ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the significance of the city of Jerusalem extends, for Dante, beyond the most obvious religious and cosmological levels. It argues that the city of Jerusalem is present throughout the Commedia, serving as a constant point of reference for Dante's conception of life-after-death, and providing a more or less overt structural model for the world which his poem describes. That the city of Jerusalem could stand, in the medieval imagination, as an image of the afterlife, and most specifically as an image of Heaven, is, of course, extremely well-known. Dante's 'Heaven of light' is not merely a reaction against the equation of Paradise with worldly 'treasure'. It is immediately apparent that Dante's description of Heaven in the Paradiso is not based in any systematic way on the notion of the Heavenly Jerusalem. The relevance of these notions of divine light to Dante's presentation of the afterlife in the Commedia is immediately apparent.
