The Ordeal of Mercy: Dante’s Purgatorio in Light of the Spiritual Path

Other exegetes of Dante have dealt with the overall architecture of the Divine Comedy, its astronomical and numerical symbolism, its philosophical underpinnings, and its historical context. Jennifer Doane Upton, however--while preserving the narrative flow of the Purgatorio and making many cogent observations about its metaphysics--directs our attention instead to many of its "minute particulars," unveiling their depth and symbolic resonance. She presents the ascent of the Mountain of Purgatory as a series of timeless steps, each of which must be plumbed to its depths before the next step arrives; in doing so she demonstrates how the center of this journey of purgation is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.