Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Dante's Fearful Art of Justice

1989; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.33137/q.i..v10i1-2.10445

2293-7382

Anthony K. Cassell, Patrick Rumble,

Historical Economic and Legal Thought

Cassell studies how the idea of the contrapasso, just retribution, functions in Dante's Inferno; how the figuration of the state of souls after death was designed by Dante to reveal God's justice, not through the establishment of a "hierarchy of punishment" but rather through the workings of a symbolic moral system in which punishment "is exquisitely apt and merited in each discrete case" (4).He also attempts to demonstrate how the representation of the damned, the relation of sin to punishment, is determined, to a great extent, by Dante's sources-not only classical, patristic, and scholastic but also "visual."(And, indeed, in at least three of his eight chapters he