Search Results: Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was an Italian poet and politician most famous for his Divine Comedy (c. 1319) where he descends through Hell, climbs Purgatory, and arrives at the illumination of Paradise. Dante meets many historical characters...

Dante Alighieri, detail from Luca Signorelli's fresco, Chapel of San Brizio, Orvieto Cathedral.

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) was an Italian poet, writer, and scholar. His most famous and influential work is the Decameron, completed by 1353, in which his ten characters present 100 tales of everyday life. The book covers all manner...

Renaissance Humanism was an intellectual movement typified by a revived interest in the classical world and studies which focussed not on religion but on what it is to be human. Its origins went back to 14th-century Italy and such authors...

A short but accurate presentation on the life of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri (l. 1265-1321 CE) best known for his masterpiece The Divine Comedy.

Medieval literature is defined broadly as any work written in Latin or the vernacular between c. 476-1500, including philosophy, religious treatises, legal texts, as well as works of the imagination. More narrowly, however, the term applies...

Petrarch (1304-1374 CE), full name Francesco Petrarca, was an Italian scholar and poet who is credited as one of the founders of the Renaissance movement in art, thought, and literature. Petrarch actively searched for 'lost' ancient manuscripts...

An 1822 CE painting by Eugène Delacroix showing Dante and Virgil in Hell, a scene from Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, c. 1319 CE. (Louvre, Paris)

The arrival in Europe of the printing press with moveable metal type in the 1450s CE was an event which had enormous and long-lasting consequences. The German printer Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398-1468 CE) is widely credited with the innovation...

Dante Alighieri by Domenico di Michelino. The scene, painted in 1465 CE, shows the poet in front of the mountain of Purgatory as described in his Divine Comedy, a copy of which he is holding. The cathedral of Florence can also be seen on...