Abstract
This chapter gives Dante’s literary biography, as had Dorothy Sayers with the Inferno, in these three parts. Its Leopard section discusses his youthful writings, which include perhaps the Mare amoroso, his lyric poetry of sung canzoni, beginning, he tells us, with “A ciascun’alma presa, e gentil core” at eighteen, and the “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore”, which he then embeds in Vita nova XIX and at Purgatorio XXIV.49–51, as well as its presence in the Vatican Canzoniere. His Vita nova creates prose autobiographical incarnational chapters as frames for the poems, in prosimetron, as Boethius had also done. The Lion section of this chapter will discuss Dante’s tragic Exile and his espousal of Empire, with his restless and usually unfinished prose writings of the De monarchia, the De vulgari eloquentia, and the Convivio, in Latin and Italian prose. Its Wolf section, his Commedia, recalls Saint Francis’ conversion of the Wolf of Gubbio as Dante’s taming of the tragedy of his Exile; the Libro del Chiodo, metamorphosed into the Pilgrimage of his Commedia, his returning to the beauty of the poetry of his youth from his bitter middle period of unfinished prose writings about poetry and politics.
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Notes
- 1.
Dante Alighieri, Convivio IV, Società Dantesca Italiana edition in Italian, pp. 256, 279; trans. in English, Richard Lansing, https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/text/library/the-convivio/ Book IV, chapters 12, 24.
- 2.
The Officiolum manuscript, found in 2003, now in private ownership, has been published in facsimile by Salerno Editrice in Rome and has a large Web public domain presence.
- 3.
C. Jean Campbell, The Commonwealth of Nature: Art and Poetic Community in the Age of Dante, is a beautifully produced book relating the BML Strozzi 146 and Plut.42.19 manuscripts with the Ambrogio Lorenzetti Siena Sala della Pace frescoes, though not realizing their connection to each other through Francesco da Barberino and that Ambrogio Lorenzetti spent considerable time in Florence, enrolled in the Arte de’ Medici et Speziali.
- 4.
Giovanni Villani and Leonardo Bruni present the best early biographical material on Dante in relation to Brunetto Latino, while recent biographies by Alessandro Barbera and Marco Santagata do not research Dante’s education from Brunetto Latino in depth. The volumes of Robert Davidsohn, because in German and Italian and not English, are not consulted by Anglophone Dantisti.
- 5.
While the sonnet, “Se non mi uale a chui fortuna inchontra” concluding the BRicc 2908 manuscript, https://www.florin.ms/DCAppendices.pdf, p. 36, is attributed to Cecco Angiolieri, whom Dante likely encountered in 1289 at Campaldino, though it appears to be part of a European repertory of contrefaits “Senno no vai a cui fortuna e conta”, https://medmus.warwick.ac.uk/data/ec1work/senno-non-val-cui-fortuna-e-conta, and could be earlier than Cecco.
- 6.
Nicolò Crisafi’s Introduction to Dante’s Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the ‘Commedia’ presents a useful overview to the secondary scholarship among the Dantisti. This book instead relies on primary materials in manuscripts, documents, buildings, etc. rather than the echo chamber of secondary scholarship.
- 7.
- 8.
Armando Petrucchi, Notarii: documenti per la storia del Notariato italiano, p. 17.
- 9.
Leonardo Bruni, Vita di Dante, p. 4.
- 10.
Enrico Cerulli, Il “Libro della Scala” e la Questione delle fonte arabo-spagnole della Divina Commedia; Nuove Ricerche sul Libro della Scala e la conoscenza dell’Islam in Occidente.
- 11.
BNCF, Banco Rari 20, Las Cantigas de Santa Maria, unfinished, which presents the rich multi-culturalism of Spain (that would be lost with their Most Catholic Majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella’s Inquisition against Muslims and Jews) in its illustrations, poetry, and music, and which will influence the Compagnia dei Laudesi di Orsanmichele and its art and architecture. Online at https://archive.org/details/b.-r.-20/mode/1up
- 12.
Cicero, Somnium Scipionis, https://www.florin.ms/SomniumScipionis.html, trans. W.D. Pearman, concludes with the Stoic warning: “For the souls of those who have given themselves over to the pleasures of the body, and have yielded themselves to be their servants, as it were, and at the prompting of those lusts which wait upon pleasures have broken the laws of God and man; when they have glided from their bodies, go groveling over the face of the earth; nor do they return to this place, except after many ages of wandering”: Latin text: http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/repub6.shtml: Namque eorum animi, qui se corporis voluptatibus dediderunt earumque se quasi ministros praebuerunt impulsuque libidinum voluptatibus oboedientium deorum et hominum iura violaverunt, corporibus elapsi circum terram ipsam volutantur nec hunc in locum nisi multis exagitati saeculis revertuntur.’ Ille discessit; ego somno solutus sum.”
- 13.
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Latin text, Loeb Classics 74; English trans., Richard Green.
- 14.
Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy. The Romaunt of the Rose and Le Roman de la Rose: A Parallel-Text Edition, trans. Ronald Sutherland. This is also the palinodic game Boccaccio and Chaucer will play with themselves donning the mask of Pandarus in Il Filostrato and Troilus and Criseyde.
- 15.
Il Fiore manuscript in Padua, Troyes, Dijon, Montpellier, the following from notes to my Italian publication, Il Tesoro di Brunetto Latino, Maestro di Dante Alighieri: “Nella sua recensione in GSLI, III, 1884, p. 95, sul libro Francesco da Barberino et la litterature provençale en Italie au Moyen Age di A. Thomas, R. Renier dice: «Quantunque in latino il titolo sia Flores novellarum, credo che in italiano si debba tradurre Fiore e non Fiori per seguire la consuetudine del tempo»; Il Fiore e il Detto d’Amore, a c. di G. Contini, Milano, Mondadori, 1984; a cura di P. Allegretti, Firenze, Le Lettere, 2011. È possibile che Francesco fosse l’autore ma non il copista del manoscritto de Il Fiore, dove i sonetti, scritti in caratteri cancellereschi (ma diversi da quelli di Francesco de Barberino nella Commedia trivulziana), accompagnano, in italiano, il testo francese del Roman de la Rose scritto in littera textualis. Fratta, Aniello, La lingua del «Fiore» (e del «Detto d’amore») e le opere di Francesco da Barberino, «Misure Critiche», LI, 14, 1984, pp. 45–62, nota la straordinaria vicinanza linguistica in queste opere, p. 62. Ho consultato il manoscritto, ora a Montpellier, custodito nella Facoltà di Medicina, H438, che prima, però, era a Padova; da lì, acquistato da Etienne Bouhier nel 1611, fu portato a Dijon, poi a Troyes e, finalmente, a Montpellier. Ricordiamo che Francesco de Barberino fu presente a Padova allo stesso tempo in cui, tra il 1304 e il 1305, Giotto dipingeva gli affreschi nella Cappella Scrovegni, e, nel 1306, Dante era presente”.
- 16.
The engraving by Nicholas Poussin to Federigo Ubaldini’s 1640 edition of Francesco da Barberino’s Documenti d’Amore clearly shows Francesco (“Chapter 4: Dante’s Colleague, Dante’s Editor”: Fig. 2. Nicholas Poussin and Andrea Camessei, engravings to edition of Francesco da Barberino, Documenti d’Amore, Rome, 1640), as author also of Il Fiore.
- 17.
The patterns, even in computer programming, are not the linearity of abcdefg, 123456, but instead an algebraic mirroring, of abcdefgfedcba, of 12345654321, like the ripples in a pond from a thrown stone, as we find in music, as we find in the sewn and symmetrical garments we wear. Gerhart Ladner noted of Gottfried von Strasbourg’s Tristan and Horia-Roman Patapievici of Dante’s Commedia that these texts turn themselves inside out or right way round, “like a sleeve”. William Blake observed this in the mirroring of typesetting and printing. Evil is Good turned inside out.
- 18.
Richard de Fournival, Le Bestiare d’Amour, Reponse de la Dame, ed. C. Hippeau; Jeanette Beer, Beasts of Love: Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’Amour and a Woman’s Response.
- 19.
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, trans. Grace Frick and Marguerite Yourcenar.
- 20.
Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan; With the Tristran of Thomas, trans. Arthur Thomas Hatto, pp. 336–353.
- 21.
Ferrara, Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea II.280 is a fine early First Redaction MS of Li Livres dou Tresor, with tençione about Pope Boniface, Charles of Anjou, Florence, Sicily, Kings of France and England, and Dante’s sonnet, “Guido io vorra che tu e Lapo e io”. Ends with Jerusalem pilgrimage: “Cist sunt li santuarij li quelz home trove e le saint peleinaies doutre la mer”, unknown to Chabaille, Carmody, Brayer, Vielliard, discovered, JB Holloway, Twice-Told Tales, p. 518.
- 22.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems and Translations, p. 402.
- 23.
Minnesang Herr Dietmar von Aist (before 1140–after 1171), Codex Manesse (Große Heidelberger Liederhandschrift, Cod. Pal. germ. 848), folio 64r, around 1300–1340, Zürich, miniature, 35.5 × 25 cm, University of Heidelberg Library, Heidelberg, Germany.
- 24.
Abraham Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Music in Its Historic Development; Erich Werner, The Sacred Bridge: The Interdependence of Liturgy and Music in the Synagogue and Church During the First Millennium; Gustave Reese, Music in the Middle Ages.
- 25.
See especially the motets Yvonne Rokseth edited, Polyphonies du XIIIe siècle: Le manuscript H 196 de la faculté de médicine de Montpellier.
- 26.
- 27.
C.S. Lewis in his earlier Allegory of Love got taken in by this game, reading it straight (other similarly satirical works are Machiavelli’s The Prince, Dean Swift’s Modest Proposal, George Orwell’s Animal Farm), though by The Discarded Image he would come to understand it.
- 28.
Pietro Alighieri cites this text, likely from his father’s library, Petri Alleghierii super Dantes ipsius genitoris Comoediam Commentarium, ed. Vincentio Nannucci, “Unde Gualterius definit sic talem amorem”, p.89.
- 29.
Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson: “For al so siker In principio, Mulier est hominis confusio—Madame, the sentence of this Latyn is ‘Womman is mannes joy and al his blis’”, 3163–3166.
- 30.
I Corinthians 7.1–5; Elizabeth Makowski, “The Conjugal Debt and Medieval Canon Law”, Journal of Medieval History, 3 (1977), 99–114, reprinted in Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages, ed. JB Holloway and Constance S. Wright, pp. 129–143.
- 31.
Dante in Convivio IV.20 writes of Guido Guinizelli’s canzone, “Al cor gentil ripara sempre Amore” [Love hastens ever to the gentle heart].
- 32.
The opening hand is like that possibly of Dante in Brunetto Latino manuscripts: BRicc 2908, BNCF II.IV.124, BML Plut.42.20, and BAV Chig L.VI.210, while the hand that writes out Dante’s sonnet at fol. 99v is not. https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.3793
- 33.
Il Canzoniere Palatino. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze Banco Rari 217 (ex Palatino 418), I Canzonieri della lirica italiana delle origini III, ed. Lino Leonardi.
- 34.
Giovanni Villani, Cronica, VIII.x, III.22.
- 35.
Necrologia, Archivio dell’Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, I.3.6, listing Brunetto Latino, fol. 3v, and Guido Cavalcanti, fol. 41r, as buried in their tombs beneath the sculpture of the Annunciation then by Santa Reparata; 1350, Boccaccio being sent by the Compagnia dei laudesi di Orsanmichele to Dante’s daughter, “Beatrice” in Ravenna with ten gold florins: 1364, Pietro Alighieri willing the Dante house to Orsanmichele’s Compagnia dei laudesi. See Anna Pegoretti, “Civitas diaboli. Forme e figure della religiosità laica nella Firenze di Dante”, Dante Poeta cristiano e la cultura religiosa medievale in ricordo di Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, Ravenna, 26 novembre 2015. Ed. Giuseppe Ledda. Pp. 65–116.
- 36.
https://www.umilta.net/cecilia.html: “Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia”.
- 37.
Giovanni Villani, Cronica, VII.lxxxix, pp. 280–281.
- 38.
William S. Heckscher, Sixtus IIII aeneas insignes statuas romano populo restituendas censuit, Utrecht University, 1955.
- 39.
Giovanni Villani, Cronica, IX.cxxxvi, p. 129.
- 40.
Conv II. 12: “Therefore, beginning again from the beginning, I say that when I lost the first delight of my soul, of which mention is made above, I was pierced by such sorrow that no comfort availed me. Nevertheless after some time my mind, which was endeavoring to heal itself, resolved (since neither my own consolation nor that of others availed) to resort to a method which a certain disconsolate individual had adopted to console himself; and I began to read that book of Boethius, not known to many, in which, while a prisoner and an exile, he had found consolation. And hearing further that Tully had written another book in which, while discussing Friendship, he had addressed words of consolation to Laelius, a man of the highest merit, upon the death of his friend Scipio, I set about reading it. Although it was difficult for me at first to penetrate their meaning, I finally penetrated it as deeply as my command of Latin and the small measure of my intellect enabled me to do, by which intellect I had perceived many things before, as in a dream, as may be seen in the New Life”.
“Pondering these, I quickly determined that Philosophy, who was the lady of these authors, sciences, and books, was a great thing. I imagined her fashioned as a gentle lady, and I could not imagine her in any attitude except one of compassion, so that the part of my mind that perceives truth gazed on her so willingly that I could barely turn it away from her. I began to go where she was truly revealed, namely to the schools of the religious orders and to the disputations held by the philosophers, so that in a short period of time, perhaps some thirty months, I began to feel her sweetness so much that the love of her dispelled and destroyed every other thought.…Since this lady, as has been said, was the daughter of God, queen of all things, most noble and beautiful Philosophy, we must consider who were these movers and this third heaven”.
- 41.
Nancy Thompson, “Cooperation and Conflict: Stained Glass in the Bardi Chapels of Santa Croce”, 267–270, maps the conflict between Spirituals and Conventuals, the Papist Conventuals winning the battle, Peter John Olivi and Ubertino da Casale leaving Santa Croce.
- 42.
BML Strozzi 146, Tesoretto, fol. 23v. See Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poets: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers, on the apprentice works of Dante and Joyce, the Vita nova, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Charles S. Singleton, An Essay on the Vita Nuova.
- 43.
Marc Bartoli, La Caduta di Gerusalemme. Il commento al Libro delle Lamentazioni di Pietro di Giovanni Olivi.
- 44.
Giovanni Villani, Cronica, VII.clv, pp. 362–363.
- 45.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems and Translations, p. 398. Guido Cavalcanti, Sonnet XLVIIIa, 1292, presented at opening of this book. White Guelph Guido Cavalcanti addresses the poem to Guido Orlandi, a Black Guelph, who replies stuffily in a tenzone that Cavalcanti had better pay heed to the Church’s authoritative teaching rather than espouse such a lay Christianity.
- 46.
JB Holloway, “The Vita Nuova: Paradigms of Pilgrimage”, Dante Studies, 103 (1985/1989), 103–124; republished, Jerusalem: Essays on Pilgrimage and Literature, 1998, pp. 101–120; in Italian, “La Vita Nuova: Paradigmi di pellegrinaggio”, Lectura Dantis 2002–2009. Omaggio a Vincenzo Placella per i suoi settanta anni, Napoli: Università degli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”, pp. 1181–1204.
- 47.
[Pseudo] Ambrogius, De XLII mansionibus filiorum Israel tractato, Migne, vol. XVII, cols. 9–40: St Jerome, Epistola 78, Ad Fabiolam de mansionibus filiorum israhel per heremum, CLCLT.CD, Universitas Catholica Lovaniensis/Brepols, Cetedoc Library of Christian Latin Texts.
- 48.
BNCF, Banco Rari 19, Laudario di Sant’Egidio, fol. 9 “Onde ne vien tu pellegrino amore”, cited by Ursula Betka, “Marian Images and Laudesi Devotion in Late Medieval Italy, 1260–1350”, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Melbourne, Melbourne 2001, p. 588.
- 49.
Edmond de Coussemaker, Drames liturgiques du Moyen Age (Paris: Vatar, 1861); Giampiero Tintori, Sacre rappresentazioni del manoscritto 201 della Bibliothèque Municipale di Orléans (Cremona: Athenaeum Cremonense, 1958), p. lxxi.
- 50.
Roger Sherman Loomis, The Romance of Tristan and Ysolt, pp. 28–33.
- 51.
Herr Dietmar von Aist (before 1140—after 1171). Codex Manesse (Große Heidelberger Liederhandschrift, Cod. Pal. germ. 848), folio 64 recto, around 1300–1340, Zürich, miniature, 35.5 × 25 cm, University of Heidelberg Library, Heidelberg, Germany.
- 52.
B.J. Whiting, “Troilus and Pilgrims in Wartime”, Modern Language Notes 60 (1945), 47–49.
- 53.
Romeo and Juliet, I.v.101–102.
- 54.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), pp. 1–58, 437–474; Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971), passim; Maria Corti, “Models and Antimodels in Medieval Culture”, NLH, 10 (1979), 339–356.
- 55.
Hartmann Grisar, History of Rome and the Popes in the Middle Ages, trans. Luigi Cappadelta, III.302–303.
- 56.
JB Holloway, “Alfonso el Sabio, Brunetto Latino, Dante Alighieri”, Thought, 60 (1985), 471.
- 57.
We have intertextuality not only in poetry but also in painting, Dante’s Vita nova having many afterlives. Likewise we need to remember that medieval poetry was not read silently but was also performed and recall Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s drawing of Tennyson reading Maud in the presence of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning in London, a synesthetic drawing they brought back to Florence’s Casa Guidi, Elizabeth having fallen in love with Robert’s Paracelsus (for her laudanum) and Sordello and eloping with him to the Continent. This intertextuality, the Rossettis, the Brownings, Pound, Joyce, Beckett, while based on the Provençal, Sicilian, and Tuscan canzoniere and so much else, is like a tree whose Vallombrosan leaves fall year after year in the shared simile in Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, even when heart-rendingly plucked from Pier delle Vigne’s suicidal poison.
- 58.
Poems and Translations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, pp. 398, 286.
- 59.
Wikipedia, which becomes ever more useful, publishes a scrap of manuscript of the Vita nova, XXXI 14–XXXIII 4, held at the Carmel of Santa Maria degli Angeli e Santa Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, at Trespiano, giving us the work’s retention in the context of Florence before Dante’s exile, even to coming within convent walls there “Vita nuova”, Wikipedia; https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vita_nuova.
- 60.
Necrologia, Archivio, Santa Maria del Fiore., I.3.6., fol. 41r
- 61.
Giovanni Villani, Cronica, VIII.viii, III.19.
- 62.
- 63.
Enrico Giannini (his family has been bookbinders in Florence for five generations) and Daniel-Claudiu Dumitrescu (whose grandfather was the top coppersmith in his part of Romania) together created two facsimiles of the cover of the infamous Book of the Nail, the Libro del Chiodo, now in the Florentine State Archives, formerly kept in the 20. Bargello, in which Dante is, three times, condemned to exile, then even to be burned at the stake if he returns to Florence from Corso Donati’s enmity against him. This binding contains the facsimile edition edited by Francesca Klein of the Florentine State Archives, published by Polistampa in 2004. It is on display in the Museo Casa di Dante, while another copy is in the English Cemetery to be given to the Società Dantesca Italiana.
- 64.
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, I.F.Stone, The Trial of Socrates, Michel Foucault, Lecture at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
- 65.
JB Holloway, Twice-Told Tales, passim, Il Tesoro di Brunetto Latino, Maestro di Dante Alighieri, Florence: Regione Toscana, 2021.
- 66.
Alberto Casadei argues for partial authorship of the Epistola with alterations by others, “Sull’autenticità dell’Epistole a Cangrande”. Ortodossia ed eterodossia in Dante Alighieri. Atti del convegno di Madrid (5–7 novembre 2012), eds. Carlota Cattermole, Celia de Aldama, Chiara Giordano, pp. 803–830.
- 67.
Thibaut IV, Count of Champagne, and, I, King of Navarre.
- 68.
De vulgari eloquentia, trans. Steven Botterill, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/academic/lines/community/kenilworth/term2-wk9-dante-reading_2.pdf
- 69.
On invective in Dante, see Nicolino Applauso, Dante’s Comedy and the Ethics of Invective in Medieval Italy: Humor and Evil.
- 70.
JB Holloway, Twice-Told Tales, pp. 52–53.
- 71.
Giovanni Villani, Cronica, IX.cxxxvi, p. 130.
- 72.
Antoine Thomas, “Lettres latine inédites de Francesco da Barberino”, Romania 16 (1887), 73–91, 571–72, gives Pier delle Vigne-like letters from BVienna 3530, written from Florence, 1313, to the Emperor Henry of Luxembourg, and to the Doge of Venice Giovanni Soranzo, in the style that Brunetto Latino taught to both Francesco da Barberino and Dante Alighieri.
- 73.
JB Holloway, “‘È una veritade ascosa sotto bella menzogna’ (Convivio II.1): San Miniato, San Mina, Sant’Albano e San Dionigio”. De strata francigena XXVI/2, 2018, 0–34.
- 74.
JB Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer. It is interesting that this literary genre came about in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, often modeled on Luke 24’s narration of the Pilgrims to Emmaus, with a continuation in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and well understood by William Blake.
- 75.
JB Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book, pp. 27–55; Il Pellegrino e il Libro, pp. 33–61, giving the text and its music of the Fleury Officium Peregrinorum, Bibliothèque Municipale, Orléans, 201.
- 76.
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Inferno.
- 77.
Francesco da Buti, Commento, I. 398; Lodovico da Fossombrone, O.F.M., Dante Alighieri Terziario Francescano, pp. 15–16.
- 78.
Maria Grazia Beverini Del Santo, Piccarda Donati nella storia del Monastero di Monticelli.
- 79.
I was faculty advisor to Penitente students when they returned to the University of Colorado at Boulder ten years after two cars filled with them entering the University were car-bombed causing multiple deaths among them.
- 80.
Thomas J. Steele, S.J., Santos and Saints: The Religious Folk Art of Hispanic New Mexico.
- 81.
JB Holloway, Twice-Told Tales, p. 35.
- 82.
Academia Bessarion 2 on Florence and the Seven Acts of Mercy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wck3hiR-P-Y&t=17s
- 83.
JB Holloway, Twice-Told Tales, p. 296, lists the documents naming Guido Guerra, Jacopo Rusticcucci, Tegghiaio Aldobrandi, Cavalcante Cavalcanti, Farinata degli Uberti, Tesauro de Beccaria, Andrea de’ Mozzi, Ugolino della Gherardesca, Archbisho Ruggieri degli Ubaldini, Vanni Fucci, and Rinier dei Pazzi.
- 84.
JB Holloway, Twice-Told Tales, pp. 24–52, Documents transcribed, Appendix I: Republic, pp. 316–327.
- 85.
“dni philippus arçenti”, Philippus Arçenti, Filippo Argenti, is buried by the 6. Santa Reparata cemetery with its marble sculpture of the Annunciation as a co-member of the Compagnia dei Laudesi of 30. Orsanmichele and therefore is listed in the Necrologia, fol. 8v, of Santa Maria del Fiore’s Archive. He also has plaque on the 16. Adimari palace on via del Corso, 18, which backs onto Dante’s house in the 14. Piazza Donati, https://www.florin.ms/DanteFlorence.html app.
- 86.
Lucan, Pharsalia, Latin text, ed. and trans. J.D. Duff, Loeb Classics 220; English trans, Robert Graves.
- 87.
JB Holloway, Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri, pp. 24–25, 28–29, 316, 321, etc.
- 88.
Libro del Chiodo, p. 4 1302 (“Dante Alleghieri de sextu Sancti Petri Maioris”) is condemned to two years of exile, for the crime of barratry (“super baracteriis, iniquis extorsionibus et lucris illicitis”); p. 15 “Dante Allighierii’; p. 147 (“De sextu Porte Sancti Petri Dante Alleghierij”); https://www.florin.ms/LibroChiodoEnglish.html
- 89.
JB Holloway, Twice-Told Tales, pp. 151–152. 296, 300, 304, 418.
- 90.
Sallust, De coniuratione Catilinae, LVIII, on Catiline’s suicide speech at Fiesole, included in Brunetto Latino’s examples of false rhetoric in both the Rettorica and the Tesoro, borrowed in turn by Dante’s Ulysses—and by C.S. Lewis in The Voyage of the Dawntreader.
- 91.
John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, “Dicebat bernardus carnocensis nos essere quasi nanos gigantum humeris insidentes”, https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog/fs743fm9703, turning to fol. 217r.
- 92.
Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus, fn. on p. 101. It was Jorge Luis Borges, “Il falso problema di Ugolino”, Nove saggi danteschi, p. 36, that alerted me to this mirroring of Dante’s own wolf-like status [“un lupo e i suoi lupachiotti” (Inf XXXIII.25–39)] as the exile betrayer of his city.
- 93.
This reminds one of Joseph Conrad’s own sense of his betrayal of Poland in the scene of the responsible officers abandoning the pilgrim ship in Lord Jim, “It was funny enough to make the angels weep”.
- 94.
I borrow from Milton’s Areopagitica on Spenser’s Faerie Queene on the Knight Guyon and his Palmer in the Cave of Mammon.
- 95.
John Demaray, The Invention of Dante’s Commedia, and I both visited to Mount Sinai because of our seeing it as Dante’s Purgatorial landscape. See also Approaching the Holy Mountain: Art and Liturgy at St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, eds. S.E. Gerstel, R.S. Nelson.
- 96.
Joachim da Fiore, 1183, had important visions while at Casamari Abbey on business.
- 97.
Horia-Roman Patapievici, Gli occhi di Beatrice: Com’era davvero il mondo di Dante; Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Dorothy Sayers, Barbara Reynolds; Maps and Diagrams, C.W. Scott-Giles, 3 vols: Hell, Purgatory, Paradise.
- 98.
Immanuello Romano, L’Inferno e Il Paradiso, ed. Giorgio Battistoni.
- 99.
Il Libro della Scala, ed. and trans. Enrico Cerulli.
- 100.
Francesco da Buti, Commento sopra la Divina Commedia di Dante Allighieri, I.9; Giovanni Villani, Cronica, IV.cxxxvi, 128–130.
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Bolton Holloway, J. (2024). Chapter 5: Dante’s Three Beasts. In: Dante and His Circle. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44093-9_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44093-9_5
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