ENGL 250: Literature of Faith: On Pilgrimage with Dante

This class is an opportunity for students to engage a rich tradition and connect it to their own practices and those of people around them in Florence, the city of Dante’s birth.

Critics have long compared Dante’s Commedia to a medieval cathedral: a grand architecture that ultimately points us to the plan of God’s overwhelming love for us. More recently, at least one critic has noted that the Commedia can also be usefully thought of as an encyclopedia, full of Dante’s synthesis of classical and medieval learning. It is in that spirit that this course is organized: to take an in-depth study of the Commedia as an opportunity to read and understand the rich theological conversation that is going on both within the text and without—and to apply it to our own lives, to our own pilgrimage journeys. After all, the Commedia was begun only decades after Francis and Dominic’s reforms had transformed medieval Europe, and Dante himself is thought to have been a 3rd order Franciscan. And to this day, Christians use the metaphor of a “pilgrimage” as one way to understand their own journeys. This class is an opportunity for students to engage that rich tradition and connect it to their own practices and those of people around them on-site in Florence, the city of Dante’s birth.

Academics

2 credits

Cost

$6000-$6500 + airfare (estimate)

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