Dante’s Inferno

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Dante’s ‘Inferno’ - a medieval journey through the nine circles of Hell. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”. This famous phrase is written above the gate of Hell in a 14th century poem by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. The poem is called the ‘Divine Comedy’ and Hell is known as ‘Dante’s Inferno’. It is a lurid vision of the afterlife complete with severed heads, cruel and unusual punishments and devils in frozen lakes. But the inferno is much more than a trip into the macabre - it is a map of medieval spirituality, a treasure house of early renaissance learning, a portrait of 14th century Florence, and an acute study of human psychology. It is also one of the greatest poems ever written.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Margaret Kean 2 episodes
  University Lecturer in English and College Fellow at St Hilda's College, University of Oxford
• John Took No other episodes
  Professor of Dante Studies at University College London
• Claire Honess No other episodes
  Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Leeds and Co-Director of the Leeds Centre for Dante Studies

Related episodes

• Hell
  
  21 Dec, 2006 230 Christianity
• Heaven
  
  22 Dec, 2005 230 Christianity
• Averroes
  
  5 Oct, 2006 100 Philosophy
• Purgatory
  
  25 May, 2017 230 Christianity
• The Devil
  
  11 Dec, 2003 200 Religion
• Faust
  
  23 Dec, 2004 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Piers Plowman
  
  29 Oct, 2020 820 English and Old English literatures
• The Egyptian Book of the Dead
  
  27 Apr, 2017 930 History of the Ancient World
• Beowulf
  
  5 Mar, 2015 820 English and Old English literatures
• John Donne
  
  12 Jan, 2023 820 English and Old English literatures
• Victorian Pessimism
  
  10 May, 2007 820 English and Old English literatures
• Virgil’s Georgics
  
  18 May, 2023 630 Agriculture
• The Later Romantics
  
  15 Apr, 2004 820 English and Old English literatures
• Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
  
  6 Jan, 2011 820 English and Old English literatures
• London
  
  28 Sep, 2000 940 History of Europe
• Julian of Norwich
  
  19 Oct, 2023 270 History of Christianity
• Death
  
  4 May, 2000 120 Epistemology
• The Nibelungenlied
  
  1 Dec, 2022 830 German and related literatures
• The Song of Roland
  
  4 Nov, 2021 840 French and related literatures
• The Metaphysical Poets
  
  3 Jul, 2008 820 English and Old English literatures

---

Programme ID: b00f05zj

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00f05zj

Auto-category: 800 (Literature)