

The word Limbo means “edge” or “hem”, as in the hem of an article of clothing. On this issue, see Giorgio Padoan, “Il Limbo dantesco,” and my essay, “Dante’s Limbo and Equity of Access: Non-Christians, Children, and Criteria of Inclusion and Exclusion, from Inferno 4 to Paradiso 32” (full citations are in Coordinated Reading). Dante’s way of conceiving Limbo is personal and original: it is a radical conceptualization, different from all others in the history of the idea of Limbo. As I will explain in this commentary, Dante’s treatment of Limbo is anomalous within the history of this idea. Inferno 4 treats the first circle of Dante’s Hell, dedicated to the space that theologians call “Limbo”.

Limbo came about as a way to accommodate the feelings of the laity regarding the injustice of exclusion from salvation, especially with respect to unbaptized infants.In the Commedia Dante creates two categories, focusing more attention on the first: 1) those who are excluded from the Christian dispensation temporally (being born before the birth of Christ) 2) those who are excluded geographically (being born after the birth of Christ, but in non-Christian lands).Dante’s personal and anomalous conception of Limbo: a radical idea, different from all others in history (see in Coordinated Reading my essay “Dante’s Limbo and Equity of Access,” from which I excerpt the historiographic Appendix below).
