Did Dante really go to paradise?

In this 700th anniversary year, the truth of the Divine Comedy is a key issue. Modern critics may explain its spiritual veracity by putting its impact down to social construction and performativity. But Dante knew about literature as much as he knew about divine life. He is emphatically clear that he has travelled to the high heavens and seeks to write so that we may follow him too. In this talk, I use Dante's own framework of the literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogic to exp...