New Releases by Dante Alighieri

A Latin treatise on secular and religious power by Dante Alighieri, who wrote it between 1312 and 1313. The great Italian poet turns his hand to political thought and defends the reign of a single monarch ruling over a universal empire. He believed that peace was only achievable when a single monarch replaced divisive and squabbling princes and kings.

The second part of Dante''s Divine Comedy, following the Inferno, and preceding the Paradiso. The poem was written in the early 14th century. It is an allegory telling of the climb of Dante up the Mount of Purgatory, guided by the Roman poet Virgil, except for the last four cantos at which point Beatrice takes over as Dante''s guide. Purgatory in the poem is depicted as a mountain in the Southern Hemisphere, consisting of a bottom section (Ante-Purgatory), seven levels of suffering and spiritual growth (associated with the seven deadly sins), and finally the Earthly Paradise at the top. Allegorically, the Purgatorio represents the penitent Christian life. In describing the climb Dante discusses the nature of sin, examples of vice and virtue, as well as moral issues in politics and in the Church. The poem outlines a theory that all sins arise from love - either perverted love directed towards others'' harm, or deficient love, or the disordered or excessive love of good things.

The reader should not be mistaken. This is not a book of stories like The Divine Comedy. It is an essay (as we would call it today) by Dante Alighieri about the power struggle in his time. De Monarchia is a political work; in fact, it had great political influence. Motivated to write it around 1313, during the unsuccessful siege that Henry VII of Luxembourg subjected the city of Florence to, Dante seeks to contribute to eradicating the prevailing anarchy in Italy and specifically in the city of Florence with this work. He dreams of a social order that establishes peace and, in a clearly Ghibelline tone, uses a logical rhetoric based on the Scholastics, the Greek and Roman classics, the historians Livy and Orosius, Marcus Tullius Cicero and Aristotle, and the Bible, elaborating a set of ideas that go against the papal bull Unam Sanctam of 1302, by Pope Boniface VIII. Therefore, De Monarchia is a treatise on the conflict between temporal and spiritual power. The theme was already controversial at the time: the relationship between the authority represented by the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and the authority of the Pope. Dante''s point of view is known, since during his political activity he fought to defend the autonomy of the government of the city of Florence from the interference of Boniface VIII. Chronologically, De Monarchia should be placed after the treatise De vulgari eloquentia and before Paradiso, that is, in a period between the second and third parts of The Divine Comedy. The original was written in Latin and is composed of three books, but the most significant is the third, in which Dante more explicitly confronts the theme of the relations between the Pope and the Emperor.

The poem discusses "the state of the soul after death and presents an image of divine justice meted out as due punishment or reward",[4] and describes Dante''s travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.

The poem discusses "the state of the soul after death and presents an image of divine justice meted out as due punishment or reward",[4] and describes Dante''s travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.