Dietro a lo sposo, sí la sposa piace : marriage in Dante's 'Commedia'
This dissertation explores the subject of corporeal marriage as both an historical reality and a figurative ideal in the Divina Commedia of Dante Alighieri. It is my contention that despite the conspicuous failure of many of the Commedia's husbands and wives to live up to the chaste mandates of their sacred vows, their wedded unions are nevertheless informed by the author's positive regard for the matrimonial state. As the seed-bed for the polis and the wellspring of Christian caritas, marriage provides the civic/ethical paradigm against which the Commedia's spousal figures are ultimately judged. I also argue that earthly matrimony functions as an evocative signifier in some of the Commedia's nuptial allusions. By comparing Dante's connubial rhetoric to a sampling of twelfth and thirteenth century discourses on matrimony, I find evidence of the conjugal love which was presupposed to exist in the sacramental, indissoluble and consensual union of one man to one woman
Computer Program, English, 2011
New York University, [New York, NY], 2011