Dante’s Sciences of the Human: An Introduction

In recent years, Dante’s relationship with medical thought has become an important thread in literary and historical scholarship, which begs for a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to medieval studies that accounts for the tight links between literature, science, and philosophy. This chapter studies Dante’s relationship with medical thought within his literary production and across the early commentary tradition of the Commedia. As the Commedia testifies, corporeality is a staple in Dante’s mind, and even the earliest commentators of the poem deemed the interpretation of its medical and scientific sources an essential part of its poetic fibers. Questioning the status of medical and scientific thought in Dante’s work opens the gates to a methodological investigation of literature and history, which the present volume takes at its core.