Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah

by Mark Mirsky

Overview

Did Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy as a young man in Florence sleep with Beatrice Portinari before and after her marriage? Did the poet travel after her death through Hell to find her again? The clues to this academic detective story, writes Mark Jay Mirsky, lie not only in Dante's earlier poetry, The New Life, or in The Divine Comedy, but in the Zohar of Moses de Leon, a Jewish text written some years before and based on Neoplatonic ideas similar to those that inspired Dante. Purgatorio and Paradiso, the second and third volumes of the Commedia, are inaccessible to most readers unfamiliar with the boldness of Dante's use of the philosophical debate in the Middle Ages. Does Dante's Commedia hint at his hope of intimacy with Beatrice in the Highest Heaven? In this book Mirsky distinctively traces the influence on Dante of Provencal poets, medieval theologians, Dante's personal life, and the sources of his classical education to propose a radical reading of Dante. The text compounds the riddles of dream, poetry, philosophy, and Dante's concealed autobiography in his work. It treats the Commedia in the spirit of its title, as a hopeful and comic vision of the other world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815630272
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	10/01/2003
Series:	Jewish Studies
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

Mark Jay Mirsky, professor of English at the City College of New York, has published five novels and collections of short fiction. He is editor of Fiction, an international magazines of prose.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Author's Note	xi
1.	Dante in America	1
2.	Heavenly Intercourse	23
3.	Seduced by Beatrice?	29
4.	Bewildered	59
5.	Ocean	77
6.	Dante and King David	97
7.	Nude in Paradise	109
8.	A Mother's Milk	121
9.	Holy Number	141
10.	Messiah on Earth	165
11.	Dante in Exile	189
12.	Rimbomba	199
	References	221
	Index	227