Dante and the Orient: the “barbarian invasions” and the occidental canon

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss the presence of the East in Dante Alighieri‘s writings, looking for his possible sources and motivations. His works, mainly the Divine Comedie, are understood as a canon of the Christian occidental culture and through them is possible to point the transmission of an idea, conceived by the philosophies of history in the 18th and 19th centuries, which considers the eastern regions as the humanity cradle. In this context, two interrelated topics will be discussed: first I will focus on the notion of Orientalism, defined by Edward Said, for which construction the Dante‘s works would have contributed, and then opposes it to others interpretations such as the thesis of Islamic culture in the Divine Comedie which was written by the Spanish philologist, arabist and historian Miguel Asín Palacios. This debate, focused in the Islamic culture, presents the complex changeswhich involved the construction of canonic texts.