No laughing matter

On the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), Pope Francis wrote an Apostolic Letter to celebrate Dante as a ‘prophet of hope and poet of mercy’.

The magnitude of Dante’s significance for Western civilisation is extensive. Here the focus will be to sample Dante’s relationship with the Bible in The Divine Comedy, his most-known work.

Inferno

The Divine Comedy is a journey into the realms of the afterlife. His journey starts from Hell (‘Inferno’) which is a Biblically-attested space, even if he imagines it as a chasm in the shape of an inverted cone, a shape that has no Biblical origin.