2025 Theses Doctoral

Dante, Poet of the Stars

Moffa, Louis

This study of Dante and the stars takes a novel approach to critical debates regarding Dante’s astronomy by situating the poet’s work within a broad historical context of theories about the stars and the universe. I attend to specific ideas and developments in the history of science—cosmic models, notions of creation, planetary and theoretical astronomy—and deploy these distinctions in order to clarify what Dante does with the stars throughout his poem.

In my first chapter I highlight critical developments in theoretical astronomy written in Latin in the 13th century, and I situate these developments in relation to both the origins of Italian literary culture at the Palermo court of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen and the final verse of Dante’s Paradiso.

In my second chapter I turn to the first canto of Inferno and historicize the opening image of the rising sun in relation to ideas regarding creation and the stars. In my third chapter I offer a comprehensive reading of the fraught and implausible astronomy of Inferno, while in my fourth chapter I cover the observational and diegetic astronomy of Purgatorio.

Noting, at the end of my fourth chapter, the sorts of spatiotemporal dilations that occur in the Earthly Paradise, I transition to tracking in my fifth and final chapter the poet’s emphasis on theoretical astronomy in Paradiso. My final chapter culminates in a historicized re-proposal of Mark Peterson’s essay, “Dante and the 3-sphere.”

Finally, my appendix offers a non-exhaustive index of references to astronomy across the Commedia.