Dante and Petrarch: Imagining Pilgrimage/oppure/ The Imaginary World of Pilgrimage

Authors on the cusp of the late Middle Ages and the early modern world, Dante and Petrarch offer two highly divergent literary interpretations of the phenomenon and the imaginary world of pilgrimage to holy places, the preeminent religious experience of their times. From the late ancient to the late medieval periods, the earthly experience of pilgrimage, first to Jerusalem, then to Rome, becomes the allegory of the soul’s ascent to the Celestial Paradise, finding its most complete expression in Dante’s Commedia. In his more distinctly modern imaginary construct, diffused throughout his works (e.g. Canzoniere, Lettera sull’ascesa di Monte ventoso [Familiares IV.1], Guida al viaggio da Genova a Terra Santa [Itinerarium Syriacum]) Petrarch intentionally reverses the movement of pilgrimage from otherworldly ascent, focusing instead on the phenomenal, natural, geographical world as an occasion for solitary meditation and self-knowledge.

Why, within several decades, does the imaginary world of pilgrimage change so radically in these “fathers” of Italian letters? Our study will include a study of the phenomenon of pilgrimage from the late ancient world to the mid-Trecento, concentrating on the late medieval period; pilgrims’ direct accounts; selected Dantean and Petrarch literary texts that engage the imaginary of pilgrimage; textual and contextual comparisons and contrasts. No previous knowledge of the Middle Ages, pilgrimage, Dante, or Petrarch is presupposed.