Product Description: This study examines all the characterizations of the female personality in the Divine Comedy, including representations of things traditionally categorized as feminine. Marianne Shapiro treats different traditional feminine roles such as wife, lover, and mother, and places Beatrice in the latter group...read more

Product Description: This book comprises twenty-two chapters, including previously unpublished material, written over the entire span of Marianne Shapiro’s working life. Its opening section on the European heritage begins with a long essay on the Aeneid that breaks new interpretative ground by examining the epic from the perspective of Virgil’s implicit prescriptions for leaders and leadership...read more

Product Description: Dante and the Knot of Body and Soul seeks to evaluate in just measure the material, bodily, erotic, and aesthetic aspects of the intellectual foundations of the Commedia and explore the idea of embodied spirit and its poetic consequences in Dante’s worldmaking poem...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Written in 1303-05, when Dante was in political exile from his native Florence, De vulgari eloquentia addresses the problem of how to raise the Italian language to the status of Latin in the esteem of the literate public. It is the fullest and most important document concerning vernacular writing in the Middle Ages—indeed, the earliest work of literary criticism dealing with a vernacular language...read more