Of all the poets whose works I admire, Dante Alighieri is foremost in my personal pantheon. And of all his works, Inferno is my unquestioned favorite. The beauty of Virgil’s explanation in Canto 2 of Beatrice’s charge to him to aid Dante along his journey, concluding in “Why do you delay, when three such blessed ladies care for you in the court of Heaven?” always brings tears to my eyes. However something has long puzzled me about the poem – the astronomical references in it. Although I’ve many times tried sorting them out, they simply don’t seem to make sense.
Mary Acworth Evershed apparently encountered the same conundrum. A Dante enthusiast herself as well as an astronomer of substantial merit, she gave considerable thought to the problems in Dante’s astronomical references, so much so that she collected her ideas on the subject in her 1914 book Dante and the Early Astronomers.
Tracy Daugherty, distinguished professor of English and creative writing emeritus at Oregon State University, has similarly given considerable thought to Ms. Evershed’s ideas about Dante’s cosmology, as well as her life and work, and the development of new ideas about the cosmos following Dante’s time and stretching up through Ms. Evershed’s own lifetime. Her own ideas on these matters will be published by Yale University Press this April in Dante and the Early Astronomer; Science, Adventure, and a Victorian Woman Who Opened the Heavens – a book I am, understandably, exceptionally keen to begin reading.
