Women, War and Wisdom, in Vertical Readings in Dante's Comedy

What is it about?

Vertical Readings in Dante's Comedy investigates cantos of the same number across canticles. My contribution to this project was to compare the eighteenth cantos of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. Many aspects of these cantos resist meaningful comparison: dominant imagery, motifs, structure and topography differ significantly. Yet, these cantos share one characteristic: across the 18s, Dante alludes to female figures in classical, Biblical and historical sources, which are often (but not always) negative and narrowly proscribed. Positive and negative images of women in the cantos share a number of characteristics and behaviors, and women are often defined in terms of their political or social functions – specifically in terms of how they aid or impede men engaged in military or heroic exploits, or in terms of their reproductive roles.

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Why is it important?

By choosing to allude to negative images of women more frequently than positive ones in the eighteenth cantos of his Comedy, Dante reveals that he may not have managed to escape the prejudices of his time. Whether Dante sets up parallels in his treatment of women across the eighteenth cantos consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally – something that cannot be known with certainty –, it is clear that these parallels exist, and that they reveal a negative bias against female figures. To ascertain whether this negative bias is localized solely in the eighteenth cantos, and to what extent the negative bias may be blamed on the way in which the source-texts from which Dante borrows portray women, are important questions which we hope to begin to address in subsequent studies.