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Word Wednesday

Dante’s LifeIn brief

A Very Brief Account of Dante’s Life

• Born sometime in May or June in 1265 in Florence Italy

• His family was moderately

wealthy and well-known

• His family picked his wife,

who he married around 1285

• But he stayed in love with

another woman

Beatrice

• There is an accepted tradition as to who she is, but nobody knows for sure.

• We do know that Dante met her only twice, once when he was 9 and she 8, and once nine years later.

• She married another man, and died in 1290,

at age 24, only 3 years later.

• Dante remained in love with her all his life.

• She appears in his two greatest works, Vita

Nuova and La Commedia, and he wrote many

poems to her.Rossetti painting, 1863

Dante’s ItalyOr, why to pick your side carefully

• There were two factions in Italy in Dante’s lifetime

• The Ghibellines (“gib-el-eens”), who wanted Europe to unify under the Holy Roman Emperor (who was German)

• The Guelphs (“gwelfs”), who wanted Italy to stay Italy.• The Guelphs were further divided, into Whites and Blacks• The Blacks were tied to the Pope, and saw him as an ally against

Emperor Rudolph

• The Whites wanted to stay independent of the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire.

• Dante was a White Guelph

The Guelphs and the Ghibellines

Florence

• Italy in those days wasn’t a country as we understand it today.

• Instead it was a loose group of “comuni”, or communes, much like what we would call city-states today.

• Dante’s Florence was a Guelph city, and much of the internal politics was the Black / White division rather than the Guelph / Ghibelline.

Exile

• There was a lot of political maneuvering in Florence in Dante’s life, but the final effect was that Dante was fined (which he could not pay, because the Black Guelphs had seized his assets) exiled from Florence in 1302.

• If he returned, he could be burned at the stake.

• Picture that for a minute. He had to leave home and he could never go back. He left his wife and three children in Florence (her family was Black Guelphs)

• He wrote Commedia while in Exile. Inferno was completed in 1314

• He died in 1321 without ever returning to Florence.

The Church

• In those days, if you were Christian, you were Catholic. Church doctrine ran just about every aspect of life.

• Particularly in Florence, which is just 140 miles from Rome. (That’s roughly from here to Laredo)

• Even thought, the very ideology of the people, is in control of the Church, and sin is in the forefront of everybody’s mind

• The Seven Deadly Sins are especially important markers:• Pride, Lust, Envy, Sloth, Avarice, Wrath, and Gluttony

TraditionOr, how Dante fits (and doesn’t) into a larger picture

Latin

• In those days, everybody wrote in Latin, and anyone who was important enough to read important works read in Latin.

• Dante wrote in Italian. This meant anybody who could read (and was Italian) could read it. Not just the classically educated.

Epic

• Dante is writing in great tradition of epic cycles, like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey

• In particular, he holds great respect for that great Latin poet, Virgil (REMEMBER THIS) and his Aeneid

• Epic is simply a lengthy narrative poem, generally concerned with heroic deeds or events significant to a culture or nation

• Commedia falls in the later half of the definition: heaven and hell are very important to the Christian culture Dante lives in.

The Descent

• A traditional part of the epic (from the Greek, Roman, and even the Christian Tradition) is the ‘descent’ narrative. The Greeks called it catabasis, and it means, basically, a trip to the underworld.

• The hero is always guided by a figure, often from their past (For Odysseus, it is the blind seer Tiresias. Aeneas, in Virgil’s epic, is guided by his father Anchises). Keep an eye on this when we get to The Inferno.