ABSTRACT
Dante Alighieri's Commedia is the supreme example in the Western Canon of literary response to the Word. The notion that in dreaming some region of the mind is more open to influxes of divinely originated understanding was warranted for Dante by the biblical revelation. Dante describes the lady as no 'less fair than Proserpine in the meadow when Pluto seized her, or Venus when she was pierced by Cupid's dart, and not less to be desired and dared for than she whom Leander desired and dared for across the Hellespont'. In order to situate the part the Commedia gives to Franciscans and Dominicans, it seems desirable to offer first, as concisely as possible, an overview of the whole poem. A few years later, Gladstone's ruminations on Dante's role in his life caused him to pen an article in the Liberal journal The Nineteenth Century putting forward the remarkable claim that Dante was at Oxford.
