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”.
Verse
Verse Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. Publius Terentius Afer, Heautontimorumenos Tu solus peregrinus es Luke 24.18
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, of Christianity at its roots as the religion of women and slaves. 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”.Footnote 1
I had titled this chapter, “Dante’s Democracy”. But an Italian colleague protested that Democracy is the “Tyranny of the Majority” forced by America’s military superpower on those weaker than herself. I replied that my sense of “Democracy” includes the Quaker practice of honoring even the one dissenting voice as being that of God within us, that sense of Justice as equal for all: but sadly remembered the fraudulent hypocritical phrase, “La Legge è uguale per tutti”, posted in every Italian courtroom. So I next chose the word, “Decolonialism”, particularly remembering a teenager poem I wrote to “my imperial father from his colonial daughter”. He was Gandhi’s friend and biographer and on the Salt March for the Times of India. I was eight when, glued to the radio, I heard Nehru proclaim India’s freedom. Jokingly, earlier, I was betrothed to a rajah.Footnote 2 Twenty years ago Dennis Looney, while he was researching his book, Freedom Readers: Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy, stood with me on this hill, perhaps an Etruscan tomb, in Florence’s Abolitionist “English” Cemetery, telling me of Theodore Parker preaching against slavery in Boston with a loaded gun at the pulpit, of Frederick Douglass, 11 May 1887, visiting his grave and also those of Richard Hildreth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she part African, her family Jamaican slave owners, for their work against slavery, and of Frances Trollope and Hiram Powers, he part Native American, likewise buried here, creating waxworks of Dante’s Commedia on the American Frontier in Cincinnati. To which I now add Joseph Garrow, Justice of the Peace, whose mother was a princess in India, whose wife was Jewish, whose daughter Theodosia married Anthony Trollope’s brother, her background like Isa Blagden’s, Theodosia and Isa becoming Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Miriam in The Marble Faun, and that Joseph Garrow was the first to translate Dante’s Vita nova into English.Footnote 3 Theodore, Richard, Elizabeth, Frances, Hiram, Theodosia, Isa, Joseph, who were richly multicultural, likewise many Dante scholars, Adolfo Mussafia and Robert Davidsohn, among them: African American, Native American, Jewish, East Indian, Russian, American, European, of both genders and all ages, lie here forever in Dante’s Florence. Dante, as Monsignor Livi, the Prior of San Lorenzo, told me, “è per tutti”, is for all.
Freedom
Dante explains his use, his sovrasenso, of the two Allegories, of the Poets, of the Theologians,Footnote 4 with Psalm 113, which he then places within his Commedia, sung by a hundred-fold pilgrims on Purgatorial shores to its unique and most ancient tonus peregrinus, celebrating the Exodus from slavery.Footnote 5 In the Convivio II.1 he noted:
The fourth sense is called anagogical, that is to say, beyond the senses; and this occurs when a scripture is expounded in a spiritual sense which, although it is true also in the literal sense, signifies by means of the things signified a part of the supernal things of eternal glory, as may be seen in the song of the Prophet which says that when the people of Israel went out of Egypt, Judea was made whole and free. For although it is manifestly true according to the letter, that which is spiritually intended is no less true, namely, that when the soul departs from sin it is made whole and free in its power.Footnote 6
And in the Letter to Can Grande he (or perhaps another), notes:
7. For me to be able to present what I am going to say, you must know that the sense of this work is not simple, rather it may be called polysemous, that is, of many senses; the first sense is that which comes from the letter, the second is of that which is signified by the letter. And the first is called the literal, the second allegorical or moral or anagogical. Which method of treatment, that it may be clearer, can be considered through these words: “When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judea was made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion” (Ps. 113.1–2). If we look at it from the letter alone it means to us the exit of the Children of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses; if from allegory, it means for us our redemption done by Christ; if from the moral sense, it means to us the conversion of the soul from the struggle and misery of sin to the state of grace; if from the anagogical, it means the leave taking of the blessed soul from the slavery of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory. And though these mystical senses are called by various names, in general all can be called allegorical, because they are different from the literal or the historical. Now, allegory comes from Greek alleon, which in Latin means “other” or “different”.Footnote 7
Pietro Alighieri is in accord with this and explains how the Fourfold Exegesis of the Theologians corresponds with Aristotle’s Four Causes—Efficient, Material, Formal, and Final.Footnote 8 Then, for Purgatorio II he explains the anagogical sense of Psalm 113 is that the soul, released from sin’s bondage, becomes free and strong.Footnote 9
I
Egypt/Israel
History ―›
Material Cause
Literal Level
Flesh/Blood/Body
Before the Psalm
II
Psalm 113
Allegory ―›
Formal and Efficient Causes
Moral and Allegorical Levels
Mind/Soul
Psalm’s tonus peregrinus
III
Everywhere, Exodus-now
True
Efficient and Final Causes
Moral and Anagogical Levels
Soul freed from Sin
After the Psalm
Nation and Language
Dante was against nationalism, what northern Italians with their warring states still refer to as “campanilismo”, referring to their bell towers, like that of Giotto’s for Florence, like that of San Miniato il Tedesco, like those of San Gimignano and Bologna, like that of Venice. The building of towers of pride in these northern Italian cities, Brunetto Latino taught, was like Nimrod’s Tower of Babylon, called Nembrot in their texts, bringing about strife, causing gang warfare between uneducated powerful families, best excluded from communal government. Instead the educated merchant classes involved in world trade sought peace and prosperity for the Commonwealth, the Republic, the Res publica, with Arnolfo di Cambio constructing the city walls from the stones recycled from the lowering of these towers of pride built from the gray green stone earlier quarried from what would become the Boboli Gardens.Footnote 10 In De vulgari eloquentia I.vi Dante eloquently wrote:
To me, however, the whole world is a homeland, like the sea to fish—though I drank from the Arno before cutting my teeth, and love Florence so much that, because I loved her, I suffer exile unjustly–and I will weigh the balance of my judgement more with reason than with sentiment. And although for my own enjoyment (or rather for the satisfaction of my own desire), there is no more agreeable place on earth than Florence, yet when I turn the pages of the volumes of poets and other writers, by whom the world is described as a whole and in its constituent parts, and when I reflect inwardly on the various locations of places in the world, and their relations to the two poles and the circle at the equator, I am convinced, and firmly maintain, that there are many regions and cities more noble and more delightful than Tuscany and Florence, where I was born and of which I am a citizen, and many nations and peoples who speak a more elegant and practical language than do the Italians.Footnote 11
Already Brunetto Latino had written Li Livres dou Tresor, incorporating Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, following upon his Ciceronian Rettorica, in Italian, then had taught these in Italian to the young Dante.Footnote 12 Brunetto, however, deliberately mistranslated one part of the Ethics, where Aristotle had defined monarchy, like Sparta’s, as the best of the three: democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy.Footnote 13 Brunetto instead opted for the communal and republican form of government as the best choice.Footnote 14 Dante, from the bitterness of his permanent exile, instead would see the solution to Ghibelline and Guelf strife to be the Roman Empire of the Pax Romana of a Caesar Augustus and therefore he supported Henry VII of Luxembourg as Holy Roman Emperor, writing for him the treatise De monarchia, much as had earlier Brunetto Latino written Li Livres dou Tresor for Charles of Anjou. Because, at the time of writing this treatise the Emperor Henry VII was still alive, Dante dreamed that this form of peace could be achieved through a universal form of Empire. Dante believed that freedom comes about with peace as a balancing of the particular with the universal and that humankind is with the angels and divine, “Thou has made him a little lower than the angels” (Psalms 97.7, 138, Hebrews 2.7). He lists democracies, oligarchies, and tyrannies as perverted governmental forms. Dante argues for rulers as servants of their peoples’ freedoms.Footnote 15
The De monarchia was placed on the Index of forbidden books by the Catholic Church in her defense of her temporal realms. The English Cardinal, Adam Easton, Julian of Norwich’s spiritual director, sought to counter Dante’s arguments in his defense of Pope Urban VI in his De ecclesiastice potestatis.Footnote 16 The De monarchia’s concepts would lead to the imperialism of the British Raj in India, to Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich in Europe and to Benito Mussolini’s Fascism in Ethiopia, though it earlier shaped Italy’s Nationalism in the Risorgimento based on Tuscan Italian. Better solutions, though these too fail, have been William Penn’s proposed United States of Europe and realized Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the League of Nations in Geneva (at which I was conceived by my journalist parents before WWII), the United Nations in New York, and the European Union in Brussels and Strasbourg. Perhaps best of all, Montesquieu’s “Citizen of the World”, a concept held dearly by Roma who belong to no nation.
One night, at dinner with the Jungian psychiatrist, Maria Teresa Colonna, and other women scholars, and the following day at their conference on “Dialoghi tra Oriente e Occidente: Contaminazioni di luci e ombre tra civiltà”, we were discussing exile and the alternative universes of different cultures and their languages, how some can inhabit two or more worlds, yet not belong to any of them completely, straddling them in exile. Similarly, Lisa Dwan and I had discussed this with Dante and Beckett on exile on BBC4.Footnote 17 A reality in which I live, my mind code-switching constantly between English and Italian; before, between English and American; before that, between English and French. How important it is to bridge to the feared Other, the English to the Irish, the American to the Russian, the European to the Roma, Europe’s largest, poorest, scapegoated minority. How it enriches even as it creates of us the feared Other, the prophet not without honor save in her own country. How cultures and their languages are universes of perception, of ordering. And how we have smashed ours into the egoism and globalized mechanized consumerism of imperial “English Only”, cruelly forced on First Nations and immigrants alike. Instead, Brunetto and Dante see how it is through one’s mother tongue that we access and learn the feared Others’ Latin, French, Provençal. Dante, in De vulgari eloquentia, carefully discusses the uses in poetry of these different languages, yet sees in them all this universal economy and emphasis on love,
Learned writers in all three vernaculars agree, then, on many words, and especially on the word ‘love’. Thus Giraut de Borneil: Si.m sentis fezelz amics, per ver encusera amor; [If I felt I were a genuine and accepted lover; I would indeed bring charges against love] The King of Navarre: De fin amor si vient sen et bonté; [From true love come knowledge and goodness] Master Guido Guinizzelli: Né fe’ amor prima che gentil core, né gentil cor prima che amor, natura. [Nor did nature create love before the gentle heart, nor the gentle heart before love]. (DVE I.ix)
We see it too, today, in Bob Marley’s “One Love”, John Lennon’s “All you need is love”, and Leonard Cohen’s “Alleluia”. It is “L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” (Par XXXIII.145) of the Apollo Astronauts’ “Blue Marble”.
Race
I have already, in “Chapter 6: Dante’s Theater, Dante’s Music”, shown how the ex-slave African playwright Terence was, because of African American slavery, white-washed out of imperialistic Old and New World classical education, though his Comedies had been used century after century for teaching the purest Latin to commoners and princes, to children, women, and men, and also how Dante, his teacher Brunetto, and his son Pietro had relied on Terence for their linguistic and democratic pedagogy, as had so many others through time.
Four Dante scholars, William Stephany, Rachel Jacoff, William E. Gohlman, and myself, on 15 October 1981, gathered at Attica Correctional Facility at the invitation of the State University of New York’s University College of Arts and Sciences at Geneseo and the Genesee Community College’s education program. Ronald Herzman and William Cook noted in their introduction to the Conference, titled “Learning in Exile: Dante in Attica”, held to commemorate the Attica Prison Riot of 1971, that this was a unique event in the histories of prisons and academia. The four of us talked on different aspects of Dante to an audience, for the most part, of Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Irish, a third of whom were murderers. We were searched at the entry of the prison. We walked to the lecture hall through a multitude of gates that had to be specially unlocked by guards. It was as if we were in the landscape of Dante’s poem.
William Stephany of the University of Vermont gave the first paper on “Dante’s Exiles”, describing Dante’s paralleling of Pier delle Vigne, the prisoner who commits suicide and who is met by Dante in Hell where he has become a tree whose branches bleed and speak when broken, and of Romeo, the pilgrim in Paradise. Both men were unjustly accused of crimes they had not committed, like Dante himself, and had then responded, in the first case by suicide in the prison tower of San Miniato il Tedesco, in the second by leaving the court, penniless, possessing only a staff and a mule and going forth on pilgrimage. Rachel Jacoff of Wellesley College gave a paper on “Dante and Virgil”. She stressed the poignancy of Virgil as the pagan, as the outsider, who is the instrument of Dante’s salvation but who is himself damned to remain in Hell for all eternity. The final paper, by William E. Gohlman of State University College of Arts and Sciences at Geneseo, on “Dante and Islam”, was of interest to the audience, many of whose members were Black Muslims. He stressed the universality of Islamic beliefs, its respect for Judaism and Christianity, the “Peoples of the Book”, and of Dante’s interest in Islam.
My paper, “Boethius the Prisoner, Dante the Exile”, was the second to be given. As you read its words, imagine yourself not in your comfortable office chair but instead as in its audience, composed of young “Lifers”, who are in the prison’s college program, in a room with bars on the windows, with uniformed guards, many of them surprisingly, women, and also surprisingly, all of them unarmed, standing behind you, and resenting the fact that you have the privilege of hearing this lecture. (Guards with machine guns man the Gothic-styled Disneyesque outer towers of the prison, but since the Riot, guards on the floor of the main prison, which is built like a Romanesque dungeon and fortress, are never armed.) The lecture will be interrupted by walkie-talkies’ noisy commands and guards calling out individual inmates’ numbers, not names, who will momentarily stiffen in resistance, then obey and leave the room.Verse
Verse
Boethius the Prisoner, Dante the Exile
This would be an easy lecture to give on the outside. In the present context I find giving this lecture both humbling and intense. I feel that I am inadequate to give it to this audience and yet that this material is far more meaningful here than in a more ordinary institution.
I should actually like to begin with a story that happened in Italy, in Rome. I was there when it happened. The Italian Cardinals had elected an old man to be Pope, thinking that he would die soon and wouldn’t be a nuisance. Pope John XXIII, however, was of peasant stock, the kind of person who would take the Christian Gospel literally. One morning, and I heard them, the Italians in Rome were saying to each other: “Do you know what the Pope did this morning?” “He went to Regina Coeli prison and visited the prisoners.” The Regina Coeli prison means the Prison of the Queen of Heaven, of the Virgin Mary, a beautiful name, like Attica, for a terrible place. The Romans were delighted at what he had done. The Pope’s actions, which obeyed Christ’s command in the Gospel that Christians visit prisoners, seemed to say that even the most sinful had the chance of being forgiven by the most holy, and this made everyone happy that morning, everyone could forgive themselves. A much loved photograph of Pope John XXIII shows him with a pajama-striped prisoner of Rome’s Regina Coeli Prison.Footnote
John Robert Glorney Bolton, Il Papa, p. 272; Living Peter, pp. 185–186. 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. 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. Convivio I.iii; Paradiso XVII.58,60. To this day Florentine bread is not salted. 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. 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. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice. Pp. 3–7. The Bigallo fresco of the Madonna della Misericordia translates that theta and pi into the Seven Acts of Mercy embroidered on her cloak. 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?” P. 9. George Eliot in Middlemarch will say the same. He speaks of ivory and crystal book cabinets, p. 18. P. 41, Book II, Poem 8. 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). Pp. 72–73. 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. Pp. 91–92. Cicero, “Dream of Scipio” in Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds, ed. Robert P. Miller, pp. 96–105. P. 37. A prisoner said here, “It was beautiful!” when I asked them what the earth was like in those pictures. One convict in Attica State Prison said to me that had been true of himself, he had blamed everyone else but himself. Carl G. Jung, Mandala Symbolism, trans. R. F. C. Hull. Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. Thomas Usk, “The Testament of Love,” in Chaucerian and Other Pieces, ed. W. W. Skeat, vol. VII.1–145. King James I of Scotland, The Kingis Quair, ed. John Norton-Smith. 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. 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. Mircea Eliade, Aspects du myth, pp. 33–70. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir. 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. 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. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
That was my paper at Attica State Prison. We mentioned to the guards how attentive and how perceptive the inmates had been to us. A guard’s angry reply was that they had only behaved well in order to have another such conference. During the “Symposium on Learning in Exile” the guards shuffled their feet and the chairs, talked on their walkie-talkies, called out the prisoners by number rudely and loudly, and rattled plates. The prisoners sat in such rapt attention that a pin could have been heard dropping, and they won our hearts by conveying to us that they were people of dignity and worth. They made comments, relating the texts to themselves, noting they had been like the souls in Hell, blaming everyone but themselves, with disarming honesty.Footnote 50 One young Hispanic asked whether we could include Spanish and Caribbean texts in our material next time. I told him of Juan de Mena’s Laberinto, a Spanish Commedia, and of Jorge Luis Borge’s writing on labyrinths,Footnote 51 but confessed my ignorance of Caribbean poetry and apologized. Another, African American, asked me whether it was not the difficulties and vicissitudes (yes, that was his vocabulary) of Dante’s life that had caused him to write such an exquisite and powerful work as the Commedia. A third, Native American, made a similar comment. We saw that America warehouses its minority races in prisons wholesale. Almost no Whites, who could pay lawyers to be free, but African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, and Irish were our audience. We went to Attica State Prison, now euphemistically named Attica Correctional Facility, thinking we would be teaching; instead we learned, we were taught, and in that prison found Philosophia, Lady Wisdom, for her home is less in a university library than it is in a place of misfortune.
The Symposium lasted most of the day. We came back again that evening to meet with the class that had been studying Dante that semester. Once again we were escorted past many locked gateways by guards. As we went down one corridor, Ron and Bill were telling us that the rioting and shooting of ten years before took place in the courtyard we could see outside that corridor’s windows. That night, under the moon, it looked strangely peaceful. The next evening we went to Vespers at the Cistercian Abbey of Genesee. It felt right to combine a prison and a monastery. We spent hours talking together about the experience at Attica and of our research on Dante. The prisoners taught us much about the outsiders, Virgil, Boethius, Dante, Saladin, we had half-encountered within our texts, and also they taught us about themselves in such a way that we found ourselves fully being, understanding ourselves and others.Footnote 52 They, like Beatrice, led us to the center.
We four Dante scholars had spoken in 1981 at Attica State Prison. To write this book, following Black Lives Matter in 2021, I turned to Wikipedia on the Attica State Prison Massacre and found this speech, a “Declaration to the People of America”, given 9 September 1971, by a young suiciding African American convict orator, Elliott James BarkleyFootnote 53:
We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such. The entire prison populace, that means every one of us here, has set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalization and disregard for the lives of the prisoners here and throughout the United States. What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed. We will not compromise on any terms except those terms that are agreeable to us. We’ve called upon all the conscientious citizens of America to assist us in putting an end to this situation that threatens the lives of not only us but of every one of you, as well.
His words echo Catiline and Ulysses’ “You were not made to live as beasts!” I questioned my academic colleagues Ronald Herzman and Dennis Looney on whether the inmates, prior to the 1980s program on Dante, had any cognition of Dante and the answer was “No”. This rhetoric for freedom is inherent and universal in all humanity.Footnote 54 But it can be twisted tragically into propaganda, as a demand for freedom of one part only, not of all the people. I remember well when teaching John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, at Berkeley, that a young white Rhodesian in the class was insisting his whiteness entitled him to such “Liberty” at the cost of the indigenous African majority. Guelf Brunetto Latino was, instead, teaching real Justice, Peace, and Freedom to his students. Some of his most eloquent speeches are about Freedom, including the request to free slaves in medieval Florence.Footnote 55
Gender and Language
Christianity, from its revolutionary Gospel, is the Religion of Women and Slaves, the depiction of its Founder androgynous,Footnote 56 though this aspect of gender inclusion became obscured when, in Crusading times, Christians came to mirror their enemy, importing Islam’s Greco-Arabic model of the University which excluded women and barred them from the authorized teaching in Latin of theology to clergy.Footnote 57
Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, though written in that excluding Latin, nevertheless opens that text by speaking of the primacy of the language of women and children as the natural Word, which grammar is not, and Dante will choose to write the Commedia in that language of women and children:
Since I find that no one, before myself, has dealt in any way with the theory of eloquence in the vernacular, and since we can plainly see that such eloquence is necessary to everyone—for not only men, but also women and children strive to acquire it, as far as nature allows—I shall try, inspired by the Word that comes from above, to say something useful about the language of people who speak the vulgar tongue, hoping thereby to enlighten somewhat the understanding of those who walk the streets like the blind, ever thinking that what lies ahead is behind them.Footnote 58
In Convivio I.xiii.4–5 Dante spoke of parents of both genders speaking in Italian, their shared language, and the mingling of their bodies, engendering his own, words and flesh.
This vernacular of mine was what brought my parents together, for they conversed in it, just as it is the fire that prepares the iron for the smith who makes the knife; and so it is evident that it has contributed to my generation, and so was one cause of my being. Moreover, this vernacular of mine was what led me into the path of knowledge which is our ultimate perfection, since through it I entered upon Latin and through its agency Latin was taught to me, which then became my path to further progress.
In Paradiso he speaks of Florentine mothers, while spinning and weaving cloth, telling orally to their babies in cradles and their female companions, the epics “d’i Troiani, di Fiesole e di Roma” [of Trojans, of Fiesole and of Rome (Par XV.121–126)].
Again, like a woman creating a patchwork quilt out of pieces of cloth already cut out and used in clothing, or like a man creating a prosimetron Menippean satura, like the Vita nova recycling earlier lyrics, I turn again to previous papers, one on Dante and the Body, which plots his progression from that of the male father figure to that of the nurturing mother/child symbiosis.
Dante and the Body
Verse
Verse
Man dies because he cannot join
the end to the beginning.
Alcmeon, Aristotle’s PhysicianFootnote
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.
A recent online conference on Dante and the Sciences of the Human: Medicine, Physics, Soul, held 23 October 2021, sponsored by CSMBR (Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance) based in Pisa, resulted in a discussion of Robert Durling’s comparison of the Inferno to the human—and male—body.Footnote 60 To which I replied, briefly, with the following arguments concerning women’s nurturing bodies in the Commedia. I take this paper’s arguments from primary materials, from Dante’s biography, from his immediate cityscape and milieux, and from Italian iconography, less than from received opinion in Dante scholarship.Verse
Verse
From my research on Brunetto Latino, appointed Dante’s guardian at the death of his father by his stepmother, Lapa, and on Dante’s Commedia, I had been coming to see that Dante, born in 1265, was orphaned twice: first at his mother Bella’s early death in 1270, when he was five; then at the death of his money-lending father, Alighiero di Bellincione, before 1283, when he was still a teenager. The manuscripts which I believe could have been copied out by Dante from Brunetto, first of the Tesoretto in a schoolboyish hand, and later the Tesoro, by the same scribe but now mature, as these are the only ones in the group of manuscripts from the 1280s and 90s of Brunetto’s writings in Italian to employ cancelleresca, that script which Leonardo Bruni described he had seen in Dante’s hand, the others being in littera textualis. These particular manuscripts in cancelleresca are written on poor parchment. The young Dante, though promising intellectually, was by no means rich.Footnote
JB Holloway, Il Tesoro di Brunetto Latino, Maestro di Dante Alighieri; https://www.florin.ms/OpereBrunettoLatino.html Robert Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze, trans. Giovanna Battista Klein, 8 vols, VII, 358. Georg Röppen and Richard Sommer, Strangers and Pilgrims, pp. 35–36. 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: John Webster Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer: Studies in Virgilian Legends, pp. 136–197, 256. 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. On liturgy of the Reconciliation of Penitents see JB Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book, pp. 62–63. 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. 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. 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]. 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. 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. Luke 1.45–55; M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. 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. 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.
We can see that Dante’s Decolonialism is the opposite of Milton’s misogyny, in his women, Bella, Lapa, Beatrice, Saint Lucy, Francesca, Semiramis, Pia, Sapia, Lia, Rachel, Matelda, the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba, Queen Dido of Carthage, even Pharoah Cleopatra of Egypt, Piccarda, Cunizza, Antonia, so many.Footnote 77 Though sadly the later mutilations of the splendidly illustrated Paris/Imola Commedia seem to be the work of a disturbed women hating her own body, who disfigures the nude souls in its illuminations. At UNESCO in St. Petersburg and again in Brussels at the EU, I spoke of the Great European Books by both women and men on Good Government: Hildegard von Bingen, Alfonso X el Sabio, Dante Alighieri, Christine de Pizan, Birgitta of Sweden, Miguel de Cervantes, Madame de Staël, Frances Trollope, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. I believe it is for these reasons that so many women have loved and written on Dante: Christine de Pizan, Footnote 78 Maria Francesca Rossetti,Footnote 79 Aurelia Henry Reinehart, Dorothy Sayers, Barbara Reynolds, Irma Brandeis, Helene Wieruszowski, Maria Corti, Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, Rachel Owen, Barbara Nolan, Teodolinda Barolini, Prue Shaw, Rachel Jacoff, Gabriella Pomaro, Marisa Boschi Rotiroti, Barbara Bordalejo, Sonia Minutello, Irene Maffia Scariati, Sara Ferrilli, Claudia Di Fonzo, Heather Webb, Alison Cornish, Paola Allegretti, Anna Pegoretti, Teresa De Robertis, Francesca Pasut, Elisabetta Tonello, Elisa Brilli, Kristina M. Olson, Catherine Adoyo, and “one other”.
Gender and Race
Dante’s Beatrice in Purgatorio XXX is presented in multiple forms, as David’s Bathsheba, as Solomon’s Queen of Sheba (Plate LXVI Piero Della Francesca, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Arezzo), and as Virgil’s Aeneas’ Dido, Queen of Carthage (in turn in the epic recited by Virgil to Caesar Augustus, a shadow of the Pharoah Cleopatra, tragically beloved by Julius Caesar and by Mark Antony). While Israel’s Solomon honored Ethiopia’s Queen, Virgil’s Rome devastated and destroyed the Queens of Carthage and of Egypt with her Imperialism. We have already in “Chapter 5: Dante’s Three Beasts” discussed the episode in Aeneid I where Venus substitutes her own son, Amore, Cupid, for Aeneas’ son, Ascanius, in the lap of Dido, Queen of Carthage. As again later with that of Cleopatra, Empress of Egypt, beloved by both Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony, whose tale Virgil is reflecting and echoing in his epic poem he is reciting to Caesar Augustus, in which he has Aeneas recite his tale to his African Queen, that love between Aeneas and Dido that will end with her tragic suicide. Dante’s Beatrice is perceived in the Commedia by Dante as a shadow of Virgil’s tragic Dido, “Conosco i segni delle antiche fiamme” (Purg XXX.48), in a transgendering.
I repeat here how Dante Author presents us Dante Pilgrim coming into the presence of his lost Beatrice in a burst of song, of transcending polyphony. In Purgatorio XXX the motet, this time triple, not double, is entirely in Latin, from the Song of Songs, the Gospel (Luke 19.38; Matthew 21.5 and 9) and from Virgil’s Aeneid, the Jewish, the Christian, and the pagan Roman, all musically blended together (Purgatorio XXX.11,19, 21). We know of Dante’s friendship with Jewish Immanuello Romano at Verona, likewise a composer of polyphony, and thus that he could also know that the “Benedictus qui venis” sung at Palm Sunday at Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, comparing him to David, and placed in the Mass, derives from the wedding song sung at a bridegroom’s entry into a Synagogue.Footnote 80 Here we have Beatrice being greeted as if Bathsheba, the Queen of Sheba, the Pharoah Cleopatra, Dante being greeted as if David, as if Solomon, as if Caesar, as if Marc Antony, while the Aeneid recalls the lines about the funeral of Marcellus over which his uncle Caesar Augustus wept and Octavia fainted on hearing Virgil chant Aeneid VI.884 in Rome. It is possible that this motet is even more complicated, that it is quadruple, its burden Psalm 31 at lines 83–84. For in the same canto we find angels singing, “In te, Domine, speravi”, until they come to the lines of “pedes meos” (Purg XXX.82–84, Psalm 31,1–8).
Dante, on seeing Beatrice, turns to Virgil to say that line Virgil’s Dido murmurs on her widowed sexuality reawakening, “Agnosco veteris vestigial flammae”, “Conosco i segni dell’antica fiamma” [I recognize the signs of the ancient flames, Aeneid IV.23, Purg XXX.48,)], amidst so many words concerning his own being orphaned from his mother and then father so young (40–54).Verse
Verse Tosto che ne la vista mi percosse l’alta virtù che già m’avea trafitto prima ch’io fuor di püerizia fosse, volsimi a la sinistra col respitto col quale il fantolin corre a la mamma quando ha paura o quando elli è afflitto, per dicere a Virgilio: `Men che dramma di sangue m’è rimaso che non tremi: conosco i segni dell’antica fiamma’. Ma Virgilio n’avea lasciati scemi di sé, Virgilio dolcissimo patre, Virgilio a cui per mia salute die’mi; Né quantunque perdéo l’antica matre, valse a le guance nette di rugiada, che, lagrimando, non tornasser atre. [As soon as the high virtue struck my sight, which had already pierced me when I was a boy, I turned to the left with the trust a little child runs to its mother, when he is frightened or when hurt, To say to Virgil, “Not a drop of blood is left in me that does not tremble, ‘I recognize the signs of the ancient flame’”. ]
But Virgil, too, is gone from his side. Or is he? In Dante is an economy in which nothing is lost. The pagan world and the Christian world for him coexist harmoniously. When Aeneas first came to Carthage its Empress was on a vast building campaign that will come to an end with her love affair with him (Aeneid I.430–440).Verse
Verse Qualis apes aestate nova per florea rura exercet sub sole labor, cum gentis adultos educunt fetus, aut cum liquentia mella stipant et dulci distendunt nectare cellas, aut onera accipiunt venientum, aut agmine facto ignavom fucos pecus a praesepibus arcent: fervet opus, redolentque thymo fragrantia mella. ‘O fortunati, quorum iam moenia surgunt!’ Aeneas ait, et fastigia suspicit urbis. Infert se saeptus nebula, mirabile dictu, per medios, miscetque viris, neque cernitur ulli.
Before that tragedy and later when Rome will plough it under with salt we see Carthage’s abuilding as compared to bees. When we come to the Commedia’s White and Gold Rose it is being inseminated, pollinated, by these same Virgilian and Homeric bees, tragedy moved back in time to felicity and productivity, to comedy (Par XXXI.7–12):Verse
Verse sì come schiera d’ape che s’infiora una fïata e una si ritorna là dove suo laboro s’insapora, nel gran fior discendeva che s’addorna di tante foglie, e quindi risaliva là dove ’l suo Amor sempre soggiorna. [as like a swarm of bees where one plunges into a flower, another turns back to the hive to turn work to flavor, so did they ever descend into the great flower, then reascend to where its love for ever dwells.]
In our white Euro-centrism, though at the same time despising the “Old World”, we forget that the Alphabet and the Bible, the building blocks of all our civilization, began outside of Europe.Footnote 81 Our maps place us at the center, at the top, as superior, ignoring what is outside our ken. But it can help to up-end the Mediterranean and see how Phoenician, Greek, Egyptian, Carthaginian, and Roman culture were each other’s neighbors. The map drawn by Sabine Réthoré, a brilliant French cartographer, shows this well (Plate LXXVI e).Footnote 82 We can juxtapose to it one by Francesco da Barberino illustrating Brunetto Latino being taught that same map by Natura with Ulysses’ Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar in the Arabic way (Plate LXXVI c, BML Strozzi 146, fol.10r), that Brunetto had already placed in the Bodleian Douce 319 Li Livres dou Tresor with its associations to Hereford’s bishops and their Mappa Mundi. Europe and Africa are ambages of each other, are equally side by side (Plate LXXVI a, BBodleian Douce 319, Arabic Mappa mundi, Tresor, fol. 8r, b, detail, d, Hereford Cathedral Mappa Mundi). The Arab world knew of the four stars of the Southern Cross of the Antipodes that Dante sees in Purgatorio I.
The Hereford Mappa Mundi map has interesting links with the manuscript of Brunetto Latino’s Li Livres dou Tresor in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Douce 319. In the Mappa Mundi “AFFRICA” is written in gold letters over Europe, and “EUROPA” over Africa, “MORS” over all of it, its “RS” signifying Bishop Richard Swynford, while Dædalus’ labyrinth is shown on Crete, Augustine in Carthage, Circe tempts voyagers, Nimrod builds his tower, and the Pliny and Othello monsters of ”men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders” abound.Footnote 83 While the Bodleian Douce 319 similarly has the Mediterranean with Africa at the top, Europe at the bottom in its Mappa Mundi.Footnote 84 Brunetto Latino’s Westminster Abbey document (“Chapter 3: Dante’s Schooling, Dante’s Library”: Plate XXXVI d) notes his relationship to the earlier “Episcopus Herbipolensis” [Bishop of Hereford], Peter de Egeblanke.
Instead of conquest and suicide on the part of these dark African Queens, in Dante’s text they triumph. I loved, during Civil Rights, when I was doing Voter Registration in Oakland, that on the buses were posters that quoted from the Song of Solomon 1.5, “Black is Beautiful”, “She is Black but Beautiful”.
Class
Scholars generally tend to argue that Dante’s family is of the minor nobility. They desire to elevate him according to class. I believe that that is a mistake and that Dante instead argues against the hierarchy of social classes as being unjust.Footnote 85 He de-gentrifies and decolonializes, although he has to walk a sword’s edge to obtain the means through patronage from the rich and powerful to sustain his family and himself, as well as to obtain parchment and ink for his writings, during his exile.Footnote 86 In Florence, the uneducated monocultural nobles of inherited lands and wealth were seen as the problem, as causing violence and unrest, the Primo Popolo expelling them, among them Farinata degli Uberti, because of their bloodshed in the streets from their tower societies and their feuds between these. The confiscated property of the Uberti, in Dante’s day, was used for building the Stinche prison. The Secondo Popolo, in which Dante served as a member of the Arte de’ Medici e Speziali, even as Prior, likewise restricted their presence from government, in favor of the now educated, skilled, broader-minded merchant class, proficient in other languages and their cultures from international trade in wool, silk, and banking.
There is a moment during Dante’s dialogue with Cacciaguida in Paradiso XVI.13–15 when Beatrice laughs reprovingly at Dante Pilgrim persona who is boasting of his noble lineage; he, as Author, comparing that laugh to the Lady Mallehaut’s coughing reprovingly at the first adulterous kiss between Guinevere and Lancelot which would bring down King Arthur’s holy Camelot. Beatrice is laughing at her pupil for having forgotten his Christian lesson in humility, in chastity, in justice. The Master of the Paduan Antiphoner brilliantly illustrates this self-correction by the Author through his anima Beatrice’s remonstrance at the fallible persona’s self-idolizing esteem for his “noble” ancestors (Plate LXXVII Commedia, BLEgerton 932, fol. 154v, Fallacy of Nobility).
This Arthurian reference reflects back to Inferno V’s perception of the De vulgari eloquentia’s “ambages pulcherrimae”, of Francesca and Paolo’s dominoing reading of Guinevere and Lancelot, which has the Arthurian/Commedia author of Inferno V be a “Galeotto”, a pornographer and pandar. Like Ovid and like Andreas Capellanus he plays out the two textual levels at once. We are all sons of Adam and therefore equal. “Nobility” is a fallacy, as is Plato’s Myth, his Lie, of the Metals, that society needs to pretend that kings are golden, nobles silver, slaves merely iron, in order to “justify” injustice.
It is in Convivio IV that Dante speaks most clearly against the classism of the “nobility”. He is basing this argument on the Bible and on Boethius who taught that nobility merely by birth with ancestral wealth is of no value, unless lived virtuously. In this Dante inveighed against persons such as Catiline and Corso Donati, of noble stock but whose violent actions were evil.Verse
Verse IV.7 This is the part which begins And so ingrained Has this false view become among us That one calls another noble If he can say `I am the son, Or grandson, of such and such A famous man,’ despite his lack of worth. Consequently it must be observed that it is extremely dangerous to allow a false opinion to take root through negligence. Thus he who is descended of noble stock through his father or some ancestor, and is also evil, is not only base but basest and deserving of contempt and scorn more than any other ill-bred person. IV.9 Consequently with full license and with utter conviction we must now strike at the heart of the received opinions and throw them to the earth so that by reason of my victory the true opinion may stand its ground in the minds of those for whom it is a benefit that this light shines strongly. Lucan attests to this when he addresses them by saying, “Without a fight the laws have perished, and your riches, the basest part of things, have led the battle.” Who does not still keep a place in his heart for Alexander because of his royal acts of benevolence? Who does not keep a place for the good King of Castile [Alfonso el Sabio], or Saladin, or the good Marquis of Monferrato, or the good Count of Toulouse, or Bertran de Born, or Galeazzo of Montefeltro? When mention is made of their gifts, certainly not only those who would willingly do the same, but those as well who would sooner die than do the same, retain in their memory a love for these men. IV.13 Thus Boethius says, in the same book, “Money, then, is good when, having been transferred to others through generosity, it is no longer possessed.” IV.15. Therefore if Adam himself was noble, we are all noble, and if he was base, we are all base, which eradicates any distinction between these conditions and so eradicates the conditions themselves. This means that from what has been said above it follows That each of us is noble or each base. The canzone adds Nor do they either, if they are Christian. It says “Christian” and not “philosophers” or “Gentiles” (even their opinions are not to the contrary) because Christian doctrine has greater strength and destroys all calumny, by virtue of the supreme light of the heaven which illuminates it. IV.20 So let none of the Uberti of Florence or the Visconti of Milan say “Because I am of such a race I am noble,” for the divine seed does not fall upon a race (that is, family stock) but on individuals; and as will be proved below, family stock does not make individuals noble, although individuals make family stock noble. IV.27 Hence we read of Cato that he thought of himself as born not for himself, but for his country and for the whole world. Ah, you ill-fated and misbegotten men who defraud widows and wards, who steal from the very weakest, who rob and seize by force the rights of others, and with these gains arrange banquets, make gifts of horses and arms, goods and money, dress in striking attire, erect wondrous buildings, and believe yourselves to be acting with generosity! What is this but to act like the thief who takes the cloth from the altar to cover his own table? We should mock your gifts, you tyrants, like the thief who would invite guests into his house and spread upon his table the cloth stolen from the altar with the ecclesiastical signs still upon it, and think that others would take no notice. Listen, you stubborn men, to what Tully has to say against you in his book On Offices: “There are many wishing to be impressive and famous who take from some in order to give to others, believing that they will be well regarded, and make them rich for whatever reason they so choose. But nothing is more contrary to what is proper than this”. Where you should take your rest, you shipwreck yourselves against the force of the wind and perish at the very place to which you have so long been journeying! Certainly the knight Lancelot did not wish to enter with his sails raised high, nor the most noble of our Italians, Guido of Montefeltro. These noble men did indeed lower the sails of their worldly preoccupations and late in life gave themselves to religious orders, forsaking all worldly delights and affairs. No one can be excused because of the bond of marriage, which may still bind him late in life; for not only those who conform to the life and ways of St. Benedict, St. Augustine, St. Francis, and St. Dominic dedicate themselves to living a religious life, but even those who are married can dedicate themselves to living a life that is good and truly religious.
This decision against classism is not only on the social level, but Dante also applies it to his choice of literary form (if the Epistle to Can Grande is his), the decision against the aristocratic violence of epic and tragedy in Latin to instead opting for comedy, for what is of the village, what is humble, and in the vulgate, the vernacular. When pressed by Giovanni del Virgilio to write in Latin he will only do so in the pastoral form of the eclogue, not the aristocratic epic, which Petrarch would later attempt and fail with his Africa. Meanwhile there is that Biblical “Put not your trust in princes” (Psalm 146.3), the stance also of Brunetto and Machiavelli, who write to princes sarcastically and familiarly, as equals, addressing them as “tu”, while showing the people how best to overthrow their tyranny.
Not only that, Dante Alighieri is writing much as would also Cardinal Newman in The Idea of a University, on education for all as a right also for the poor and oppressed, for women and children, widows and orphans, for Catholics, Jews, and Dissidents, not just a privilege for the rich and powerful, adult and male, communicating members of the Church of England, who only could attend Oxbridge, continuing his teacher Brunetto Latino’s creation of an encyclopedia that contains a university education within the covers of one book, to teach kings and republicans, men, women, and children alike. For this reason Dante in Convivio II.14–15 sets up a university curriculum to correspond with the spheres of the Cosmos, in the medieval manner, similar to the Hebrew Kabbala, and the Hindu chakra, with Grammar for the Moon, Dialectic for Mercury, Rhetoric for Venus, Arithmetic for the Sun, Music for Mars, Geometry for Jupiter, Astrology for Saturn, Physics for the Fixed Stars, Metaphysics for the Galaxy, Moral Philosophy for the Crystalline Sphere, Divine Science for the Empyrean. He creates, in the Commedia, an Open University.Footnote 87 As had Brunetto before him, he creates that book, tuition free, debt free, for you.
Religion
Dante reads the Bible and the Gospel, seeing their teachings as being from Pride to Humility, paralleling this as being from Latin to Italian, Tragedy to Comedy, through inclusion. He embraces both the pagan world and the “Peoples of the Book”, in De vulgari eloquentia seeing the Hebrew language as that of Adam and Jesus.
One reason is this: no one, whether philosopher, pagan, Jew, Christian, or member of any sect, doubts that they are full of all blessedness, either all or the greater part of them, or that these blessed ones are in the most perfect state of being (Conv II.iv).
I say that of all the follies the most foolish, the basest, and the most pernicious is the belief that beyond this life there is no other; for, if we look through all the books of both the philosophers and the other sages who have written on this topic, they all agree in this: that there is some part of us which is immortal. Aristotle seems to confirm this above all in his book On the Soul; every Stoic seems above all to confirm this; Tully seems to confirm this, especially in his short book On Old Age; every poet who has spoken according to the pagan faith seems to confirm this; every creed confirms this–whether Jews, Saracens, Tartars, or whoever else lives according to any principle of reason (Conv II.viii).
He includes the declared heretic Sigier of Brabant, Averroës’ disciple teaching the “Unity of the Intellect”, among the doctors of the Church (Par X.136). Likewise the Aeneid’s Ripheus (Par XX.68) and the just Brahmin on the Ganges are worthy of salvation (Par XIX.70).Footnote 88 Dante gives in sculpted marble on the Terrace of Pride, side by side with that of the Annunciation, and of David dancing before the Ark to Michol’s scorn, the story of the pagan Emperor Trajan for whose soul Pope Gregory had prayed, baptizing him with his tears, that domino effect from the widow’s tears (Purg X.73–93).
There were several European centers open to the “Peoples of the Book”, Frederic II’s Sicily of Palermo, Alfonso X el Sabio’s Seville and Toledo, and Can Grande della Scala’s Verona. We have already discussed the Arabic-Jewish translations of texts at Alfonso’s court, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Alfraganus’ Almagest, the Kitab al-Mirag (Book of the Ladder), and the multiculturalism of the regal Las Cantigas de Santa Maria, that Brunetto taught his students. Giorgio Battistoni has edited the Heaven and Hell written in Hebrew by Dante’s friend in Verona, Manoello Giudeo/Immanuello Romano and discussed the sonnets exchanged between Immanuello Romano, Bosone da Gubbio, and Cino da Pistoia (whose poetry is so present with Dante’s in De Vulgari Eloquentia and in the Vatican canzoniere, BAV lat. 3793, while the Palatino canzoniere, BNCF Banco Rari 217, includes lyrics by Frederic II and Saladin).Footnote 89 Bosone da Gubbio and Jacopo Alighieri, in 1322, joined forces in writing commentaries to early “Danti del Cento” manuscripts of the Commedia associated with Francesco da Barberino.Footnote 90 It is clear that Dante, his sons, and his fellow poets created an Open Society, a Republic of Letters, and that they collaborated in their revolutionary seizure of scriptoria to do so. Today we use Japanese, Chinese, Malaysian, and Indian technology to power our electronic communications systems. The circle about Dante, following Alfonso X el Sabio and Brunetto Latino, was doing the same in adopting the superior architecture and scribal technology of the Islamic world to the Christian one.
Sandow Birk magnificently gives in his graphic novel a Latina Beatrice with Dante gazing down at the Kaaba at Mecca for the Celestial Rose.Footnote 91 Religions are sandboxes where cultures either convey a moral compass of meaning—or smash it with crusades. I make present the founder from the past, become this male/female persona, ingesting memoried wheat and grapes, bread and wine, flesh and blood, death and life, uttering “Amen”. The word as deed. Knowing the teachings—ob-audire, “to hear”, the true meaning of “obedience”—listening to them, heeding them, not to crusade/crucify the Other, the stranger, who would have us welcome the stranger, the Other, as God in the disguise of the beggar’s rags—who is ourselves. The Buddha’s calm kindness in going from rich prince to poor monk, the ethics of humility, the Beatitudes, the Magnificat, the world-upside-down or inside out, because we are Adam, who is Eve, made of earth, to which we shall return. In this we can learn wisdom. Dante, and we with him, seek this—as Pilgrim Readers—as Freedom Readers—through the prose writings of the De vulgari eloquentia and the Convivio and through the singing poetry of the Vita nova and the Commedia.
Justice
See especially the essays by Anna Pegoretti, Giuseppe Ledda, Justin Steinberg, in Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante, eds. Giulia Gaimari and Catherine Keen.
Brunetto Latino’s known students were Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri, and Francesco da Barberino. I studied a cluster of manuscripts written out during the time when Brunetto was teaching these youths in Florence, in the 1280s–1290s, following his return to the city after the Peace of Cardinal Latino and the Sicilian Vespers.
The 1280s–1290s cluster of manuscripts of Brunetto Latino’s Tesoro taken down in dictation by his discipuli scriptores importantly gives diagrams which include the Squaring of the Circle (Plate LXXVIII a, Tesoro, BML, Plut.42.20, fol. 74r; b, Baptistery Mosaic; c, BNCF Magl. VIII.1375, fol. 26v; d, BAmbrosian G75 sup, fol. 30v; e, BGuernerian 238, fol. 99v).Footnote 92 In Convivio II.xiii Dante discusses this Squaring of the Circle:
Geometry moves between two things antithetical to it, namely the point and the circle–and I mean “circle” in the broad sense of anything round, whether a solid body or a surface; for, as Euclid says, the point is its beginning, and, as he says, the circle is its most perfect figure, which must therefore be conceived as its end. Therefore Geometry moves between the point and the circle as between its beginning and end, and these two are antithetical to its certainty; for the point cannot be measured because of its indivisibility, and it is impossible to square the circle perfectly because of its arc, and so it cannot be measured exactly.
In De monarchia III.iii.1–8 Dante would further discuss the Squaring of the Circle.
Multa etenim ignoramus de quibus non litigamus; nam geometra circuli quadraturam ignorat, non tamen de ipsa litigat; theologus vero numerum angelorum ignorat, non tamen de illo litigium facit; Egiptius vero Scitharum civilitatem, non tamen propter hoc de ipsorum civilitate contendit.
[There are many things about which we are ignorant but which are not subjects of dispute: the geometers do not know how to square the circle, but they do not dispute the question; the theologians do not know how many angels there are, but they do not debate the issue; the Egyptians know nothing about the civilization of the Scythians, but they do not argue about it.]
And the concept recurs where Dante describes God in Paradiso XXXIII.133–136:Verse
Verse Qual è il geomètra che tutto s’affige per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritruova, pensando, quel principio ond’ elli indige, [As the geometer who sets himself to measure the circle and who cannot find, however he thinks, the principle he lacks.]
These manuscripts by Brunetto’s students share these cosmological drawings,Footnote 93 including this Squaring of the Circle. They share how a stone dropped through the earth stays by gravity at its center from Gossuin de Metz’ Image du Monde (Plate LXXI a, b, BML Plut.42.20, fol. 72v; c, BNCF Magl.VIII.1375, fol. 26r; d, BAmbrosian G75 sup, fol. 29v; e, BGuarnerian 238, fol. 96r. Two also share lunar tables, one with a horoscope (Plate XL b, BML Plut.42.20, Dante’s hand?, fol. 110v; a, c, d, BNCF II.VIII.36, Guido Cavalcanti’s hand?, fols. 82v–84r with horoscope), it being noted in several early commentaries that Brunetto drew Dante’s horoscope.Footnote 94
These manuscripts all share the Celestial Hierarchies, Brunetto Latino listing them in turn as “Homo, Principates, Troni, Serafini, Cherubini, Potestates, Dominaciones, Archangeli, Angeli”, presenting “HOMO” within that Hierarchy, turning it into an Equality (Plate LXXIX Man as Angel, as mirroring God, a, Tesoro, BML Plut.42.20, fol. 79v; b, Baptistery Mosaic; c, BNCF II.VIII.36, fol. 82r; d, BGuarnerian 238, p. 105; e, BTrivulzian 1080, Paradiso). Dante, when he discusses the Angelic ranks, notes the discrepancies between those listed by Dionysius the Areopagite (whom Abelard discovered to be a fraud) and by Pope Gregory (Par XXXVI.130–135), casting doubt on the opposing by Church hierarchies to the Gospel’s inclusion of the least, the leper, the prostitute, the Samaritan, the despised outsider. Dante in the Commedia unlearns. Dante’s earlier use of “VOM” had been of giants, such as Nimrod, builder of Babel’s Tower,Footnote 95 felled for their Ghibelline-like pride, their figures carved upon marble tomb stones (Purg XII reflecting back upon Inf XXXI).Footnote 96 We are all mortal, all destined to be entombed, death is a democracy. The Gospel is a democracy, is Decolonialism, is a Kingdom of Heaven of Justice, moved by Power, Wisdom, and Love. Thus Amyclas, the pagan fisherman in his poverty, is equal to Caesar and to Francis, for Lucan in the Pharsalia and for Dante in Paradiso XI.67. Likewise the Aeneid’s Ripheus (Par XX.68) and the just Brahmin on the Ganges (Par XIX.70) are worthy of salvation.Footnote 97 Dante is writing lay theology, a universalist theology, shaped by Avverroës and Sigier de Brabant’s “Somma Sapienza” [Highest Wisdom, the “Unity of the Intellect”], that the Church, in its self-interest, decreed as heresy in 1270, but which in the Gospel is no heresy at all.Footnote 98
The Emperors of Constantinople had given to the Kings of France the works of Pseudo-Dionysius, believing him to be the St. Dionysius on the Areopagus converted by St. Paul, along with the woman Demaris (Acts 17), a fraudulence which was unmasked by the difficult brilliant Abelard, the monk of St. Denis where French kings are buried in pomp, that cathedral which caused the birth of Gothic architecture, so influenced by Islamic architecture, by its Abbot Sugar. The pseudo-author of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchies and the Celestial Hierarchies, who, in fact, invented the word “Hierarchy”, was pretending he was St. Dionysius but was instead a brilliant fraudster, a Syrian writing centuries later.Footnote 99 Next, Pseudo-Dionysius was believed and even cited as an Apostolic Father about 1700 times by Thomas Aquinas.
Though in Convivio II.v, Dante supposedly returns to the more conventional, safer teachings of the Church, giving them as Gregory’s Angels, Archangels, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Principalities, Powers, Cherubim, Seraphim (actually Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Archangels, Angels), and in Paradiso XXVIII instead of using that, he says, listing as of Pseudo-Dionysius, “Dominazioni, Virtudi, Podestadi, Principati, Archangeli, Angeli” (actually Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, Angels), omitting the Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim.Footnote 100 But in all this he replicates most closely the depiction of the seven hierarchies in the 3. Baptistery’s mosaics (Plates XVII a, b, LXXVIII b, LXXIX b), which give the figure of Christ the God Man with the Seraphim and Cherubim, then clockwise, Thrones, Virtues, Principalities, Angels, Archangels, Powers, Dominations, thus rendering the Hierarchy and its Gregorian and Dionysian Authorities unstable, doubtful, contradictory, anarchistic, like his changing opinion on moon spots (Convivio II.xiii.9; Par II.49–148), until he comes to his Vision of God, his “mi parve pinta ne la nostra effige” [he seemed to me as if painted in our image], which is firmly based on our so human mortal image.Footnote 101 He had already told us that he himself was painting angels, their supposed hierarchy, back in Florence, the year after Beatrice’s death, Vita nova XXXIV.
Victor Turner studying liminality in pilgrimage,Footnote 102 Mikhail Bakhtin studying the Carnivalesque in literature,Footnote 103 Julian Jaynes and Iain McGilchrist studying the bicameral brain,Footnote 104 all saw a breaking down of hierarchies in a universalizing of particulars, where nation, race, gender, class, religion cease to differ, where we become the freed African slave Terence’s Chremes declaring “Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto” [I am human; therefore I consider no one a foreigner to me], answering Luke’s query to his unrecognized resurrected Christ on the Emmaus road “Tu solus peregrinus es?” [Are you the only foreigner here?]. The dogma of hierarchy is the opposite of the Carnivalesque Christ of the Gospels’ inclusion of women, lepers, outsiders, the disenfranchised poor. This is the true anagogy, where we recognize that of God in everyone, that we are not born to live as beasts but that all of us are among the angels.Footnote 105
Orsanmichele (Plate XXXII) and the other great monuments in Florence were the creation of a lay piety outside of ecclesiastical structures, these often carrying out the Gospel’s Seven Acts of Mercy, such as the 7. Misericordia (Plates XXII, XXIII a, b), 8. Santa Maria Nuova Hospital (Plate XXIV), the 24. Buonuomini di San Martino (Plate XXX a, b), the Hospital of the Innocenti, all still functioning for their original purposes apart from Orsanmichele.Footnote 106 Pope Boniface VIII’s espousal of the Ghibelline-like and violent Black Guelf party led by Corso Donati resulted in Dante’s exile and his stance as prophet outside his city, preaching to her. One can see his Decolonialism, beyond nation, language, race, gender, class, as based on Terence, Cicero, the Gospel, Boethius, Francis, and Clare. In this Dante was not only speaking to Florence in his fourteenth century but to the entire world for all time. His Commedia teaches, with laughter, Freedom and true Justice. Belonging to the Arte de’ Medici e Speziali, Dante, through his Commedia, becomes the “Sanatore”, Viktor Frankl’s Doctor of the Soul.
Charles Singleton argued in his study of the Vita nova that medieval theology paired the Book of the Word and the Book of the World.Footnote 107 Dante re-creates the Book of the Word as World in our midst, “Incipit erat Verbum” [In the Beginning was the Word], to become “Nel mezzo dal cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai in una selva oscura” [In the midst of the road of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood], as Creation, Annunciation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, updated in time to 25 March 1301, and now, at the present moment, as we read his words mirroring the Word.Footnote 108 We come to ourselves, whether women or men, Black or white, Jew or Gentile, Muslim, Buddhist or Communist atheist, in that poem world’s landscape, first lost in a labyrinth of darkest despair, then assaulting a seven-story sun-clad mountain, mirror-reversing it, finally soaring through the nine spheres in this most splendid sci-fiction psychiatric soul healing metanoia to seeing each other and ourselves in the image of our Creator, as Creator ourselves, “mi parve pinta ne la nostra effige” [who seemed to me as if painted in our image].
In the Rose all are present, Virgil’s bees a’building Dido’s African Carthage (Par XXXI.7), inseminate the Incarnation, women and men are equally present as in a Quaker Meeting,Footnote 109 likewise pagan past and Christian centuries coexist in a palimpsest, as polyphony, as Florence’s Gospel, as the Oriflamme of Peace, “pacifica oriafiamma” (Par XXXI.127), her Gonfalone of Justice. Dante has circled the square, has prismed light into rainbows, has gathered up all the scattered Sibylline leaves, of Terence, Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Ovid, Horace, Sallust, Augustine, Aristotle, Avicenna, Avverroës, even of his schoolmaster’s Tesoretto and Tesoro, even of the Libro del Chiodo decreeing his tragic, unjust exile, into one volume, the Comedy, joining end to beginning. In God we see our Humanity.
Study Questions
Discuss the preferability of Empire or City State. Discuss “Me, too”, “Black Lives Matter”, and Dante’s writings. Study Avverroës and Sigier of Brabant in relation to the Commedia. Discuss Abbot Sugar, Abelard, Julian of Norwich, and Dante Alighieri on Pseudo-Dionysius and ask whether hierarchies are consonant with Christ’s teachings of inclusion in the Gospels. Discuss Humanity as in God’s Image in Genesis, Terence, Luke, Dante. Study the Squaring of the Circle.
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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