Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) created the greatest world poem of Western literature with his Divine Comedy. The prerequisite for this was an extreme life situation: exile, which forbade Dante's return to his hometown of Florence due to entanglements in politics and deprived him of his means of living. The renowned Dante scholar Karlheinz Stierle introduces the reader to Dante's beginnings and his early works in this book, from the Vita Nova to Dante's defense of the Italian language as a literary language. He recounts what we know about the poet's years in exile and presents the Commedia in detail. Dante worked on his masterpiece for 20 years with the foresight of a master builder. He aimed to surpass Virgil, the greatest poet of antiquity, and to unfold a vision of the world as a whole. Stierle makes it clear how profound this endeavor was.