Dante and the Practice of Humility

by Rachel K. Teubner
Dante and the Practice of Humility
Author: Rachel K. Teubner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2023-07-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009315366
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In this book, Rachel Teubner offers an exploration of humility in Dante's Divine Comedy, arguing that the poem is an ascetical exercise concerned with training its author gradually in the practice of humility, rather than being a reflection of authorial hubris. A contribution to recent scholarship that considers the poem to be a work of self-examination, her volume investigates its scriptural, literary, and liturgical sources, also offering fresh feminist perspectives on its theological challenges. Teubner demonstrates how the poetry of the Comedy is theologically significant, focusing especially on the poem's definition of humility as ethically and artistically meaningful. Interrogating the text canto by canto, she also reveals how contemporary tools of literary analysis can offer new insights into its meaning. Undergraduate and novice readers will benefit from this companion, just as theologians and scholars of medieval religion will be introduced to a growing body of scholarship exploring Dante's religious thought.

Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante's Commedia

by Helena Phillips-Robins
Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante's Commedia
Author: Helena Phillips-Robins
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2021-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 026820070X
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This study explores ways in which Dante presents liturgy as enabling humans to encounter God. In Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante’s “Commedia,” Helena Phillips-Robins explores for the first time the ways in which the relationship between humanity and divinity is shaped through the performance of liturgy in the Commedia. The study draws on largely untapped thirteenth-century sources to reconstruct how the songs and prayers performed in the Commedia were experienced and used in late medieval Tuscany. Phillips-Robins shows how in the Commedia Dante refashions religious practices that shaped daily life in the Middle Ages and how Dante presents such practices as transforming and sustaining relationships between humans and the divine. The study focuses on the types of engagement that Dante’s depictions of liturgical performance invite from the reader. Based on historically attentive analysis of liturgical practice and on analysis of the experiential and communal nature of liturgy, Phillips-Robins argues that Dante invites readers themselves to perform the poem’s liturgical songs and, by doing so, to enter into relationship with the divine. Dante calls not only for readers’ interpretative response to the Commedia but also for their performative and spiritual activity. Focusing on Purgatorio and Paradiso, Phillips-Robins investigates the particular ways in which relationships both between humans and between humans and God can unfold through liturgy. Her book includes explorations of liturgy as a means of enacting communal relationships that stretch across time and space; the Christological implications of participating in liturgy; the interplay of the personal and the shared enabled by the language of liturgy; and liturgy as a living out of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. The book will interest students and scholars of Dante studies, medieval Italian literature, and medieval theology.

Dante, Eschatology, and the Christian Tradition

by Lydia Yaitsky Kertz
Dante, Eschatology, and the Christian Tradition
Author: Lydia Yaitsky Kertz
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2024-01-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1501516876
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Dante, Eschatology, and the Christian Tradition honors Ronald B. Herzman, SUNY Geneseo Distinguished Teaching Professor of English. Over more than fifty years Professor Herzman has been a major force in the promotion of medieval studies within academe and public humanities. This volume of essays by his colleagues, students, and friends celebrates Professor Herzman’s outstanding career and reflects the wide range of his scholarly and pedagogical influence, from biblical and early Christian topics to Dante, Langland, and Shakespeare.

Dante's Christian Ethics

by George Corbett
Dante's Christian Ethics
Author: George Corbett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2020-03-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108489419
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This book is a major re-appraisal of the Commedia as originally envisaged by Dante: as a work of ethics. Privileging the ethical, Corbett increases our appreciation of Dante's eschatological innovations and literary genius. Drawing upon a wider range of moral contexts than in previous studies, this book presents an overarching account of the complex ordering and political programme of Dante's afterlife. Balancing close readings with a lucid overview of Dante's Commedia as an ethical and political manifesto, Corbett cogently approaches the poem through its moral structure. The book provides detailed interpretations of three particularly significant sins - pride, sloth, and avarice - and the three terraces of Purgatory devoted to them. While scholars register Dante's explicit confession of pride, the volume uncovers Dante's implicit confession of sloth and prodigality (the opposing subvice of avarice) through Statius, his moral cypher.

The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri

by Robert M. Durling
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri
Author: Robert M. Durling
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 886
Release: 2010-10-07
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0199752699
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Robert Durling's spirited new prose translation of the Paradiso completes his masterful rendering of the Divine Comedy. Durling's earlier translations of the Inferno and the Purgatorio garnered high praise, and with this superb version of the Paradiso readers can now traverse the entirety of Dante's epic poem of spiritual ascent with the guidance of one of the greatest living Italian-to-English translators. Reunited with his beloved Beatrice in the Purgatorio, in the Paradiso the poet-narrator journeys with her through the heavenly spheres and comes to know "the state of blessed souls after death." As with the previous volumes, the original Italian and its English translation appear on facing pages. Readers will be drawn to Durling's precise and vivid prose, which captures Dante's extraordinary range of expression--from the high style of divine revelation to colloquial speech, lyrical interludes, and scornful diatribes against corrupt clergy. This edition boasts several unique features. Durling's introduction explores the chief interpretive issues surrounding the Paradiso, including the nature of its allegories, the status in the poem of Dante's human body, and his relation to the mystical tradition. The notes at the end of each canto provide detailed commentary on historical, theological, and literary allusions, and unravel the obscurity and difficulties of Dante's ambitious style . An unusual feature is the inclusion of the text, translation, and commentary on one of Dante's chief models, the famous cosmological poem by Boethius that ends the third book of his Consolation of Philosophy. A substantial section of Additional Notes discusses myths, symbols, and themes that figure in all three cantiche of Dante's masterpiece. Finally, the volume includes a set of indexes that is unique in American editions, including Proper Names Discussed in the Notes (with thorough subheadings concerning related themes), Passages Cited in the Notes, and Words Discussed in the Notes, as well as an Index of Proper Names in the text and translation. Like the previous volumes, this final volume includes a rich series of illustrations by Robert Turner.

Dante's Persons

by Heather Webb
Dante's Persons
Author: Heather Webb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2016-05-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191081876
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Dante's Persons explores the concept of personhood as it appears in Dante's Commedia and seeks out the constituent ethical modes that the poem presents as necessary for attaining a fullness of persona. The study suggests that Dante presents a vision of 'transhuman' potentiality in which the human person is, after death, fully integrated into co-presence with other individuals in a network of relations based on mutual recognition and interpersonal attention. The Commedia, Heather Webb argues, aims to depict and to actively construct a transmortal community in which the plenitude of each individual's person is realized in and through recognition of the personhood of other individuals who constitute that community, whether living or dead. Webb focuses on the strategies the Commedia employs to call us to collaborate in the mutual construction of persons. As we engage with the dead that inhabit its pages, we continue to maintain the personhood of those dead. Webb investigates Dante's implicit and explicit appeals to his readers to act in relation to the characters in his otherworlds as if they were persons. Moving through the various encounters of Purgatorio and Paradiso, this study documents the ways in which characters are presented as persone in development or in a state of plenitude through attention to the 'corporeal' modes of smiles, gazes, gestures, and postures. Dante's journey provides a model for the formation and maintenance of a network of personal attachments, attachments that, as constitutive of persona, are not superseded even in the presence of the direct vision of God.

Female Leadership

by Karin Jironet
Female Leadership
Author: Karin Jironet
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2010-10-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1136846786
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This book explores the nature of female leadership and illustrates how women may seek to renew the notion of leadership through psycho-spiritual development, either in groups, retreats or one-to-one sessions.

Feminine Leadership

by Karin Jironet
Feminine Leadership
Author: Karin Jironet
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2019-12-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0429943105
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This revised and updated edition of Feminine Leadership: Personal Development Beyond Polarities illustrates how contemporary leaders may seek to renew the very notion of leadership through their own personal development. In an accessible and engaging style, Karin Jironet demonstrates the process of personal transformation using Dante’s seven sins and virtues, explains the value of psychology and spirituality for leadership roles, and presents a pioneering and refreshed vision of leadership that meets present global demands for social cohesion and sustainability. This revised edition contains updates throughout and presents personal narratives that illustrate the seven virtues of leadership practice in our current socio-political context. This book addresses questions on how leadership is defined, exercised and communicated in contemporary society. Feminine Leadership will be of great interest to all leaders and professionals who wish to familiarize themselves with personal leadership development and learn how Jungian theory has been put into practice in this field.

Dante’s Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion

by G. Stone
Dante’s Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion
Author: G. Stone
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2006-05-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1403983097
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This book explores the Islamic roots of the Western values of tolerance and religious pluralism, and considers Dante from the perspective of the Arab-Islamic philosophical tradition. It examines the relations between Islamic and Western thought, the historical origins of Western values, and the tradition of tolerance in classical Islamic thought.