Dante's Inferno is just one of many different sources that attempted to offer the medieval mind a glimpse of hell. The tradition is long and notable, two important statements regarding hell can be found in the works of Augustine and Aquinas. In the City of God (c.425), St Augustine wrote of a place where the damned ‘can burn without being consumed, and suffer without end.’ In the Summa Theologica (c.1270), Thomas Aquinas states that ‘a place is assigned to souls in keeping with their reward or punishment, as soon as the soul is set free from the body it is either plunged into hell or soars to heaven.’ However, these are theological ideas, written in Latin for the well educated. Dante wrote in Italian. His audience was the localised and non-specialist.

Dante created an ‘other world’ which shared many motifs with the popular tradition that preceded and succeeded him. For example, the shared iconography in Dante and a later artist of the medieval period, Hieronymous Bosch, even to some surprisingly small details, could be argued to demonstrate a cultural amalgamation regarding Hell that was common across medieval Europe.

Ultimately, in medieval thought a few aspects of Hell appear to be universal; the fire, the devils, and the everlasting suffering. However, beyond this Hell becomes open to interpretation and every person can imagine the worst way their soul could suffer. It happens that Dante captured something in his work which creates a sense of common terror. His Hell feels truthful and while it shares aspects with previous Hells, there is something frighteningly original in it. Therefore, while we cannot say that his Hell represents an authoritative take on how the medieval mind imagined Hell, we can say, with some hesitation, that it demonstrates how one medieval mind, Dante's, imagined Hell. Moreover, the medieval minds that read Inferno, much like the process that we go through when reading it today, would have had their idea of Hell altered. Pieces of culture do not survive for half a millennium by accident, clearly his work resonated with the people that interacted with it enough, that they found some truth worth protecting and sharing in it. In conclusion, Hell is an idea, and no single work can be a complete authority on what it meant to a medieval individual. Nevertheless, works as extraordinarily vivid as Inferno held the power to influence people’s perception of Hell, and therefore took the medieval person as close to Hell as possible while they were still living.