Dante’s Divine Comedy is one of the great literary masterpieces of his time not only because of its profound complexity and its wonderful style, but because it gives us great insight into the age it was written. Dante wrote the Divine Comedy in 1320 in medieval Italy and the work reflects this in a lot of different ways. The two largest of these influences would be the intellectual movement of Scholasticism and the total authority and domination of the Catholic Church and Christian beliefs. I will be showing you how the Divine Comedy was greatly influenced by the intellectual perspective of late Medieval Europe. When everyone thinks about Europe during the middle ages they assume it was a dark and scary place with stagnant economies and virtually no development in learning. But these people couldn’t be more wrong and The Divine Comedy is proof of that. In the later Middle Ages, when Dante was alive, there was a great intellectual movement in Europe known as Scholasticism. It was a system of theology and philosophy based on Aristotelian logic and the writings of the early Church Fathers and having a strong emphasis on tradition and dogma. There were five main elements of scholasticism all of which can be found in the Divine Comedy. First of these elements is the reconciliation of contradictions, which is rigorous conceptual analysis and the careful drawing of distinctions but more importantly bringing opposite things together in harmony with each other. The first place we see this in the Divine Comedy is the title itself. Divine and comedy are two very contradicting words. Divine means epic and has to do with God or God like things and was a very serious adjective in Dante’s time. While comedy is the opposite, it is lighthearted, designed to make one laugh, involves satire, and has a happy ending. So what Dante has done in the title of his masterpiece is brought God like and joke together in perfect harmony to describe his work. The second element of Scholasticism is division and subdivision. This was an effort to have all learning divided into perfect parts to make everything orderly. Again we immediately see this in the Divine Comedy’s structure. The book has been divided into three separate parts, Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Heaven). It is then sub divided into thirty three cantos per section plus one introduction canto adding up to a perfect 100 cantos or chapters. Another way Dante further divides his work into sections of three is through his use of the Terza Rima. Terza rima is a rhyming verse stanza form that consists of an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme and was a popular stanza form in Italy at the time. The third element of Scholasticism is totality. Scholars were very interested in gaining all the knowledge they possibly could about a certain subject and covering matters totally. The entire book is an amazing example of this particularly in Dante’s view of hell and the punishments for the