I went over to Goodreads yesterday, hoping I could trim down my "currently reading" shelf, but after getting it down to 9 books, I took thought again, realized I'd left some out, and now my currently-reading count is back up to twelve.
Sigh.
In related news, I've been (very, very slowly) working on an article I'm tentatively titling "In Defense of Romance", and today I went and dug out an old lecture I gave once called "Why Dante Didn't Sleep with Beatrice". I cleverly included sex in the title, you see, because the lecture was for college students and I wanted a big audience.
It worked.
Anyway, that really is what the lecture was about. It was about the courtly love tradition that developed in France in the tenth century, and how Dante took that tradition and Christianized it, and how you can see it all happen in the Vita Nuova and the Divine Comedy - and how that all explains why there's no adultery in Dante's magnum opus. (Not between the principal characters, anyway.)
And, upon rereading my lecture, I realized that if I really want to do justice to the article I'm writing, I also need to go back and reread (at least parts of) the Vita and the Comedy, and probably also bits of The Romance of the Rose, and Tristan and Isolde, and some of C. S. Lewis' more academic works. Oh, and Books III & IV of the Faerie Queen. Because it's been awhile and I want to know whereof I speak.
I guess what I'm saying is: there is no hope at all for my "currently reading" shelf over at Goodreads.
Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell
*The title of this blog is a quotation of the phrase Dante says is over the gate to Hell: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."
1 comment:
You just can't help yourself. :)
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