Those of you in the Ideas section of Church and Empires will cover Dante more extensively than we do on the History side, but I thought you might be interested in therecent biographical sketch in Christian History magazine.

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Dante Alighieri
Worldly creator of divine verse

“O conscience, upright and stainless, how bitter a sting to thee is a little fault!”

By his early fifties, Dante had been exiled from his hometown, wrestled with the top authorities of the church, and taken up arms against his fellow countrymen. He had made plenty of enemies, and he was not pleased. So he did with his enemies what many have wished to do: he sent them all, even the pope, to hell—literarily, that is. But his damnatory writing was no screed; it was the finest poem of the Middle Ages, a summation of classical and medieval beliefs so profound that its critics labeled it “divine”: The Divine Comedy. (Click here to read more…)