To block the sun

What Dante’s shadow says about embodied existence

There’s only one shadow cast in Purgatorio, and that is Dante’s - an illustration by Gustave Doré

When you see your own shadow but not that of the person walking beside you, something in the order of reality is off.

This is Dante’s experience in the third canto of Purgatorio, and it demolishes the persistent modern assumption that medieval Christianity wa…