A Mediterranean Comedy

In 1921, Miguel Asín Palacios published a pioneering book, The Islamic Eschatology in the Divine Comedy, in which he argued that Dante’s poem, the summa of Christian Middle Ages, had to be read on the backdrop of Islamic lore. The idea that the ‘Tuscan afterworld’ could have Quranic sources triggered one of the most heated literary debates of the 20th century, with both sides evincing nationalistic and cultural biases. The first section of the book analyzes this contentious episode of literary criticism from a historical standpoint: the post-WW2 decolonization period and the emergence of the Mediterranean as an hermeneutical framework of interpretation. It focuses on the multifaceted biography of Enrico Cerulli (1898–1988), a governor of Italian colonies and a scholar of Somali and Ethiopian studies, whose philological works are landmarks of the debate on Dante and Islam. The second part of the monograph presents some novel lines of inquiry on the reception, interpretation, and appropriation of the Comedy in the early-modern period. In this context, surprising intersections with Islamic sources materialize. The overarching goal of the book is to test the Mediterranean as a productive concept in the interpretation of Dante's work.