Dante’s Christian Ethics
This book is a major reappraisal 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 often register Dante’s explicit confession of pride, this volume uncovers Dante’s implicit confession of sloth and prodigality (the opposing sub-vice of avarice) through Statius, his moral cypher. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
George Corbett is Senior Lecturer in Theology and the Arts at the School of Divinity, University of St Andrews. Prior to this, he was Junior Research Fellow of Trinity College, and Affiliated Lecturer in Italian at the 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’ (2015–17).
Open access