This book examines Dante’s Divine Comedy as centrally concerned with humility and as a compositional exercise, training its author in the practice of humility. Canto by canto, Teubner demonstrates the many means – textual, intertextual, and ascetical – by which the poem’s theology responds to the concerns of today’s readers. Read in this way, the language and poetry of the Comedy can be approached as dramatizing the capacities of humility that is rightly understood as grounded in right relation to the divine: self-giving and yet dynamically self-possessed.

Teubner contributes to a turn in Dante studies that reads the Comedy as a practice of self-examination, informed by the scriptural, literary, and liturgical background of the poem, while offering fresh feminist perspectives on its theological challenges. Undergraduate and novice readers will benefit richly from this gracefully written companion, which also introduces theologians to a growing body of scholarship exploring Dante’s religious thought.