The Divine Comedy is a poem born out of the intersection of a number of crises. The civil war in Dante’s native city of Florence serves as the backdrop to the text’s moral claims, and the poem is, in many ways, a direct response to the sociopolitical chaos that would result in Dante’s exile from the city. Paradiso in particular treats the crises of Dante’s age, tackling a range of instabilities from the world-historical to the theological, and culminating in the image, in Paradiso 33, of all the tumultuousness of creation, brought together and bound by love, into a single volume.

In addition to grappling with the political, moral and social instabilities of its own era, the Divine Comedy has been co-opted by centuries of scholars, artists, politicians and philosophers to meditate on various forms of political and ideological instability. Dante’s poem became the rallying cry for nascent Italian nationalist movements in the mid-19^th century. Primo Levi and T.S. Eliot, among others, use the poem as a healing cultural touchstone after the devastation wreaked on Europe in the wake of two world wars. Marx, Nietzsche, Said and other theorists of culture reference Dante and his Comedy as one of the central examples of their respective theories in pre-modern Europe. Visual artists and filmmakers have relied on the imagery of the Comedy to set forth their critiques of contemporary society, from Sandow Birk’s intricate re-location of the Inferno to 21^st century Los Angeles, to Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre Musique, which uses Dante’s tripartite structure to meditate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and responses to political violence and trauma.

For this panel we have selected presentations that address the theme of crisis with three different approaches. In the first paper, “Dante’s Moral Canzoni Le dolci rime and Poscia ch’Amor: The Crisis of mid-1290s Florence and the Commedia,” Teodolinda Barolini takes a historicizing approach, considering the poet’s response to crises within his own political and social milieu. In January 1293, the Florentine government, led by Giano della Bella, issued the Ordinamenti di Giustizia, which limited the power of the magnate families and continued to shift governance of the city into the hands of the people. The crisis of power that these ordinances ushered in became the subject of much dispute among noble and non-noble citizens, until they were tempered by a second set of ordinances in 1295, following Giano della Bella’s expulsion from the city. In these same years, circa 1294-1295, Dante composed two social and moral canzoni, which, Barolini claims, directly address the redefinition of nobility in the years of the Ordinamenti. Le dolci rime treats the question of nobility theoretically, arguing with extraordinary boldness that nobility does not reside in wealth or ancient breeding. Poscia ch’Amor picks up the topic in less theoretical fashion, looking at the detestable habits of those who purport to be noble in current Florentine society but whom the author considers base. Barolini’s reading of these two canzoni as responses to the civic crisis of mid-1290s Florence sheds new light on the shaping resonance of the Ordinamenti di Giustizia in the moral underpinnings of the Divine Comedy.

In the second paper, “Dante and the Crisis of Representation in the Modern Age,” William Franke argues that Dante’s poem bore witness to an epistemological crisis of the representation of reality, a crisis of which we are the heirs today. Comparing Dante’s theory with that of his contemporary, John Duns Scotus (1265/66-1308), the Scholastic philosopher and theologian, Franke traces a momentous paradigm shift in epistemological theory, which reconceived objective reality as representation, thereby empowering the human intellect and its self-reflexive potential. In contrast to Scotus, Dante takes representation not as articulating reality itself but as only analogically revealing true and ultimate being. He incorporates the self-reflexive powers of representation into a larger paradigm governed by analogical imagination. The analogical imagination keeps representation open to another world of mystical-religious experience. The truly real is, for Dante, no longer representable in any direct way as literal-historical truth but rather only through poetic allegory and metaphor. Franke ultimately claims that this is the epistemological crisis in which we still live, and he suggests that postsecular studies spearheaded by Dante can produce alternative solutions to this crisis in order to bypass the impasses of the technical-managerial approach that dominates our modern world.

Finally, in “Maintaining Neutrality in Moral Crisis: The Appropriation of Inferno 3 from JFK to Martha Nussbaum,” Kristina Olson will discuss the relationship between Dante’s definition of cowardice (ignavia) and modern discussions of moral inaction, waffling, and fear, both within academic and activist circles. Olson’s argument begins from President John F. Kennedy’s mistranslation of ignavia as “neutrality” in a 1963 speech commemorating the establishment of the German Peace Corps. She argues that President Kennedy’s creative mistranslation of Dante’s punishment of cowardice has reverberated within the circles of political activism and discussions of human rights, establishing the idea of neutrality in moral crisis as the worst civic sin. In her paper, Olson traces these appropriations from the mid-twentieth century to today, appropriations that converge and contrast with the Inferno. Her paper attends to how this understanding of Inferno 3 becomes a rhetorical fulcrum for descriptions of civic dissolution in the critique of feminism, which the structuralist philosopher Martha Nussbaum wages against Gayatri Spivak and others. She concludes by looking outside of the academy, to the evolution of President Kennedy’s mistranslation within activist circles, including the resistance efforts and demonstrations protesting the 2016 elections, such as the Women’s March of January 21, 2017, where the pointed appropriation of Inferno 3 now claims a renewed interest.