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Alain Chartier's Livre de l'Espérance: A Remodeling of Dante's Commedia?
- Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 7, Number 2, Fall 2018
- pp. 230-249
- 10.1353/dph.2019.0002
- Article
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Abstract:
Alain Chartier's Livre de l'Espérance is widely considered the chef d'oeuvre of his opus, melding the personal, the political, and the spiritual into a catechesis of Christianity. Its debt to Boethius, the Bible, and patristic writings has been analyzed. There may be another source less acknowledged: the Commedia of Dante Alighieri. Is it possible that Chartier was influenced by Dante's work? This essay traces the evidence and possibilities for such a textual encounter. Establishing the influence of Dante on Chartier allows further recognition of the paths by which humanist ideas from Italy entered France during the transitional fifteenth century.