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The Ancient Flame
Dante and the Poets
Winthrop Wetherbee
While the structure and themes of the Divine Comedy are defined by the narrative of a spiritual pilgrimage guided by Christian truth, Winthrop Wetherbee’s remarkable new study reveals that Dante’s engagement with the great Latin poets Vergil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius constitutes a second, complementary narrative centered on psychological and artistic self-discovery.
This fresh, illuminating approach departs from the usual treatment of classical poets in Dante criticism, which assigns them a merely allegorical function. Their true importance to Dante’s project is much greater. As Wetherbee meticulously shows, Dante’s use of the poets is grounded in an astute understanding of their… Read More
Behind the Scenes at Galileo's Trial
Including the First English Translation of Melchior Inchofer's Tractatus syllepticus
Richard J. Blackwell
NEW IN PAPERBACK
Galileo’s trial for heresy in 1633 before the Roman Inquisition is one of the most frequently mentioned topics in the history of science. Galileo’s encounter with the Catholic Church was not only a major turning point in the history of western culture; it is the paradigm case of the clash between the institutional authority of religion and the authority of scientific reason.
Richard J. Blackwell focuses on the church’s official theological position against Galileo. At the center of Blackwell’s account stands Melchior Inchofer, S. J., the Jesuit most directly involved in Galileo’s actual trial. Inchofer’s judgment… Read More
Press News
CHOICE Magazine reviews Winthrop Wetherbee's The Ancient Flame
- CHOICE Magazine praised Winthrop Wetherbee’s book The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets, calling it “. . . [l]earned, readable, genuinely and profoundly humane . . . .”
“A well-known scholar of classical and medieval Latin poetry, Wetherbee brings his enormous expertise in that field to bear on Dante’s Commedia, with consistently original and thought-provoking results. . . . Learned, readable, genuinely and profoundly humane, these readings succeed admirably in attaining their author’s stated goal of showing ‘the extent to which [Dante’s] gradual discovery of his own mission as a vernacular poet depended on a close…Read More
