Search

This article introduces one of the forgotten figures of religious and literary studies: the Italian scholar, philosopher, metaphysician, poet and writer Silvano Panunzio (1918–2010). His contribution has so far been relegated to the margins of academic debate, and, currently, there are no academic studies on his work, in which mysticism plays a pivotal role. Panunzio believed that the transcendental and mystical dimension is fundamental for fully understanding the social, cultural, historical and political events of humanity. Another relevant aspect of his work is the importance he gave to literature and its relationship with mysticism, as in the case of Dante's Divine Comedy or other European and Eastern writers and poets, such as Goethe, Shakespeare, Ibn Arabi and Dostoevsky. Significantly, Panunzio saved from oblivion the work of a forgotten man of letters of the nineteenth century, Gabriele Rossetti (1783–1854), who proposed the first symbolic and esoteric interpretation of Dante's literary production and of European medieval love literature. Raising awareness of the intellectual amnesia around the figure of Silvano Panunzio may be a useful contribution to future research, both in the field of religious and literary studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The medieval epic poem, The Divine Comedy, and Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy's prestige drama, Westworld, have more in common than at first meets the eye. Both represent hellish and purgatorial geographies, both physical and psychological. And both share the view that what is regularly considered "perfect liberty", or the liberty to indulge in any and every desire one wishes to with impunity, is in fact a form of slavery, as argued by Aristotle. Both the denizens in Dante's Inferno and the guests in Westworld's park, therefore, are ensnared by their own desires. This article will consider the structure of Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy and Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy's hit HBO show Westworld, which I will argue takes parts of its structure consciously from Dante's The Divine Comedy. And though at the outset, the two works of art appear dissimilar, the theologically and philosophically infused medieval Catholic-Italian poetry of Dante and the sensuous, nihilistic, and provocative story-telling of Jonathan Nolan's recent work on the generation and expression of consciousness, ultimately what they share is similarity in structure and an agreement on the connection between activity, suffering, madness, perfection, consciousness, and freedom of the will from sin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to conduct a rhythmic and syntactic study of the third rhyme as a metre for medieval vernacular translations. Since scientifically reliable and specific tools for the rhythmic and syntactic analysis of the tercets are already available for Dante’s Commedia, the verses of Purg., XI, 1-24, in which the proud souls recite a vernacular version of the Pater noster from Matt. VI, 9-13, has been chosen as the starting point of this essay. After this preliminary section and using the same method, the study focuses on how the third rhyme works in a sample of passages from the vernacular version of Boethius’ Consolatio philosophiae, composed by Alberto della Piagentina in the first half of the 14th century. Thanks to this privileged point of view, the comparison between the two works opens up a new perspective to the stylistic study of the third rhyme, allowing the subtle differences that characterise the style of the two different authors to emerge and making possible a better understanding of how the metre works.

In much extant scholarship, Dante is either misused as the prophet of the modern Italian nation-state or dismissed as a naive imperialist. This paper steers clear of both these characterizations and gives serious consideration to Dante’s own understanding of nationhood. I examine the construction of language and national community in De vulgari eloquentia and then place Dante’s idea of the nation in the context of his argument for world government in Monarchia. Grappling with the received view that for Dante, as for Aristotle, language is inherently political, the paper suggests that Dante’s nation is first and foremost a kind of psychological bond arising from the experience and use of common language; it is not embodied in political-juridical institutions, nor is it a suitable sphere for human self-realization through civic discourse and participation. The recovery of Dante’s ‘non-political’ understanding of the nation cautions against a blanket dismissal of premodern ideas of the nation and offers a more nuanced perspective on language, national identity, and the future of nation-states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay focuses on Dante's divisio scientiae presented in the second book of his Convivio. As a first step, it offers a fresh reading of Dante's description of knowledge and the cosmos, emphasizing its deeply visual nature. The article then presents an overview of the Medieval tradition of the divisio scientiae, culminating with divisions that are geographically and chronologically close to Dante's Florence. In relation to Brunetto Latini's Rettorica and Tresor, new evidence is provided to elucidate his peculiar division of logic. Ultimately, Dante's divisio and its objectives are reassessed in light of their historical background, underscoring their cosmological and totalizing scope. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the findings consider cognitive practices, such as diagrams, and examine a wide array of sources within their historical and institutional context, highlighting their transmission and dissemination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study evaluated the velocity‐selective (VS) MRA with different VS labeling modules, including double refocused hyperbolic tangent, eight‐segment B1‐insensitive rotation, delay alternating with nutation for tailored excitation, Fourier transform–based VS saturation, and Fourier transform–based inversion. Methods: These five VS labeling modules were evaluated first through Bloch simulations, and then using VSMRA directly on various cerebral arteries of healthy subjects. The relative signal ratios from arterial ROIs and surrounding tissues as well as relative arteria‐tissue contrast ratios of different methods were compared. Results: Double refocused hyperbolic tangent and eight‐segment B1‐insensitive rotation showed very similar labeling effects. Delay alternating with nutation for tailored excitation yielded high arterial signal but with residual tissue signal due to the spatial banding effect. Fourier transform–based VS saturation with half the time of other techniques serves as an efficient nonsubtractive VSMRA method, but the remaining tissue signal still obscured some small distal arteries that were delineated by other subtraction‐based VSMRA, allowing more complete cancelation of static tissue. Fourier transform–based inversion produced the highest arterial signal in VSMRA with minimal tissue background. Conclusion: This is the first study that angiographically compared five different VS labeling modules. Their labeling characteristics on arteries and tissue and implications for VSMRA and VS arterial spin labeling are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Múltiples espacios circulares aparecen en el itinerario de la Commedia, desde los inmensos giros y la música de las esferas celestiales hasta las pequeñas ruedas de dos relojes mecánicos. En el primer reloj (Par. X 139-148) reaparecen las relaciones entre ruedas y música en un mecanismo provisto de sonería horaria o de despertador, que se mueve y suena como una rueda celestial, "in tempra". En la época de Dante los relojes mecánicos ya eran artefactos conocidos y las fuentes más antiguas suelen destacar la capacidad de producir regularmente sonidos musicales. En el segundo reloj (Par. XXIV 10-18) las ruedas que se asimilan con rondas de almas de santos giran acordes con una función precisa. El movimiento de la sonería horaria es el que se adapta mejor a la descripción de las ruedas del segundo reloj. Los primeros relojes mecánicos respondieron históricamente a la distinción entre las horas canónicas y las del trabajo urbano, pero también fueron considerados instrumentos con valor simbólico y solo posteriormente modelos mecánicos del universo. Dante es uno de los primeros en presentar los relojes como artefactos que imitan con ruedas mecánicas, movimientos y sonidos de las esferas celestiales, como lo indica la repetición de la expresión "in tempra".

Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a Romantic vision of evil energy that reaches to the heavens, a geographical representation of capacity and scope and perpetual cosmic change. On the other hand, Lewis's vision of hell in The Great Divorce is that of a land without substance: a conurbation of addiction to mental maladies, an endless mental substance abuse, an emptying of presence, and a banal stasis to the journey of the soul. Many of Lewis's sources and inspirations for The Great Divorce, similarly, portray hell as a land of paradoxical 'seeming-largeness', while having ontological smallness. Throughout Lewis' narrative, one gets an increasing sense of the importance of understanding place correctly, as a matter of eternal consequence. Lewis often returns to the idea that places are important for the ways that they can convey glimpses of heaven, by displaying their ebullience of life, or spiritual presence, dramatized through the classical and medieval idea of the genius loci--the 'spirit of a place'--showing how the divine presence can fill landscapes, but is emptied from others. Additional Keywords Lewis, C. S.; Blake, William; Williams, Charles; Macdonald, George; The Great Divorce; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Descent into Hell; hell; heaven; geography; symbolism; metaphor; landscape; genius loci; Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce--Moral and religious aspects; Williams, Charles. Descent Into Hell; Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce--Characters--George MacDonald; Good and evil in C.S. Lewis's works; Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Hell in fantasy literature; Heaven in fantasy literature; Landscape in fantasy literature; Genius loci in fantasy literature, Whether this ['outer darkness'] means (horror of horror) being left to purely mental existence, left with nothing at all but one's own envy, prurience, resentment, loneliness & self conceit, or [...]

The article examines the images of three landowners — Tentetnikov from the second volume of “Dead Souls” by N. V. Gogol, Oblomov from the novel of the same name by I. A. Goncharov, and Lavretsky from “The Noble Nest” by I. S. Turgenev — which stand out among the literary representatives of this social group have a common crucial property — laziness. Traditionally, these characters are usually brought together based on belonging to the “superfluous person” type, but this does not shed light on the reasons for their similarities. The article proposes to look for its foundations in a general literary source, which is the “Divine Comedy” and, in particular, in the image of the lazy Belacqua from the second cantica. In this regard, the mediation of S. P. Shevyrev, whose interpretation of Dante influenced Gogol and Goncharov, is significant. In the works of writers, there is an interpretation of spiritually criminal lazy apathy. Belacqua is too lazy to save himself. The responsibility for awakening lies upon the person himself — this Dantean idea appeared close to both Gogol and Goncharov. In the case of Lavretsky, we are already dealing with Goncharov’s mediation in the adaptation of Dante’s ideas.

In 1792, in Rome, the Dutch collector Thomas Hope commissioned the first exclusively illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy to the English artist John Flaxman. The first publication, limited and for private circulation, was distributed by the engraver Tommaso Piroli’s workshop in July 1793, and Hope, holder of the rights, forbade the printing of further copies. However, in 1802, Piroli repurposed the engravings from Flaxman’s illustrations for a new edition which was distributed throughout Europe, immensly successful as evidenced by the editions of the Comedy in the first 19th century in which they were included. The collaboration between Flaxman and Piroli, their relationship with Hope and the history of this illustrated Comedia, born from a rigorous neoclassical theory on the relationship between poetry and art, establish themselves as a living testimony of Dante’s reception between the 18th and 19th centuries through a study of the dynamics in book market.

Dante's articulate and sometimes critical attitude towards the academic community is evident in several of his works, specifically in Paradiso. To understand the actual extent of this 'anti-academic' attitude, this study considers the magistri of the higher schools and the holders of university chairs to observe their position regarding the Commedia. The study aims to ascertain whether the poem was regarded as a teaching text in the 14th and 15th centuries, and particularly whether it was referred to in the textual hermeneutics practiced in lectio. The analysis examined the utilization of the Commedia within schools and universities as an authoritative text in the commentary on the canon of the auctores maiores. The inclusion of Dante's glosses in various manuscripts recalled to provide erudite data, lexical interpretations, exempla, and sententiae, reflects the progressive integration of the poem within the academic community. This integration signifies its acknowledgment among the auctores employed in exegetical practices, a phenomenon observed across various geographical regions as evidenced by the analyzed manuscripts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The constitutional monarchy of present-day Britain hardly seems the same sort of institution as fourteenth-century feudal kingdoms, but Dante’s Monarchia (c. 1313) and Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution (1872) share fundamental assumptions about what the purpose and strengths of monarchy are. In the Monarchia, Dante lays out the essential attributes of monarchy that endure even today: authority, impartiality, and unity. Dante values and promotes monarchy as final arbiter of conflicts, sole just judge without cupidity, and unifying will. More than 550 years later, Bagehot, despite his distrust concerning the Crown’s actual effectiveness, conceives of monarchy in surprisingly similar terms. The monarch is ‘the regulating wheel of our Constitution’, an authority outside and above partisan politics, and the ‘dignified’, ‘intelligible’, unifying element of government. In both cases, the monarch functions as the government’s source of impartial, unifying authority – whether monarch or Parliament ultimately wields that authority. The broad outlines of monarchy are surprisingly similar for both writers, suggesting a basic continuity in the conceptualization of monarchy from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century (and beyond) and an abiding store of reserve symbolism within the monarchic concept that writers, thinkers, and politicians throughout those centuries are able to tap at will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with Innocent III's pontificate, participation in the crusades became increasingly interpreted as imitatio Christi patientis. Innocent III's crusade theology was revived by later pontiffs and became ingrained in the collective imagination through preaching. This article shows how Dante draws on thirteenth-century crusade theology in his depiction of the cross of Mars, with special attention paid to imitatio Christi. Dante's rendering of his inner sacrifice (Par. xiv, 88–93) foreshadows the apparition of the cross and appears to have been influenced by the imagery of the crusader's vow as found in contemporary ecclesiastical documents. In these texts, crusaders are frequently depicted as participating in an inner sacrifice prompted by the fire of caritas that recalls Christ's own sacrifice. Reading Paradisoxiv-xv in light of this context – and with an awareness of the significance of Cacciaguida's placement in the same heaven – allows us to explore Dante's self-representation as a miles Christi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the hermeneutic dispute of the contemporary value of medieval aesthetics within the writing of two giants in the 20th century—Umberto Eco and Hans Urs von Balthasar. I claim that Eco's Joycean adaptation of medieval aesthetics uses religious language to insert a permanent, postmodern aesthetic dismantling of cosmic form. I argue that Balthasar's reading of Dante challenges the limits that Eco frames as inherent within the medieval cosmos, and that Balthasar offers an adaptive medieval aesthetics that rebuts the religious overhaul Eco demands. This debate amplifies the flexibility of aesthetics based on form to attune to contemporary concerns while remaining faithful to the fundamental religious commitments of Christian tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Borges pretende operar una identificación total entre el paradigma poético y las realizaciones artísticas de Dante. A esto obedece la deconstrucción sistemática de la creación dantesca, asimilada a la poética ideal en virtud de la misma conexión con la vida. Trabajando sobre el complejo de obras borgeanas dedicadas al examen de los lineamientos poéticos generales y específicamente dantescos, se mostrará cómo los dos conjuntos representados configuran dominios idénticos, reveladores de bases epistemológicas coincidentes. En el vértice de las especificaciones borgeanas relativas a Dante encontraremos por tanto la tentativa de fundar, basándose en productos decodificables, una verdadera epistemología creativa.

This article introduces one of the forgotten figures of religious and literary studies: the Italian scholar, philosopher, metaphysician, poet and writer Silvano Panunzio (1918–2010). His contribution has so far been relegated to the margins of academic debate, and, currently, there are no academic studies on his work, in which mysticism plays a pivotal role. Panunzio believed that the transcendental and mystical dimension is fundamental for fully understanding the social, cultural, historical and political events of humanity. Another relevant aspect of his work is the importance he gave to literature and its relationship with mysticism, as in the case of Dante’s Divine Comedy or other European and Eastern writers and poets, such as Goethe, Shakespeare, Ibn Arabi and Dostoevsky. Significantly, Panunzio saved from oblivion the work of a forgotten man of letters of the nineteenth century, Gabriele Rossetti (1783–1854), who proposed the first symbolic and esoteric interpretation of Dante’s literary production and of European medieval love literature. Raising awareness of the intellectual amnesia around the figure of Silvano Panunzio may be a useful contribution to future research, both in the field of religious and literary studies.

In Dante's allegorical pilgrimage to hell and back, he travels through three stages of transformation that are illustrated in his paradigmatic example of identity transformation; namely, Dante's Divine Comedy. As a pilgrim, he starts out in a state of 'unease' (or 'sin'). Next, there is a 'solution' to his psychological disarray, which results in the religious experience of joy. William James has persuasively argued that these are the common features of all religious experiences (1901). Dante is in a stage of his life when he can no longer be reached by argument. This state of mind is described, by the Dante translator Dorothy Sayers, as being 'hard hearted.' In this state, no rational arguments about God are convincing; and no amount of talking or reading will be able to shift a hard-hearted person's mind. Dante then goes on an allegorical pilgrimage which transforms him from a hard hearted person with a calloused soul (immune to rational arguments, which might supply reasons in favour of changing his way of life), into a more compassionate person that is open to beauty and positivity. Notably, this remodeling of Dante's belief network does not come about through reasoning and rational argument. Rather, the change is analogous to a shift in a way of perceiving the world that comes about through experiences. Most pilgrims today don't view themselves as sinners anymore (like in Dante's day), but they are, to varying degrees, spiritually alienated; psychologically distressed; dysfunctional; in crisis; or suffering loss of meaning in their lives. Pilgrimage is an experience--of walking in nature; listening to music; immersion inside a cathedral or some other sacred architecture; or being emotionally moved by participation in a shared event--that can shift their mindset. The experiential transformation that is often described by pilgrims involves adjustments in one's entire 'web of belief'--a term used by philosopher Quine to refer to a holistic worldview of interconnected beliefs, attitudes, and commitments. Using ideas from the philosophy of science about belief formation, it will be argued that identity transformation in pilgrims is comparable to a 'scientific revolution'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article establishes a connection between Ian McEwan's Enduring Love and Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. It defends that the narrative journey of Joe Rose, protagonist of McEwan's novel, to recover his idyllic lost love resembles Dante's voyage through Hell and Purgatory led by Virgil to the threshold of Earthly Paradise, where he meets Beatrice. The psychological and metaphorical hell to which Joe is subjected in the wake of a ballooning accident constitutes an ordeal in which, led by Jed Parry's obsessive love, he confronts and purges the trauma in a redemptive arc that brings him closer to a promising yet uncertain paradise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics have often acknowledged Dante's influence on the poetry of Seamus Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. During the conflict in Northern Ireland, Dante's political and linguistic thinking showed Heaney a way of cultural reconciliation between the British and Gaelic traditions. From the early 1970s to the late 1990s, political (dis)harmony, linguistic unity, faith and poetics are some of his major themes, often explored through the reworking of passages from the Commedia. After the end of the Troubles in 1998, Dante's poetry may have taken on a new significance for the Irish author. This article therefore aims to explore Dantean intertextuality in Heaney's first peacetime collection, Electric Light (2001). Through the revival of settings, themes and motifs (particularly in the remake of 'Guido, i' vorrei'), Dante's presence seems to act as an analytical lens that shapes the poetic self, filters his literary experience, and redefines descriptive imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I will highlight how Dante's clear separation between heretics and schismatics is radical compared to contemporary thought and can, therefore, tell us a great deal about his conception of these two sins and about the nature of the characters condemned in Cantos X and XXVIII. In fact, the heresy of disobedience, a political weapon created ad hoc to favor the imposition of the hierocratic model, tended, in the reflection of jurists, to bring together these two sins so well-separated by Dante. The proposal of a new interpretation of these concepts that is more adherent to their historicity, with a specific and radical meaning, can open up interesting reflections on Dante's possible desire to affect this historical process. It also brings new interpretations to questions that still lack a convincing answer, such as the silence on the numerous heretical movements that had characterized the decades preceding the writing of the Commedia, the presence of Dolcino among the schismatics, and the selection of Epicurus as an exemplum of heresy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article places the question of the presence of the Averroist philosopher Siger of Brabant in Dante's Paradiso within the debate concerning Dante's relationship with Averroistic philosophy throughout his works, particularly in the Commedia. The purpose of this research is to initially query the issue of Dante's potential retraction of previously adopted Averroistic positions in the Commedia, and then to examine in greater detail the relationship between the Florentine poet and the Brabantian philosopher. United by the thematic and autobiographical thread of knowledge persecuted by power, embodied in the history of both figures, the proposed viewpoint is that Dante finds a model of intellectual honesty and freedom in Siger's thought, ready to question even the authority of Aristotle, a model that Dante admires, places in Paradise, and upon which he structures his poema sacro. In conclusion, this work suggests a reading of some paradigmatic and antithetical pairs in the Commedia, linked by common principles yet opposite destinies, including Dante himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital humanities are rapidly expanding access to scholarly and literary materials once largely confined to the university. No more: now, with free digital resources, like Giuseppe Mazzotta's lecture series available for free through Open Yale Courses on YouTube, or Teodolinda Barolini's 54-lecture long "The Dante Course", also available for free through her Digital Dante website, academic discussions of difficult masterpieces are available to any person with enough bandwidth to handle it. I, too, made a brief foray into the digital humanities, and prior to turning to academic work, I provided a 42-lecture Dante-in-translation course which itself covered the entirety of Dante's Comedy and sought to offer a less academic, and more accessible series of lectures on Dante than its more academic and more popular predecessors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article centers on two novels by Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi--Requiem: A hallucination and For Isabel: A mandala. It analyzes the polysemic elements that constitute the symbolic construction of both works, supported by the main tenets of Jungian psychology and in particular the notions of coniunctio oppositorum, individuation, and journey of self-discovery. The investigation explores the relationship of Tabucchi's narrative with works by Ferdinando Pessoa and Herman Hesse. Homologies between the author's view of the self, cognition, human reality, and the formal structure of the novels are examined through the Bakhtinian notion of dialogical narrative and through his metaliterary and self-reflexive mode of writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the interconnections between writing on addiction, Dante's Comedy , and theological commitments. The narratives of addicted persons and recovery coaches come into creative play with the literature of Dante and the theological positions of Aquinas. This article explores the strengths and weaknesses of what transformation entails in the harrowing of the hell of the addiction and the hope for resurrection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading ‘The Martyr’s Crown’ as a parody of the Biblical Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, this article presents a previously unrecognised intertextual source to which the title of Brian Nolan’s story alludes: the liturgy of the Roman Catholic mass celebrated on the memorial day of Our Lady of Sorrows. As will be shown, this liturgical source serves as a key for an additional cluster of three interrelated literary echoes in Nolan’s short story. First, ‘The Martyr’s Crown’ is discussed as an ironic rewriting of the Biblical Annunciation story via the Mock-Marian imagery featured in the Paolo and Francesca da Rimini episode of the Divina Commedia – an indecent story or fabliau inserted in Dante’s epic framework. Secondly, Nolan’s tale is examined as a rewriting of the Biblical Annunciation story via Ophelia-related passages from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Thirdly, the story is approached as a rewriting of the ancient tradition of the naughty Milesian tale, as reflected in the ‘Widow of Ephesus’ episode inserted in Petronius’s Satyricon. Within the frame of ‘The Martyr’s Crown,’ the fabliaux- and Milesian tale-inspired mockery of the Biblical Annunciation to the Virgin recurs in the embedded narrative of the widow Mrs Clougherty told by the unreliable narrator Mr Toole. Finally, the article shows how this intertextual cluster is queered in the narrative situation of ‘The Martyr’s Crown.’

Le recenti esposizioni dedicate a Giotto e a Dante offrono la possibilità di fare alcune considerazioni sul fenomeno delle mostre d’arte di ambito medievale. Per Giotto, il punto di partenza non può non essere l’esposizione del 1937 che, messa in risonanza con tutte quelle principali successive, contribuisce alla ricostruzione della stessa vicenda critica giottesca attraverso le differenti tradizioni di studi. Per Dante, il problema è la modalità con cui mettere in rapporto proficuo le vicende biografiche e letterarie con le esigenze espositive; il contributo offre un primo bilancio critico delle diverse proposte italiane in occasione del settimo centenario della sua morte.

Dante Alighieri was well educated in literature, rhetoric, philosophy and theology. His long reading list could not lack the works of the classical authors, especially the Ovid’s one. The wellknown Florentine demonstrated his extensive knowledge many times in his works, particularly in The Banquet. This work was conceived as his summa philosophiae but from his fifteen planned treatises he wrote only four. Among many works quoted by Dante in his treatises there was also the Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The aim of this paper is the analysis of the quotations and mentions on the Ovid’s poetic work from The Banquet and to define their functions in the Dante’s work.

In the Russian literary and philosophical milieu of the Early Twentieth Century, interest in the works of Dante and Dostoevsky acquires a new metaphysical dimension compared to their nineteenth-century reception. References to their works are used by Russian Symbolists as a functional interpretive code in order to solve the philosophical and aesthetic problems of modernism. In this regard, it may be particularly interesting to highlight possible associations between these two authors in the Symbolist thought. This article considers only one of the aspects of the Symbolist reception of Dante and Dostoevsky; namely, it focuses on Dostoevsky’s quotations used to interpret the Commedia in Dmitry Merežkovsky’s book dedicated to Dante (1938), which was published in Italy in 1938, after the poet’s emigration from Soviet Russia. It seems significant that Merežkovsky does not focus on the traditional comparison between Commedia and Memoirs from a House of the Dead, but turns to other works, images and/or concepts. The purpose of this article is to examine how Dostoevskian quotations become for Merežkovsky a functional tool for interpreting Dante’s Inferno, considering his conception of man’s spiritual freedom and the doctrine of apocatastasis.

The essay considers the representation of childhood and adolescence in the work of Dante. While in Convivio the poet discusses the ages of human life but does not address infanzia or puerizia, in his poem the representations of this earlier phase of life are many and varied, presented above all through similes. These representations illustrate the particular attention Dante paid to the mother/child relationship, which allows the reader to form hypotheses about his family environment and relationship with the woman with whom he shared his life in Florence: not Beatrice, but Gemma Donati.

The medieval epic poem, The Divine Comedy, and Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s prestige drama, Westworld, have more in common than at first meets the eye. Both represent hellish and purgatorial geographies, both physical and psychological. And both share the view that what is regularly considered “perfect liberty”, or the liberty to indulge in any and every desire one wishes to with impunity, is in fact a form of slavery, as argued by Aristotle. Both the denizens in Dante’s Inferno and the guests in Westworld’s park, therefore, are ensnared by their own desires. This article will consider the structure of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy and Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s hit HBO show Westworld, which I will argue takes parts of its structure consciously from Dante’s The Divine Comedy. And though at the outset, the two works of art appear dissimilar, the theologically and philosophically infused medieval Catholic-Italian poetry of Dante and the sensuous, nihilistic, and provocative story-telling of Jonathan Nolan’s recent work on the generation and expression of consciousness, ultimately what they share is similarity in structure and an agreement on the connection between activity, suffering, madness, perfection, consciousness, and freedom of the will from sin.

The essay focuses on Dante’s divisio scientiae presented in the second book of his Convivio. As a first step, it offers a fresh reading of Dante’s description of knowledge and the cosmos, emphasizing its deeply visual nature. The article then presents an overview of the Medieval tradition of the divisio scientiae, culminating with divisions that are geographically and chronologically close to Dante’s Florence. In relation to Brunetto Latini’s Rettorica and Tresor, new evidence is provided to elucidate his peculiar division of logic. Ultimately, Dante’s divisio and its objectives are reassessed in light of their historical background, underscoring their cosmological and totalizing scope. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the findings consider cognitive practices, such as diagrams, and examine a wide array of sources within their historical and institutional context, highlighting their transmission and dissemination.

The article presents the novel The Precipice as the final part of the novel trilogy by I. A. Goncharov (by analogy with the canticle “Paradise” in the composition of the “Divine Comedy” by A. Dante). So Raisky appears as the central (not declaratively, but essentially) character of the novel, crowning Goncharov’s ideas of a “serious human figure” and an “idealist character.” The article examines the image of Raisky in its evolutionary development, and designates the vector of his spiritual movement as an experience of falling, repentance and resurrection. The image of the ascetic artist Kirilov clearly manifests Goncharov’s ideas about the purpose of art, about the indecomposable unity of art and religion. It turns out that the spiritual evolution of Raisky — from the “Petersburg” part of the novel to the “Malinovskaya” and to the finale — takes place under the sign of Kirilov’s ideological and aesthetic attitudes, despite the fact that they do not coincide with installations of both Raisky and Goncharov himself. For the first time, the article shows the character of the plot, which is particular for the general meaning of the novel, connected with the spiritual duel of Vera and Mark Volokhov, since all the main meanings of the work, including biographical ones, converge in the figure of Raisky.

This article addresses a forgotten aspect of the history of ideas, namely the fact that one of the most important figures of the twentieth century, Ezra Pound, was influenced by Dantean esotericism and the medieval esoteric doctrine of love proposed in the nineteenth century by Gabriele Rossetti. It aims to show the relations between literature and esotericism, in the wake of a dialogue between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century. The study of this unexplored horizon of research is presented here through the epistolary exchange between Pound and Gabriele Rossetti’s granddaughter, Olivia Rossetti Agresti.

One of the most fascinating, and debated, topics regarding Dante's immortal masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, concerns the date on which he imagines his journey to take place. Almost all commentators have placed it between March and April 1300, based on many apparently reliable historical and symbolic quotations. However, several astronomical references point in a completely different direction, and indicate a date around 25 March 1301. In addition to this, a closer examination of the historical and symbolic indications reveals that they are far from homogeneous: some provide no useful information, several give information congruent with 1301, and only a few are consistent with 1300. This paper also explores the reasons for the apparent contradictions between different references. The strong indication that seems to come from the present work in favour of 25 March 1301 represents an invitation to Dante scholars to reconsider the whole question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the transformation of Dante's image in post-Soviet scholarship. The author shows how Russian philologists Vladimir Bibikhin, Olga Sedakova, and Georgii Chistiakov introduced a new image of Dante to post-Soviet readers in fresh translations of his work, scholarly writings, and lecture courses that revealed previously obscured philosophical and theological dimensions of his texts. The post-Soviet reader came into contact with a more complex image of Dante than previously portrayed in official Soviet literary scholarship: Dante the philosopher, the Christian humanist, the spiritual guide who calls upon individuals to embark upon a difficult but crucial existential journey. The author also shows how the unstable and transitional decade of the 1990s was a time of a particularly active study of Dante's philosophical and poetic anthropology. Dante's main themes (personal salvation, activism, living in tradition) resonated profoundly with intellectuals during the late Soviet and early post-Soviet years, which were marked by a special soteriological attitude and a belief that individuals and society not only can but must change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ep. XIII provides a hermeneutic instrument to test legal validity today in the light of multi-layered phenomena shaping the ecosphere and infosphere. While De Saussure's thrust regarded the one-to-one relation between a word and its meaning, Dantean multi-sensory theory may give more consistent framework to perceive the evolution of reality and its components at the time of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab, 2014). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the translations of Dante's Divina Commedia into Hungarian, focusing on Ádám Nádasdy's translation published in 2016. It mentions that the first Hungarian translations of Dante's work were published in the mid-19th century, with Mihály Babits' version being the most popular. Throughout the 20th century, several other translations were published, but in anthologies or incomplete forms. Nádasdy's translation, in unrhymed iambic pentameter, is presented as the latest and is analyzed in the article. The article also highlights the presence of Dante's works in Hungarian education and the ongoing activities of the Hungarian Dante Society. [Extracted from the article]

Baldassarre Peruzzi's cosmological vault fresco (1510–11) in the Villa Farnesina in Rome, prominently featuring a scene of Perseus and Medusa, showcases a dynamic operation that was often at work in the early modern period between the beholder and an immobile work of art. These types of representational objects participate in the discourse around materiality, not by employing the signifying powers of their constituent materials, but by encouraging thought about their material presence. I explore the process of haptic engagement that the fresco painting urges in its beholders, raising the possibility that the trope of petrification, made popular by Dante and other Italian writers of amorous poems, unlocks the work's layered meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adopts a law and humanities-based methodology to critique the binary distinction between remembering and forgetting that often features in law and policy. Using the right to be forgotten as a case study, the paper argues that such a distinction conceals the many ways that remembering and forgetting are intrinsically connected. In particular, a binary distinction understands forgetting as not remembering. But forgetting can also take the form of enlightened remembering: a deliberate choice to think differently about the past, an attempt to remember it in more positive or constructive ways. Drawing on insights from Dante's Divine Comedy, the paper pursues a normative argument about the value of enlightened remembering and then assesses the implications for legal discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nel 1865 la letterata tedesca Anna Vivanti-Lindau lascia la sua abitazione londinese per compiere un viaggio nel Mediterraneo assieme al marito Anselmo. Tappa fondamentale del tour è Firenze, dove la letterata, grande estimatrice di Dante, si reca con l'intento di assistere alle celebrazioni del seicentenario dantesco. Nel suo resoconto di viaggio A Journey to Crete, Costantinople, Naples and Florence. Three Months Abroad, Vivanti-Lindau rievoca il soggiorno fiorentino, offrendo un report del festival dantesco. Riflettendo la ricezione ottocentesca politico-risorgimentale di Dante, ella individua nell'autore della Commedia il padre e profeta dell'Unità italiana e, insieme, il simbolo di una libertà che andava oltre i confini del territorio italiano. Il presente contributo propone una lettura analitica delle pagine del Journey dedicate al seicentenario, contestualizzandole nel quadro della fortuna ottocentesca di Dante nel periodo in cui si muove Vivanti-Lindau, con particolare attenzione alla ricezione britannica del poeta negli anni a cavallo dell'unificazione italiana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]