Dante And The Mediterranean Comedy

In recent decades the concept of Mediterranean has been cited with increasing frequency in relation to the study of medieval literatures. And yet, in what sense would Dante’s Comedy be ‘Mediterranean’? Is it because of its Greek-Arabic and Islamic sources? Dante and the Mediterranean Comedy analyzes the ideological function of references to the sea in the study of the Comedy undertaken by Enrico Cerulli, a scholar of Somali-Ethiopian languages, and a colonial governor of ‘Italian East Africa.’ Then it presents novel lines of inquiry on the reception and appropriation of the poem, such as the presence of Islamic sources in early commentaries of the Comedy, and cross-cultural allusions to Dante’s Hell in some graffiti on the walls of the Spanish Inquisition prison in Palermo. The image of the Mediterranean that seeps through the poem and through the history of its circulation is vivid yet hardly idyllic.

In 1921, Miguel Asín Palacios published a pioneering book, The Islamic Eschatology in the Divine Comedy, in which he argued that Dante's poem, the summa of Christian Middle Ages, had to be read on the backdrop of Islamic lore. The idea that the 'Tuscan afterworld' could have Quranic sources triggered one of the most heated literary debates of the 20th century, with both sides evincing nationalistic and cultural biases. The first section of the book analyzes this contentious episode of literary criticism from a historical standpoint: the post-WW2 decolonization period and the emergence of the Mediterranean as an hermeneutical framework of interpretation. It focuses on the multifaceted biography of Enrico Cerulli (1898-1988), a governor of Italian colonies and a scholar of Somali and Ethiopian studies, whose philological works are landmarks of the debate on Dante and Islam. The second part of the monograph presents some novel lines of inquiry on the reception, interpretation, and appropriation of the Comedy in the early-modern period. In this context, surprising intersections with Islamic sources materialize. The overarching goal of the book is to test the Mediterranean as a productive concept in the interpretation of Dante's work.

In recent decades the concept of Mediterranean has been cited with increasing frequency in relation to the study of medieval literatures. And yet, in what sense would Dante’s Comedy be ‘Mediterranean’? Is it because of its Greek-Arabic and Islamic sources? Dante and the Mediterranean Comedy analyzes the ideological function of references to the sea in the study of the Comedy undertaken by Enrico Cerulli, a scholar of Somali-Ethiopian languages, and a colonial governor of ‘Italian East Africa.’ Then it presents novel lines of inquiry on the reception and appropriation of the poem, such as the presence of Islamic sources in early commentaries of the Comedy, and cross-cultural allusions to Dante’s Hell in some graffiti on the walls of the Spanish Inquisition prison in Palermo. The image of the Mediterranean that seeps through the poem and through the history of its circulation is vivid yet hardly idyllic.

The Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia) by Dante Alighieri (Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri). A “comedy”, that became a “divine book” for ancestors, is one of the greatest works of art known to the world. It is an encyclopedia of “moral, natural, philosophical and theological” knowledges, a tremendous synthesis of the feudal catholic ideology and the same tremendous epiphany that spread during the new culture times. A great poetic genius of the author put this comedy above the era and made it a legacy of centuries.