An Introduction To PURGATORIO

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Welcome back! We've been on hiatus for a bit, after we finished INFERNO. (If, that is, you're listening to this podcast IRT.) And now we're ready to start our climb up the next third of the poem: the mountain of purgation, the (perhaps) most human section of Dante's divine masterpiece.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I offer a little introduction to PURGATORIO--not so much to the poem but to our methods in this podcast. I want to tell you how the episodes for PURGATORIO are going to work (different from those for INFERNO). And I want to let you know--in advance!--the five basic ways I interpret (or "read," to use the literary term) this second canticle of COMEDY.

Here are the segments for this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE, our first on PURGATORIO.

[03:07] The methodology of how we'll walk through (up?) PURGATORIO: chunk, then smaller pieces (rather than the constant smaller pieces we undertook in INFERNO).

[06:15] Take heart: no funny voices in PURGATORIO! But that also means there's a translation issue.

[08:24] My initial five rubrics for interpreting PURGATORIO. First, PURGATORIO is about the perfection of the will and the correction of the intellect.

[11:20] Second, PURGATORIO is moving away from the classical (pagan?) world and more firmly into the Christian world. But that's not an easy move for our poet who so loves his classical learning.

[13:35] Third, PURGATORIO is the most heterodox portion of COMEDY.

[17:12] Fourth, PURGATORIO is a meta-commentary on the writing of INFERNO.

[18:35] Fifth, PURGATORIO is structured by the architecture of the New Testament.