Note 45, Chapter 5 of the author's Christina Rossetti in Context which the University of North Carolina Press published in 1988. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
Relevant to discussions of Christina Rossetti's work in this context is Singleton's earlier insistence on Dante's pursuit of this program despite those readers who "somehow cannot allow that good Christians, Christians who know that there is only one God of Love, could play with a convention of venus that had, as a central figure, either a god of love in no way identifiable with the God of Love of the Christian faith, or else at the center had a woman, midons, enthroned and worshipped in his stead (or had, more commonly, both figures)" (47).
Last modified 24 June 2007