ABSTRACT
D'Ancona paid due heed to the materialism shown in the conceptions of paradise in almost all the Christian legends precursory of the Divine Comedy, and concluded that Dante, in tracing his spiritual and ethereal picture of paradise, was uninfluenced by those legends. The contrast between Dante and his Christian predecessors was referred to in the discussion of the Paradiso, 495 when it was suggested that the materialistic pictures of heaven appearing in the mediaeval Christian legends were themselves based on Moslem models. Now is the occasion to prove that assertion.
