Traveling through the Medieval Mediteranean: Dante’s Commedia

We will explore the Commedia in a contemporary key: the poet’s visionary journey through the pan-Mediterranean literary, intellectual, and religious traditions, including the classical, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic. While a visionary journey, the Commedia actually proposes the reformation of earthly life, religion, and politics. We will consider the particularly Mediterranean nature of this transformation. We will read selected cantos, and other of Dante’s works, in relation to literary or visionary journeys across the traditions: not only to Virgil’s Aeneid and the prophets of the Bible, but also to the Islamic Libro della Scala, Mohammed’s own visionary journey, and Francis of Assisi’s encounter with the Sultan. We will also consider Islamic figures of the Commedia and those thinkers influencing its proposals for earthly life: the crusader hero Saladino, and Mohammed himself; the philosophers Avicenna, Averroes, and Al-Farabi. In so doing, we aim to reveal the poet’s modernity: his synthesis of the three traditions, proposing to his readers a “interpretive” journey that broadens the Western Christian imagination in a radical re-visioning of ethical and spiritual life on earth.