Dante

Abstract

Dante’s works, both vernacular and Latin, include the most extensive and complex instances in Western literature of the entire gamut of allegorical devices available to the poet as the heir of classical and medieval Christian traditions of figurative discourse, from particular metaphors, tropes, and personifications to structures of extended narrative allegory and adaptations of biblical typology. Both in the vernacular prose Convivio (1306) and in an Epistle to Can Grande della Scala attributed to Dante (1320), how a text might be understood to have multiple senses is set out; for the Epistle this programme is relevant to reading the Commedia. For his major work, Dante harnessed his intensely self-conscious allegorical habits and applied techniques of ancient and medieval dream-vision in order to fashion, with elaborate rhetorical artifice, an imaginary journey through the afterlife: one so vividly realized that some modern critics believe it must mirror authentic experience.