I have to admit - I own it but still haven't read it. This is a excerpt from a long article that I thought very interesting.
Where Dante Guides Us
The Divine Comedy, the poet’s tour of the Christian afterlife, is filled with strikingly modern touches—and a poetic energy rooted in the imperfectly human.
The New Yorker
By Claudia Roth Pierpont
He was a contemporary and possibly an acquaintance of the great Florentine painter Giotto, whom he mentions in the Comedy for having seized attention from Cimabue—Giotto’s former master, who produced images of icon-like rigidity—much as Dante himself will overtake the writers of his youth. Here, in two different arts, is the moment when medieval severity gives way to physical and psychological nuance, when human figures stretch their limbs and take breath. Within a generation, Boccaccio would write that Dante had opened the way for the long-absent Muses to return to Italy...
If poetry made Dante’s life, politics overturned it. In 1300, in his mid-thirties, he served on a Florentine governing committee that exiled several leaders of two clashing political factions, in a bid for peace. The following year, while Dante was on a diplomatic mission to Rome, his own faction back home was ousted, and he was falsely accused of corruption. He found himself exiled from Florence in absentia and, in 1302, he was sentenced to burn at the stake should he ever return...
Fourteen thousand two hundred and thirty-three lines. Not in Latin, it must be emphasized, the language of erudition and prestige—the obvious choice for an epic work—but in a language that ordinary people spoke and that (as he said) even women could read. Illiterates would have heard it recited; there are fourteenth-century tales of blacksmiths and garbage collectors rattling off passages by heart. But how many people, even then, could make out the references? The need for a supplemental commentary—footnotes—was recognized by one of the earliest Dante scholars, Dante’s son Jacopo, soon after the poet’s death, when the ink on Paradise was barely dry. By the end of the fourteenth century, the list of commentaries was long. To read what has accumulated now would be a career...
His first reaction is fear that, without a home and the protection of a government, he won’t have the courage to tell the truth about powerful figures and risk exposure to their revenge. But in Paradise he’s told he must speak anyway: “Open your mouth.” This is advice he takes. The Divine Comedy is a work of political courage, from its willing antagonism of the families of the damned who are named in Inferno to the greater targets of Paradise, where Dante clearly felt that he had nothing left to lose. Here, residents of Heaven, including Thomas Aquinas and St. Benedict, variously denounce the state of the Dominican, Franciscan, and Benedictine orders. St. Peter rails against the greed and the political intrigues of the contemporary Papacy, which have turned the Church into “a sewer of blood and stench.” The city of Florence is condemned, too: once a modest and well-mannered republic, it’s now corrupted by wealth and vulgar display. Except for Hell, it’s the place that Dante seems to hate most.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/12/01/dante-the-essential-commedia-prue-shaw-book-review