Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture (William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature) - Softcover

Gragnolati, Manuele

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0268029652 ISBN 13: 9780268029654

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008

Synopsis

Experiencing the Afterlife provides the first sustained analysis of popular, vernacular depictions of the afterlife written in Italy before the Divine Comedy by authors such as Uguccione da Lodi, Giacomino da Verona, and Bonvesin da la Riva. Manuele Gragnolati uses his readings of these poets to provide a new interpretation of Dante’s work. Combining elements from several disciplines, he investigates the richness of high medieval eschatology and the concept of personal identity it expresses. Gragnolati is particularly concerned with how the notions of body and pain characteristic of medieval spirituality and devotion inform the eschatological representations of the time, especially in their paradoxical urge to stress at once the physical experience of the separated soul and the final necessity of bodily resurrection.

By integrating lesser-known texts and scholarship from other disciplines into the specialized field of Dante studies, Gragnolati sheds new light on some of the most vigorously debated and crucial questions raised by the Divine Comedy, including the embryological discourse of Purgatorio 25, the relation between the soul’s experience of pain in Purgatory and the devotion that late medieval culture expressed toward Christ’s suffering, and the significance of the audacious vision of resurrected bodies that Dante the pilgrim enjoys at the end of his journey. At the same time, Gragnolati brings these questions back into contemporary discussions of medieval eschatology and opens new perspectives for current and future work on embodiment and identity. Scholars and students of Dante and Italian studies, as well as those in medieval history, religion, culture, and art history, will be rewarded by the fresh insights contained in Experiencing the Afterlife.

About this title

About the Author:

Manuele Gragnolati is Fellow and Tutor in Italian at Somerville College, Oxford. Before joining the Oxford faculty in 2003, he taught Italian and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. His latest book is Amor che move. Linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante, Pasolini e Morante (Milan: il Saggiatore 2013).

Review:

“In his fine book, Manuele Gragnolati expertly explores the many issues and tensions that shaped the connections between grave, body, soul, and immortality. . . . Gragnolati's analyses provide a cultural context for the central innovation in Dante's vision of eschatological experience: the soul's generation of an aerial body when the fleshly body dies. . . . Wide-ranging yet precisely focused, Experiencing the Afterlife is an excellent companion to the other thought-provoking volumes in Notre Dame's Devers Series in Dante Studies.” (Speculum)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0268029652
• ISBN 13: 9780268029654
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 298