Preaching the Commedia in a German World

The essay focuses on an anonymous Latin Lenten sermon collection, the Quadragesimale peregrini cum angelo, written probably in the early fifteenth century. The Peregrinus appropiates Dante’s itinerary through hell, purgatory, and paradise by transforming it into a semi-dramatic narrative framework for its sermons. Threfore, the preacher invites the listeners to participate in a virtual and instructive pilgrimage through the realms of the afterlife, the new world that would welcome them at the end of their earthly life. However, the history of the circulation of this text offers us also an insight to another “new world”. The Peregrinus, though being manifestly elaborated in Italy, found a considerable dissemination in Germany, and results as one of the first testimonies of the presence of the Commedia outside Italy. Within this new cultural context, Dante was a novelty and his vernacular verses could not be used in the pulpit. The text needed a cultural mediation, and the manuscripts of the Peregrinus copied in Germany unfold different strategies used by preachers to adapt these Dantesque sermons to the new type of audience.