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This article has been published in: Ocula 26, Matters of holiness: semiotic perspectives on Dante

author: Alessandro Vettori (Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA)

Dannata ricchezza e beata povertà: La spiritualità francescana in Dante

language: italian

abstract: A vertical reading of Cantos xi of the Comedy reveals a thick network of interconnections between the administration of money in Inferno, the punishment of the prideful through exempla of humility in Purgatorio xi, and the representation of Francis’s mystical marriage with Lady Poverty in Paradiso xi. The strong links in subject matter among cantos xi in the three different canticles show how the opposition between the world of economic gain of northern Italy in Dante’s time and the minimalist lifestyle the Franciscans preached in the same years might very well be a deliberate choice on the poet’s part. The pathway from condemning wealth in hell moves through humility (another Franciscan virtue besides poverty), before it reaches to Francis’s apotheosis of absolute poverty in heaven.

citation information: Alessandro Vettori, Dannata ricchezza e beata povertà: La spiritualità francescana in Dante, "Ocula", vol.23, n.26, December 2022. DOI: 10.57576/ocula2022-7

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