19. Paradise XV, XVI, XVII

Dante in Translation (ITAL 310) This lecture focuses on the cantos of Cacciaguida (Paradise XV-XVII). The pilgrim’s encounter with his great-great grandfather brings to the fore the relationship between history, self and exile. Through his ancestor’s mythology of their native Florence, Dante is shown to move from one historiographic mode to another, from the grandeur of epic to the localism of medieval chronicles. Underlying both is the understanding of history in terms of genealogy reinforced and reprov