Perspectives On Dante Politico

This book argues that political concerns, inseparable from Dante’s biography, permeate his entire corpus, emerging at the intersection of the multiple fields of knowledge he explores, from the liberal arts to law, philosophy, and theology. It also shows that Dante, by elucidating the natural integration of the humanities with the sciences, continues to be a source of provocative insights and inspirations on how to be political beings today. The essays collected in the volume offer a range of close textual and contextual readings of Dante’s life and works grouped in four parts: 1. The Self and History, 2. Visions of the World: Cosmology and Utopia, 3. From the Language of Politics to the Language of Theology, 4. Instances of Political Reception in Asia and South America. The different disciplinary angles adopted by the contributors include history, economics, jurisprudence, linguistics, ethics, metaphysics, theology, cosmology, social thought, ecology, and the performing and visual arts. The collection addresses a specialized audience of Dante scholars, medievalists, historians, political philosophers and scientists, reception scholars, and legal and cultural historians.

This book argues that political concerns, inseparable from Dante’s biography, permeate his entire corpus, emerging at the intersection of the multiple fields of knowledge he explores, from the liberal arts to law, philosophy, and theology. It also shows that Dante, by elucidating the natural integration of the humanities with the sciences, continues to be a source of provocative insights and inspirations on how to be political beings today. Preceded by an introductory chapter focused on politics and education, the essays collected in the volume offer a range of close textual and contextual readings of Dante’s life and works grouped in four parts: 1. The Self and History, 2. Visions of the World: Cosmology and Utopia, 3. From the Language of Politics to the Language of Theology, 4. Instances of Political Reception in Asia and South America. The different disciplinary angles adopted by the contributors include history, economics, jurisprudence, linguistics, ethics, metaphysics, theology, cosmology, social thought, ecology, education, and the performing and visual arts. The collection addresses a specialized audience of Dante scholars, medievalists, historians, political philosophers and scientists, reception scholars, and legal and cultural historians.

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

Dante's political thought has long constituted a major area of interest for Dante studies. Yet there has been a tendency for the poet's views on matters of politics to be seen by critics as a self-contained, discrete area for study.This edition of four political letters examines the extent to which they can be said to contain the seeds of the political poetry of the Commedia, and to look again at the ways in which the author transforms the Latin political rhetoric of the letters into the Italian poetic language of his vernacular masterpiece.Table of Contents:1. Introduction: `Rome once had two suns? 2. The Letter to the Princes and Peoples of Italy (Epistola V)3. The Letter to the Florentines (Epistola VI)4. The Letter to the Emperor Henry VII (Epistola VII)5. The Letter to the Italian Cardinals (Epistola XI)6. BibliographyDr Claire Honess is a Senior Lecturer in the Italian Department at the University of Leeds.

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's political thought has long constituted a major area of interest for Dante studies, yet the poet's political views have traditionally been considered a self-contained area of study and viewed in isolation from the poet's other concerns. Consequently, the symbolic and poetic values which Dante attaches to political structures have been largely ignored or marginalised by Dante criticism. This omission is addressed here by Claire Honess, whose study of Dante's poetry of citizenship focuses on more fundamental issues, such as the relationship between the individual and the community, the question of what it means to be a citizen, and above all the way in which notions of cities and citizenship enter the imagery and structure of the Commedia.