Dante's Divine Comedy 1: Inferno

Undergraduate / Graduate

This is the first part of a sequence focusing on Dante's masterpiece. We examine Dante's Inferno in its cultural (i.e., historical, artistic, philosophical, sociopolitical) context. In particular, we study Dante's poem alongside other crucial Latin and vernacular texts of his age. They include selections from the Bible, Virgil's Aeneid, Augustine's Confessions, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the stilnovist and Siculo-Tuscan poets. Political turmoil, economic transformation, changing philosophical and theological paradigms, and social and religious conflict all converge in the making of the Inferno.