New Releases
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
Pope Innocent III (1160/61-1216)
To Root Up and to Plant
John C. Moore
“Thank goodness that John C. Moore’s biography of Pope Innocent III is finally available in an affordable format. His clarity of language, nuanced analysis, and evident mastery of both the sources and the wealth of studies devoted to this pope, whose pontificate was a major watershed in Western history, make Moore’s study a ‘must have’ addition to the library of every medieval student and scholar.” — Alfred J. Andrea, University of Vermont
“Refusing to be driven by one or another of the great operatic episodes of Innocent’s pontificate, Moore has produced the most comprehensive and rounded study ever written… 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
