Urban space and its practices in shaping the imagination of Dante in his 'Commedia'

The aim of this thesis is to test how interpreting Dante’s Commedia through the lens of architecture — both the lived experience of urban environments and understandings of architecture in intellectual, cultural, and religious life — might provide new insights. I do this by exploring the intersection of the visual and the literary — in particular, the ways in which ideas are expressed and transmitted in the material culture of architecture and the built environment and how this intersection is explored through writing. I ask the question: how did architecture and urban expansion in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Florence influence the poetry of Dante’s Commedia? This thesis argues that architecture, rather than being a discrete topic of concern for Dante, should be seen as a way for him to convey his broader interests, relating to identity, spiritual growth, community, and corruption, within the poem. It shows how Dante drew on the lived experience of architectural models in order to convey their symbolic meaning and to guide the reader in using and experiencing the spaces of his afterlife as one would the spaces on Earth. This allows the architecture of the afterlife to become a part of the penitential process, not only for the inhabitants of the afterlife and Dante-personaggio, but for the reader of the Commedia as well. I treat architecture and the built environment as it would have been interpreted by Dante’s contemporaries as not only a lived experience but an active agent in forming identity and shaping understandings of the world. This approach offers new insights into widely discussed episodes of the poem, showing how architecture and urban space inform the text alongside other aspects of material culture, as well as the intellectual, cultural, political, and religious currents which have traditionally shaped Dante studies.