The Divine Comedy

The Divine Comedy is Dante Alighieri's own early fourteenth century Italian poem, completed around 1320, and its final section, the Paradiso, is the fullest surviving literary realization of the medieval Christian cosmos, the soul's ascent through the concentric planetary spheres to the Primum Mobile and the Empyrean beyond. As Dante's own text it is the correct primary source for what the poem actually says about this cosmology, in his own structuring of it, rather than a secondhand description. Its limit is that it is a work of theological poetry shaped by Dante's own Scholastic education and poetic purposes, not a neutral astronomical or doctrinal manual, so a claim about the medieval church's official cosmology more broadly should be checked against a scholarly study of medieval cosmology alongside Dante's own imaginative synthesis of it.