Liturgical Performance and Modes of Knowledge in Dante's Commedia

In this thesis, I show how liturgy can be used as a particularly efficacious hermeneutical key in order to read and interpret Dante’s Commedia. Starting from an analysis of the liturgical approach to the concepts of truth and knowledge, always understood as embodied in time and space, I move on to show how Dante’s approach to these concepts shares the same features. I first discuss how this liturgical hermeneutics is employed by Dante in its most appropriate context – namely when dealing with the truth of Revelation and the interpretation of Scriptures – and then I show how, throughout the poem, Dante is able to graft the different modes of knowledge available to him at the time – theology, philosophy, poetry and science – onto this ‘liturgical attitude’.