The following sections of this BookRags Literature Study Guide is offprint from Gale's For Students Series: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Works: Introduction, Author Biography, Plot Summary, Characters, Themes, Style, Historical Context, Critical Overview, Criticism and Critical Essays, Media Adaptations, Topics for Further Study, Compare & Contrast, What Do I Read Next?, For Further Study, and Sources.
(c)1998-2002; (c)2002 by Gale. Gale is an imprint of The Gale Group, Inc., a division of Thomson Learning, Inc. Gale and Design and Thomson Learning are trademarks used herein under license.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: "Social Concerns", "Thematic Overview", "Techniques", "Literary Precedents", "Key Questions", "Related Titles", "Adaptations", "Related Web Sites". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults: "About the Author", "Overview", "Setting", "Literary Qualities", "Social Sensitivity", "Topics for Discussion", "Ideas for Reports and Papers". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
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1265-1321
Italian poet who in his Divine Comedy (1308-21) popularized ideas on geometry and astronomy. Perhaps the most significant literary work of the later Middle Ages, the Divine Comedy is an allegory representing the poet's journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, with the Roman poet Virgil serving as guide through the first two locales, and the last guided by Beatrice Portinari, a woman of Dante's native Florence toward whom he cherished an ideal love. The book is a compendium of medieval thought, featuring figures and ideas from the preceding three millennia of Western civilization. In choosing to compose it in Italian rather than Latin, Dante established the foundations of Italian literature and, indeed, all modern Western vernacular literatures. Like everything else about the work, the scientific underpinnings are exceedingly complex, drawing on the cosmological ideas of Ptolemy and others. In the realm of geology, Dante used notions developed by Ristoro d'Arezzo, who wrote that mountains are created by the stars' upward pull on the Earth.