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Walking With Dante
by Mark Scarbrough
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Latest episodes
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Unfulfilled Vows . . . But To Whom? PARADISO, Canto V, Lines 1 - 16
October 25, 2026 · 26 minDante wants to know if someone (who?) can make an unfulfilled vow good with other good works? Beatrice begins her answer with a tightly woven passage that illustrate a high degree of poetic skill . . . and then seems to acknowledge her own…
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Free Will Turns Personal: PARADISO, Canto IV, Lines 115 - 142
October 22, 2026 · 33 minBeatrice has answered the pilgrim's two unasked questions . . . but she doesn't yet know the one he really wants to ask. Having heard her doctrines about free will and unfulfilled vows, the pilgrim Dante winds himself up through flattery…
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Guilty As Charged By Aristotle and Aquinas: PARADISO, Canto IV, Lines 91 - 114
October 18, 2026 · 32 minBeatrice launches into a subpoint about free will, one derived from her larger discussion of culpability. In this passage, she refines exactly why Piccarda and Constance are charged with breaking their vows in the sphere of the moon: They…
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Justice Permits No Excuses: PARADISO, Canto IV, Lines 64 - 90
October 14, 2026 · 33 minBeatrice now takes on the pilgrim's second . . . doubt? It had been questions. Now it sounds as if it's more. Doubts. Here, she launches into a discussion of free will that ultimately implicates Piccarda and Constance in their own…
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Plato and Beatrice, Together At Last: PARADISO, Canto IV, Lines 49 - 63
October 11, 2026 · 27 minBeatrice continues her rectification of Dante's doubts by using a passage from Plato's TIMAEUS to turn her argument from accommodation to free will. This passage contains perhaps the heart of Beatrice's second grand discourse in PARADISO…
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Seeing Is (Almost) Believing: PARADISO, Canto IV, Lines 28 - 48
October 4, 2026 · 29 minBeatrice begins to take apart the two questions (or doubts) that she has intuited the pilgrim Dante is holding in silence. She first takes on the one with more "poison" in this passage, in which she reveals that the souls in the moon…
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Paralyzed by Free Will: PARADISO, Canto IV, Lines 1 - 27
September 30, 2026 · 29 minPiccarda may have vanished but questions remain. The pilgrim Dante is caught between them, unable to voice them. Beatrice to the rescue! She voices what he cannot say . . . or perhaps what he is afraid to say. She articulates his two…
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The Expanding Community of Women in the Moon: PARADISO, Canto III, Lines 109 - 130
September 23, 2026 · 24 minPiccarda Donati doesn’t stop her monologue with the cryptic line about her life after the convent. She turns to another figure in the lunar landscape: Constance I of Sicily, the Holy Roman Empress and mother of Frederick II, the stupor…
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The Violent yet Elliptical End to Piccarda Donati's Story: PARADISO, Canto III, Lines 88 - 108
September 20, 2026 · 28 minPiccarda Donati finally answers the question about who she is. She's given her name but not much else about her. In twelve lines (or four tercets) she brings her personal story to its violent yet elliptical conclusion. Before that the poet…
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Piccarda Donati's Apotheosis of the Will: PARADISO, Canto III, Lines 58 - 87
September 16, 2026 · 31 minPiccarda has confessed to her more humble place in the heavens. Our pilgrim Dante then wants to know if she wants more. Her answer leads her to an apotheosis of the will. Everything in the universe is in harmony; all dissonances are put…
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The First Soul in Paradise, Piccarda Donati: PARADISO, Canto III, Lines 34 - 57
September 13, 2026 · 29 minAt long last, the first soul--or "shade"--steps forward in Paradise. She's Piccarda Donati, a figure we've already encountered once (maybe even twice) in COMEDY. Dante flatters her to speak and she begins, not with herself, but with some…
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Catching Feelings in the Sensual Sphere of the Moon: PARADISO, Canto III, Lines 1 - 33
September 9, 2026 · 28 minDante is about to meet the first souls in Paradise, emerging from the liquid light of the moon. The poetry is lush and sensuous. The metaphors are complex and compounded. And Beatrice is a bit chilly, full of Latinisms and a condescending…
About the show
Ever wanted to read Dante's Divine Comedy? Come along with us! We're not lost in the scholarly weeds. (Mostly.) We're strolling through the greatest work (to date) of Western literature. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I take on this masterpiece passage by passage. I'll give you my rough English translation, show you some of the interpretive knots in the lines, let you in on the 700 years of commentary, and connect Dante's work to our modern world. The pilgrim comes awake in a dark wood, then walks across the known universe. New episodes every Sunday and Wednesday.