Through Human Love to God: Essays on Dante and Petrarch

Dante and Petrarch are two of the world's greatest love poets who convey emotional, intellectual and religious life through the story of human love. This book focuses on the attitudes of these two poets to sexual desire and throws light on to their human love and the value given to this love in the context of their Christian lives. Despite the contrasts between them, Dante and Petrarch are often compared, for they write in a common literary, classical and Christian tradition. It is generally considered that Dante describes his human love experience as positive and Petrarch views it as a negative emotion. It is the general argument of this study that Dante and Petrarch, as well as leaving their own mark on the tradition of love poetry, have insights into religion, which can be characzterized by examining their attitudes to human love. The discussion here is that of their faith, which is coloured by and explored through human love.