In an interview on Dante

Peter Hawkins’s Dante: A Brief Biography explores Dante’s impact on artists and scholars alike. Does this make for a good introduction?

I think this work stands out as the strongest short introduction for probably three reasons. The first is that it’s lively and accessible without oversimplifying major issues concerning Dante’s politics, religion, poetics and sexuality. It’s also based on his own long study of Dante which resulted in one of the best critical accounts – his 1999 book on Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination. And thirdly it derives from a long experience of teaching the subject. For instance, chapter three begins with the wonderful sentence: ‘There comes a time in every Dante class where someone blows the whistle on Beatrice.’ [Dante’s inamorata and guide.] Then it goes into a dramatisation of conversations between students about Dante’s relationship with Beatrice. That is some indication of its accessibility.

How does Hawkins lay out the history of Dante’s impact?

One way in which he contextualises Dante is to focus initially on his life and another way of historicising the subject is through an important concluding chapter which he calls ‘Dante’s Afterlife’– dealing with the presence of Dante from the Middle Ages onwards and indeed into modern and contemporary culture.

Does Hawkins touch on the preference for Inferno over the other two canticles in popular culture?

He does indicate the prominence of Inferno as what most people associate with Dante. I think he recognises, like anyone who deals with the reception of Dante, that Inferno has this kind of priority for readers. In a sense that was the case from the Middle Ages onwards. For instance, the first mention of Dante by an English writer, Chaucer, identifies him as an expert on hell.