ABOUT THIS BOOKDante’s Volume from Alpha to Omega brings together essays written by internationally recognized scholars to explore the poet’s 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 Dante’s 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 Dante’s 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 Dante’s poetic summa yield multiple opportunities to reflect on their points of intersection, and the urgency of the convergence of the poem’s aesthetic, intellectual, and affective aims.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHYChristiana Purdy Moudarres is assistant professor of Italian studies at Yale University. She is a contributing editor of Table Talk: Perspectives on Food in Medieval Italian Literature and coeditor, with Andrea Moudarres, of New Worlds and the Italian Renaissance: Contributions to the History of European Intellectual Culture. Carol Chiodo is the inaugural librarian for collections and digital scholarship at Harvard University Library.