This is an extremely niche and nerdy thing, but “The Divine Comedy was fanfiction” and similar takes are...Reductive? Like the cool thing about old literature is that it’s from a world very different from the one we live in today, so I don’t understand the motivation to retroactively label classics as fanfic, which is very modern. I’m all for people joking and having fun, but I’ve seen that sentiment repeated here and on twitter in complete seriousness and it’s just a wacky framework with which to approach literature from a context centuries removed from the idea of fandom. Dante, a medieval Christian, did not think of himself as a “fan” of the Bible. Christianity isn’t a fandom lol. Dante did not think of the Bible as a work of fiction, and the Divine Comedy was not viewed as fiction by his contemporaries, either. When he went and recited that shit, it was as testimony to something he claimed he witnessed.
Medieval European dream visions are an entire genre of literature; there are many examples of people using a “vision from god” seen in a dream (or so they claimed) to criticize political/religious figures that were otherwise untouchable to them. Thus all of those popes being punished in Dante’s hell, for example. Vergil’s presence in the Inferno functions as 1) a mouthpiece and 2) an appeal to the authority of a revered poet. Vergil was a device, not the canon character in a self-insert fic. Isn’t that so much more interesting than “it was fanfic about Dante and his pal Vergil”? Imo it’s so much funnier that the safest way to criticize, say, a king was to be like, “I had a dream where Jesus himself called the king an ugly slut. Dreams come from god so it must be true”.
On one hand this is very understandable and it’s in a way true that it shouldn’t be simplified that much... but on the other hand, a literary work of transformative character in which a writer expresses their views, opinions and reflexions on a previously existing piece and using it to expand, explore and explain previously unseen portions of the content and/or using it to understand themselves and reexamine the original work through his own lens is literally the definition of fanfic.
Monetizeyourcat used to make a good point that Joseph Smith and the origin of Mormonism make sense as the result of a clever, creative young man in a Western New York “Burned-Over District” where like, The Word of God was the basis of all popular culture