Dante and the human body

John C. Barnes & Jennifer Petrie, editors

‘Another detailed analysis that adds a further dimension to this great poet’s work’, Books Ireland (March 2008).

‘This collection is published for the UCD Foundation for Italian Studies and is based on lectures delivered in University College Dublin in 2003 and 2004. They include some penetrating and new insights into Dante’s writing from scholars in Ireland, England, Switzerland and Israel’, T.A.L., Contemporary Review.

'An apparent paradox of Dante’s account of his journey in the afterlife is the ‘corporeality’ of the souls, i.e. the fact that these can suffer physical punishment and react to external conditions such as illness and starvation. The subject matter is one well known to Dante scholars, having been previously discussed in seminal studies by Nardi, Gilson, and Boyde. Yet this volume is a welcome addition since it revitalizes the debate, bringing fresh historical material and theoretical insights presented from a variety of perspectives … the volume greatly benefits from the variety of perspectives, providing at times different interpretations of the same passages (most notably Purgatorio XXV), and offers specialized readers a valuable contribution to a broad and complex topic’, Dario Tessicini, Medium ævum (2008)