When the Ocean Towered Above the Earth: Dante’s Questio in Context

Scholarship on the Questio de aqua et terra has recently moved from problems of attribution toward a better understanding of its cultural and historical context. Building upon this trend, this chapter focuses on the largely misunderstood doctrine the author of the Questio intends to refute: namely, that the surface of the sphere of water would be in part of its circumference higher than the sphere of earth. This theory has always been dismissed as an absurd construct, that defied basic common sense and rightly spurred Dante’s outrage. On the contrary, I argue that it represented a sophisticated and plausible solution to one of the most debated issues in medieval science, finding widespread diffusion even in vernacular encyclopedias and didactic works. In fact, evidence suggests that the author of the Questio ignored or failed to grasp crucial aspects of the theory he set out to disprove and that he might have been unfamiliar with some of the most significant literature on the topic.