Dante and the Sciences of the Human: Medicine, Physics, and the Soul

This edited collection explores Dante Alighieri’s contribution to medical, scientific, and spiritual thought in medieval and early modern times. The chapters address how Dante shaped an understanding of the human body and mind, his relationship with medical and scientific thought in his literary and philosophical production, and his legacy which continued into the following centuries. Each chapter questions Dante’s contribution to these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective, thus putting medieval literatures in conversation with the history of medicine and science, politics, theology, and philosophy. Covering questions on the body, soul, matter, politics, and physics, this valuable book presents an overview of Dante’s relationship with medical thought and the medieval sciences.

Matteo Pace is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Connecticut College, in the USA. Upon earning a PhD in Italian and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2019, he won a Santorio Award for Excellence in Research from the Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance, where he is also an Associate Fellow. In his research, he focuses on the intersections between vernacular cultures and medical thought in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Besides Dante, he has published on Boccaccio’s Decameron; Guido Cavalcanti and Dino del Garbo; Giacomo da Lentini and the Aristotelian tradition; Guido Guinizzelli, Avicenna, and Taddeo Alderotti’s medical philosophy; and Catherine of Siena’s theology of blood.