This study explores how Dante represents violence in the Comedy and reveals the connection between contemporary private and public violence and civic and canon law violations. Although a number of articles have addressed particular aspects of violence in discrete parts of Dante’s oeuvre, a systematic treatment of violence in the Commedia is lacking. This ambitious overview of violence in Dante’s literary works and his world examines cases of violence in the domestic, communal, and cosmic spheres while taking into account medieval legal approaches to rights and human freedom that resonate with the economy of justice developed in the Commedia. Exploring medieval concerns with violence both in the home and in just war theory, as well as the Christian theology of the Incarnation and Redemption, Brenda Deen Schildgen examines violence in connection to the natural rights theory expounded by canon lawyers beginning in the twelfth century. Partially due to the increased attention to its Greco-Roman cultural legacy, the twelfth-century Renaissance produced a number of startling intellectual developments, including the emergence of codified canon law and a renewed interest in civil law based on Justinian’s sixth-century Corpus juris civilis. Schildgen argues that, in addition to “divine justice,” Dante explores how the human system of justice, as exemplified in both canon and civil law and based on natural law and legal concepts of human freedom, was consistently violated in the society of his era. At the same time, the redemptive violence of the Crucifixion, understood by Dante as the free act of God in choosing the Incarnation and death on the cross, provides the model for self-sacrifice for the communal good. This study, primarily focused on Dante’s representation of his contemporary reality, demonstrates that the punishments and rewards in Dante’s heaven and hell, while ostensibly a staging of his vision of eternal justice, may in fact be a direct appeal to his readers to recognize the crimes that pervade their own world. Dante and Violence will have a wide readership, including students and scholars of Dante, medieval culture, violence, and peace studies.
Exploring medieval concerns with violence both in the home and in just war theory, as well as the Christian theology of the Incarnation and Redemption, Brenda Deen Schildgen examines violence in connection to the natural rights theory ...
Fifteen-year-old Ari Mendoza is an angry loner with a brother in prison, but when he meets Dante and they become friends, Ari starts to ask questions about himself, his parents and his family that he has never asked before.
Franke reads the Divine Comedy through the insights into interpretation developed by hermeneutics, and at the same time uses Dante's poem, with its interpretive praxis based on a theological vision, to challenge prevailing assumptions about ...
For Ate as “ psychic intervention ” by a god , see E. R. Dodds , The Greeks and the Irrational ( 1951 ; reprint , Berkeley and Los Angeles : University of California Press , 1973 ) , p .
But until now, students of the Inferno have lacked a suitable resource to guide their reading. Welcome to Danteworlds, the first substantial guide to the Inferno in English.
Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.
Its plan is taken partly from Cicero and partly from Aristotle , the authority of the latter being hardly less for Dante than that of Scripture . Cicero's ' force ' , or violence , is taken as equivalent to Aristotle's ' mad brutishness ...
Ralph M. McInerny, 'Metaphor and Analogy', in Inquiries into Medieval Philosophy: A Collection in Honor of Francis P. Clarke, ed. James F. Ross (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1971), 75–96; Cornelius Ernst, O.P., 'Metaphor and Ontology in ...
In the case of the Twos, the practice of 'vertical reading' is signalled rather differently. The cantos are not marked by multiple textual echoes in ... Inferno ii is infused with the pilgrim's fears and doubts concerning the journey he ...
With this story of the Dante Club’s own descent into hell, Mr. Pearl’s book will delight the Dante novice and expert alike.”—The Wall Street Journal “[Pearl] ably meshes the . . . literary analysis with a suspenseful plot and in ...