Dante's Gluttons Food And Society From The Convivio To The Comedy

Dante’s Gluttons: Food and Society from the Convivio to the Comedy explores how the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) uses food to express and condition the social political and cultural values of his time. Combining medieval history food studies and literary criticism Dante’s Gluttons historicizes food and eating in Dante beginning in his earliest collected poetry and arriving at the end of his major work. For Dante the consumption of food is not a frivolity but a crux of life and gluttony is the abdication of civic and spiritual responsibility and a danger to both the individual body and soul as well as the greater collective. This book establishes how one of the world’s preeminent authors uses the intimacy and universality of food as a touchstone forging a community bound by a gastronomic language rooted in the deeply human relationship with material sustenance. |Dante's Gluttons Food and Society from the Convivio to the Comedy