For example, the multiple perspectives of `Near Perigord', an inquiry into the relationship between the troubadour Bertran de Born and the Lady Maent of Montaignac, dislocate temporal reenactments both in and out of persona.

The troubadour Bertran de Born presents himself in several songs in ways that modern readers find reprehensible and even repugnant.

For all its breathtaking scope, Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge still takes enormous power from sharp readings of particular texts, like the Inferno's canto of Bertran de Born where "God's justice is poetic justice" (79), the Purgatorio's dream of the siren where vision is privileged "because it is never partitioned" (152), and Paradiso's heaven of the contemplatives where "poetry is the source of vision" (166).