Dante, Eros, & Kabbalah / Mark Jay Mirsky.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mirsky, Mark.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. Divina commedia.

Dante Alighieri.

Love in literature.

Cabala in literature.

Physical Description:

xi, 234 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Other Title:

Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah

Place of Publication:

Syracuse, NY : Syracuse University Press, 2003.

Summary:

Did Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy, as a young man in Florence sleep with Beatrice Portinari before and after her marriage? Did the poet travel after her death through Hell to find her again? The clues to this academic detective story, writes Mark Jay Mirsky, lie not only in Dante's earlier poetry, The New Life, or in The Divine Comedy but in the Zohar of Moses de Leon, a Jewish text written some years before and based on Neoplatonic ideas similar to those that inspired Dante.

Purgatorio and Paradiso, the second and third volumes of the Commedia, are inaccessible to most readers unfamiliar with the boldness of Dante's use of the philosophical debate in the Middle Ages. Does Dante's Commedia hint at his hope of intimacy with Beatrice in the Highest Heaven? In this book Mirsky distinctively traces the influence on Dante of Provencal poets, medieval theologians, Dante's personal life, and the sources of his classical education to propose a radical reading of Dante. The text compounds the riddles of dream, poetry, philosophy, and Dante's concealed autobiography in his work. It treats the Commedia in the spirit of its title, as a hopeful and comic vision of the other world.

Contents:

1. Dante in America 1

2. Heavenly Intercourse 23

3. Seduced by Beatrice? 29

4. Bewildered 59

5. Ocean 77

6. Dante and King David 97

7. Nude in Paradise 109

8. A Mother's Milk 121

9. Holy Number 141

10. Messiah on Earth 165

11. Dante in Exile 189

12. Rimbomba 199.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0815630271

OCLC:

52002076