Quaestio de aqua et de terra
Dante AlighieriAccording to the canonical structure of the medieval quaestiones, the Dantesque text is the determinatio, that is, the last written phase of the quaestio, in which the master exposes his evidence in support of the thesis he previously proposed, in oral form only, and discussed and opposed by the public, of which the master here refutes the objections.
The theme of this question is on the "forma [...] aque [...] et terre": scholars wonder about the differences between the cosmological conception reported in the Quaestio and the one found in the verses of the Divine Comedy, a problem inscribed in the long-discussed one of the authenticity and authorship of the writing, the latter partially resolved from the publication of the Quaestio, in 1921, within the fundamental edition The Works of Dante, edited by Michele Barbi.
The question was about the arrangement of the four fundamental elements (water, earth, air and fire), which at the time were believed to be ordered into four concentric spheres with the Earth in the center. Antonio Pelacani was one of the exponents of a minority current of thought according to which water and earth would occupy a single common sphere, within which water would have filled the hollow parts of earth, mutually complementing it.