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Hellish Imaginations from Augustine to Dante: An Essay in Metaphor and Materiality

by Minnis Alastair

  • Hardback
  • 290 pages
  • Publisher: Medium Aevum Monographs / SSMLL
  • 14.9 x 21.1 x 1.8 cm

£31.92

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For readers interested in medieval theology.

Explains how past thinkers understood soul suffering.

See how historic views still inform literary ideas.

An enlightening journey through medieval theology that examines how thinkers conceptualised pain in the afterlife.

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Medieval literature and art abounds in descriptions of grotesque torments (punitive in hell, redemptive in purgatory) being meted out to the unhappy dead. But how can pain be experienced in the absence of the body? Can the main agents of suffering specified in Old Testament prophecies, fire and the worm, actually trouble a disembodied soul? The relative merits of material and metaphorical understandings of the economy of pain were debated throughout the Middle Ages, and extended far beyond, surviving the abolition of purgatory within Protestantism. This book brings to life many of the intellectual clashes, beginning with Augustine's foundational yet troubling doctrines, proceeding to the problems caused by Aristotle's insistence that death kills off all sense and sensation, and culminating in a fresh reading of Dante's Purgatorio, Canto XXV. Wide-ranging, lucid and bristling with ideas on every page, it illustrates superbly well the variety, liveliness and continuous creativity of scholastic thought, particularly in respect of the contribution it made to literary theory.
Hellish Imaginations from Augustine to Dante: An Essay in Metaphor and Materiality and From Eden to Eternity: Creations of Paradise in the Later Middle Ages
From Eden to Eternity: Creations of Paradise in the Later Middle AgesHellish Imaginations from Augustine to Dante: An Essay in Metaphor and Materiality

  • Title

    Hellish Imaginations from Augustine to Dante: An Essay in Metaphor and Materiality

  • Author

    Minnis Alastair

  • Book Format

    Hardback

  • Publisher

    Medium Aevum Monographs / SSMLL

  • Published

    September 2020

  • Weight

    500g

  • Page Count

    290

  • Dimensions

    14.9 x 21.1 x 1.8 cm

  • ISBN

    9780907570677

  • ISBN-10

    0907570674

  • Eden Code

    5318217