--- title: Dante & Medieval Literature description: Medieval literature runs from Beowulf to Dante and Chaucer. You will learn how to read the Divine Comedy and its companions, the best translations, and the romances and epics of the Middle Ages. category: literature-writing subcategory: literature-analysis difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced url: /subject/dante-and-medieval-literature --- # Dante & Medieval Literature Medieval literature runs from Beowulf to Dante and Chaucer. You will learn how to read the Divine Comedy and its companions, the best translations, and the romances and epics of the Middle Ages. ## Available Resources 3 Books • 1 Courses • 3 Websites ## Books ### 1. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature **Author:** C. S. Lewis The gap that stops modern readers of Dante is not vocabulary, it is the missing cosmology - why the spheres are ordered as they are, why Fortune is an intelligence, what the Empyrean is. This is the short standard book that supplies it, and it is the prerequisite that makes Paradiso legible rather than abstract. Reconstructs the cosmological, astrological and psychological model medieval writers assumed their readers shared: the Ptolemaic heavens, the hierarchy of being, the faculties of the soul. Written as background for reading Dante, Chaucer and the romances. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521477352?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** medieval-literature, medieval-cosmology, renaissance-literature, dante, intellectual-history ### 2. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (bilingual edition) **Author:** Seamus Heaney (translator) Facing-page Old English and Heaney's verse translation, which keeps the alliterative stress pattern while reading as modern English. Norton edition; the parallel text lets readers check any line against the original without knowing Old English. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393320979?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** beowulf, old-english, verse-translation, epic-poetry, anglo-saxon-literature ### 3. The Inferno (Hollander bilingual verse translation) **Author:** Dante Alighieri; translated by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander Bilingual Anchor edition with the Italian facing Robert and Jean Hollander's verse translation. Robert Hollander's canto-by-canto commentary is the volume's real substance, summarizing seven centuries of interpretive dispute and marking where he departs from consensus. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385496982?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** dante, inferno, divine-comedy, bilingual-edition, literary-commentary, italian-literature ## Websites ### 1. Harvard's Geoffrey Chaucer Website **Author:** Larry D. Benson Larry Benson's teaching site built on the Riverside Chaucer. Provides glossed Middle English of the Canterbury Tales with line-by-line interlinear modern translations, source analogues, pronunciation and grammar lessons, and background material on medieval life and belief. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/ **Tags:** chaucer, canterbury-tales, middle-english, interlinear-translation, medieval-literature ### 2. Dartmouth Dante Project **Author:** Robert Hollander, Simone Marchesi, Stephen Campbell Searchable full-text database of more than seventy-five commentaries on the Commedia, spanning the fourteenth century to the present. Query any line of the poem and read what seven hundred years of commentators wrote about it. Nothing else in any language lets you read Jacopo Alighieri, Boccaccio, Benvenuto, Singleton and Hollander on the same tercet in one query. It is the step past Barolini for anyone who wants to see how a reading was arrived at. **Difficulty:** Advanced | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://dante.dartmouth.edu/ **Tags:** dante, divine-comedy, commentary-tradition, textual-database, italian-literature ### 3. Digital Dante: The Divine Comedy and the Commento Baroliniano **Author:** Teodolinda Barolini (Editor-in-Chief) Columbia's canto-by-canto edition of the Commedia. Each canto page carries Teodolinda Barolini's Commento Baroliniano, the first commentary written for the web, alongside the Italian text with English translations, plus image galleries, audio and video. This is what replaces the study guide entirely: read a canto, read Barolini on it, move on. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/ **Tags:** dante, divine-comedy, medieval-italian-literature, literary-commentary, primary-texts ## Courses ### 1. Dante in Translation (Open Yale Courses ITAL 310) **Author:** Giuseppe Mazzotta The single best free structural spine for the topic: a real Ivy semester, not a summary. Covers the Commedia in full and the minor works most readers never reach, and situates Dante in late-medieval intellectual history rather than treating Inferno as a standalone horror text. Twenty-four recorded Yale lectures by Giuseppe Mazzotta covering the Divine Comedy canto group by canto group, plus Vita nuova, Convivio and the Epistle to Cangrande. Video, audio and full transcripts are posted alongside the syllabus. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://oyc.yale.edu/italian-language-and-literature/ital-310 **Tags:** dante, divine-comedy, medieval-literature, italian-literature, lecture-series --- *This content is part of Dantes.io - Your Treasure Map to Knowledge* *Curated by humans at Dantes.io. Personal study use welcome; republishing this curation requires permission (team@dantes.io).* View this page online: https://dantes.io/subject/dante-and-medieval-literature