[Tom] Hello. Professor Alison Milbank
is responsible for the MA module 'Dante,
Religion, and Culture.'
And I've asked her to come here today just to tell us some of
the highlights of the module and what you
can expect if you're studying it.
[Alison] Thank you. It's a module I've been teaching for awhile,
and it sits beautifully between our two programmes,
the one in Church History and the one
in Systematic and Philosophical Theology.
Ruskin in the 19th century called Dante
'the Central Man of all the World.'
And I do believe that everybody in their life should
make a study of Dante's great poem, the Commedia.
And sometimes it really helps to have somebody to
take you through rather than doing it all on your own.
The best thing would be to be in a group, but
this is the next best thing, to actually study it.
And it's a poem, of course,
that both tries to take you on a journey through the afterlife,
through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise,
the state of damnation or salvation,
and it's also a view of Dante's own
society and how he understands its ethics,
its politics, its theology, philosophy, its mystical traditions
and therefore it's a module that encourages
you to read it through particular lenses.
The module as a whole offers a reading through the whole poem,
particularly if you take it in the 40-credit version.
And so in that sense,
it's a textual module and you learn
skills of textual analysis.
But it's also somewhere that you can develop your own interests.
So for example, you might be interested in the rather naughty
Popes that Dante describes and make a study of those.
You might look at medieval penitential practice,
which is in a sense, both,
the frame of what Dante is doing and also described.
You might be interested in liturgy.
You might be interested in politics.
It's been taken in different ways by students over
the years and has led to two academic articles.
One person wrote an article about Dante's attitude to usury,
to borrowing money on interest.
And another student wrote eventually
an article on Dante and medieval music,
because in purgatory, there is a great deal of music.
It's a work that I try to take you through
in quite a directive way so that you can hear
my voice leading you through the module.
There are a great many resources out there,
not only books and articles, but websites.
Academics are usually sending people away from websites;
well, not in Dante Studies,
because great American universities like
Princeton and other places, Texas,
have done wonderful online resources to help
you. There are sites where you can read
every commentary through history
practically. There's all sorts of wonderful things to help you.
So it's the kind of module
you can do at home and you can
write. There are an awful lot of essay questions down there.
The ones at the 40 level tend to be comparative.
And if it sounds a bit frightening,
you can always say write on one canto and
compare it with one in another cantica,
one in purgatory and one in paradise.
But you can also follow your own interests
and I'm happy to help people develop their own interests
and even perhaps write another
academic article, because with a literary text,
it's not difficult to actually be original --to
find your own interpretation of something. [Tom] Alison,
Thank you very much, and I hope that has encouraged
you to go off and work on Dante, Religion and Culture.