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Millennial Representations Of Medieval Religious Schism In Western Media: An Iconographic Analysis Of Dante’S Inferno 28 And The Twenty-First Century Films Dracula Untold And Kingdom Of Heaven, Nafise Shajani

Languages and Cultures Publications

Dante Alighieri’s Inferno 28 is the place of the sowers of discord and scandal who are responsible for causing a split within their own communities; among them in the ninth bolge of the eighth circle is Muhammad whose mutilated body represents the division he brought to Christianity. A historical contextualization of the Inferno, however, confirms that the hostility between Christianity and Islam had emerged earlier with the rise of Islam as a political power in the seventh century. This paper examines Medieval and twenty-first century visual representations of this division within Christianity, which mirror the schism within Inferno 28. …