Dante's Enigmas

Medieval Scholasticism and Beyond

Richard Kay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780860789840
• eBook ISBN: 9781040233566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Dante's Comedy is a puzzling poem because the author wanted to lead his readers to understanding by engaging their curiosity. While many obscure matters are clarified in the course of the poem itself, others have remained enigmas that have fascinated Dantists for centuries. Over the last thirty-five years, Richard Kay has proposed original solutions to many of these puzzles; these are collected in the present volume. Historical context frames Kay's readings, which relate the poem to such standard sources as the Bible, Aristotle, Aquinas, and the Latin classics, but he also goes beyond these Scholastic sources to exploit Dante's use of less familiar aspects of Latin clerical culture, including physiognomy, Vitruvian proportions, and optics, and most especially astrology. Kay explores new ways to read the Comedy. For instance, he argues that Dante has embedded references to his authorities in a continuous series of acrostics formed by the initial letters of each tercet. Again, he shows how Dante returns to the theme of each infernal canto and develops it in the parallel cantos of Purgatorio and Paradiso. Particularly worthy of note are four essays on the poem's finale in the Empyrean.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• I Rucco di Cambio de' Mozzi in France and England Studi Danteschi 47. Florence, 1970
• II The sin(s) of Brunetto Latini Dante Studies 112. Albany, 1994
• III The Pope's wife: allegory as allegation in Inferno 19.106-111 Studies in Medieval Culture 12. Kalamazoo, 1978
• IV Dante's double damnation of Manto Res Publica Litterarum 1, Lawrence, 1978
• V The spare ribs of Dante's Michael Scot Dante Studies 103. Albany, 1985
• VI Two pairs of tricks: Ulysses and Guido in Dante's Inferno XXVI-XXVII Quaderni d'Italianistica 1. Ottawa, 1980
• VII Vitruvius and Dante's giants Dante Studies 120. New York, 2002
• VIII Dante's razor and Gratian's D.XV Dante Studies 97. Albany, 1979
• IX Dante's prophecy of peripety (Par. 27.142-148): an astrological fortuna Last Things: Apocalypse, Judgment and Millenium in the Middle Ages, ed. Susan J. Ridyard (= Sewanee Medieval Studies 12). Sewanee: University of the South Press, 2002
• X Unwintering January (Dante, Paradiso 27.142-143) MLN [Modern Language Notes] 118. Baltimore, 2003
• XI Dante's Empyrean and the Eye of God Speculum 78. Cambridge, Mass., 2003
• XII Vitruvius and Dante's Imago dei Word & Image 21. Abingdon, Eng., 2005, pp. 252-260
• XIII Dante in ecstasy: Paradiso 33 and Bernard of Clairvaux Mediaeval Studies 66. Toronto, 2004
• XIV Flash or effulgence? Mental illumination in Dante's Paradiso 33.141 Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy duQuesnay Adams, ed. Stephanie Hayes-Healy, vol. 2. New York: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2005
• XV Parallel cantos in Dante's Commedia Res Publica Litterarum 15/1. Fano, 1992
• XVI Dante's acrostic allegations: Inferno XI—XII L'Alighieri 21/2. Rome, 1980
• XVII Dante's acrostic allegations: Inferno XI Res Publica Litterarum 10. Lawrence, 1987
• XVIII Dante's acrostic allegations: Inferno XII Res Publica Litterarum 13. Fano, 1990
• XIX An acrostic allegation in Dante's Vita nuova In Iure Veritas: Studies in Canon Law in Memory of Schafer Williams, ed. Steven B. Bowman and Blanche E. Cody. Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati, 1991
• XX II Giorno della nascita di Dante e la dipartita di Beatrice Studi Americani su Dante, ed. Gian Carlo Alessio and Robert Hollander. Milan: Franco Angeli, 1989
• General Index
• Index of Citations to Dante's Works