Beatrice Priest (University of Cambridge)
Dynamic Beauty: Creation and Begetting in Paradiso 23
Paradiso 23 has been described as one of the most beautiful canti of the Commedia. In partial response to Matthew Treherne’s discussion of pain in Purgatorio 23, this paper discusses the way in which Dante reuses certain structural elements and metaphors found in Purgatorio 23 in Paradiso 23 to describe a vision of Christ and the Virgin Mary in the most ‘beautiful’ terms. Taking Elaine Scarry’s work on beauty as a starting point, this paper will discuss the links between beauty, creation and begetting in the Commedia. It will argue that one of the ways in which Dante conceives of beauty is as a dynamic process, a perpetual renewal.
Beatrice Priest is writing a thesis on Fecundity in Dante’s Commedia. She is in the first year of her PhD and is under the supervision of Zyg Baranski at Cambridge. She is researching the different sorts of fecundity found in the Commedia: maternal, natural, spiritual and poetic. Allied to this discussion is Dante’s representation of sterility. She is examining Dante’s reworking of images of fecundity drawn from Classical, Biblical and Medieval sources. Still at the initial stages of her research, she is currently working on an introductory chapter - a comparison between the 'fecundity' of the last canti of Paradiso and the 'sterility' of the last canti of the Inferno, and the way in which the final canti of Purgatorio intersect with these.
