The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time by Britannica Educational Publishing

arguments of the
Convivio
.
T HE D IVINE C OMEDY
    Dante’s years of exile were years of difficult peregrinations from one place to another. Throughout his exile he nevertheless was sustained by work on his great poem.
The Divine Comedy
was possibly begun prior to 1308 and completed just before his death in 1321, but the exact dates are uncertain.
    The Divine Comedy
consists of 100 cantos, which are grouped together into three sections, or canticles,
Inferno, Purgatorio
, and
Paradiso
. There are 33 cantos in each canticle and one additional canto, contained in the
Inferno
, which serves as an introduction to the entire poem. For the most part the cantos range from about 136 to about 151 lines. The poem’s rhyme scheme is the terza rima (
aba, bcb, cdc
, etc.).
    The poem’s plot can be summarized as follows: a man, generally assumed to be Dante himself, is miraculously enabled to undertake a journey that leads him to visit the souls in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. He has two guides: Virgil, who leads him through the
Inferno
and
Purgatorio
, and Beatrice, who introduces him to
Paradiso
. Through these fictional encounters taking place from Good Friday evening in 1300 through Easter Sunday and slightly beyond, Dante learns of the exile that is awaiting him (which had, of course, already occurred at the time of the writing). The exile of an individual becomes a microcosm of the problems of a country, and it also becomes representative of the Fall of Man.
    The Divine Comedy
is a profoundly Christian vision of human temporal and eternal destiny. By writing it in Italian rather than Latin, Dante almost singlehandedly made Italian a literary language. By the year 1400 no fewer than 12 commentaries devoted to detailed expositions of its meaning had appeared. Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a life of the poet and then in 1373–74 delivered the first public lectures on
The Divine Comedy
, making Dante the first of the moderns whose work found its place with the ancient classics in a university course. Dante became known as the
divino poeta
, and in an edition of his great poem published in Venice in 1555 the adjective was applied to the poem’s title; thus, the simple
Commedia
became
La divina commedia
, or
The Divine Comedy
.
    In his final years Dante was received honourably in many noble houses in the north of Italy, most notably by Guido Novello da Polenta, the nephew of the remarkable Francesca, in Ravenna. There, at his death, Dante was given an honourable burial attended by the leading men of letters of the time, and the funeral oration was delivered by Guido himself.

PETRARCH
----
    (b. July 20, 1304, Arezzo, Tuscany [Italy]—d. July 18/19, 1374, Arquà, near Padua, Carrara)
    P etrarch, an Italian poet and humanist, was regarded as the greatest scholar of his age. His poems addressed to Laura, an idealized beloved, contributed to the Renaissance flowering of lyric poetry, and his consciousness of the Classical past as a source of literary and philosophical meaning for the present was of great importance in paving the way for the Renaissance.
    Petrarch, whose Italian name was Francesco Petrarca, undertook his first studies at Carpentras, France, and athis father’s insistence he was sent to study law at Montpellier, France (1316). From there he returned to Italy with his younger brother Gherardo to continue these studies at Bologna (1320). After his father’s death, in 1326, Petrarch took minor ecclesiastical orders at Avignon and entered the household of the influential cardinal Giovanni Colonna.
    Petrarch had during his early youth a deep religious faith and a love of virtue. There now followed the reaction—a period of dissipation—which also coincided with the beginning of his famous chaste love for a woman known now only as Laura. Petrarch himself kept silent about everything concerning her civil status. He first saw her in the Church of St. Clare at Avignon on April 6, 1327, and loved her,