Dante

Back in high school I wanted to learn Latin, but my school only offered Italian, so I went with that. Actually, I wanted to do Music and Drama, but those clashed, so I did Music and Italian. So when I heard about this Divine Comedy written in Italian, it sounded like something I’d like to read one day.

It must have been Nolan’s new Odyssey movie which brought it to mind. This term I embarked on Hillsdale College’s free online course on Dante’s Divine Comedy. - not sure if that link will work without logging in first, but it’s a free account.

Martin Kochanski - I can’t find the spelling of his name, sounds like KoHainSki. Anyway, he just started a run through Dante’s Divine Comedy as a tour through the seven deadly sins on the way through Mount Purgatorio.

Brian Holdsworth used the image of Dante’s Inferno as an image of the traditional Catholic view of Hell in his recent video: Modern Christianity Made Hell Harder to Defend

Gavin Ashenden wrote From Ithaca to Paradise which contrasts Homer’s Odyssey with Dante’s Divne Comedy.

It is said that once you buy a car, you see that particular make and model everywhere. Now that I’m reading Dante, I seem to hear mentions of him in a similar way. One course recommended first reading through, without zooming in too much, to get the overall outline of the epic. That sounds like good advice.

Anthony Esolen, whose translation is employed in the Hillsdale course, has a talk available at THe Institute fore Catholic Culture. ICC also has what it calls a Lecture Series by James Patrick, but it only seems to have two recordings available.

Godsplaining did a series of three podcast episodes on the Divine Comedy for Advent 2023.

Princeton Uni has The Princeton Dante Project

Columbia has Digital Dante including an exhaustive course of 54 lectures.

Yale University has a free course by Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta in 24 lectures with exams too! I found that through openculture.com which has lots of other related content.

edX has a course from Georgetown X: the Divine Comedy - it’s archived, but looks like you should be able to access most of it. Turns out this is a very amazing thingy using a platform called MyDante. - you use your edX username and password to log in.

Yet another collection The World of Dante from the University of Virginia.

Danteworlds from the University of Texas.

Dartmouth has a Dante Lab Reader

There are many resources out there!

Cover image by Domenico di Michelino / After Alesso Baldovinetti - https://twitter.com/museofirenze/status/1075345296048181248This is a retouched picture, which means that it has been digitally altered from its original version. Modifications: brightened image., Public Domain, Link