Dante: The Story of His Life - Hardcover

Santagata, Marco

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674504860 ISBN 13: 9780674504868

Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2016

Synopsis

Marco Santagata’s Dante: The Story of His Life illuminates one of the world’s supreme poets from many angles―writer, philosopher, father, courtier, political partisan. Santagata brings together a vast body of Italian scholarship on Dante’s medieval world, untangles a complex web of family and political relationships for English readers, and shows how the composition of the Commedia was influenced by local and regional politics.

Santagata traces Dante’s attempts to establish himself in Florentine society as a man of both letters and action. He raises the intriguing possibility that Dante translated an illness, thought by some to be epilepsy, into an intensely physical phenomenology of love in the Vita Nova. Most importantly, Santagata highlights Dante’s constant need to readjust his political stance―his involvement with the pro-Papacy Guelph faction as well as his network of patrons―in response to unfolding events. Linking these shifts to the changing ethical and political convictions expressed in the Commedia, Santagata reveals the paradoxical achievement of Dante’s masterpiece: a unified, universal poem nonetheless intimately entwined with the day-to-day dealings of its author.

The most striking facet of Dante’s personality was a belief in his unique destiny. In every aspect of his life―his birth under the sign of Gemini, falling in love with Beatrice, banishment from Florence―Dante glimpsed the shadow of his fate. This idea, cultivated by the poet in his youth, grew into the conviction that God had invested him with the prophetic mission of saving humanity.

About this title

About the Author

Marco Santagata is Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Pisa.

Review

Definitely recommended, it will make my best non-fiction of the year list for sure. (Tyler Cowen Marginal Revolution)

To the ranks of the best popular biographies of the great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri...is added Marco Santagata’s Dante... [Santagata] tells it with a fiercely learned calm and energy throughout... As with all first-rate author biographies, the book will propel readers straight back to Dante’s own works, which is right where they should end up in any case. (Steve Donoghue Open Letters Monthly)

Full of useful information and explanations of a very complicated time, well worth reading for its bold claims and wealth of historical evidence, this book constructs a novel, strong reading of Dante as political actor. (Alison Cornish, University of Michigan)

Both specialized readers and the general public will benefit from this account of Dante Alighieri’s life as a man of letters and of political action. A welcome addition to the catalogue of intellectual biographies of Dante available in English. (Simone Marchesi, Princeton University)

A superb intellectual biography of Dante. (Ian Thomson The Tablet)

This sumptuous volume by Marco Santagata...offers the reader a richly documented and often gripping account of the development, peregrinations, and shifting fortunes of the celebrated poet Durante (Dante) Alighieri. (Diana Glenn Australian Book Review)

Santagata does a thorough and highly engaging job of bringing politics and social pressures of 13th-century Florence to the page in this very readable biography that doesn’t scrimp on scholarly research...Even more fascinating is the way the author reveals Dante’s intense interest in political systems, philosophy, and in the makeup of the universe, all shown to be at the very heart of the imposing poetic figure. (Herman Sutter Library Journal (starred review))

Santagata has written a book that any reader interested in Dante will find absorbing, richly informative and very thought-provoking...With their well-known fondness for literary biography, [English readers] will surely be grateful for this bold, vigorous and invigorating account of Dante’s life and times. (Prue Shaw Times Higher Education)

It is lively and a pleasure to read. (Simon West The Australian)

This substantial work incorporates all the most recent Dantean scholarship. There is much to chew upon, since Dante lived at the very center of his city’s political life...Santagata, thoroughly steeped in the politics and genealogies of the period, gives the best account I have ever read of Dante in his historical context...You will never read an account clearer than Santagata’s. Nor will you read a more convincing description of how Dante changed his mind, quite fundamentally, about the political issues which confronted him (Pope vs Emperor) and the deep religious questions which underpin his work...This is a wonderful book. Even if you have not read Dante you will be gripped by its account of one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of literature, and one of the most dramatic periods of European history. If you are a Dantean, it will be your invaluable companion forever. (A. N. Wilson The Spectator)

About this edition

• Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0674504860
• ISBN 13: 9780674504868
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496