ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between desire, corporeality, and language, and seeks to bring together several aspects of the author research on the concept of identity in Dante and the Middle Ages. The corporeality and materiality of Dante's portrayal of experience reveal some affinities with people's contemporary embodied and relational concept of identity, and add another dimension to the concept of individuality to which Erich Auerbach referred in his famous statement that 'Dante was the first to configure man, not as an abstract or anecdotal representative of an ethical type, but man in his living historical reality, the concrete individual in his unity and wholeness'. There is nothing in the sonnet itself that indicates that lady held by Love in the vision is Beatrice, and it is only in libello, which is centred on Beatrice's death and opens and closes with image of her glory in heaven, that dream described in sonnet can represent a premonition of the lady's death.
