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Guest Essay

By Sebastian Langdell

Dr. Langdell is a professor of medieval literature at Baylor University.

I teach a seminar for graduate students called Divine Comedies. My students and I trace Dante’s influence through the ages. After a close friend — like me, a medievalist — died by suicide last year, I found the passage of the “Inferno” where Dante describes a grove of suicides almost intolerable. The poet relegates the souls of those who have died by their own hand to trees in a withered forest in the seventh circle of hell. During the Last Judgment, we are told, they will not reoccupy their bodies like everyone else, but will remain trees, with their skins hanging........

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