Dante and the Franciscans

Only the second volume dedicated to Dante and the Franciscans, this collection of essays offers a Franciscan reading of the Divine Comedy. Nine of the ten essays address how Dante’s Comedy and his Vita Nuova were influenced by Franciscan spirituality; the tenth essay addresses the influence that Dante’s Comedy had on the preaching of the Franciscan Order. More specifically, the essays in this volume are truly interdisciplinary and contribute to the understanding of how Dante understood and employed Franciscan sources in his literary production and how Bernardino of Siena integrated Dante’s work in his preaching.

Santa Casciani, Ph.D. (1994) in Italian, University of Wisconsin-Madison, is Associate Professor of Italian at John Carroll University, The Jesuit University in Cleveland. She has published on a wide variety of topics on Italian and Italian American literature and pedagogy and has co-edited and co-translated The Fiore (and the Detto d'amore) attributed to Dante (with Christopher Kleinhenz).