Dante’s Sacramental Poetics. Confession in the Commedia

This article seeks to investigate Dante’s intertwining of two confessional models, the sacramental and the Augustinian, throughout the first two cantiche of the Commedia. It shows how the poem repeatedly stages confessions that are either ineffective or unorthodox, in a bid to redefine the forms of truthfulness and authority that accompany the first person, allowing the poet to engage in confessional and prophetic forms of discourse. To do so, the article considers contemporary developments in theology and ecclesiastical practice so as to understand how Dante positions both his poem and himself as author vis-à-vis the important changes that occurred in the Latin Church in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.