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.

"e;Life of Dante"e; brings together the earliest accounts of Dante available, putting the celebratory essay of literary genius Giovanni Boccaccio together with the historical analysis of leading humanist Leonardo Bruni. Their writings, along with the other sources included in this volume, provide a wealth of insight and information into Dante's unique character and life, from his susceptibility to the torments of passionate love, his involvement in politics, scholastic enthusiasms and military experience, to the stories behind the greatest heights of his poetic achievements.Not only are these accounts invaluable for their subject matter, they are also seminal examples of early biographical writing. Also included in this volume is a biography of Boccaccio, perhaps as great an influence on world literature as Dante himself.

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.

"For all that has been written about the author of the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) remains the best guide to his own life and work. Dante's writings are therefore never far away in this authoritative and comprehensive intellectual biography, which offers a fresh account of the medieval Florentine poet's life and thought before and after his exile in 1302. Beginning with the often violent circumstances of Dante's life, the book examines his successive works as testimony to the course of his passionate humanity: his lyric poetry through to the Vita nova as the great work of his first period; the Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia and the poems of his early years in exile; and the Monarchia and the Commedia as the product of his maturity. Describing as it does a journey of the mind, the book confirms the nature of Dante's undertaking as an exploration of what he himself speaks of as "maturity in the flame of love." The result is an original synthesis of Dante's life and work." --Amazon.com.

The essays in this volume probe current critical assumptions about the celebrated Italian poet, literary theorist, moral philosopher, political theorist.

Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante presents new research by international scholars on the themes of ethics, politics and justice in the works of Dante Alighieri, including chapters on Dante’s modern ‘afterlife’. Together the chapters explore how Dante’s writings engage with the contemporary culture of medieval Florence and Italy, and how and why his political and moral thought still speaks compellingly to modern readers. The collection’s contributors range across different disciplines and scholarly traditions – history, philology, classical reception, philosophy, theology – to scrutinise Dante’s Divine Comedy and his other works in Italian and Latin, offering a multi-faceted approach to the evolution of Dante’s political, ethical and legal thought throughout his writing career. Certain chapters focus on his early philosophical Convivio and on the accomplished Latin Eclogues of his final years, while others tackle knotty themes relating to judgement, justice, rhetoric and literary ethics in his Divine Comedy, from hell to paradise. The closing chapters discuss different modalities of the public reception and use of Dante’s work in both Italy and Britain, bringing the volume’s emphasis on morality, political philosophy, and social justice into the modern age of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

The Divine Comedy, completed around 1320, is a supreme work of the imagination None of Dante's other works, nor even all of his other works taken together, can rival the Comedy. How did the Florentine exile come to create this masterpiece? What steps in his development can explain the making of this extraordinary poem? In this book, a preeminent Dante scholar turns to the poet's body of works - the only real biography of Dante that we have - to illuminate these questions. Through an exposition of Dante's other writings, Robert Hollander provides a concise intellectual biography of the writer whom many consider the greatest narrative poet of the modern era. Hollander writes for those who have already encountered the Comedy, suggesting to these readers how Dante's other works relate to the great poem and inviting them to reread the Comedy with new interest and understanding.