Dante & Beatrice: A Non-Existent Love Affair

Dante’s love for Beatrice is unlike any love before or after it. At the very least, it is the strangest love of all. As Harold Bloom once said, nothing else in Western literature ‘is as sublimely outrageous as Dante’s exaltation of Beatrice’. He turned this average Florentine woman into a ‘crucial element in the church’s hierarchy of salvation’. According to the theologian Charles Williams, for the full…