Conversations on Dante 14: Rebekah Locke on Purgatory after Dante

Conversations on Dante is a series of podcast episodes from the Leeds Centre for Dante Studies at the University of Leeds. In each episode, we sit down with researchers from a range of disciplines to discuss some of the work which is helping to shape our understanding of Dante, his context and works, and his place in the cultures of the world. In this episode, hosted by Matthew Treherne, Rebekah Locke discusses her research on Purgatory in Italy in the centuries after Dante's death. Rebekah gives examples of visual and textual accounts of Purgatory in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which suggest that - for all its daring originality - Dante's Purgatorio had a limited influence on how Purgatory was represented and understood; rather than seeing Dante's text as offering a decisive intervention in the tradition of writing on Purgatory, Rebekah argues for a richer understanding of the deep persistence of long-standing ideas on the nature of this realm. Rebekah's work, which offers an important challenge to critical commonplaces on Dante's role in shaping understandings of Purgatory, can be read online in her 2020 doctoral dissertation at the University of Bristol. The episode was edited by Esme Sayal.