Dantes Volume from Alpha to Omega

Dantes Volume from Alpha to Omega brings together essays written by internationally recognized scholars to explore the poets encyclopedic impulse in light of our own frenzied information age. This comprehensive collection of essays, coedited by Carol Chiodo and Christiana Purdy Moudarres, examines how Dantes spiritual quest is powered by an encyclopedic one, which has for more than seven centuries drawn a readership as diverse as the knowledge his work contains. The essays investigate both the intellectual and spiritual pleasures that Dantes Commedia affords, underscoring how, through the sheer breadth of its knowledge, the poem demands collective and collaborative inquiry. Rather than isolating the poetic or theological strands of the Commedia, the book acts as a bridge across disciplines, braiding together the well-worn strands of poetry and theology with those of philosophy, the sciences, and the arts. The wide range of entries within Dantes poetic summa yield multiple opportunities to reflect on their points of intersection, and the urgency of the convergence of the poems aesthetic, intellectual, and affective aims.