Envisioning the Afterlife: Dante and the Irish Visionary Tradition | University College Cork, 20 May 2024

Envisioning the Afterlife: Dante and the Irish Visionary Tradition

Study Day

20 May 2024

The Council Room, University College Cork, & online

 

This study day, organised by the UCC Centre for Dante Studies in Ireland, focuses on the medieval Irish vision tradition and its relationship with the Commedia, Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century poetic vision of the afterlife.

 

In collaboration with specialists in literature, theology, cosmology, history, and textual transmission, we aim to examine the particularity of medieval Irish literary visions and their ‘insular’ features, while also considering their extraordinary European circulation, especially the influence that works such as the Visio Tnugdali and Navigatio Sancti Brendani had in Italy, where they were copied, translated, and transformed. Despite the relatively high number of surviving manuscripts of these Latin and vernacular texts, the Irish visionary tradition has received little attention among Dante scholars, and its direct or indirect impact on late medieval Italy is yet to be fully explored. 

 

This study day brings the Italian and the Irish literary traditions into dialogue via Dante in a way that appreciates their distinctiveness, while also recognising the commonalities they have in answering questions central to the medieval – and possibly modern – understanding of the self: namely, how can one be present to other realities than those immediately evident to our senses? How do writers invite readers to partake in their extraordinary visionary experiences? And how is our understanding of the miraculous and the supernatural in vision literature shaped by genre expectations and social, cultural, philosophical, and theological contexts of transmission?

 

In addition to hosting senior specialists and early-career scholars from Ireland, Italy, Hungary, and the UK, this study day draws upon existing research strengths at the UCC Department of Early and Medieval Irish and especially the project ‘De Finibus: Christian Representations of the Afterlife in Medieval Ireland,’ which resulted in the two-volume collection The End and Beyond: Medieval Irish Eschatology (2014).

 

Professor John Carey (UCC) will deliver a keynote on (dis)embodiment and (im)materiality in visionary experience, concentrating mainly on Irish texts, but also considering sources shared by Dante and the Irish, notably Visio Sancti Pauli and Gregory the Great’s Dialogues.