Dante Alighieri: The Poet Who Mapped the Afterlife
BIO 360
M. Muñoz
Ebook
122
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About this ebook
In the spring of 1302, a Florentine politician named Dante Alighieri was sentenced to permanent exile from his native city on charges that were almost certainly fabricated by his political enemies. He was forty years old, stripped of his property and his civic identity, separated from his family, and condemned to wander the courts of northern Italy for the rest of his life. What he did with that ruin is the subject of this book, and the answer is one of the most extraordinary stories in the history of human creativity. During those nineteen years of exile, Dante wrote the Divine Comedy, a poem of one hundred cantos that descends through Hell, climbs the mountain of Purgatory, and ascends through the heavens of Paradise to a vision of God. It is the greatest poem of the Middle Ages and one of the greatest works in any language. It placed real, named contemporaries — including a living pope — in Hell while its author was still alive. It mapped the entire moral universe of medieval Christianity with the precision of an architect and the emotional intensity of a man who has lost everything and decided to explain why. Dante Alighieri. The Poet Who Mapped the Afterlife is the story of this man and this poem: the turbulent city of medieval Florence that formed him, the political catastrophe that exiled him, the woman named Beatrice who became his theological obsession, the philosophical framework he spent a lifetime assembling, and the three canticles of the Comedy itself — the Inferno with its unforgettable gallery of the damned, the Purgatorio with its atmosphere of painful hope, the Paradiso with its blinding vision of divine love. This is a book for readers who want to understand why a fourteenth-century Italian exile still speaks to us, why his questions are still our questions, and why the love that moves the sun and the other stars has not yet finished moving us.
In the spring of 1302, a Florentine politician named Dante Alighieri was sentenced to permanent exile from his native city on charges that were almost certainly fabricated by his political enemies. He was forty years old, stripped of his property and his civic identity, separated from his family,...
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