Dante: The Banquet

by Christopher Ryan (translator)

English (translation)Original Italian

253 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1988

About the author

Librarian's note: There is more than one author on Goodreads with this name.

For Christopher Ryan, PhD and author of Sex at Dawn, see Christopher Ryan.

Reviews

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is more labor intensive than other Dante texts. It is like the Vita Nuova, verse mingled with prose commentary--one suspects satire, but it may be that he is entirely in earnest. It commences with a thorough defense of the vernacular, moves through medieval astronomy, personal virtue, and politics. That last ties to the Monarchia to the extent he wants a universal monarch. What's interesting about the presentation is that Dante adopts an argument that makes wealth in itself morally corrupt and thus no marker of nobility, which only functions through virtue, which itself only comes from the divine. He is thus the grandfather of Marx's lament that under capitalism all that is solid melts into air and all that is holy is profaned. Dante may sound like an anarchist in that moment complaining about inchoate capitalism in 13/14th century Florence, stricken with Black Guelph aristocrats and White Guelph la gente nuova e i sùbiti guadagni--but he is making the point in an attempt to recapitulate imperial power so as to arrest further historical development, a sort of thomistic nostalgia for pre-capitalist formations. In some ways, a reworking of the Vita Nuova, specifically how he presents another woman as an object of affection after Beatrice died--here, it is reconstructed as an allegorical 'lady philosophy.' Either way, Bea remembers in the Commedia.

[jessica isnt cool · Rating 4 out of 5]

i promise i read,,, it’s been a long month :(
lovely to see dante’s thoughts cemented here in a more didactic way. it’s no vita nuova but certainly amusing for him to explain his thoughts towards his own canzone.
i do wish the translation was a little more poetic especially regarding the canzone. they’re easy to miss as poetry and just read as a proem. shame ! still my bad for only having access to my decrepit uni library version.

i have banqueted certainly, epistemologically speaking.