The study day ‘Envisioning the Afterlife: Dante and the Irish Visionary Tradition’, organised by the Centre for Dante Studies in Ireland (CDSI) (Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė, Elsina Caponetti, Daragh O’Connell), supported by the Society for Italian Studies, and hosted by the Department of Italian, University College Cork, took place as a hybrid event on May 20, 2024. Recorded presentations from the study day are now available on the CDSI YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@danteinireland7648.
Researchers in vision literature and Dante studies were invited to discuss the medieval Irish visionary tradition and its relationship with the Dante Alighieri’s Commedia from the perspective of their specialty, which included literary criticism, theology, philology, and comparative literature. The day saw the participation of academics from a wide range of career levels and backgrounds, including PhDs, early-career, and senior academics from the Department of Early and Medieval Irish (UCC), the Department of Italian (UCC), the University of Bristol, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Scuola Superiore Meridionale Napoli, and Trinity College Dublin.
During the morning session moderated by Dr O’Connell, Dr Eszter Draskóczy (‘The Contrappasso in Visionary Texts: The Irish Tradition and the Commedia’), Dr Emma Nic Cárthaigh (‘From Seven Heavens to Twenty-Seven and from Inferno to Paradiso and Back: How the Journey of the Soul to Judgement in the Irish Tradition Compares with Dante’s Vision of Hell and Heaven’), and Filippo Ungar (‘Print Tnugdalus in Italy. Diffusion and Circulation of the Visio Tnugdali in Italian Incunabula’) looked at the structural similarities between Dante’s poem and the Irish visionary tradition, focusing on cosmology and the organization of punishments, and traced the presence of the Visio Tnugdali in 15th-century printed books from Veneto and Milan.
The keynote lecture ‘“Whether in the Body, or Out of the Body”: Aspects of Visionary Experience’ was delivered by Professor John Carey, from the Department of Early and Medieval Irish, UCC. Drawing on early Irish texts and taking account of the sources shared by Dante and the Irish, notably Visio Sancti Pauli and the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, Professor Carey considered some of the pivotal questions posed by vision narratives, especially regarding the embodied or disembodied status of the visionary experience and the visionary’s perception of material and spiritual realities.
During the afternoon session chaired by Dr Caitríona Ó Dochartaigh, Dr Eileen Gardiner (‘Grace and Divine Mercy in Dante, Tundale, and Bernard of Clairvaux), Dr Nicole Volmering (‘Understanding Sin and Salvation in the Visio Tnugdali and the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii’), and Elsina Caponetti (‘Wounds of Penitence and Purgation in Dante and Visionary Literature’) examined some thematic parallels between the Commedia and the Irish visions, focusing especially on the notions of mercy and grace, embodiment, travel, and landscape.
Each session was followed by enriching discussions which examined the particularity of medieval Irish literary visions and their “insular” features, while also considering the extraordinary European circulation of works such as the Visio Tnugdali, Navigatio Sancti Brendani, Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii and the influence that these texts might have had on Dante’s depiction of the afterlife.
This study day was an outstanding opportunity for the UCC Centre for Dante Studies in Ireland to bring together specialists on Dante and visionary literature from all over Europe, encouraging a fertile intellectual dialogue which will hopefully extend into the future. As the interest in the popular and transcultural Dante continues to grow, the work begun at UCC will help further illuminate how Dante was embedded in the shared conceptions and imaginings of the afterlife represented by the popular European vision tradition of his time, and how the Commedia may have in turn influenced our impression of, and expectations about, what the medieval canon of visionary texts must have looked like.