Dante A Brief History

InDante: A Brief History, Peter S. Hawkins brings the great Italian writer Dante Alighieri to life. Drawing on over 30 years' experience of teaching and writing about Dante, he introduces newcomers to the poet and his masterpiece, the Commedia.Hawkins starts by offering a brief account of the poet's life and works that demonstrates the importance of Dante's personal story to his writing, and by outlining the story of the Commedia. He then goes on to consider the prominence Dante gives to eros as part of spiritual life, and to probe his idiosyncratic interpretation of Christian theology. Finally, he traces how, over the centuries, Dante has been portrayed variously as a lover, a statesman, a Neo-Platonist, a proto-Protestant Reformer, a Romantic visionary, a Byronic hero, a Pre-Raphaelite, the father of his country, a theologian in verse, and "altissimo poeta," the consummate poet.

Peter S. Hawkins is Professor of Religion at Boston University, where he directs the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts. His publications include Dante’s Testaments: Essays on Scriptural Imagination (1999), The Poets’ Dante: Twentieth-Century Reflections (edited with Rachel Jacoff, 2000), and The Language of Grace (2005).