In spite of our distance from medieval theology, the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri's (1265-1321) allegorical journey through hell, purgatory and paradise remains one of the essential books of mankind - about suffering bodies and human weakness, and about divine ecstasy
The California Lectura Dantis is the long-awaited companion to the three-volume verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum of Dante's Divine Comedy. Mandelbaum's translation, with facing original text and with illustrations by Barry Moser, has been praised by Robert Fagles as ""exact…
The Venetian courtesan has long captured the imagination as a female symbol of sexual license, elegance, beauty, and unruliness. What then to make of the cortigiana onesta--the honest courtesan who recast virtue as intellectual integrity and offered wit and refinement in return …
