Alternate Name
Born Florence, (Italy), May or June 1265
Died Ravenna, (Italy), 14 September 1321
Dante Alighieri, a poet rather than an astronomer, is nevertheless remarkable for the extent to which he wove the astronomical conceptions of his day – principally Ptolemaic and Aristotelian – into the fabric of one of the greatest literary and imaginative works of the Middle Ages, his Divina Commedia(Divine Comedy).
Dante was the son of Alighiero di Bellincione Alighieri and his first wife, Bella. From youth to middle age, Dante was involved in politics. However, at the turn of the century, the ruling party in Florence, the Guelphs, split into two factions, the “Blacks” and the “Whites,” and with the victory of the Blacks, Alighieri, who was a White, went into permanent exile from his beloved native city. Because of his exile, he was also permanently separated from his wife of some years, Gemma di Manetto Donati, with whom he had fathered four children, Jacopo, Pietro,...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Selected References
Cornish, Alison (2000). Reading Dante’s Stars. New Haven: Yale University Press. (The most complete recent guide to astronomy in the Divina Commedia.)
Danielson, Dennis (ed.) (2000). The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to Hawking. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus, esp. Chap. 15, “From This Point Hang the Heavens,” pp. 89–91.
Dante Alighieri (1939). The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, translated by John D. Sinclair. New York: Oxford University Press. (Useful for its presentation of the Italian text with prose translation, and for its commentary.)
— (1949–1962). The Divine Comedy. London: Penguin. (Vol. 1, Hell, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers, contains a useful, short section on “Dante’s Universe,” pp. 292–295. Vol. 3, Paradise, translated by Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, adds a further note, “Astronomy in Paradise,” pp. 350–351.)
Lovejoy, Arthur O. (1936). The Great Chain of Being. (Reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1960.)
Osserman, Robert (1995). Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos. New York: Doubleday, esp. pp. 89–91.
Peterson, Mark A. (1979). “Dante and the 3-Sphere.” American Journal of Physics47: 1031–1035. (The most thorough available discussion of the geometry of Paradiso, 28 and of Dante’s cosmos.)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this entry
Cite this entry
Danielson, D. (2014). Dante Alighieri. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_37
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_37
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-9916-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-9917-7
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyReference Module Physical and Materials ScienceReference Module Chemistry, Materials and Physics