Lecture: “Whose Aquinas? Which Dante? Étienne Gilson and Pierre Mandonnet on Thomism and Dante Studies in the 1920s and 1930s”
George Corbett (University of St Andrews)
The Dominican master par excellence of the historical method, Pierre Mandonnet (1858–1936) came to Dante as one of the leading Thomists and medievalists of his generation. However, his monograph Dante le théologien (1935) was neglected and largely forgotten, mainly as a result of the Étienne Gilson’s book-length refutation in Dante et la philosophie (1939). This talk situates Mandonnet’s work in relation to prevailing currents of Dante scholarship in the early twentieth-century, and outlines how it might invite a reappraisal of central features of Dante’s thought today.
George Corbett is Professor of Theology, School of Divinity, University of St Andrews. His publications include Dante and Epicurus (2013), Dante’s Christian Ethics (2020), and, with Heather Webb, Vertical Readings in Dante’s ‘Comedy’, 3 vols (2015–2017).