medieval Italian

Why Dante’s Italian Isn’t Italian: Reading the Commedia in Its Original Medieval Tuscan

· July 18, 2026
Why Dantes Italian Isnt Italian: Reading the Commedia in Its Original Medieval Tuscan

I made a discovery last month that shook my confidence in my Italian reading skills. My university’s facing-page edition of the Divine Comedy had footnotes on nearly every third line. Not historical footnotes. Linguistic ones. Words I didn’t recognize. Grammar that looked wrong. Spellings that seemed like typos. My first thought: had I wasted those … Read more

What Did the Divine Comedy Bring to the World?

· June 25, 2026

Ask what a poem gave the world and you usually get a reading list. Dante’s case is stranger. He didn’t just influence writers — he handed eighty million people the language they currently think in. That’s the concrete version. The more unsettling versions go deeper: a picture of the afterlife that quietly overwrote scripture in … Read more