Religion was an extremely important aspect of the Renaissance. During that era, it was near enough impossible to find a text that was not heavily influenced by Christianity and what it represented for different types of people. Perhaps the most famous text that did this was The Divine Comedy, or more specifically, Inferno, written by Dante Aligheri. In this poem, Dante, as a fictionalised version of himself, reflects on morality, death and sin. He wrote the poem in his native tongue to make the poem more accessible to readers, so that they fully understood the message he was attempting to send. I thoroughly believe that in a culture so reliant on religion, sin and sinners are represented reasonably well due to the detailed accounts of various sinners in Hell. In my opinion however in modern times, this is not a brilliant representation of sin as Dante allows his feelings about personal experiences to cloud the judgement of fictional characters in the poem.
Before going into more specific details of Dante and his thoughts about sinners, it is important to note the overall handling of the sins and how they are fully represented. Sin is described as a corruption from one’s self and their true desires, however Tonia Triggiano writes it best when she states that the poem “describes sin as a distortion of one’s will; man’s nature wrenched itself from the nature it shared with God” . Throughout ‘Inferno’, sins and their punishments are structured from the least morally corrupt and