ABSTRACT
Paradiso Dante and his contemporaries inherited a world-view built up through the centuries during which Christian doctrine had gradually permeated European society. Though stubborn elements of paganism remained, the church had embraced the world within its realm. Through Boethius, and through the search for a satisfactory theory of knowledge of St Augustine of Hippo, the philosophy of Plato and his followers, the Neoplatonists, filtered through to the Middle Ages. If behind this changing world there was the changeless reality of the creator, then the human mind must seek beyond sensory experience a correspondingly immutable realm of knowledge. Dante’s extraordinary intuition rests on the assumption that the Middle Ages took from Boethius, that the true view of the universe is perceived not from where we are but from where God is. A flourishing school of business studies, including letter writing and accountancy, developed in Oxford in the later Middle Ages, but, significantly, it was not part of the university.
