Abstract
In the White and Gold Rose all are present, Virgil’s bees, a’building Dido’s Carthage, inseminate the Incarnation, women and men are equally present as in a Quaker Meeting, likewise pagan past and Christian centuries coexist in a palimpsest, as polyphony, as Florence’s Gospel, as the Oriflamme of Peace. Dante has circled the square, has prismed light into rainbows, has gathered up all the scattered Sibylline leaves, of Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Ovid, Horace, Sallust, Aristotle, Avicenna, Avverroës, the Kitab al-Mirag, even of his schoolmaster’s Tesoretto/Tesoro, even of the Libro del Chiodo decreeing his tragic, unjust exile, into one volume, the Comedy. In whose God we see our Humanity. But we need to read his text “true”, to find this Decolonialism of Freedom, Peace, and Love. To do so we must tackle the false divisions, the injustices, of Nation, Language, Race, Gender, Class, Religion, as we find Dante to do. Dennis Looney so titled his book, Freedom Readers. We can become “Freedom Readers”, Dante explaining that the Freedom of the Soul is the intent and goal of his allegory, indeed the anagogy, of his Commedia’s use of Psalm 113, “In exitu Israel de Aegypto”.
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Notes
- 1.
I am influenced by the 1981 English Institute I attended at Harvard: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979: English Literature: Opening Up The Canon, ed. Leslie A. Fiedler and Houston A. Baker, Jr.
- 2.
John Robert Glorney Bolton, The Tragedy of Gandhi; Peasant and Prince, on India; Il Papa, trans. Living Peter, on Pope John XXIII. Because we restored the Indian Prince’s tomb in Florence’s Cascine, the Maharajah of Kolhapur has now invited me to India.
- 3.
The Early Life of Dante Alighieri together with the original in parallel prose, trans. Joseph Garrow. We have recently held two events for this English Cemetery in which I write this book, one on the Dante scholars buried here, among them Robert Davidsohn, Adolfo Mussafia, Frances Trollope, Hiram Powers, Joseph Garrow, the other on Florence and India, held jointly in Florence and Delhi with the Accademia dell’Arte di Disegno and the Companions of John Ruskin’s Guild of St George, https://www.florin.ms/CBX.html
- 4.
Erich Auerbach, “Figura”, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim, pp. 49–51; Fredric Jameson, “Metacommentary”, PMLA 86 (1971), 9–17; Phillip W. Damon, “The Two Modes of Allegory in Dante’s Convivio”, Philological Quarterly 40 (1961), 144–149; Robert Hollander, Allegory in Dante’s Commedia.
- 5.
JB Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer, pp. 147–150; Mattias Lundberg, Tonus Peregrinus: The History of a Psalm Tone; Dunstan J. Tucker, O.S.B., “‘In Exitu Israel de Aegypto’: The Divine Comedy in The Light of the Easter Liturgy”, Benedictine Review 11:1 (1960) 43–61; Robert Hollander, “Purgatorio II: Cato’s Rebuke and Dante’s scoglio”, Italica 52 (1975) 348–363; Musica della Commedia dell’Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC6oOeZ1QL8&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=5.
- 6.
Dante Alighieri, Convivio, trans. Richard H. Lansing.
https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/text/library/the-convivio/book-02/#01
- 7.
Dante Alighieri, Letter to Can Grande, trans. James Marchand, https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/cangrande.english.html
- 8.
Petri Allegherii super Dantis ipsius genitoris Commoediam Commentarium, ed. Vincenzio Nannucci, p. 3.
- 9.
P. 305, “scilicet anagogicus… quod dicitur in dicto psalmo, spiritualiter est quod in exitu animae a peccato facta est libera et in sua potestate”.
- 10.
I caretake these stones in Florence’s English Cemetery, formerly built against the Guelf wall and Gate of Porta a’ Pinti, by Arnolfo di Cambio from the Ghibelline towers of pride
- 11.
De vulgari eloquentia I.vi, trans. Stephen Botterill, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/academic/lines/community/kenilworth/term2-wk9-dante-reading_2.pdf
- 12.
The evidence of Brunetto’s teaching Latin through Italian is given particularly in the Sommetta to BNCF II.VIII.36 Brunetto Latino, Il Tesoro, La Sommetta, scribe, Guido Cavalcanti?, 1286, where the diplomatic addresses that would have been written in Latin are here given in Italian. Brunetto’s mode of education was through the mother tongue to the other, as Dante says, to teach even women and children, while in the Renaissance that process would be reversed for the male elite, not the general populace.
- 13.
Karl Popper, The Open Society, I.F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates, and Michel Foucault lecturing at Boulder while dying of AIDS, have shown how Socrates’ circle admired the enemy state of Sparta with its monarch and slaves, for which Athens condemned the teacher of Plato, who had only needed to plead “parrhesia”, “freedom of speech” to have not drunk the hemlock.
- 14.
Nicomachean Ethics, VIII.x, p. 489; Tresor, ed. Carmody, II.xxxxiiii, p. 211: Tesoro, BNCF II.VIII.36, fol. 12r; JB Holloway, Twice-Told Tales, p. 233.
- 15.
In De monarchia, trans. Herbert W. Schneider, Dante argues, Book I, pp. 27–32, for nobility of forbears and by virtue, citing interestingly Dardanus as from Atlas in Africa and likewise Dido as African; p. 34, on the first Brutus sacrificing his children who conspired with the enemy; p. 35 on Cato, to kindle the love of liberty in the world, showed how highly he valued liberty by freely preferring to suicide rather than to remain living as slave, Cicero on Cato, De officiis, that he kept before him his resolve that it is better to die than to bow to a tyrant; Book II, pp. 44, 49, Dante favors Romans as sacred, citing even Luke on Jesus as born under Caesar Augustus, argues that Roman conquests demonstrate their right as might, as God willed, trial by combat; p. 48, Roman people gained the Empire by ordeal and hence by right; p. 51, anti-Constantinian; Book III, against the Pope, Nature=Divine Will, Natura God’s Vicar; p. 55, we owe to the Pope the keys, what is due, but not all that is due to Christ; p. 70, blinded by zeal or greed or decretalism (bureaucracy), Church not to be of temporal power, invalid gift of Constantine, Nicomachean Ethics, donor to recipient as agent to patient; p. 75, Empire prior to Church; p. 76, now the form of the Church is nothing else than the life of Christ, in word and in deed, Christ to Pilate “My kingdom is not of this world”; p. 79, useful means of liberty and peace; p. 80, God alone is the ruler of all things spiritual and temporal.
- 16.
JB Holloway, Anchoress and Cardinal: Julian of Norwich and Adam Easton, OSB, p. 160.
- 17.
Lisa Dwan and JB Holloway on Dante Alighieri, Samuel Beckett and exile, BBC4, 2016.
- 18.
John Robert Glorney Bolton, Il Papa, p. 272; Living Peter, pp. 185–186.
- 19.
Trans. King Alfred, ed. John Walter Sedgefield; trans. Geoffrey Chaucer, in The Riverside Chaucer; trans. Queen Elizabeth, in Queen Elizabeth’s Englishings of Boethius, Plutarch and Horace, ed. C. Pemberton, EETS OS 113.
- 20.
I.F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates. I had heard him lecture at Princeton on Socrates’ dislike of “eleutheria”, freedom, for which I.F. Stone taught himself Greek in his eighties. Later I heard Michel Foucault at Boulder explain that all that Socrates had needed to do to attain freedom was to plead for “parrhesia”, the right to speak the truth at personal risk for the public good. The classicists in the audience at Princeton had hissed at Stone refusing to give up their paradigm of him as democratically noble, rather than as a lover of Sparta’s fascism, her racist “Myth of the Metals”, justifying the slavery of the Helots as mere Iron to their Silver and Gold.
- 21.
Convivio I.iii; Paradiso XVII.58,60. To this day Florentine bread is not salted.
- 22.
Of his accusers, Boethius says, “One of them was Basil who had earlier been expelled from the King’s service and was now forced by his debts to testify against me. My other accusers were Opilio and Gaudentius, also men banished by royal decree for their many corrupt practices. They tried to avoid exile by taking sanctuary, but when the King heard of it he decreed that, if they did not leave Ravenna by a certain day, they should be branded on the forehead and forcibly expelled. How could the King’s judgement have been more severe? And yet on that very day their testimony against me was accepted.” Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, p. 11.
- 23.
I saw, at the dispensary at Cistercian Casamari Abbey, where Joachim da Fiore had his visions, 1183, monks dispensing penicillin, but also dressing sores by applying lotion with a bird’s wing feather from a jar.
- 24.
Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice.
- 25.
Pp. 3–7.
- 26.
The Bigallo fresco of the Madonna della Misericordia translates that theta and pi into the Seven Acts of Mercy embroidered on her cloak.
- 27.
P. 7: “Mistress of all virtues,” I said, “why have you come, leaving the arc of heaven, to this lonely desert of exile? Are you a prisoner, too, charged as I am with false accusations?”
- 28.
P. 9. George Eliot in Middlemarch will say the same.
- 29.
He speaks of ivory and crystal book cabinets, p. 18.
- 30.
P. 41, Book II, Poem 8.
- 31.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary, especially notes the relationship between first-person narrative and right hemisphere activity, pp. 59, 70, 75–76, 81, 88, 89, 191, 397 (e-mail communication, 8/3/2016).
- 32.
Pp. 72–73.
- 33.
Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, “The Philosophy of Parmenides,” Ph. D. Dissertation, Yale University, 1963. I found this dissertation thrown out by a professor in a Princeton University corridor and treasure it.
- 34.
Pp. 91–92.
- 35.
Cicero, “Dream of Scipio” in Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds, ed. Robert P. Miller, pp. 96–105.
- 36.
P. 37.
- 37.
A prisoner said here, “It was beautiful!” when I asked them what the earth was like in those pictures.
- 38.
One convict in Attica State Prison said to me that had been true of himself, he had blamed everyone else but himself.
- 39.
Carl G. Jung, Mandala Symbolism, trans. R. F. C. Hull.
- 40.
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy.
- 41.
Thomas Usk, “The Testament of Love,” in Chaucerian and Other Pieces, ed. W. W. Skeat, vol. VII.1–145.
- 42.
King James I of Scotland, The Kingis Quair, ed. John Norton-Smith.
- 43.
Sir Thomas More, A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, eds. Louis L. Martz and Frank Manley, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol 12.
- 44.
Sir Walter Ralegh, The History of the World, ed. C.A. Patrides; Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History: Being Further Letters to His Daughter, Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People.
- 45.
Mircea Eliade, Aspects du myth, pp. 33–70.
- 46.
Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir.
- 47.
Herrad von Landsberg, Hortus Deliciarum, ed. Rosalie Green; George Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought: The Biblical Experience of the Desert in the History of Christianity and the Paradise Theme in the Theological Idea of the University.
- 48.
St. Patrick’s Purgatory: The Versions of Owayne Miles, ed. Robert Easting, EETS 298; Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives.
- 49.
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
- 50.
I now recognize that this ability to be honest comes from the procedures, which are self-taught, of the Alcoholics Anonymous Twelve Steps. I wish university administrators and faculty, politicians and their voters, could work the same Twelve Steps.
- 51.
Juan de Mena, Laborinto de Fortuna, ed. Louise Vasvari; Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths; El Aleph.
- 52.
Leslie A. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare.
- 53.
The Wikipedia article on Elliott James Barkley, who was only twenty-one and just about to be released, can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attica_Prison_riot, the YouTube documentary at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXgP0lkqPNk, Elliott James Barkley’s gravestone at https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/180088289/elliott-james-barkley
- 54.
Professor Ronald Jenkins shared with me his project on reimagining Dante’s Commedia with currently and formerly incarcerated men and women: “Transformation Behind Bars”, The Yale ISM Review: Exploring Sacred Music, Worship and the Arts 4 (2018). https://www.ismreview.yale.edu/article/transformation-behind-bars/ with the production at Yale Divinity School. Also Naomi Wilson singing “Oh, Freedom” in response to Virgil’s words to Cato in the first canto of Purgatorio. It is a song she sang often in the prison cathedral during her thirty-seven years behind bars. She is performing the song in Harlem to an audience of families whose relatives are in prison: https://youtu.be/XSn1H9gCrPo
- 55.
Twice-Told Tales, pp. 121–126, 132.
- 56.
Julian of Norwich, in the Showing of Love, opts for God as saying “I it am”, beyond gender.
- 57.
Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages, eds. JB Holloway, Constance S. Wright and Joan Bechtold; cited and affirmed by Hans Küng, Christianity: The Religious Situation of our Time, pp. 439–443, 870.
- 58.
Parallel text in Latin and English: https://dante.princeton.edu/pdp/vulgari.html
- 59.
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Mary Flexner Lectures); Georg Röppen and Richard Sommer, Strangers and Pilgrims: An Essay on the Metaphor of Journey, p. 20.
- 60.
I heard Robert Durling lecture on this theme at Princeton; he frequently published on this concept.
- 61.
JB Holloway, Il Tesoro di Brunetto Latino, Maestro di Dante Alighieri; https://www.florin.ms/OpereBrunettoLatino.html
- 62.
Robert Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze, trans. Giovanna Battista Klein, 8 vols, VII, 358.
- 63.
Georg Röppen and Richard Sommer, Strangers and Pilgrims, pp. 35–36.
- 64.
Apuleius, Opera, BML Plut.54.32, scribe, Giovanni Boccaccio; The Golden Ass Being the Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, trans. W. Adlington; John V. Fleming, The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography, from Valencia, MS 387, fol. 146v; Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Venice: Cristoforo Tomasini, 1655, Esilio, p. 184, https://archive.org/details/iconologia00ripa/page/184/mode/2up: Pilgrim in Labyrinth, Boethius von Bolswart (1580–1634) in Hermann Hugo, Pia desideria (1624), https://emblems.hum.uu.nl/hu1624.html:
- 65.
John Webster Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer: Studies in Virgilian Legends, pp. 136–197, 256.
- 66.
I use the Dante Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi, Milan: Mondadori, 1975, edition, taken electronically from the Società Dantesca Italiana website for https://www.florin.ms/Dantevivo.html for the hypertexted searchable Italian text with images, readings, and music, and my own adaptations from the Temple Classics, ed. J.A. Carlyle, Thomas Okey and P.H. Wicksteed.
- 67.
On liturgy of the Reconciliation of Penitents see JB Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book, pp. 62–63.
- 68.
Both structures, the Baptistery and the future Santa Maria del Fiore, are domed like the Madonna’s breast, the latter prompted by the Baptistery, and the miracles of Las Cantigas de Santa Maria that also engendered Orsanmichele. See, for instance, Lorenzo Monaco “Intercession of Christ and Mary”, The Cloisters of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Christ is in red, Mary in white, their blood and milk interceding with God the Father for the salvation of Florence from the plague in 1402, a work formerly in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.
- 69.
Sonnet XXXV to Guido Orlando in Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti, trans. Ezra Pound, p. 85: given in Preface; for Florence’s Compagnie dei Laudesi see Ursula Betka, https://www.florin.ms/beth2.html#lauda. Brunetto Latino’s daughter, Biancia, left Orsanmichele’s Compagnia dei Laudesi a handsome endowment of ten gold coins and a third of the remainder of her estate, JB Holloway, Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri, pp. 168–169, 175.
- 70.
The “Dormition of the Virgin” was eclipsed by the dogma of the “Assumption of the Virgin”. Brunetto Latino, who himself wrote a magnificent lauda to the Virgin, online Appendix, says in the Tesoro: “Et sappiate che la nostra donna moriò al secolo corporalmente. e portarolla li apostoli a seppelire ne la valle di iosaphat. faciendo si grandi canti li angeli in cielo ke non si potrebe ne dire ne contare. |Et quel canto udirono li apostoli. e molti altri per l’uniuerso mondo. |Ma poi chella fu seppellita. al terço dì li apostoli non ui trouaro el corpo suo. |Onde douemo credere che domenedio la resuscito. et è collui ne la gloria di paradiso” [Tesoro BML Plut.42.19, fol. 15rb].
- 71.
Renate Lellep Fernandez, my colleague at Princeton University where we co-taught in the student-initiated Woodrow Wilson Seminar, Problems of World Hunger, observed that with the introduction of American cattle in the Asturias, for bottle-feeding babies, the images of the lactating Madonna and Child came to be seen as obscene and were covered up, when she lectured on the pros and cons of human lactation.
- 72.
Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend does not give this story but notes that St. Bernard’s mother breastfed him and her other children rather than giving them to wetnurses, while Caroline Walker Bynum gives the importance of the legend, giving an early example from Palma de Mallorca, 1290, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Arnaud Delorme on Academia.edu notes that Carlo Ossola, Introduzione alla Divina Commedia, had already observed this relationship to the Lactatio Bernardi and also to the “Dormition of the Virgin”. Likewise the importance of milk and blood can be seen in the Lorenzo Monaco “Intercession of Christ and Mary”, The Cloisters of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Later, Filippino Lippi, son of Fra Lippo Lippi and his nun model for the Virgin, Lucrezia Buti, will paint the Virgin appearing to St. Bernard, 1485–1487, for Dante’s 21. Badia which is where Dante as a boy had heard the monks’ Gregorian chanting of the Psalms, including the Miserere Psalm he cites five times over in his David/Solomon like poem and where Boccaccio would give his lecture commentaries on the Commedia.
- 73.
Luke 1.45–55; M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World.
- 74.
Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity.
- 75.
8. Santa Maria Nuova Hospital, founded by Folco Portinari in 1288, in Dante’s time, still functions today, 700 years later. As I write I hear 7. Misericordia ambulances sirening their way to it; the Misericordia likewise founded centuries ago, in 1244. Michelangelo in his Florentine Pietà reflected his own portrait as a Misericordia worker as that of Nicodemus supporting the grieving Mary as she supports her dead Son. Likewise had Piero della Francesca painted the Madonna del Parto above his mother’s tomb, whose name “della Francesca” identifies his female parentage, not that of an absent male father.
- 76.
While Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents disparaged the “oceanic feeling” as merely derived from the memory of the mother’s breast, William Blake in The Everlasting Gospel wrote, “This world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation or vegetation is finite and temporal”. Freud manifests left-hemisphere dominant atheism, Blake, like Dante, right-hemisphere perceptions.
- 77.
Especially insightful about Dante’s Beatrice is Teodolinda Barolini, “Gendered History of Italian Literature, with a Discussion of Beatrix Loquax”, Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, pp. 360–378, 463–466.
- 78.
Christine de Pizan/Cristina da Pizzano. Le Chemin de Longs Etudes/Il Cammin di Lungo Studio. Trans. Ester Zago. Ed. Julia Bolton Holloway. Parallel text, French/Italian. De Strata Francigena. Ed. Renato Stopani. Florence: Centro Studi Romei, 2017.
- 79.
Maria Francesca Rossetti. A Shadow of Dante: Being an Essay Towards Studying Himself, His World and His Pilgrimage. London: Longmans, Green, 1894.
- 80.
Francesco Ciabattoni, Dante’s Journey to Polyphony, p. 36.
- 81.
The City and the Book International Conference, I, The Alphabet and the Bible, Certosa, May 30–31, June 1, https://www.florin.ms/aleph.html
- 82.
Sabine Rethoré, http://mediterraneesansfrontieres.org/
- 83.
I excerpt from my review: Marcia Kupfer. Art and Optics in the Hereford Map: An English Mappa Mundi, c. 1300: “In particular this study sets out to solve the contrary writing of its T-O Map with ‘AFFRICA’ placed upon Europe, ‘EUROPA’ upon Africa, these words, as well as ‘MORS’, written in large gold Lombard capitals across its surface, the ‘RS’ also signifying the Bishop of Hereford Richard Swynfield’s initials. As with texts such as Dante’s Commedia and Langland’s Piers Plowman, we are shadowed in the author, and enabled freely to choose between the Siren’s song and Christ. We are present within the book, within the frame, within the labyrinth as microcosm that it depicts on the island of Crete as active ludic participants. Speaking of the near puns of watch tower and mirror, speculo and speculum, she explains this mirror reversing as expressing the difference between the mortal sight ‘through a glass darkly’, to that ‘face to face’, between worldly confusion and sin, the pagan Siren’s song, and the eschewing of that false music for God, the sacred palimpsested upon the profane in a mirror reversal, as being God’s ‘stage left’ and ‘stage right’ in opposition to our perspective. Augustine is present in his Hippo, (Aeneas’ Carthage) in the map, not far from the Siren in the Mediterranean. But it is Gregory’s vision of St Benedict upon which she most draws, how Benedict’s vision of the entire cosmos, seen as one beam of light, seems small because it is contemplated–speculations–in the presence of its Creator. Likewise she notes the play on passe and compasse. She discusses the Mappa mundi’s use and naming of the four measurers of the globe, Nicodoxus to the East, Policitus to the South, Teodocus to the North and West, dispatched by Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus, the bureaucratic pagan layering to the palimpsest which gave rise to Luke’s account of the Census and the Bethlehem journey. She draws on Augustine’s City of God, Orosius’ De Ornesta mundi, Macrobius on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Gregory’s Dialogues on Benedict, Hugh of St Victor, Robert Grosseteste, Vincent of Beauvais, Lambert of Saint-Omer’s Floridus, Ovid and the Roman de la Rose’s Narcissus, Roger Bacon’s Optics, Peter of Limoges’ Moral Treatise on the Eye, the topoi of the Wheel of the Ages of Man, and the Three Living and the Three Dead who become the Dance Macabre, and she is influenced by the insights of Mary Carruthers, Michael Camille, Jeffrey Hamburger, Suzanne Conklin Akbari and others. The book has copious notes, a lengthy bibliography, a manuscript index, a general index and lists its illustration credits”.
- 84.
BBodleian, Douce 329, Brunetto Latino, Li Livres dou Tresor https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/1ce5325d-03f6-412c-b14c-ee50b4fdb167/surfaces/b6537326-8851-4923-8e23-07773dd94414/
- 85.
Heather Webb, “Postures of Penitence in Dante’s Purgatorio”, Dante Studies 131 (2013), 225, notes this of the encounter with Omberto Aldobrandeschi, where the souls realize they have a “comune madre” and “Our Father”, correcting himself following asking after the nobility of their parentage.
- 86.
See Sabrina Ferrara, “Ethical Distance and Political Resonance in the Eclogues of Dante”, Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante, pp. 111–126.
- 87.
Education, a human right. We know that poor countries like Kerala, investing in the education of women, immediately raised their life expectancy and lowered the infant mortality rate. My university twice car-bombed Penitente students, killing many, so they then stayed away for ten years. When they returned I became their faculty advisor and shared my early retirement pay with them to help with their tuition to become lawyers, doctors, teachers, civil servants. Colorado had already massacred every Native American in the State. I found it crucial wherever I studied or taught (University of California at Berkeley, Quincy University, Princeton University, University of Colorado at Boulder) to share with African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, women, deaf students, the Gospels’ inclusion for Freedom and Justice. Education, like medical care, should be a human right, not a privilege for the rich and powerful.
- 88.
Here I acknowledge Professor Catherine Adoyo’s eloquent argument. Langland’s Piers Plowman XI.140–234 gives the same inclusiveness with the story of the Emperor Trajan for whose soul Pope Gregory had prayed, JB Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book, pp. 97–101.
- 89.
Giorgio Battistoni, Dante, Verona e la cultura ebraica.
- 90.
BTriv 1080, BNCF Palatino 313, BBruxelles 14614.14616, BRicc 1033, BNCF II.IV.243, BAV Urb. lat. 378.
- 91.
Kristina M. Olson, “Dante in a Global World: Sandow Birk’s Divine Comedy”, The Unexpected Dante: Perspectives on the Divine Comedy, ed. Lucia Wolf, p. 57.
- 92.
Le Opere di Brunetto Latino, http://www.florin.ms/OpereBrunettoLatino.html, published as Il Tesoro di Brunetto Latino: Maestro di Dante Alighieri, ed. JB Holloway.
- 93.
Cosmological Diagrams: Tesoro, BML Plut.42.20, fol. BAV Chig. L.VI.210 BAmbrosian G75 sup.
- 94.
La Divina Commedia nella figurazione artistica e nel secolare commento, ed. Guido Biagi, Turin: UTET, 1924, 3 vols, I.402–411, gives the commentaries by Chiose anonime, Jacopo della Lana, Benvenuti Rambaldi da Imola, Cristoforo Landino, Alessandro Vellutello, Pompeo Venturi, Niccolò Tommaseo, Raffaello Andreoli, Ottimo Commento, Giovanni Boccaccio, all discussing Brunetto’s teachings on astrology, drawing Dante’s horoscope at his nativity, 14 [?] May 1265. I consider the crude horoscope in the littera textualis BNCF MS II.VIII.36 as possibly drawn by Guido Cavalcanti.
- 95.
“Incorrigible humanity, therefore, led astray by the giant Nimrod, presumed in its heart to outdo in skill not only nature but the source of its own nature, who is God; and began to build a tower in Sennaar, which afterwards was called Babel (that is, ‘confusion’). By this means human beings hoped to climb up to heaven, intending in their foolishness not to equal but to excel their creator”, DVE I.vii.
- 96.
Elisa Brilli and Mirko Tavoni’s discussion of Inferno XXXI: https://www.facebook.com/177266152286270/videos/128216899289746
- 97.
Here again I acknowledge Professor Catherine Adoyo’s eloquent argument.
- 98.
Piers Plowman’s Emperor Troianus/Trajan, shared with Gregory and Dante, St Erkenwald’s Just Judge, and Julian of Norwich’s Showing of Love on Jews, all give this universalism of salvation, as possible for those outside of Christianity, this being true to the Gospel’s inclusiveness, if not of Churches’ dogmas. Pope Francis I, as had Pope John XXIII, opens Roman Catholicism to inclusiveness, to Liberation Theology.
- 99.
Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, ed. Paul Rorem, Preface, Rene Roques, Introduction, Jaroslav Pelikan, Jean Leclercq and Karlfried Froeìhlich.
- 100.
See “Commento Baroliniano”: https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/paradiso/paradiso-28/
- 101.
In Italian, “Uomo,” as does “Adam” in Hebrew, means both genders. That is not the case in English. I had great difficulty translating the splendidly inclusive theology of Don Divo Barsotti, until I found I could give his “Uomo” as “We,” as our Common Humanity. Whereupon Cardinal Pell, for my decision to avoid masculine-only English terms, had me expelled and silenced. He had already had the Catholic Catechism in English pulped for the same reason and re-written to male-only terms.
- 102.
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, pp. 95–97, describes the breakdown of social hierarchies on pilgrimage, attaining a liminal state.
- 103.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense of the Carnival, especially in the play between Latin and the vernacular which mocks it, turning it inside out, presents an ethos where normal hierarchies, social roles, proper behaviors, and assumed truths are subverted in favor of the “joyful relativity” of free participation in the festival. It gives a temporary dissolution or reversal of conventions, generates the liminal situations where disparate individuals come together and express themselves on an equal footing, without the oppressive constraints of social objectification: the usual preordained hierarchy of persons and values becomes an occasion for laughter, its absence an opportunity for creative interaction, “everything in his world lives on the very border of its opposite”, Rabelais and His World.
- 104.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which I helped write and which was the theoretical precursor of modern Neuroscience’s findings concerning the human brain.
- 105.
JB Holloway, “‘Come ne scriva Luca’: Anagogy in Vita nova and Commedia”, Divus Thomas 115 (2012), 150–170.
- 106.
See especially 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.
- 107.
Charles S. Singleton, An Essay on the Vita Nuova, pp. 25–54.
- 108.
In this Dante is presenting the Avverroïst “Unity of Intellect”, taught also by Sigier of Brabant, that we individually are nevertheless part of the universal consciousness, beyond time and space, being fragments of the wholeness of God at the center.
- 109.
I owe this remark to Professor Louise Clubb who made it during my doctoral orals at Berkeley.
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Bolton Holloway, J. (2024). Chapter 8: Dante’s Decolonialism. In: Dante and His Circle. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44093-9_8
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