Professor Boitani's latest book explores the areas of the tragic and the
sublime in medieval literature by asking what medieval texts mean to
modern readers. Boitani, who has written widely on medieval and
comparative literature, studies tragic and sublime tensions in stories
and scenes recounted by such major poets as Dante, Chaucer and Petrarch,
as well as themes shared by writers and philosophers and traditional
poetic images. The result is a learned, stimulating, and wide-ranging
volume of studies in comparative European literature, which takes into
account poems written in English, Italian and other languages, and
compares them with their classical and biblical ancestors as well as
with their modern descendants.