THAT DANTE PRESENTS Hell as a realm of chaos and confusion, and Paradise as one of harmony and union, a reader of the Commedia recognizes in the first reading. The astonishing variety of settings and of infernal guards in Hell, the rapid shifts from one of the many damned souls to another, their hostility to Dante and to their companions, all contrast sharply with Paradise, where the heavens seem to differ only in intensity of light and joy, where the souls come to meet and to share their joy with Dante, and the movement from one soul to another seems slow and dignified. Purgatory is transitional, with fewer changes in setting, guards who instruct rather than control, souls fixed only temporarily where Dante sees them, trying to be helpful to him and to each other. Perhaps because it is transitional, Purgatory is more given to formal and visual patterns which fix it in the mind if not in reality.

These large differences are suggested by the action of the plot, but are reinforced by a whole range of formal elements. I shall consider a number of these here: the length of individual cantos, the relative proportions of narrative and speech, enjambment, and the varieties of rhyme and of rhyme sounds within and beyond terza rirna.

Allegory and autobiography

Among the last words spoken by Jesus in the Gospel of John are those directed to Peter, predicting the disciple's martyrdom:

In his commentary, St. Augustine explains that these verses mark the passage in Peter's life from youthful self-reliance to humility, from the sin of presumption to confession and contrition. In middle age (for Peter is neither young nor old), he is called upon to demonstrate his love by caring for the Lord's sheep and by being willing to accept crucifixion.

The conversion from presumption to humility is also the theme of Dante's descent into Hell, which likewise takes place in middle age: “nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.” The landscape of the prologue scene borrows several details from book 7 of Augustine's Confessions, where philosophical presumption is distinguished from confession: “it is one thing, from a wooded mountain top, to see the land of peace and quite another to reach it, when one's way is beset by the lion and the dragon.” It is likely that casting off the rope girdle halfway through the Inferno signifies a surrender of self-reliance analogous to Peter's, while the rush with which the pilgrim is girt at the beginning of the Purgatorio is a traditional emblem of humility (“umile pianta”).

IT IS COMMONLY said that the Divina Commedia ends with Dante's vision of the Trinity. This will pass as a generalization, but it is not precisely true; and it is not merely a scholarly quibble to note why. When, as his journey is coming to an end, Dante sees the Trinity in the form of three differently colored circles, he notices that an image of man is depicted on the second circle, and his attention is drawn entirely to that fact; at the last he strains to understand how the circle and the image can be united, how God and man can form a unity. It is when this desire is fulfilled, through the granting of a momentary flash of intuition, that the vision comes to an end and Dante acknowledges finally the inability of his imagination to mediate what he understood.

It is entirely apt that the final vision should end in this way, for it may be said that the central quest of Dante's understanding in the poem, and indeed in his œuvre as a whole, was to grasp how the divine is present in the human. Behind the thirst for that knowledge lay the conviction, permeating all his works, that God is supremely to be discovered in human nature.

DANTE'S ANGRY denunciation of Florence and the Florentines is one of the memorable themes of the Divina Commedia. Repeatedly in the great poem, and in several of his letters, Dante excoriated the Florentines for the violence, factionalism, and instability of their politics, for their excessive pursuit and consumption of wealth, and, worst of all, for their criminal resistance to what he considered the divinely ordained authority of the Roman emperor. Because we know so little of Dante's political views and opinions about Florence before his exile in 1302, it is tempting to use the fact of the exile and Dante's emotional reaction to it as a way of explaining his harsh critique of his own city. While there is no doubt much truth in such an approach, it is equally important to grasp the influence on Dante of the traditions of political and historical thought that emerged in Florence during the course of the thirteenth century, and in particular of the ideas associated with movements of popular opposition to the traditional dominance of the elite of upper-class families.

NO AUTHOR OF a literary work in the western tradition has solicited more critical attention and learned commentary than the Dante Alighieri of the Divina Commedia. And still the problem of explaining the very existence of this poem has remained beyond our reach. In fact, the remarkable critical and scholarly gains of recent years have only made our dilemma plainer. We have increasingly revealed the extraordinarily complex yet orderly structure of the Commedia; yet each advance in understanding of the scope and precise nature of Dante's achievement in a real sense only makes it that much more difficult to understand how such creativity came to be – what made a “Dante Alighieri” possible at that time and in that place (late medieval Europe; communal and feudal Italy; proto-capitalist Florence in the late 1200s and early 1300s).

Recent theoretical and methodological tendencies in the study of literature have taught us to be skeptical about trying to understand literary texts as the products of individual “genius.” They have urged us to see literature as a “system of discourse” – as a set of structural possibilities (and limitations) intrinsic to language in general and to the specific traditions of literary production in particular. They have pressed upon us the need to understand the social and political exigencies (ranging from constructive articulation of cultural “values” to the repressive enforcement of ideological codes) that call forth and determine the creations of individual authors. Finally, they have pushed us to recognize the psychologically “unconscious” forces that work parallel, and yet in opposition, to the conscious designs of the creative imagination of a poet.

IN HIS BRILLIANT little book Dante as a Political Thinker, published forty years ago but arguably still the most stimulating introduction to the subject in English, my old teacher Alessandro Passerin d'Entrèves assigns to Dante's theory of the empire only a limited place. D'Entrèves emphasizes Dante's preoccupation with his Florentine “patria” and the church, as well as his cultural patriotism, while denying his political nationalism. Dante was therefore in the tradition of his family essentially a loyal “Guelf,” even if a troubled one as the Commedia shows (a work begun, d'Entrèves believes, after the collapse in 1313 of Emperor Henry VII's Italian expedition). Dante's “Ghibellinism,” his advocacy of the imperial cause, was an important but passing phase in the evolution of his thought. His treatise on the empire, Monarchia, which d'Entreves dates as c. 1312, was an aberration, indicating how he had been overcome by the hope that a human saviour could take away the sins of the world, forgetting the fundamental Christian idea that from within, and not from without, must mankind be redeemed and saved. D'Entrèves believes that the Commedia was written after the Monarchia and marks a return to a more orthodox view of salvation.

The Paradiso is the continuation and culmination of the earlier canticles, and at the same time a new departure. Refiguring themes, issues, images, and episodes from Inferno and Purgatorio, it nonetheless establishes a new set of conditions for both the poet and the reader. While the poet's memory has hitherto been sufficient to his task, the Paradiso acknowledges the gap between memory and experience in its opening lines, and, even more, the gap between both psychological categories and language itself. The agon of the poet in his attempt to negotiate this space beyond memory and speech is ever more insistently foregrounded as the poem progresses. But the poem also provides a series of investitures by figures of increasing authority, calling attention to its progressive definition as a “poema sacro,”a sacred text “to which both heaven and earth have set their hand.” The reader, too, is repositioned. A series of direct addresses, as well as a number of “tasks”which actively engage imaginative collaboration, implicate the reader in the work of the poem.

THE TRANSLATION, imitation, and contestation of Dante in English shows no signs of abating after six hundred years. The waning of scholasticism, the Reformation, the rise of new nation-states (including Italy, Ireland, and the United States), the two World Wars, the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland, and the struggles of African-Americans have all been articulated through readings and rewritings of Dantean texts. The first part of this history is easy to narrate: the painstaking intelligence with which Chaucer, Milton, and Shelley respond to Dante is easily distinguished from the general ignorance and imaginative feebleness that prevails in the first four centuries. Thereafter things become more complicated: an American Dante comes into being; Pound and Eliot connect American, English, and continental traditions; an Irish Dante (Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Heaney) achieves things that are beyond the grasp of the English or Americans. Interest in Dante has, if anything intensified in the last few years. This survey begins with a secure origin – Chaucer's De Hugelino Comite de Pize – and works forward to an imperfect, Farinata-like vision of our own immediate future.

THE LIFE OF Dante is such a tangle of public and private passions and ordeals experienced over the fifty-six years he lived that it has always been a source of inexhaustible fascination. It is as if everything about his life – its innumerable defeats and its occasional and yet enduring triumphs – belongs to the romantic and alluring realm of legend: a love at first sight that was to last his whole life and inspire lofty poetry; the long, cruel exile from his native Florence because of the civil war ravaging the city; the poem he wrote, the Divina Commedia, made of his public and private memories; the turning of himself into an archetypal literary character, such as Ulysses, Faust, or any of those medieval knights errant, journeying over the tortuous paths of a spiritual quest, wrestling with dark powers, and, finally, seeing God face to face.

Many are the reasons why generations of readers have found the story of Dante ’s life compelling. His relentless self-invention as an unbending prophet of justice and a mythical quester for the divine are certainly two important reasons. The fact that in his graphic figurations of the beyond (rare glimpses of which were available in only a few other legendary mythmakers – Homer, Plato, and Virgil) he was an unparalleled poet also greatly heightens our interest in him.

OF THE THREE otherworldly kingdoms which the Divina Commedia represents, Purgatory is Dante's most original creation. Hell and Paradise were already well established places within the medieval imagination. Each possessed a standard set of topographic and iconographic attributes which, accrued in the course of many centuries of patristic tradition, rendered them instantly recognizable to prince and pauper alike. Hell was a dark, subterranean place where eternal torments were administered by demons under the guidance of Satan, the ruler of the underworld. Paradise was Hell's positive counterpart: a luminous celestial palace where eternal blessings were administered by the angels under the guidance of God, the emperor of the universe. In both cases the author of the Commedia felt called upon less to alter preexisting traditions, than to extend and systematize them: establishing, for instance, a much more precise hierarchy of the degrees of damnation or blessedness endured or enjoyed by souls in the afterlife; and finding a place for specifically Christian categories of error, like heresy, within an Aristotelian moral system.

DANTE'S FIRST BOOK (his libello, or “little book,” as he calls it), marks the beginning of a tendency that will dominate his literary career as a whole – the tendency to edit the self. All of Dante's major works – the Vita nuova, the Convivio, the De vulgari eloquentia, and of course the Divina Commedia – share this pattern of self-commentary on the part of an author who, for some reason, was never content merely to write poetry, but who also felt the need to instruct his reader about how that poetry came into being and how it should be read. Dante's work has been taken seriously by his readers over the centuries, to be sure, but it is fair to say that no one has ever taken it more seriously than the author himself.

The most striking aspect of the Vita nuova, for those who do not merely take its canonical stature for granted, or whose perception of the work is not mystified by the fact of its authorship, is the utter seriousness with which the author sets out to dignify and solemnify the rather innocent (and often mediocre) lyric poems that he composed in his youth.

NO POEM HAS ever drawn the attention of so many exegetes as has Dante's Divina Commedia. It is probably fair to say that any young student of poetry who was aware of what is required of a dantista would happily choose to remain an amateur in respect to the poem, would choose to own it privately, only as it speaks to one's own eyes and ears. Dante himself is so much richer and deeper than we who write about him are, and allow him to seem, that the defender of the uses of the commentary tradition may be expected to display a certain hesitation. That tradition is so vast that those who decide to devote themselves to the study of it tend, understandably enough, to lose sight of the poem upon which this huge and unwieldly corpus sits. Nonetheless, we should probably observe that the originary fault lies with Dante himself. For no other poet has more evidently hoped to have a commentator at his margins. (Boccaccio, rightly, was so worried that no one would ever contribute a commentary to his Teseida that he supplied his own; and it was probably the existence of his own marginalia which encouraged at least two later and now mainly forgotten studiosi to supply their own.)

UNDERWRITING THE entire world in which Dante lived is a single book, the Bible. Believed to be authored by a God who chose human scribes to speak his word, it had an authority quite beyond any human text. For this reason it was the most studied book in the Middle Ages, both the primer on which the young clerk learned his alphabet, and the “sacred page” that dominated every branch of higher learning. Not that the power of the Scriptures was limited to school or to the literate. As the holy book of the church, it informed not only liturgy and preaching, art and architecture, but also constituted a vast and complex symbolic network that was intelligible, on whatever level, to all classes of society. Far more than Latin, the Bible itself was the universal “language”of Christian culture.

It is not surprising, then, that when Dante's writings are considered as a whole, the Christian Scriptures should be the source of more reference and allusion than any other work: by one count there are 575 citations of the Bible in Dante, compared with 395 to Aristotle and 192 to Virgil.

DANTE IS HEIR to a complex and lively Italian lyric tradition that had its roots in the Provençal poetry nourished by the rivalling courts of twelfth-century southern France. The conventions of troubadour love poetry - based on the notion of the lover's feudal service to “midons”(Italian “madonna”), his lady, from whom he expects a “guerdon”(Italian “guiderdone”), or reward - were successfully transplanted to the court of Frederick II in Palermo, which became the capital of the first group of Italian vernacular lyric poets, the so-called Sicilian School; the centralized imperial court did not offer a suitable venue for the transplantation of Provence's contentious political poetry, which was left behind. The “leader” (or “caposcuola”) of the Sicilian School was Giacomo da Lentini, most likely the inventor of the sonnet (while the Provençal canso was the model for the Italian canzone, the sonnet is an Italian, and specifically Sicilian, contribution to the various European lyric “genres”). Giacomo signs himself “the Notary,” referring to his position in the imperial government; this is the title Dante uses for him in Purgatorio 24, where the poet Bonagiunta is assigned the task of dividing the Italian lyric tradition between the old – represented by Giacomo, Guittone, and Bonagiunta himself – and the new: the avant-garde poets of the “dolce stil novo” or “sweet new style” (Purgatorio 24, 57), as Dante retrospectively baptizes the lyric movement that he helped spearhead in his youth.

The Mughal empire was one of the largest centralized states known in pre-modern world history. By the late 1600s the Mughal emperor held supreme political authority over a population numbering between 100 and 150 millions and lands covering most of the Indian subcontinent (3.2 million square kilometers). Timurid India far outstripped in sheer size and resources its two rival early modern Islamic empires – Safavid Persia and Ottoman Turkey. The Mughal emperor's lands and subjects were comparable only to those ruled by his contemporary, the Ming emperor in early modern China.

The “Great Mughal's” wealth and grandeur was proverbial. His coffers housed the plundered treasure of dozens of conquered dynasties; his regalia and throne displayed some of the most spectacular precious stones ever mounted. Nearly all observers were impressed by the opulence and sophistication of the Mughal empire. The ceremonies, etiquette, music, poetry, and exquisitely executed paintings and objects of the imperial court fused together to create a distinctive aristocratic high culture. Mughal courtly culture retained its appeal and power long after the empire itself had declined to a shell. Today the Mughal style as represented in miniature paintings, or much-admired buildings like the Taj Mahal, has an immediate and powerful attraction.

For nearly one hundred and seventy years (1556–1719) the Mughal empire remained a dynamic, centralized, complex organization. The emperor commanded cadres of officials and soldiers of proven loyalty who carried out his orders in every province. Men, money, information, and resources moved regularly and routinely throughout the empire as official needs dictated. Mughal success was the product of hard-driving, active rulership exercised by extremely capable rulers who acted as their own chief executives.