Middle Ages Primary Sources | Dante Alighieri

Excerpt from the Divine Comedy

Published in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, 1906

"Beneath my head the others are dragged down / Who have preceded me in simony, / Flattened along the fissure of the rock."

The poet Dante Alighieri (DAHN-tay al-eeg-YEER-ee; 1265–1321), usually referred to simply as Dante, is considered one of the greatest writers of all time—on a par with figures such as the Greek poet Homer (700s B.C.) or the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare (1564–1616). By far the most widely admired of Dante's works is the Divine Comedy, which is not a comedy in the traditional sense: here the term refers to the fact that the story, told in a series of 100 "chapters" called cantos, has a happy ending.

The term "divine" is a reference to God, an abiding presence in the narrative as the poet journeys into the depths of the Inferno or Hell,...