DESCRIPTION:

This doctoral seminar, open to a very limited number of master's level students by special permission, will read Dante's Divine Comedy and explore its relation to fourteenth and fifteenth century art and theology. Student preparation and discussion will focus critical attention on the themes and characteristics of Dante's work as an expression of the medieval figural imagination and its consequent understanding of theology.

The Divine Comedy is arguably the most important expression of the medieval worldview and an important influence on subsequent art and even theology. Its influence and importance continues to this day not only in the Catholic tradition, but, in the current aesthetic renaissance, in the Protestant world as well. The Comedy stands as a monument of integration between deep theological truth and the believer's life and the larger movement of history.

The seminar will meet weekly for three-hour sessions. Each week students will read sections of the Comedy. After discussion of that section students (a doctoral student paired with a master's level student) will consider a text from that section of the Comedy in its relation to some theological theme or work (or works) of visual art.

Dante Alighieri. The Inferno; Purgatorio; Paradiso. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. Knopf, 1995.

Hawkins, Peter S. Dante's Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination. Stanford University Press, 1999.

Jacoff, Rachel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Dante. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Auerbach, Eric. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton University Press, 1953.

Barolini, Teodolinda and H. Wayne Storey. Dante for the New Millennium. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003.

Cook, W. and R. Herzman. The Medieval World View: An Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2003.

Lewis, R. W. B. Dante. Lipper/Viking, 2000.

Reiss, Jonathan B. The Renaissance Anti-Christ: Luca Signorelli's Orvieto Frescoes. Princeton University Press, 1995.

Turner, Victor and Edith Turner. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives. Columbia University Press, 1978.

In addition to reading the Comedy and taking part in the weekly discussions, students will be required to write a research paper on a portion of the Comedy in relation to a theme in medieval art or theology. The length of master's level students' papers will be appropriately adjusted from that required of doctoral students.

For master's level students: written permission of the professor.