, Tundale, the Monk of Evesham, and Thurkill. Bibliography, index, glossary, notes, illustrated.