Dante-The Divine Comedy

Catalog description

Refashioning the conventions of poetry, Dante (1265-1321) used the account of his presumed journey through the three realms of the Christian afterlife - Hell, Purgatory and Paradise - to explore the world at the close of the Middle Ages. The poem is both an adventure story and an exhaustive, assessment of the state of politics, society, religion, literature, philosophy, and theology at the beginning of the fourteenth century. This course examines a selection of cantos Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso in its cultural, theological, social and political context. In particular we will explore how the underground world imagined by the poet relates to late medieval urban life and culture. A guiding concern of the discussion is to assess the ways in which Dante changed our understanding of the relationship between the human and the divine, justice and love, will and reason, happiness and knowledge, literature and the Bible. Political turmoil, philosophical and theological paradigms social and religious conflict all converge in the making of the Comedy and will thus form crucial elements of our investigation.