Dante saw a girl in a Florentine street and built a cosmology on her. Charles Williams takes that first sight seriously, and follows Beatrice all the way to the Paradiso.

Published in 1943, The Figure of Beatrice argues that falling in love is a genuine road to God rather than a distraction from one. Williams calls it the Way of Affirmation of Images: the beloved is glimpsed as she truly is, in her heavenly perfection, and the glimpse asks something of the lover for the rest of his days. He reads the whole of Dante in that light, moving through the Vita Nuova, the Convivio and the De Monarchia before working in sequence through the Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso.

Charles Williams (1886-1945) was an editor at Oxford University Press, a poet, novelist and playwright, and one of the Inklings alongside C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. This is the study that made Dante a living writer for a great many English readers, and the fullest account Williams ever gave of what he called romantic theology.

This edition features:

• The complete 1943 study, tracing Beatrice from the first sight in the Vita Nuova to the vision that closes the Commedia
• A reading of the Commedia in sequence, through the fourfold medieval sense of scripture and image
• Williams's fullest account of the Way of Affirmation of Images, the idea that runs through all his work
• Chapters on the Convivio and the De Monarchia alongside the poems every reader already knows
• A way in to Dante for readers who came to Williams by way of C. S. Lewis or the other Inklings