Anatomy of Florence: Illness and Body Politics in the Commedia

This chapter focuses on a few loci in the Commedia, in which Dante compares Florence to a human body, the harm or illness of which stands for corruption and flaws affecting the city as a polity. Medical allegories of the body politic are relatively common in scholastic literature. They ultimately stem from Plato, Aristotle, and the vast Greek-Arabic and Latin tradition of their interpreters. One example of this tradition over which I will briefly linger is al-Fārābī’s treatise on the virtuous city (Kitāb arā’ ahl al-madīnah al-fāḍilah), in which the body politic is a city (madīnah), rather than principalities or kingdoms, as often in Medieval political thought (Dante’s Monarchia included). The chapter suggests a philosophical reading of some of the references to Florence in the Commedia. From a theological-political perspective, the ultimate “source of the ills in the city” (Par. 16.67–69) is the city’s aspiration to self-governing.