Research

The goal of this paper is to give an overview of Dante, his life, and his most famous work, “The Divine Comedy”, including themes, symbols, events, characters, and character selection. Dante Alighieri is considered one of the most famous writers of literature from the Middle Ages. Second only to Shakespeare himself, Dante uses not only the people around him in his work(s), but also the environment, settings, events and personal experiences. This is what sets him apart from the other writers, not only in the Middle Age, but from the many generations of writers to come after him. Later, you will see how he puts himself, and others, in his works in order to make since of the events in his time. He uses his relationships, his exile, and his beliefs to express a point to the people, religious leaders, and the government of his time. “The Divine Comedy” was written I believe to express opposition to the corruption, scandals, and misuse of the power from not only the government, but more so to the religious establishment of that time, which also controlled the government. By using the people from his time as “subjects” in his story, he places them is the respective levels of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise based on their actions (The Divine Comedy)

In his work, “The Divine Comedy”, Dante uses many of the events in his life as a type of “story plot” and some of the events in his life become the basis of his story. Born in the late 1200’s, Dante grew up in a higher middle class family. At the age of 12, Dante’s parents arranged a marriage between himself and the daughter of family friends, also from the upper class (Sparknotes). The two had no problems with each other, but in his teenage years, Dante grew blindly in love with another woman,...

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...le and inner rings. The outer ring of hell is a place where all the people who harm one another go to suffer. The middle ring is the place where the people who harmed themselves or even committed suicide. The punishment for these people is that they have been turned into trees and shrubs so that the animals may break and eat them. The most inner circle of the 7th level of hell is reserved for the blasphemers who have misled all of the people around them.

In the eight level of Hell, Fraudulence is the most populated place in hell. This is for the liars, sorcerers, false prophets, seducers, bad politicians, hypocrites, unwise and false councilors. These people are thrown down into stony ditches and under bridges for all of time. The souls are guarded by a large, flying beast with the ability to change appearances, much like the inhabitances’ sin, such as a fraud.