Divine Comedy (Volume II): Hell

Readers often cannot understand how such a serious work may be called a "comedy". In Dante's time, all serious scholarly works were written in Latin, a tradition that would persist for several hundred years more until the waning years of the Enlightenment, and works written in any other language were assumed to be more trivial in nature.

Furthermore, the word "comedy" in the classical sense refers to works which reflect belief in an ordered universe, in which events tended toward not only a ...