School of Arts

In 1979 or thereabouts, several members of the Manhattan College community decided to meet regularly to read and discuss The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. The original idea was to gather each Thursday and discuss a canto of the poem, beginning with Inferno 1 and concluding with Paradiso 33, a project that thus would take 100 Thursdays. And that is what it did take although, the demands of academic institutions being what they are, it was not possible to meet every week; still, the Dantisti (as we called ourselves) were singularly committed to their study, there were never long periods between meetings, and in about six years, or two years each for the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso, the journey (as we thought of our accompanying Dante on his journey through the other worlds) was completed.

With Jim Cascaito, Kristen Murtaugh, and Nonie Wanger in Foreign Languages, John Keber in Religious Studies, Pat Horner, John Nagle, and Mark Taylor in English, and one student, Rocco Marinaccio, now a member of the English Department, the Dante Seminar contained a very good mix of people and a considerable amount of expertise in the Christian traditions of the Middle Ages, scholastic philosophy, the Italian language, and western literary scholarship and criticism. Several of us possessed also Charles Singleton's great six-volume edition of the poem with commentary, a stimulus to the whole enterprise.

Shortly after finishing the Inferno, the Dantisti decided that their progress to date should be marked in a special way, and so we invited Allen Mandelbaum, who had just published his translation of the Inferno, to be the first of what would become, through 2004, twenty-one annual guest speakers. These speakers have included some of the most eminent of the world's scholars in Italian studies and the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance; they are all listed here.

Around 1985, we finished our reading of the Paradiso and thus of the entire poema sacro. We shared a great sense of accomplishment but also, suddenly, a great absence in our lives. What were we to do now? Some suggested we start all over with Inferno 1 and read the whole poem again, or switch to the Bible, or perhaps to the epics of Homer. Finally, we tried two other projects: a reading of the poetry of William Blake, then a reading of Cervantes's Don Quixote, where we could proceed at the rate of a chapter each week in clear imitation of our study of Dante. For whatever reasons, neither project proved sustainable, and within a year or so of finishing Dante, we were once again without purpose and threatened with dissolution.

The Dante Seminar decided then on an entirely different kind of activity. In a college where there was no regular forum, outside of classes, for the exchange of ideas in the humanities, we determined to meet exactly six times a year—the first five to discuss the scholarly projects of our members, the sixth to continue the tradition of guest speakers. Accordingly, we now meet usually (depending on school holidays) the final Thursdays of September and October, the first Thursday of December, and the final Thursdays of February and March, when, typically, someone reads or summarizes an original paper, which everyone present then discusses. We believe that this format has been most stimulating and successful. Then in April a guest speaker edifies and entertains us.

Everyone in the college community—faculty, students, and staff—is cordially invited to participate in the activities of the Manhattan College Dante Seminar, whose schedule is published in the monthly calendar printed by the office of the Dean of Arts.

Last updated by N. Cave on January 5, 2005