Dante's Christian Ethics: Purgatory and Its Moral Contexts

by George Corbett

Overview

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. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781108489416
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/12/2020
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature , #110
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

George Corbett is Senior Lecturer in Theology and the Arts, School of Divinity, University of St Andrews, Scotland. Prior to this, he was Junior Research Fellow of Trinity College, and Affiliated Lecturer in Italian, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Dante and Epicurus: A Dualistic Vision of Secular and Spiritual Fulfilment (2013), editor of Annunciations: Sacred Music for the Twenty-First Century (2019), and co-editor, with Heather Webb, of Vertical Readings in Dante's Comedy, Volume 1-3 (2015–17), a major reappraisal of the poem in three volumes. He received a bronze medal from the Società Dantesca Italiana in Florence on the 750th anniversary of Dante's birth in 2015.

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.

Editorial Reviews

‘It is perhaps a mark of how far removed from original contexts literary critics have wandered that this book needed to be written. But one should be grateful that Corbett (Univ. of St Andrews, Scotland) did write it. The refreshing aim of this remembering of Dante's Commedia is to remind the reader that the spiritual, moral, and ethical concerns of medieval literature were real and related directly to a robust, coherent Christian tradition available to readers in the day and to today's readers.’ D. Pesta, Choice

From the Publisher