DanteAn Author ProfileSecond Canto: Vita Nuova By Gabriel Blanchard From the depths of political, personal, and spiritual defeat, Dante went on—”God knoweth how”—to write one of the great […]
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The canon of literature is like a lofty tower, composed by hands that seem superhuman (for “there were giants in the earth in those days”). Yet one poet surpassed storied Babel; for he did “reach unto heaven, and make a name.”
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The Renaissance was a pivotal historical period which did not exist, and lasted for one century that began in 1300 and ended in 1650, give or take fifty years in both directions. These, at least, are the impression one might take away from reading a randomly-chosen handful of modern historians.
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St. Bernard of Clairvaux:An Author Profile By Gabriel Blanchard The academy, the battlefield, the royal court, and the chapel of twelfth-century Europe all bore the mark of St.
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Victorian novelist Frank Smedley wrote that “All’s fair in love and war”; though we cannot be sure, Renaissance diplomat Christine de Pizan might have thrown her complete works at his head if she had heard that.
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Héloïse d’Argenteuil An Author Profile By Gabriel Blanchard We do not typically think of wife and nun as words that can apply to the same woman at the
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Lessons From Purgatory By Autumn Kennedy In its own capacity, Dante’s Purgatorio resembles Virgil, shepherding its readers up the sacred mountain in this life as he shepherded its
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Malory: Peril, Piety, and Perdition By Gabriel Blanchard No one codified the legend of King Arthur and its meaning for English culture as powerfully as Thomas Malory. The
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The Legacy of the Nibelungenlied By Gabriel Blanchard What legacy is there to utter destruction? As it turns out, if it has a poet on its side, quite
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The Nibelungenlied: A Romance of Disaster and Death By Gabriel Blanchard Romance; treachery; vengeance; many unpronounceable names: here we have the ingredients of high epic. The Nibelungenlied, or
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