Sicily in the Poetic Imagination: Dante

• In Event: Repositioning Art, Architecture, and Humanism in Renaissance Sicily and the Italian South I

Abstract

This paper forms part of a larger study of the role Sicily played in the poetic imagination from Latin Antiquity through the Renaissance. By focusing on the poetic influence of Latin texts about Sicily, I have been able to track the effect these writings had on such poets as Vergil, Ovid, and Dante – effects that were often at odds with both the material realities of the day, and more strikingly, the literal levels of the poets’ own works. Key classical myths about Sicily that appear in Dante’s second canticle suggest that Purgatorio should be understood poetically as informed by these ancient writings, an identification nominally at odds with Dante’s own identification of the location of Purgatory. We hope to establish a clarification of Sicily's status within the Renaissance literary imagination at large, as well as a richer understanding of the 'afterlife' of the classical texts in this later context.

Author

• Sarah Spence, The Medieval Academy of America