Dante's Christian Ethics: Purgatory and Its Moral Contexts

This book is a major re-appraisal of the Commedia as originally envisaged by Dante: as a work of ethics. Privileging the ethical, Corbett increases our appreciation of Dante's eschatological innovations and literary genius. Drawing upon a wider range of moral contexts than in previous studies, this book presents an overarching account of the complex ordering and political programme of Dante's afterlife. Balancing close readings with a lucid overview of Dante's Commedia as an ethical and political manifesto, Corbett cogently approaches the poem through its moral structure. The book provides detailed interpretations of three particularly significant vices - pride, sloth, and avarice - and the three terraces of Purgatory devoted to them. While scholars register Dante's explicit confession of pride, the volume uncovers Dante's implicit confession of sloth and prodigality (the opposing subvice of avarice) through Statius, his moral cypher.

Author: George Corbett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 03/12/2020
Pages: 246
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.40w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781108489416

Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2020

About the Author
Corbett, George: - George Corbett is Senior Lecturer in Theology and the Arts, School of Divinity, University of St Andrews, Scotland. Prior to this, he was Junior Research Fellow of Trinity College, and Affiliated Lecturer in Italian, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Dante and Epicurus: A Dualistic Vision of Secular and Spiritual Fulfilment (2013), editor of Annunciations: Sacred Music for the Twenty-First Century (2019), and co-editor, with Heather Webb, of Vertical Readings in Dante's Comedy, Volume 1-3 (2015-17), a major reappraisal of the poem in three volumes. He received a bronze medal from the Società Dantesca Italiana in Florence on the 750th anniversary of Dante's birth in 2015.