Dante's Inferno Research Paper

Dante’s Real Inferno The three most significant influences on Dante Alighieri were his philosophical education, his political struggles in Florence throughout his life, and his infatuation with the woman known as Beatrice. Dante’s education played a major part in influencing his famous writing, Inferno. Dante grew up in Florence, a significant artistic and intellectual center throughout the 13th century, says Jay Rudd. Dante had private tutors in his youth and studied Christian theology at the Florentine Dominican center of Santa Maria Novella (Rudd). According to the Literature Resource Center, Dante enrolled at the University of Bologna and studied philosophical works of Boethius, Cicero, and Aristotle. Also, Saint Thomas Aquinas and
Dante grew up in a time of political turmoil in his hometown of Florence. According to Jay Rudd, the Guelphs and Ghibellines were constantly fighting over who had power, which was always shifting between the two groups, meaning new laws and more people to be exiled. Dante placed many of the Florentine politicians in different circles of Hell (Rudd). Rudd says that Dante spent much of the decade of the 1280s learning and exercising the military skills that would have been expected of him because of his aristocratic ancestry. He later took place in the Battle of Campaldino in the Casentino Valley (Rudd). In 1295, Dante was dragged into the world of Florentine politics when his own kinsman fought the rival Cerchi family (Rudd). The fighting escalated by the year 1300, “turning a municipal dance into a bloody riot,” and Dante was forced to punish both sides, as he was the Chief Magistrate of Florence at the time, and he banished leaders from both sides- his kinsman, Corso Donati, and Guido Cavalcanti (Rudd). Due to his decisions he made during his term as the Chief Magistrate, Dante became a well-respected and influential leader in Florence (Rudd). Throughout Inferno, Dante is given multiple political prophecies that recorded what had happened within in Florence before Dante began writing the famous poem. One prophecy details the war to come in Florence and Dante’s banishment from the city, while another prophecy states the defeat of the Ghibelline faction, which Dante had sided with at the time, by the Guelph faction (Rudd). Dante was exiled after the Ghibelline defeat on March 10, 1302, and he never again set foot in the city of his birth (Rudd). The Florentine politics influenced Dante’s writings