Use Of Cultural Bias In Dante's Inferno

Dante’s Inferno is an unparalleled piece of literature where Dante creates, experiences, and explains hell. He organizes it into four different sections, inconvenience, violence, simple fraud, and treachery. These sections are further divided into ten different circles of hell, which are the Neutrals, Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Avarice and Prodigality, Anger and Sullenness, Heresy, Violence, the Ten Malebolge, and the Frozen Floor of Hell. King Minos passes judgement on each of the people who enter hell, and he then sends them to their designated circle. The organization of Dante’s four sections, his ten circles, and the judgement from King Minos all display forms of cultural bias. This paper will demonstrate possible differences by providing an

The book itself is politically biased due to it being written in Tuscan Italian. Dante used Tuscan to promote an ideology of cultural and political unity throughout Italy. Dante’s use of Tuscan Italian makes him the first canonical classical author to write in a vernacular language. Additionally, The Divine Comedy contains undeniable religious references, symbolism, and bias. The Divine Comedy has three portions, including The Inferno. Additionally, each portion has thirty-three cantos. Three and its multiples are important for religious symbolism due to their reference to the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Dante also references the Pope through the she-wolf blocking Dante the character’s path to heaven. The she-wolf represents greed or avarice and symbolizes the turmoil of the Catholic Church in the fourteenth century. His focus on such a visual portray of his creations in another reference to religious bias and embodies the shift to visual scholasticism that Europe was experiencing. An example of his skill with creating an image through

These people cause direct harm to more people than just themselves, but their influence still has a limit. The circles included in the third section in descending order are anger and sullenness, deceit, and violence. While the people sentenced to the third section can have a significant direct and indirect impact, their power has a limit, and they have a small impact when comparing the people affected to the global population. I would place the anger and sullenness circle with deceit and violence because anger can cause significant emotional damage to a person. Also, I placed the circle of violence below deceit’s circle due to a change in cultural bias from Dante, in which I understand violence to be the most extreme form of harm that one can inflict upon another or