SOURCE: “Pilgrim Text Models for Dante's Purgatorio,” Studies in Philology, Vol. LXVI, No. 1, January, 1969, pp. 1-24.

In the following essay, Demaray demonstrates how, in the Purgatorio, Dante drew from tales of actual Holy Land pilgrimages.

The theological virtue of hope, so Beatrice declares before St. James, enabled Dante Alighieri to make the journey from Egypt to Jerusalem to see the Church Militant (Par. XXV, 52-7).¹

A long and perhaps wearisome familiarity with Dante's epistle to Can Grande della Scala has taught us the kind of multifold interpretation that the author of the Commedia intended be applied to such a spiritual pilgrimage. Yet for a full appreciation of the Commedia, the poet's words to Can Grande must be taken most seriously. The Exodus from Egypt to the Holy Land, as Dante explained by reference to Psalm 114 (Ps.113 in the Vulgate),² need not be understood simply as a literal journey...