Dante's Christian ethics : Purgatory and its moral contexts
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Dante's Christian ethics : Purgatory and its moral contexts
(Cambridge studies in medieval literature, 110)
Cambridge University Press, 2020
- : hardback
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Note
Bibliography: p. 215-228
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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 vices - 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.
Table of Contents
- Part I. Ethical and Political Manifesto: 1. Dante's ethical agenda: vital nourishment
- 2. Dante's political polemic: church and empire
- Part II. Reframing Dante's Christian Ethics: 3. Dante's theological purgatory: earthly happiness and eternal beatitude
- 4. Two traditions of Christian ethics: Aquinas and Peraldus
- Part III. Penance and Dante's Purgatory: 5. The terrace of pride, and the poet as preacher
- 6. The terrace of sloth, and the sin of scholars
- 7. The terrace of avarice, and love of children.
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