Dante’s Volume from Alpha to Omega

Dante’s Volume from Alpha to Omega brings together essays written by internationally recognized scholars to explore the poet’s encyclopedic impulse in light of our own frenzied information age. This comprehensive collection of essays, coedited by Carol Chiodo and Christiana Purdy Moudarres, examines how Dante’s spiritual quest is powered by an encyclopedic one, which has for more than seven centuries drawn a readership as diverse as the knowledge his work contains. The essays investigate both the intellectual and spiritual pleasures that Dante’s Commedia affords, underscoring how, through the sheer breadth of its knowledge, the poem demands collective and collaborative inquiry. Rather than isolating the poetic or theological strands of the Commedia, the book acts as a bridge across disciplines, braiding together the well-worn strands of poetry and theology with those of philosophy, the sciences, and the arts. The wide range of entries within Dante’s poetic summa yield multiple opportunities to reflect on their points of intersection, and the urgency of the convergence of the poem’s aesthetic, intellectual, and affective aims.

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations, Editions, and Translations
Introduction - by Carol Chiodo and Christiana Purdy Moudarres
Part One: Theology
Dante’s Orthodoxy and the Authority of Knowledge- by Jennifer Helm
Cathedrals of Light: An Overview of Dante’s Commedia in the Shadow of Bonaventure’s Thought - by Filipa Afonso
The Rain of Hope: Theology and Exile in Paradiso 25 - by Maria Clara Iglesias Rondina
Dreams of Prophets, Dreams of Poets - by Giulia Cardillo
Body-less Vision: An Examination of the Incarnational Theology of Paradiso 31–33 - by Junius Johnson
Part Two: Philosophy
Dante’s Humanistic Ontology: Notes for a Reading of the Dialectic Hylomorphism of the Commedia - by Humberto Ballesteros
Remembering the Convivio: Dante and the Art of Memory - by Eleonora Buonocore
“Eternal Hate Created Me As Well”: In Search of Hate in Dante’s Commedia - by Elizabeth Coggeshall
Part Three: Sciences
Ugolino and the Practice of Divination through Dreams - by Ambrogio Camozzi
Hitting the Mark: Projectile Motion and the “segno lieto” in Dante’s Commedia - by Carol Chiodo
The sphaera infinita in Dante’s Paradiso: Between the Suspension of the “geomètra” and Modern Physics - by Anna Bagorda
Legends of the Fall: Genetics and Corruption in Inferno 27 - by Christiana Purdy Moudarres
Part Four: Arts
The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll show the glory of the (Heavenly) King: Medieval Spectacle in Dante’s Purgatorio - by Loren Eadie
“Non ciascun segno/è buono, ancor che buona sia la cera”: Dante’s Poetic Conversion and the Metapoetics of Purgatorio - by Siobhan Quinlan
“Dare a Molti”: The Trecento Commentaries on Inferno 26 - by Rosa Affatato
Music and Political History (Paradiso 15–17) - by Giuseppe Mazzotta
Bibliography
Index of Names
Notes on the Contributors

Christiana Purdy Moudarres is assistant professor of Italian studies at Yale University. She is a contributing editor of Table Talk: Perspectives on Food in Medieval Italian Literature and coeditor, with Andrea Moudarres, of New Worlds and the Italian Renaissance: Contributions to the History of European Intellectual Culture. Carol Chiodo is the inaugural librarian for collections and digital scholarship at Harvard University Library.

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Dante’s Volume from Alpha to Omega