Abstract
Abstract At Verona in 1320 Dante Alighieri delivered an address, later published as “A Question of the Water and of the Land,'’which dealt with the position and origins of the continental land mass and its mountains. In this cogently argued discourse the ideas expressed in Aristotle's Meteorologica and De caelo are blended with Dante's own cosmography and cosmogeny, as expressed in his Divine Comedy. There is, however, a shift in emphasis from the poetical-theological explanations of the Inferno to an approach based on assumed physical principles. In essence, the land mass and its mountains were uplifted by the stars of Dante's eighth heaven, which attracted them by diffusing an “elevating virtue'’(akin to magnetism) and by causing vapors to rise within the land, thus swelling it. In this paper Dante's ideas on the origin and form of the land are presented and analyzed. I relate Dante's ideas to the theories of other natural philosophers of the Middle Ages, including Avicenna, Jean Buridan, and Ristoro d'...
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