Category: Religion

Reading Dante’s Inferno as an Initiated Text   To the modern literary mind, Dante’s Inferno is to Hell what Milton’s Paradise Lost is to the Fall:  a poetic masterpiece that has defined, even replaced, the imagery of its biblical antecedent.  It is fitting and expected, then, for critics such as Dr. Luisa Vergani to claim…

When considering the various manifestations of the imagination during the early Middle Ages, such as visual art, literature, folklore and visions, one notices a certain Hell-centric obsession.  The Apocalypse of St. Paul was but one example of this outpouring, notable because “it was the most widely known of all narrative tours of Hell.”[1]  This vision…