Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-07(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Giuseppe Mazzotta.

This dissertation is principally an investigation of the "production of the voice," in Dante's Inferno. The protagonist of the epic poem, Dante's alter-ego whom we call the pilgrim, travels through the Inferno not only because, as Virgil says in the first canto, "`It behooves you to go by another way,"'1 but in order to meet and talk to the people that he finds there. His full experience2 experience2 depends upon speech. Yet, however much the transformations of the bodies of the sinners, and their interactions with the punishments, already produce a soundscape that is the object of lively poetic description, the sinners are not necessarily inclined to speak to this living man who will return to the world. For reasons specific to each episode, the pilgrim entices the sinners to speak in a variety of ways. Sometimes he must extract a voice from their deformed and lacerated bodies; some sinners hail him The manner in which the pilgrim succeeds in making the sinners speak inevitably anticipates what they have to say.

The 13th century saw the codification of two institutions which depended entirely on the confession of the subject: the sacrament of penance, and judicial interrogation. I discuss the obligation of all the faithful to recount their sins to their parish priest with their own naked voice, as Raymond of Penafort says. Parallel to the development of this institution was the codification of an entirely new form of a criminal trial, the inquisitio, which arrived at its most authoratative form of proof, the confession of the accused, by means of torture. I discuss three episodes of Dante's Inferno in great detail, making ample reference to the history of confession -- judicial and penitential -- in order to show how the poem builds up to a climax in which the sinners comply with these forms of coercion, yet in so doing upset the power that produces them. In short, this dissertation is a long commentary of three lines of poetry spoken by three sinners: Pier delle Vigne's "`ingiusto fece me contra me giusto,"' Guido's "`lunga promessa con l'attender corto,"' and Ciampola's "`Malizioso son io troppo." These extraordinarily dramatic and strangely comical climaxes emerge from the political crises of an Italy without Empire, where counsel is contaminated by confession and the verdict by money and conspiracy.

1Inf., 91. (trans. Singleton) 2 Inf. XXVIII, 48.