Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture (William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature)

Experiencing the Afterlife provides the first sustained analysis of popular, vernacular depictions of the afterlife written in Italy before the Divine Comedy by authors such as Uguccione da Lodi, Giacomino da Verona, and Bonvesin da la Riva. Manuele Gragnolati uses his readings of these poets to provide a new interpretation of Dante’s work. Combining elements from several disciplines, he investigates the richness of high medieval eschatology and the concept of personal identity it expresses. Gragnolati is particularly concerned with how the notions of body and pain characteristic of medieval spirituality and devotion inform the eschatological representations of the time, especially in their paradoxical urge to stress at once the physical experience of the separated soul and the final necessity of bodily resurrection. By integrating lesser-known texts and scholarship from other disciplines into the specialized field of Dante studies, Gragnolati sheds new light on some of the most vigorously debated and crucial questions raised by the Divine Comedy , including the embryological discourse of Purgatorio 25, the relation between the soul’s experience of pain in Purgatory and the devotion that late medieval culture expressed toward Christ’s suffering, and the significance of the audacious vision of resurrected bodies that Dante the pilgrim enjoys at the end of his journey. At the same time, Gragnolati brings these questions back into contemporary discussions of medieval eschatology and opens new perspectives for current and future work on embodiment and identity. Scholars and students of Dante and Italian studies, as well as those in medieval history, religion, culture, and art history, will be rewarded by the fresh insights contained in Experiencing the Afterlife . Cover 1 Experiencing the Afterlife 2 Title 4 Copyright 5 Contents 6 About the William and Katherine Devers Series 8 Acknowledgments 10 Preface 12 Chapter 1 Eschatological Poems and Debates between Body and Soul in Thirteenth-Century Popular Culture 20 The Last Judgment and Bodily Return: Uguccione da Lodi and Giacomino da Verona 21 From the Resurrection to the Separated Soul: Bonvesin da la Riva 44 Chapter 2 Embryology and Aerial Bodies in Dante’s Comedy 72 Individual Judgment, Experience, and Embodiment 72 Competing Anthropological Models in Late-Thirteenth-Century Scholastics 77 From Plurality of Forms to (Near) Unicity of Form: Embryology in Purgatorio 25 86 The Power of the Soul: Aerial Bodies in Hell and Heaven 96 Chapter 3 Productive Pain: The Red Scripture, the Purgatorio, and a New Hypothesis on the “Birth of Purgatory” 108 Puzzling Similarities 108 Redemptive Suffering: Pain, Blood, and the Red Scripture 111 Passion, Purgatory, and Pain 128 The Pattern of Purgatory as a Journey to /as Christ 142 Productive Pain 154 Chapter 4 Now, Then, and Beyond: Air, Flesh, and Fullness in the Comedy 158 Identity, Experience, and Eschatological Clashes 159 Epilogue: The Body’s Journey and the Pilgrim in the Paradiso 180 Appendix 198 Notes 202 Bibliography 270 General Index 290 Index of Passages from Dante’s Works 296 Experiencing the Afterlife provides an analysis of depictions of the afterlife written in Italy before the Divine Comedy by authors such as Uguccione da Lodi, Glacomino da Verona, and Bonvesin da la Riva. Manuele Gragnolati uses his readings of these poets to provide an interpretation of Dante's work. A deep ambivalence runs through thirteenth-century beliefs about body and soul, their nature, relationship, and destiny in the afterlife.