The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2010

  $8.33

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $4.39

  A new blank verse translation of Dante's epic, complete with an authoritative Introduction, diagrams, maps, and notes.

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $8.09

  Translated by H. F. Cary With an introduction by Claire Honess.

  Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the most important and innovative figures of the European Middle Ages. Writing his Comedy (the epithet Divine was added by later admirers) in exile from his native Florence, he aimed to address a world gone astray both morally and politically. At the same time, he sought to push back the restrictive rules which traditionally governed writing in the Italian vernacular, to produce a radically new and all-encompassing work.

  The Comedy tells of the journey of a character who is at one and the same time both Dante himself and Everyman through the three realms of the Christian afterlife: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. He presents a vision of the afterlife which is strikingly original in its conception, with a complex architecture and a coherent structure. On this journey Dante's protagonist - and his reader - meet characters who are variously noble, grotesque, beguiling, fearful, ridiculous, admirable, horrific and tender, and through them he is shown the consequences of sin, repentance and virtue, as he learns to avoid Hell and, through cleansing in Purgatory, to taste the joys of Heaven.

• New

  Hardcover
  1995

  $20.12

  This edition prints all three parts of Dante's great poem about the journey of the soul - Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso - in the recent English translation by Allen Mandelbaum, with an introduction and explanatory notes on each canto by the noted Dante scholar, Peter Armour. This is the only reasonably priced hardback edition of one of the world's greatest masterworks and should prove to be the most accessible for students and general readers alike. It includes Botticelli's glorious and relatively unknown illustrations of The Divine Comedy, drawn in the 1480s.