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Abstract
This dissertation examines the intersection of medieval medicine and theology in Dante's Divine Comedy. The various sciences that animate Dante's poetic universe have attracted growing interest in recent decades, and medicine is no exception. Mindful of the depth and breadth of medical erudition ascribed to Dante since his early commentators, I argue that this particular science occupies a unique place within his poetic encyclopedia due to the theological resonances of its objective, salus. The aim of this study is to situate Dante's displays of medical learning within the aesthetic theology that distinguishes his poem. What began as an investigation of two distinct agents of his poetic imagination has evolved into a study of their complicity within the major intellectual debates engaged throughout his works. As thirteenth century physicians brought to light critical discrepancies between Galenic and Aristotelian understandings of body and soul, they granted theologians diverse, yet equally fertile grounds on which to stake their rival claims. As I hope will become clear over the course of this study, scientific medicine was part and parcel of theological discourse by the turn of the fourteenth century, and when Dante incorporates its concepts into the body of his poetry, he does so with a critical awareness of their theological weight. My purpose in pursuing the origins and permutations of this complicity is not to reduce Dante's poetry to a repository of intellectual history, but to suggest his awareness of its limitations.
The areas of medicine on which Dante draws range from anatomy and physiology to psychology and embryology. I have chosen to focus on his use of dietetics, the study of the most elemental of nature's effects upon body and mind, under the extreme circumstances of gluttony (Inferno 6) and starvation (Inferno 32–3). The dissertation is accordingly divided into two parts, each consisting of three chapters. Part One considers the contrapasso of Dante's gluttons in light of medieval dietetics' influence on the notions of identity this canto brings to the fore: earthly (Chapter One: “Devouring Selves in the Circle of Gluttony”); otherworldly (Chapter Two: “The Burden of Surfeited Flesh: Anonymity in the Afterlife”) and political (Chapter Three: “Gluttony and the Body Politic: the Contamination of Civic Identity”). Part Two examines the contrapasso of Ugolino and Ruggieri in terms of the medical debate embedded in their union—“là 've 'l cervel s'aggiugne con la nuca”—and its implications for the canto's constellatory concerns of ethics (Chapter Four: “Bodily Starvation and the Ravaging of the Will”), sacrifice (Chapter Five: “Spiritual Starvation and the Fruits of Eucharistic Sacrifice”) and political theology (Chapter Six: “Searching the Soul of the Body Politic”).
