Tag: Italian

The women in the Divine Comedy, the epic poem by the Italian writer Dante Alighieri, served as symbols and metaphors of political affiliation, intrigue, virtue, scandal, and violence. Centuries later, though, little is known about many of the women Dante included in his seminal work. Laura Ingallinella, a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in Italian studies and English at Wellesley, and her students have worked to change that by writing the women of the Divine Comedy back into history. The project included working with Wikimedia Foundation to use Wikipedia as a pedagogical space. The students researched female characters of their choosing and wrote Wikipedia entries.