Dante in Love: A Biography

Front Cover
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Oct 25, 2011 - Biography & Autobiography - 400 pages

For William Butler Yeats, Dante Alighieri was "the chief imagination of Christendom." For T. S. Eliot, he was of supreme importance, both as poet and philosopher. Coleridge championed his introduction to an English readership. Tennyson based his poem "Ulysses" on lines from the Inferno. Byron chastised an "Ungrateful Florence" for exiling Dante. The Divine Comedy resonates across five hundred years of our literary canon.

In Dante in Love, A. N. Wilson presents a glittering study of an artist and his world, arguing that without an understanding of medieval Florence, it is impossible to grasp the meaning of Dante's great poem. He explains how the Italian states were at that time locked into violent feuds, mirrored in the ferocious competition between the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy. He shows how Dante's preoccupations with classical mythology, numerology, and the great Christian philosophers inform every line of the Comedy.

Dante in Love also explores the enigma of the man who never wrote about the mother of his children, yet immortalized the mysterious Beatrice whom he barely knew. With a biographer's eye for detail and a novelist's comprehension of the creative process, A. N. Wilson paints a masterful portrait of Dante Alighieri and unlocks one of the seminal works of literature for a new generation of readers.

 

Contents

I WHY THIS BOOK HAS BEEN WRITTEN
1
II ROME
14
III DANTES FLORENCE 126074
38
IV GEMMA DONATI AND BEATRICE PORTINARI
53
V DANTES EDUCATION
67
VI A NEW CONSTITUTION FOR FLORENCE AND THE SICILIAN VESPERS
73
VII LATE TEENS THE DREAM
80
VIII A POETS APPRENTICESHIP
104
XIV THE COMMON TONGUE
218
XV MEDIEVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY
231
XVI DANTE IN LOVE WITH A WOMAN IN CASENTINO THE ORIGINS OF THE COMEDY
243
XVII CROWN IMPERIAL 131013
265
XVIII DANTE IN LOVE AGAIN WITH BEATRICE
281
XIX RAVENNA AND VENICE
291
XX IN PARADISUM
300
XXI DANTES AFTERLIFE
317

IX THE WARRIOR WHO FOUGHT AT CAMPALDINO
118
X DEATH OF BEATRICE
129
XI THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY
136
XII THE DARK WOOD
167
XIII DANTE AND THE PAINTED WORD GIOTTO AT PADUA
192
NOTES
345
BIBLIOGRAPHY
358
INDEX
373
Copyright

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About the author (2011)

A. N. Wilson is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist. He is the author of The Elizabethans, Our Times, and After the Victorians, among others. He lives in North London.

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