Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry. Edited by Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne.

Abstract

The latest volume in The William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante Studies emerged from the 2003 eponymously titled conference at Robinson College in Cambridge, where an impassioned discussion on the relationship between theology and poetry took place. The essays presented in Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry focus on the controversial connections between not only theology and poetry, as the title promises, but also meta-critical arguments on theology and language. The title is thus somewhat misleading. While not damaging the book's content, the title is limiting as the collection includes far more than the poetic form in which Dante writes. Instead, the essays broadly present reflective analyses on how poetics, gestures, images, and concepts can assist in talking about the divine, as reflected in Dante's Commedia. Montemaggi's and Treherne's introduction to the book presents the work's main intent by posing important questions on theological language. Essentially, how does one speak about God? Placing Benedetto Croce as the destructive force constructing our modern notions of poetry, Montemaggi and Treherne posit that poetics, in fact, can and should be closely connected with theology. The essays following the introduction tackle this question in numerous ways, legitimately marking the connection between theology and poetry as an important and infinitely expansive inquiry by not providing one sole authoritative answer.