Paradiso 10. 7-25 : Lift up then, Reader, to the lofty wheels With me thy vision straight unto that part Where the one motion on th...

[Update: The last few paragraphs have been revised in faint hopes of producing a bit more clarity.] Let's look at  Paradiso 9 with re...

Mary Beard author of SPQR , a recent history of Rome, talks about the relation of the contemporary mind to turbulence in the Roman world. S...

Dante was not going to leave the sphere of Venus without some dalliance with love stories from the ancient world and, in a different way, f...

A reasonable question to ask of Paradiso 8 is why Charles Martel is the focus of the first encounter after hearing Beatrice's account ...

At the Yale University Art Gallery hang wall paintings from one of the world’s oldest churches. Buried by the middle of the third century,...

A good deal of the story Beatrice tells in Paradiso 7 plays off of the question of direct versus indirect similarity, or proximity, or ca...

Paradiso 7 might present some interpretive difficulties, but there can be no argument that its opening tercet offers a song, sung by Justin...

Raffaello Sorbi: Piccarda taken from the convent Often close reading is a matter of attention to words -- their nuances, quirks of sens...

When one wants to indicate that something is right, fair, or fitting in modern Italian, one often uses the word  giusto.   If someone says ...

In Paradiso 4 , Beatrice has just completed a subtle explication of will -- its elemental power, its potential to collude with violence. Sh...

A thoughtful post on classical and medieval uses of the labyrinth:  Daedalus’ construction of a labyrinth is referred to by Virgil as a...