Dante's Two Beloveds

Re-examining key passages in Dantes oeuvre in the light of the crucial issue of moral choice, this book provides a new thematic framework for interpreting the Divine Comedy. Olivia Holmes shows how Dante articulated the relationship between the human and the divine as an erotic choice between two attractive womenBeatrice and the other woman. Investigating the traditions and archetypes that contributed to the formation of Dantes two beloveds, Holmes shows how Dante brilliantly overlaid and combined these paradigms in his poem. In doing so he re-imagined the two women as not merely oppositional condensations of apparently conflicting cultural traditions but also complementary versions of the same. This visionary insight sheds new light on Dantes corpus and on the essential paradox at the poems heart: the unabashed eroticism of Dantes turn away from the earthly in favor of the divine.