This study examines the importance of geographical ideas in Dante’s Commedia and develops a historically sensitive geocritical methodology to analyze the function of real world geography within Dante’s poem. I aim to expand our understanding of the importance of the poet’s use of geography beyond the consulation of geographical sources and consideration of place names. In the first chapter case studies of geographical references with connections to the Islamic world show how historicized approaches open up new possibilities of understanding the medieval significance of the poet’s references. Subsequent chapters explore the relationship of the Commedia’s geography to medieval mapping technologies; comparing the parameters and borders of Dante’s world to the genre of medieval mappaemundi as well as putting this worldview into conversation with the emerging field of portolan charts and the developing navigational technology of the thirteenth century. This project further expands our definition of the stakes of geographical knowledge and traces the the social, political and cultural implications of the various modes of representing the world and how these implications are evident in the scholarly responses to the worldview represented within the Commedia. Ultimately, this project shows how a geocritical historicized reading of the Commedia opens up new directions for Dante studies and puts the geographical material of Dante’s work into conversation with other disciplines. The conclusion ends with a proposal for future digital directions for this research.

This dissertation aims to show that the Commedia develops an original and coherent philosophy of human nature. Deploying the methodologies of two separate disciplines, the history of philosophy and literary criticism, it places the poem’s ideas in the intellectual context in which they developed, and analyzes the learnedness, freshness and validity of its conclusions. The topic is divided in three themes, discussed in the same number of chapters: 1) Love and desire. After following Arendt in tracing a tension in Augustine’s works between the theological primordiality of dilectio Dei and the biblically endorsed importance of love for one’s neighbor, I argue that the Commedia develops a concept of social charity that seeks to reconcile that seminal Christian paradox. 2) Free will. Based on a study of the theory of free will advanced by Purgatorio and Paradiso, I advance the idea that Dante’s metaphysics and psychology of human freedom, particularly in regards to his description of the workings of absolute and relative will, contrast in a fundamental way with Aquinas’ in the Appendix of the Summa theologica; and based on that conclusion, and on an analysis of the example of Piccarda Donati, it is possible to conclude that the Commedia not only postulates a hierarchy of volitions as a necessary condition for human freedom, but also defines free will as the ability to formulate a self-forming action. 3) Body and soul. Based on the account of the creation of the universe found in Paradiso XXIX, I argue that the Commedia’s cosmos is strictly hylomorphic, and postulate that this theory also applies to the relationship between body and soul. Thus the transumanar depicted by the last canticle, far from a rejection of worldly existence, rather implies a reencounter with those inalienably human characteristics, but on a higher plane.

This dissertation examines the literary depiction of physical disability in Dante’s Commedia, Convivio, and his other works using a two-pronged approach: answering Barolini’s call to historicize and incorporating disability theorists’ models of and approach to investigating medieval disability. Blameless Defect: A Dantean Model of Disability thus follows the theological, philosophical, medical, and legal aspects of disability in Duecento and Trecento Florence and within the broader context of Europe and the Mediterranean. This broad historical context, as well as contemporaneous writers’ treatment of disability, is used to contextualize Dante’s own attitude and representation of physical disabilities, specifically deafness, blindness, and mobility disabilities. Dante’s representation reflects and engages with the medieval concept of virtue or vice that can be read on the body; specifically, Dante’s engagement with deafness in the Convivio reveals a Dantean category of blameless physical defect that indicates separation between disability and sin and exonerates those who have impediments that limit their knowledge, such as those with lived experience of disability. This treatment of blameless deafness is contextualized through its philosophical sources. The dissertation considers whether blindness and mobility disabilities fit into what I term the Dantean category of “blameless defect.” Mobility disabilities are represented throughout the Commedia; their presence is tied to sin largely within metaphorical contexts or as the lesser of a hierarchy of sins. Similarly, blindness is present throughout the Commedia and is even included among the divine punishments, albeit in a temporary manner. Further, Dante, often using simile or metaphor, represents blindness in the Commedia to illustrate both spiritual and human understanding. Finally, Dante’s own blindness is read within the theoretical framework of “disability gain” as an approach which sees the author’s text open to greater possibilities. Blameless Defect, on the whole, demonstrates a sympathetic and non-normative Dantean attitude to the physically disabled, whom Dante represents vividly and with great accuracy. Dante’s portrait of the physically disabled thus stands in contrast to the attitudes, practices, and laws of his times.

"Italian Readers of Ovid: From the Origins to Dante" studies the reception of Ovid's writings in medieval Italian prose and poetry, from the first vernacular poems composed in Sicily to Dante's "Divina Commedia." Starting from the very beginnings of a new literary culture, I show how the increasing availability of Ovid's texts is mirrored in the increasing textual presence of Ovid in the vernacular writings of the period. Identifying the general traits common to this Ovid-inspired literature, I discuss how medieval Italian authors used Ovid's works and his characters to address questions of poetics, openly debating the value of Ovid's poetry for their own writings. I then illustrate how, in his lyric poetry and the "Commedia," Dante inserts himself into this vernacular practice of discussing poetics through the medium of Ovid. Ultimately, I argue that Dante's reading of Ovid in the "Commedia" is deeply rooted in his own lyric poetry and that of his predecessors. Chapter 1, "Medieval Italian Readers of Ovid, Modern Readers of Reception," describes the material and cultural contexts of the reception of Ovid during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in Italy, challenging existing notions about Ovid's reception in medieval Italian scholarship. Previous studies mostly treat Dante's "Commedia" as the starting point of this reception history, neglecting the preceding and equally important lyric tradition. Questioning this approach, I reconstruct the increasing availability of Ovid's works in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Italy and specify in which formats (commentaries, translations, anthologies, mentions in treatises, other works of literature) and contexts (schools, universities, courts, monasteries) contemporary readers could have encountered Ovid's works. By outlining these texts and contexts, I depict a growing community of Italian readers of Ovid, many of whom not only read Ovid but also incorporated the Latin poet's work in their writings. Chapter 2, "Readers Turned Writers: From the Sicilian School to the dolce stil novo," focuses on a first series of these Ovid-inspired Italian writings. This chapter explores the poetic implications of including Ovid in their works--a trait found in the poetry of Pier della Vigna, Guido Cavalcanti, and Guido Guinizzelli, among others. During this period, poets debate with their contemporaries about how to write poetry, openly addressing and even attacking fellow poets while defending their own poetics. The Italian poets explicitly evaluate their readings of Ovid's love poetry in their poems and single out his poetry as an emblem of the kind of poetry they write, or no longer wish to write. The vernacular poets treat Ovid's "Metamorphoses" similarly. By means of the simile, the Italian poets feature a select group of Ovidian characters to underline their own exceptionality: for example, the poet is similar to the male Ovidian character (but better), his lady to the female (but more beautiful). The third chapter, "Readers Turned Writers: Dante Alighieri and Cino da Pistoia," focuses on the exceptional position of Dante and Cino among this group of vernacular writers. Both Dante and Cino integrate Ovidian material in their poetry with more complexity. Including similes in their poetry, Dante and Cino radically revise this common practice by associating themselves with the female Ovidian character--a gender switch that later Petrarch will adopt. Both poets also go beyond comparing their world with that of the "Metamorphoses" (what all the vernacular poets discussed in Chapter 2 did), but truly integrate Ovidian material into their poetry, blending Ovid's world into theirs. Furthermore, this chapter challenges the notion of two phases of Dante's writing posed in Dante scholarship: one phase when he is exclusively interested in vernacular poetry, and the second phase when he turns to classical literature. Finding Ovid featured in one of Dante's earliest poem exchanges, I illustrate that it is precisely in his vernacular lyric poetry that Dante slowly starts to experiment with Ovidian material. The petrose, a series of four poems written around 1296, are central in this development. These poems test out some new techniques that Dante will use more frequently in the "Commedia": the integration of both central and peripheral elements from a larger passage in Ovid's text, and the combination of different Ovidian sources at the same time. Chapters 4 and 5 trace the development of these techniques from Dante's lyric poems to the "Commedia," where for the first time we encounter Ovidian material in a Christian context. While it is not my aim to de-allegorize Dante's reading of Ovid, I stress that the most radically allegorizing and Christianizing commentaries on Ovid are not part of the cultural context of Dante's time and, instead, illustrate how much Dante's reading of Ovid is rooted in the lyric tradition. Chapter 4, "Metapoetics in Ovid and Dante's Commedia," focuses on the role Ovid's writings play in Dante's definition of his poetics. Looking at metanarrative moments in the "Commedia" (Inf. 24-25, Purg. 24, the poetic invocations in Purg. 1 and Par. 1), I illustrate how Dante repeatedly discusses poetics through the medium of Ovid, just as the Italian lyric poets did. Chapter 5, "Shifting Shapes of Ovidian Intertextuality: Ovid's Influence in Purgatorio and Paradiso," proposes to categorize Ovidian allusions in the "Commedia" by the kinds of elements Dante drew from his Ovidian sources. The primary method with which Dante incorporates Ovidian material in the "Commedia" is the rhetorical trope of the simile, which was also repeatedly used by the vernacular lyric poets. Focusing on the Purgatorio and Paradiso, the two canticles where the poet compares himself most often with certain characters from the "Metamorphoses," I illustrate how Dante adopts and transforms this vernacular lyric practice. Of these vernacular poets, Dante is certainly the Italian reader of Ovid who integrates Ovidian material in his poetry most frequently and with the most complexity: he combines the methods of the vernacular lyric poets with other classical or theological sources and conforms these methods to the poetics of the "Commedia." But this complexity, I ultimately argue, can only be fully understood in connection within the cultural context of the reception of Ovid: an Italian literary culture that from its very beginnings reflects on Ovid's texts.

This is an interdisciplinary study that aims to reassess Dante's use of Franciscan sources in the Divine Comedy. Particularly, I focus on two important, yet marginalized, theologians: the Provençal friar Pietro di Giovanni Olivi, and his disciple, Ubertino da Casale. Both are coeval of Dante Alighieri, and served as lectores in Florence. In particular, I examine the eschatological aspects of their works, in an attempt to understand how they contribute to Dante's own eschatological vision. Ubertino and Olivi were extremely interested in understanding history through the dense symbolism of the Apocalypse. Therefore, I inspected their works, particularly Olivi's Lectura Super Apocalipsim (a commentary on the Apocalypse written in 1298, of which there exist no modern editions), and Ubertino's Arbor Vitae Crucifixae Jesu, "The Tree of the Crucified Life of Jesus," a massive work on the life of Christ, composed in 1305, in which the author incorporates and develops large parts of Olivi's commentary. I attempt to disentangle the crossed references that link these two books with Dante's Divine Comedy. I aim to revise our knowledge of Dante's appropriation of these sources, for I believe that scholars have unjustly dismissed Ubertino as an unoriginal mediator, on the ground of his ideological dependence on Olivi. Therefore I propose an amendment in Ubertino's favor. Upon a redefinition of Dante's ideological genealogy, I hope to improve our comprehension of how Dante incorporates the eschatology debate of his time in the sacred poem.

In this study of Dante and the religious orders and institutions of his time, I argue that the poet embeds histories of the religious orders into the Commedia. I demonstrate that Dante’s historical vision, as it pertains to the religious orders, is one of parallel decline, whereby the virtuous intentions of religious institutions are corrupted as time moves forward. By taking Dante’s own historical scheme, which is best articulated through the character of St. Benedict of Nursia in Paradiso 22, I propose a reading of the Commedia that excavates and traces the histories that Dante tells of the papacy, cardinals and bishops, monasticism, and the mendicant fraternal orders. The first chapter identifies the scriptural foundations of apostolic succession as they are articulated in the Commedia, and how the historical tribulations of the early church, especially the Donation of Constantine, is depicted by Dante through his early papal history. The second chapter posits that Dante’s “modern popes” are a useful category for understanding how the papal history of the Commedia intersects with issues of conversion and political theory. My third chapter focuses on Dante’s history of cardinals and bishops and has two goals: to explore the ways in which the twinning of the figures of Peter and Paul create the backbone of the Commedia’s program for apostolic renewal and to examine and historicize Dante’s critiques of the Decretalists. The next chapter, on the history of monasticism, focuses on Benedict of Nursia and the origins of Western monasticism as depicted in the Commedia, the history of monastic reform traced by Dante in his poem, and the ways in which he stages issues of compulsion on the backdrop of religious life. In my fifth and final chapter I turn to Dante’s histories of the mendicant fraternal orders (the Order of Friars Minor and the Order of Preachers) and the lives of their two founders (Francis and Dominic) as told in Paradiso. By tracing the histories of religious orders that are sutured into the fabric of his Commedia, this dissertation proposes a new way of examining Dante’s historical imagination and narrative craft.