With the advent of the printing press, it was the Aldine small books in octavo editions that launched Dante into the canon, positioning him alongside Virgil and Petrarch, Del Soldato says. “The Divine Comedy” and its literary successors have had “more of an impact on Christian images and ideas of hell than the Old or New Testament,” McDaniel says. “Nonetheless, many are familiar with the nine levels of hell, the images-made famous by Dore’s etchings and Botticelli’s ‘Map of Hell’-of men condemned to push boulders up the sides of mountains or the image of Satan with three heads lodged in ice.” “Dante’s difficult verse, with its countless intertextual references to figures in Biblical and Classical literature, as well as to Mediterranean religious, social, and economic history, is dizzying to the modern reader,” he says. Religious studies professor Justin McDaniel notes that the “Divine Comedy,” while rarely read in its entirety, has become an integral part of the Western canon. While Florence has since reclaimed Dante as a native son, his influence reverberates throughout the world. “There are Florentines basically everywhere,” including Canto 25 in “Inferno,” where the damned souls are Florentine thieves. Dante employs philosophical and theological concepts as the poem evolves, Del Soldato says.Īfter being exiled for his political views, Dante chose to people hell with his former neighbors and old haunts as “a sort of revenge against a city that had expelled him,” says Del Soldato.

Along the way he meets both historical figures, like Plato and Aristotle, both in limbo as enlightened pagans, and contemporary figures, like Francesca da Rimini, situated in hell for falling in love with her brother-in-law. John Pollack explains the significance of this volume to Christopher Picchiello, a senior from Bohemia, New York in the School of Nursing.ĭante’s magnum opus is widely considered to be the “Divine Comedy,” a poem in which an autobiographical protagonist journeys through hell, purgatory, and paradise under the guidance of the Roman poet Virgil.

Dante comedy