During his inaugural lecture, Professor Gilson will show how ideas about vision and cognate faculties such as the wits and the imagination are central to Dante’s masterpiece, the Commedia. Understanding these concerns helps us to appreciate not only how his narrative is structured and enlivened but also raises fundamental questions about the poem’s status, ultimate themes and messages.

Simon Gilson Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Magdalen College. He works on Dante and Renaissance Italian literary, cultural and intellectual history. He has published widely on Dante, literary criticism in Renaissance Italy, and the relations between science, philosophy and literary culture in medieval and Renaissance Italy.