Like his groundbreaking Inferno (Hackett, 2009) and Purgatorio (Hackett, 2016), Stanley Lombardo's Paradiso features a close yet dynamic verse translation, innovative verse paragraphing for reader-friendliness, and a facing-page Italian text. It also offers an extraordinarily helpful set of notes and headnotes as well as Introduction-all designed for first-time readers of the canticle-by Alison Cornish.

Like his groundbreaking Inferno (Hackett, 2009) and Purgatorio (Hackett, 2016), Stanley Lombardo's Paradiso features a close yet dynamic verse translation, innovative verse paragraphing for reader-friendliness, and a facing-page Italian text. It also offers an extraordinarily helpful set of notes and headnotes as well as Introduction-all designed for first-time readers of the canticle-by Alison Cornish.

Alison Cornish offers a compelling new take on the Commedia with modern sensibilities in mind. Believing in Dante re-examines the infernal dramas of Dante's masterpiece that alienate and perplex modern readers, offering an invigorating view of the whole Divine Comedy, bringing it to meaningful life today. Addressing the characteristics that distance an author like Dante from the modern world, Alison Cornish shows the value of critically and constructively engaging with texts that do not coincide with current worldviews. She thereby reveals how we might discover constellations by which to navigate the process of reading. Written with incisiveness and sophistication, this landmark book elucidates Dante's eminently readable universe: one where we can and must choose what we want to believe.

Translation and commentary are often associated with institutions and patronage; but in Italy around the time of Dante, widespread vernacular translation was mostly on the spontaneous initiative of individuals. While Dante is usually the starting point for histories of vernacular translation in Europe, this book demonstrates that The Divine Comedy places itself in opposition to a vast vernacular literature already in circulation among its readers. Alison Cornish explores the anxiety of vernacularization as expressed by translators and contemporary authors, the prevalence of translation in religious experience, the role of scribal mediation, the influence of the Italian reception of French literature on that literature, and how translating into the vernacular became a project of nation-building only after its virtual demise during the Humanist period. Vernacular translation was a phenomenon with which all authors in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe - from Brunetto Latini to Giovanni Boccaccio - had to contend.

John Freccero is internationally renowned for his scholarship on Dante, Petrarch, Macchiavelli, and other authors. Currently Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at New York University, he has also taught at Yale, Stanford, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins. His numerous honours include Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships and awards from the city of Florence and the Republic of Italy. His publications encompass articles on film, philosophy, and literature of virtually all time periods. All the authors in this Festschrift are former students of Freccero. All the articles appertain to Italian literature - from Dennis Costa's literary analysis of Bonaventure's Itinerarium to Patricia Parker's tracing of the State of Maryland's medieval Italian motto back through its English Renaissance sources. Many pieces are concerned with Dante directly (Kleiner, Schnapp, Jacoff, Cornish, Ginsberg, Hawkins, Chiarenza), and several others dealing with medieval and Renaissance Italian subjects do so indirectly (Costa, Stephens, Quint). Two are concerned with pre-modern cultural and literary implications of the history of science (Stewart, Reeves); the remainder trace the afterlife of medieval or Renaisance Italian motifs in modern culture (Parker, West, Marcus).

Translation and commentary are often associated with institutions and patronage; but in Italy around the time of Dante, widespread vernacular translation was mostly on the spontaneous initiative of individuals. While Dante is usually the starting point for histories of vernacular translation in Europe, this book demonstrates that The Divine Comedy places itself in opposition to a vast vernacular literature already in circulation among its readers. Alison Cornish explores the anxiety of vernacularization as expressed by translators and contemporary authors, the prevalence of translation in religious experience, the role of scribal mediation, the influence of the Italian reception of French literature on that literature, and how translating into the vernacular became a project of nation-building only after its virtual demise during the Humanist period. Vernacular translation was a phenomenon with which all authors in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe - from Brunetto Latini to Giovanni Boccaccio - had to contend.