Abstract
This chapter is divided in four sections, the first part, I. Dante’s Theater, beginning with Pietro Alighieri explaining that his father bases the Commedia on Terence’s Comedies and the Roman theater in the round, likewise the “Letter to Can Grande” making this observation; its second section more directly on Terence, including an explanation concerning the Greek logographers and their relation to Greco-Roman drama; its third on liturgical drama based in turn on Terence whom the oblates read in order to learn their conversational Latin, all the while noting that Terence was the freed slave from Africa of the Scipios and their Somnium Scipionis that Cicero penned. The second part is on II. Dante’s Music, particularly discussing the findings for the performance of the Music of the Commedia, that Dante composed seven motets which combine profane vernacular and sacred Latin, reconciling these with St Bernard’s lauda, “Vergina Madre”.
Verse
Verse Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. Publius Terentius Afer, Heautontimorumenos Tu solus peregrinus es Luke 24.18
This chapter will be divided into four sections, the first part, I. Dante’s Theater, beginning with Pietro Alighieri explaining that his father bases the Commedia on Terence’s Comedies and the Roman theater in the round, likewise the Letter to Can Grande making this observation; its second section more directly on Terence, including an explanation concerning the Greek logographers and their relation to Greco-Roman drama; its third on liturgical drama based in turn on Terence whom the oblates read in order to learn their conversational Latin, all the while noting that Terence was the freed slave from Africa of the Scipios and their Somnium Scipionis that Cicero penned. The second part is on II. Dante’s Music. Julian of Norwich spoke of her text as needing to be performed; the same is intensely true of Dante’s Commedia. Its miniatures, especially in BL Egerton 943,Footnote 1 and again in Botticelli’s splendid drawings,Footnote 2 bear out their theatricality. Dante’s text is performative and sensual of the right hemisphere, rather than of the abstracted silent reading of the left hemisphere. Though it is art, not life, it at times fractals into itself literal reality and is always representing bodies. It is filled with gestures, with voices, with sounds, and in the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, also with music. Paradoxically our modern reading takes place in an abstracted theoretical space, divorced from the body which is seen as distracting. Medieval reading was synesthetic and instead fully embodied; as Richard de Fournival showed in Li Bestiare d’Amours, where his manuscript, and even the 1860 engraved reproduction of it in Celestin Hippeau’s 1860 edition, gives two doors, the eye, the ear, with which to read him.Footnote 3 This is how to respond to Dante (Fig. 1).
Pietro Alighieri’s Commentary
How did I come to Pietro Alighieri’s Commentary to his father’s Commedia? That in itself is a story. I was writing my Berkeley dissertation on pilgrimage in Dante, Langland, and Chaucer and teasing out the fourfold allegoresis, which Dante relates to the Exodus paradigm of going from bondage to freedom, to the singing of the Psalm 113, In exitu Israel de Aegypto,Footnote 4 and which James Joyce reverberates with its unique tonus peregrinus again in Ulysses’ Easter Uprising. Doing so I came across Father Dunstan Tucker, O.S.B.’s essay on “Dante’s Reconciliation in the Purgatorio”,Footnote 5 which places that Psalm in its Easter liturgical context of baptism.Footnote 6 It would have been sung in 3. Florence’s Baptistery (Plates XVII a, b; LXXVIII b; LXXIX b) on Holy Saturday, 27 March 1266, when Dante’s name would have rung out beneath that mosaiced dome, all Florentine babies born since Easter, 1265, and before Easter, 1266, being baptized on that date. Dante, three times, would use Psalm 113’s allegorizing, in Convivio I.1, in Purgatorio II, and in Epistola X. But Father Dunstan Tucker, in making some corrections to his essay, muddled his footnotes. That caused me to try to find his reference to a passage in Pietro Alighieri’s Commentary. But it wasn’t there at the page number he gave. So, seeking to find it, I read the entire Latin commentary through in both exasperation and gratitude.
Dante named his three sons Pietro, Jacopo, and Giovanni, after the three disciples present at the Transfiguration. Pietro Alighieri, born around 1283–1285, when coming of age, was condemned to death with his brothers, and so went to join his father in exile to escape that fate, 6 November 1315. He is documented as a Judge in Verona, in 1332, probably having studied law in Bologna. Around 1355, Moggio de’ Moggi tells us, he recited a now-lost poem of his composing outlining his father’s Commedia in Verona’s Piazza delle Erbe. His brother, Jacopo, also composed a Commentary in verse which is appended to several manuscripts of the Commedia that emanate particularly from Francesco da Barberino’s officina and which carefully note Dante’s death in Ravenna, for instance, in BML Plut.40.11: “Explicit liber comedie Dantis ala/gherij de florentia per eum editus/ sub anno dominice incarnationis/ Millessimo trecentimo. de mense mar/tii. Sole in ariete. Luna nona in libra./ Qui decessit in ciuitate rauenne in an/no dominice incarnationis Millessimo/ trecentesimo uigesimo primo die sanc/crucis de mense septembris anima cu/ius in pace requiescat ammen”. Pietro Alighieri died in Treviso in 1364 and his magnificent tomb is extant there.
There are three versions in Latin of Pietro Alighieri’s Commentary to his father’s poem, the first edited by Vincenzo Nannucci for Lord Vernon, in the edition I read through in its Latin many years ago, finding treasures such as the cataloguing of what would have been his father’s library as including the Classics, Aristotle, Ovid, Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Terence, Seneca, and the Patristic and Scholastic authors, Augustine, Boethius, Isidore of Seville, Thomas Aquinas, but also Andreas Cappellanus, De arte honeste amandi,Footnote 7 and Alanus de Insula.
I found most valuable his comment that his father structured the Commedia on the circular Roman theaters such as where Terence’s Comedies were performed, for this validated the use of drama in the Commedia, Terence being the freed African slave whose brilliant plays delighted the Roman Republic of the Scipios and the Roman Empire following upon it, his influence on pedagogy with laughter then being used to teach spoken Latin in medieval convents and monasteries and in Renaissance schoolrooms, Shakespeare’s Globe born from the same knowledge. The acting by the abbots, monks, and oblates of the Officium Pereginorum with its delightful dramatic irony was done in monastic churches in the context of their study of Terence’s laughter-filled Comedies.
Pietro Alighieri tells us:
Libri titulus est: Comoedia Dantis Allegherii; et quare sic vocetur, adverte. Antiquitus in theatro, quod erat area semicircularis, et in ejus medio erat domuncula, quae scena dicebatur, in qua erat pulpitum, et super id ascendebat poeta ut cantor, et sua carmina ut cantiones recitebat, extra vero erant mimi joculatores, carminum pronuntiationem gestu corporis effigiantes per adaptationem ad quemlibet, ex cujus persona ipse poeta loquebatur;… et si tale pulpitum, seu domunculam, ascendebat poeta, qui de more villico caneret, talis cantus dicebatur comoedia…et quod ejus stylus erat in materia incipiente a tristi recitatione et finiente in laetam… Et quod auctor iste ita scribere intendebat, incipiende ab Inferno et finiendo in Paradisum, sic ejus Poema voluit nominari. Item quod poeta in comoedia debet loqui remisse et non alte, ut Terentius in suis comoediis fecit.
[The book’s title is Dante Alighieri’s Comedy, as much as to say that in Antiquity the theatre, which was a semicircular area, and in the midst of it was a small house, called the “Scene”, in which was a pulpit, and the poet would ascend this in order to sing, and his song would be recited, besides which were players, performing the song with gestures, their bodily figures adapted to this, of whom the poet was speaking. And in this pulpit or small house, the poet would ascend, if singing in common speech, a comedy… and this style was for material that began sadly and ended happily… And this author intended writing so, beginning with the Inferno and ending in Paradise, so he wished this Poem to be called this. So the Poet in a comedy must renounce lofty eloquence, and do as Terence did in his Comedies.]
This form of a classical theater, for the acting of Terence’s plays, was still being remembered later (Plate LX a, Josephus Master, BNF, lat 7907, fol. 2v, b, Terence, Comedies, Lyon, 1493).
Dante’s supposed Letter to Can Grande is in agreement with Pietro Alighieri’s account:
10. The title of the book is: “Begins the Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Florentine in birth, not in custom”. In order to understand you need to know that “comedy” comes from komos “village” and oda, which means “song”, whence comedy sort of means “country song”. And comedy is sort of a kind of poetic narration, different from all others. It differs, therefore, from the tragedy, in matter by the fact that tragedy in the beginning is admirable and quiet, in the end or final exit it is smelly and horrible; and it gets its name because of this from tragos, which means “goat”, and oda, sort of like “goat-song”, that is, smelly like a goat, as can be seen in Seneca’s tragedies. But comedy begins with harshness in some thing, whereas its matter ends in a good way, as can be seen by Terence in his Comedies. And thus letter writers are accustomed to say in their salutations in the place of an address “a tragic beginning, a comical end”. They differ also in the way of speaking: the tragedy is elevated and sublime, the comedy loose and humble, as Horace tells us in his Poetria, where he permits now and again comic writers to speak like tragedians and also vice versa. “At times, however, even comedy exalts her voice, and an angry Chremes rants and raves; often, too, in a tragedy Telephus or Peleus utters his sorrow in the language of prose”…And from this it is obvious that the present work is called comedy. And if we look at the matter, in the beginning it is horrible and smelly, because Inferno; in the end it is good, desirable, and graceful, for it is Paradiso; as to the manner of speaking, it is easy and humble, because it is in the vulgar tongue, in which also women communicate. And thus it is obvious why it is called Comedy.Footnote 8
The reference to Chremes’ speech is to Terence’s Heautontumorumenos or “The Self-Tormentor” and its grandiloquent proclamation: “homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto” [I am human, therefore I consider no one an alien to me].
I had first perused the Commentarium in the fine Lord Vernon edition of 1846, printed in hand-set and highly legible type on rag paper, finding it in the library stacks at Berkeley, studying it again in the Società Dantesca Italiana library in Florence, finally purchasing it in two anastatic volumes from India. Pietro continued his work of elucidating his father’s poem, making use of the family library of manuscripts, in two further versions, the final one edited and given me by the tragic scholar Massimiliano Chiamenti who published it with the University of Arizona Press in 2002, using BAV Ottoboniana lat. 2867 as his base text, which is retrievable from the Vatican website.Footnote 9 And then Massimo Seriacopi found the version of the Commentary translated in volgare, in Tuscan Italian, in the Laurentian Library publishing it in two volumes in 2008 and 2009. We collaborated, he turning my edition of the Opere di Brunetto Latino into an Italian acceptable to Italian scholars, and then we worked together on Purgatorio XXI of the Emmaus Peregrini. He gave me copies of his two volumes of Pietro Alighieri’s Commentary in volgare along with a recording of his observations on the importance of that work: Osservazioni sul commento di Pietro Alighieri alla Commedia.Footnote 10
Dante’s Terence
Originally published as “Dante’s Terence: Decolonializing the Commedia”, Il Pacioli: “Nostra maggior musa” I maestri della letteratura classica nella Commedia di Dante, ed. John Butcher, pp. 37–58, republished with permission from John Butcher.
It was many years ago that I was on the Board of Directors of the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities and we were voting on funding projects. Such as a perennially popular one by CEOs of corporations to do seminars on Machiavelli’s Prince, read straight, which I would have to explain was instead satire (“Io ho insegnato a’ principi esser tiranni: ma ho anche insegnato a popolo come spegnerli” [I taught princes how to be tyrants: but I also taught the people how to undo them]). When one project for Black Awareness Week was met with utter bewilderment by all around the table, I was sitting on my hands. “What has Black Awareness Week to do with Terence?” everyone scoffed. Finally, it was my turn. I blurted out “But Terence was Black!”, explaining to my colleagues that the productions of Terence’s Adelphoi and Phormio by the Black theater group in Denver, the Eden Theater Company, directed by Lucy Walker, had every right to be funded by us. I explained that Terence influenced Cicero’s concept of “humanitas”, becoming our “Humanities”. That he also gave Dante his poem’s title, the Comedy, the Commedia.
Terence, Publius Terentius Afer, had long ago fascinated me to the extent that I called up the manuscripts of his Comedies as I Eurail passed when researching Brunetto Latino, Birgitta of Sweden, and others in libraries across Europe.Footnote 11 I had hated Latin in school where we were forced to read Caesar and had cried over my textbook every night, titled “Latin without Tears”. The brilliant classicist and meticulous editor of Greek and Latin authors, A.E. Housman had written, in an address to his own poetry, “Terence, this is stupid stuff”,Footnote 12 for his writing about the lower classes, about Shropshire pastorals, in so doing interiorizing the class-conscious, racist, toxic imperialism of classical studies in the British Empire—which got rid of Terence for school children, substituting Caesar instead. It was that substitution that made the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities consider it impossible that a Black theater group could act a Terence comedy, for surely he must be white, as in all the white marble busts of dead classical authors. Even Penguin, which first chose an excellent cover of an Egyptian encaustic portrait, chose to later substitute it with a grotesque white marble mask (Plate LXI a, b, Penguin Terence, Comedies, editions).Footnote 13
But it is time to cease whitewashing and instead to resurrect Terence, the freed Nubian slave, whom Suetonius described as slight, handsome, and “fuscus”,Footnote 14 the initial Penguin cover being more accurate, and in whose plays women and slaves come out on top. Before Christianity, the “religion of women and slaves” (his dates are circa 195/185–circa 159 B.C.E.). He is a “Magnificat” writer, a Carnivalesque writer, turning the tables, turning the status quo, upside down, siding with adolescents against their fathers, siding with defenseless poor young pregnant girls, with prostitutes with hearts of gold, with slaves who by their intelligence solve all the familial problems, having “All’s Well that Ends Well” be through their agency, by their kindness. And he does so by a stagecraft as nimble and quick-footed as that in his mirroring slave characters, crafting all the speeches in exquisite though colloquial Latin sung poetry. Consequently his plays were loved and taught and adapted: in convents, as in Hrotswitha’s Comedies, where she combined his plots with Christian tales from the Desert Fathers;Footnote 15 in monasteries, such as in liturgical dramas like the Benedictine Officium Peregrinorum performed throughout Europe, at Silos, at Winchester, at Fleury, in Florence,Footnote 16 of the Emmaus tale, serving to teach oblates both Latin grammar and Gregorian chant;Footnote 17 in Dante’s Commedia; in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales;Footnote 18 in the Wakefield Plays’ First and Second Shepherds’ Plays; in Stratford-on-Avon’s Grammar School from which Shakespeare could create his Puck and his Ariel; in that famous line painted on Montaigne’s tower study ceiling in Bordeaux; in Molière’s Tartuffe, acted before Louis XIV, where the quick-thinking servant Dorine saves the day against the machinations of Tartuffe, copied in Frances Trollope’s novel, The Vicar of Wrexhill; and in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, where the wife and servants together outwit their lecherous irascible master and husband.
In Convivio I.v Dante discusses the stable scribal Latinity of dramatists like Terence versus the volatility of the vernacular, an aspect of the two languages also studied by Mikhail BakhtinFootnote 19:
Because of its nobility, for Latin is eternal and incorruptible, while the vernacular is unstable and corruptible. Thus in the ancient Latin comedies and tragedies, which cannot undergo change, we find the same Latin as we have today; this is not the case with the vernacular, which, being fashioned according to one’s own preference, undergoes change. Thus in the cities of Italy, if we care to take a close look, we find that within the last fifty years many words have become obsolete, been born, and been altered; if a short period of time changes language, much more does a greater period change it. Thus I say that if those who departed this life a thousand years ago were to return to their cities, they would believe that they were occupied by foreigners, because the language would be at variance with their own. This will be more fully discussed elsewhere in a book I intend to write, God willing, on Eloquence in the Vernacular.
Barbara Reynolds said that the Vita nova is a poem about poetry.Footnote 20 That is even more true of the Commedia which pulsates with quotations from and references to other authors, both of the Classical and Biblical past and of Dante’s present, particularly to those poets related to the formation of Guido Cavalcanti’s dolce stil nuovo. The Commedia is also intensely theatrical and elocutionary, a poet’s library crammed with these other “talking books”, their dialogues, which are now performed by us, coming again to life, as we read this dream vision. Jorge Luis Borges reminds us of Joseph Addison in the Spectator, 487, saying the soul in dreams is herself “the Theatre, the Actors, and the Beholder”.Footnote 21 Among those subsumed authors is decidedly the freed African slave, Publius Terentius Afer, who endows the Commedia with its title, and whose patron was the noble Scipio Africanus the Younger, of whom Cicero would write in the Somnium Scipionis, the Commedia’s dream vision prototype.
Terence had gone unnamed in Inferno’s Limbo of the Virtuous Pagans but is introduced first—and first of all as being there—in Purgatorio XXII with the theatrical encountering of Statius with Virgil and Dante, a scene derived from Luke 24 in the Gospel, Luke, perhaps, deriving its dramatic irony from Greco-Roman literature, its epiphany, its tragi-comic anagnorisis. Dante here contrives another listing of Virtuous Pagans, this time at their head, “Terrenzio nostro antico”, whose whereabouts are queried by Statius,
Verse
Verse Tu dunque, che levato hai il coperchio che m’ascondeva quanto bene i’ dico, mentre che de l‘andarel avén soverchio, dimmi dov’ è Terrenzio nostro antico, Cecilio e Plauto e Varro, se lo sai: dimmi se son dannati, e in qual vico. [You therefore who have lifted the lid that hid so much of what I say, while we are still climbing, tell me where are our ancient Terence, Cecilius, Plautus and Varro, if you know, tell me if they are condemned and to what place, (Purg XXII.94–99)]
with Virgil answering that Terence is with him in that First Circle of the dark prison (Purg XXII.100–117).We have evidence of the survival of Terence’s Comedies from the catalogues of manuscripts in major libraries in Italy, France, and England, a presence that would continue after Dante’s time into the Renaissance, being particularly beloved in the manuscripts that swirled about Christine de Pizan and the Duc de Berry,Footnote 22 through the eighteenth century, before Terence fell out of favor during the era of the global slave trade. Some of these manuscripts, and later printed books, down the centuries, kept alive the visual memory of how these plays were acted with theatrical masks in circular theaters. There must have been countless other manuscripts now lost through wars, fires, and, as school books, from inevitable and intense use, wear and tear.
To get nearer to Dante’s own acquired knowledge of Terence’s Comedies we can consult the text of the Tesoro of his teacher, Brunetto Latino, in the manuscript written out by Dante’s fellow student, Francesco da Barberino, BML Plut.42.19, which quotes from Terence five times and whose name is spelled in three different ways, as Terentio, Terrentino, and Tarrantino:Verse
Verse
¶|Terentio disse. Mentre che’l cuore ee
doctoso. elli ua qua ellà. 57v
. ¶|Terrentino disse ti=
ene in te ciò che tu odi più uolontieri che
tu non parli. 58v
. ¶|Terentino dice. |Chi
osa di seruire suo padre che fara alli altri
chi non perdona a se come perdonera alli altri 66r
¶|Tarrentino dice
questa uirtù non crede che nessuna cosa uma=
na sia strana da lui. e tiene li altrui dan=
naggi per suoi profecti. 67v
. ¶|Terentino disse che tutti quelli che an=
no auersità è sciagura. e non sanno perche i=
stimano che ciò ke l’uomo fa tutto sia per loro
male sempre lo pare che l’uomo lo dispetti
per loro impotença. 68r
. ¶|Terren=
tino disse peggioriano tosto. quando noi aue=
mo lo desiderio 70rFootnote
https://www.florin.ms/OpereBrunettoLatino.html, Vol II, Tesoro I and II, giving transcriptions of BML, Plut,42.19.
Besides this witnessing from the teacher and guardian, Brunetto Latino, to the orphan Dante following the death of his father,Footnote 24 we had Dante’s son, Pietro Alighieri, also affirming the importance of Terence’s Comedies to the Commedia, where he had made his argument in two parts: in the first describing the structure of the theater in which Terence’s Comedies were performed as in the form of a semi-circle, this being remembered in later miniatures and engravings, as indeed is Dante’s Commedia with its labyrinthine circles in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, while the poet (Terence/Dante) is as in a pulpit dialoguing with the masked characters of the play; in the second speaking of the lowly, humble style of the comic form, about ordinary people, beginning with difficulties and progressing to joy.
Just as there is a tendency to think of Terence as white, denying his ethnicity, sweeping him under the carpet, there is a similar tendency to ennoble Dante, when Dante himself jokes about falling into the trap of taking pride in his ancestry with Cacciaguida, at which Beatrice as in the Arthurian text gives a warning “Ahem” (Plate LXXVII BL Egerton 932, fol. 154v, Fallacy of Nobility). In the Christian Guelf world the quest for Ghibelline towers of pride led to bloodshed in the streets and discord in the city, to its tragedy. Dante’s Celestial Rose will be of inclusion, of men with women, the Old with the New, all as equal. And in the face of God he will see mirrored that of Adam, of Everyman, of himself, of us, his readers, as equal with him, being led to that equality through the humility of Beatrice, Lucy, and Mary to Christian Comedy, and away from the alta mia tragedia of Virgil’s lacrimae rerum; to the Gospel rather than the Aeneid, though the Aeneid is given an equal presence, the city of Carthage, of Dido, with its inseminating bees, inseminating this Rose. Dante begins in pride, commits, in the poem’s fiction, all the Seven Deadly Sins, then is purged in humility of them and we with him. He has become our trickster savior, the mischievous slave of the Terentian Comedies who mends the cracks of the world.Footnote 25 His—and our—Marks of Cain, the seven P’s, are wiped from our brows by the angel wings of his poetry, which embeds also the Song of Songs, the Psalms, Luke’s Gospel, and the humble joyous vernacular Franciscan Laude.
The Logographers
One other facet of classical drama needs to be discussed in relation to Dante, and which is often mentioned by Brunetto Latino in his writings of rhetoric, that of the Logographers, of Athens’ practice not of having lawyers act on one’s behalf but of professional/paid speech writers who would train their clients to give a forensic speech that could convince the agora, the market place being the law court, the forum, of one’s “innocence” despite one’s guilt. Such forensic logographers were Antiphon, Demosthenes, Lysias, Isocrates, and Isaeus. They carefully studied their clients’ psychology and adapted the speech they wrote for them to their characters to make it real-seeming. Which paradoxically led to a sense of hypocrisy and fraudulence. The Sophists ran commercial schools for professionals to be trained in such true-seeming rhetoric, to make the worse appear the better part. Yet the world of the Logographers was closely related to that of the Dramatists, who patterned plays out of the interactions of characters, each with their stylized artificial mask, their persona (which literally means “sound through”, the masks as megaphones in the vast outdoor theaters).Footnote 26 Cicero, and then Brunetto, on the contrary, trained their readers to recognize false true-seeming rhetoric appealing to the emotions, such as in the speeches by Catiline, Caesar, and Virgil’s Sinon, to those given with integrity and plainness by Cato, Cicero, and Virgil’s Laocoon. Dante crafts Ulysses’ speech from the former negative group, not the latter.
Thus the professional rhetoric of the agora, while true-seeming, was considered false, and that of allegory, away from the agora (allos+agorein), instead as true. Dante, writing Ulysses’ speech is being a logographer, a sophist, a galeotto. He has Ulysses plagiarize and steal Catiline’s suiciding “You were not born to live as beasts”, “Considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza” [You were not made to live as beasts, but to follow virtue and knowledge (Inf XXVI.118–120)]. He has Ugolino voice and deny at once, in the subjunctive, his cannibalism of his children, “Poscia, più che ‘l dolor, potè’ digiuno” [Then had hunger more power than grief (Inf XXXIII.75)]. He also sets up the entire Commedia, not as an agora for trying criminals so much as a theater, like that at Epidauros, which served, along with its hospital to Aesculapius, as a center of physical and mental healing, as cultural psychiatry.Footnote 27
Dante’s Luke
Dante refers to Luke’s Gospel (24,13–15), in a simile, describing the encounter that Virgil and he had with Statius as being like that on the road to Emmaus meeting the risen Christ by Cleopas and another disciple, who is not named («due ex illis») in the Gospel but who was considered in the Middle Ages to be Luke (we recall how Dante likewise does not name himself when citing his poetry in De vulgari Eloquentia),
Verse
Verse Ed ecco—sì come ne scrive Luca che Cristo apparve ai due ch’erano in via, già surto fuor de la sepulcral buca - ci apparve un’ombra, e dietro a noi venìa, dal piè guardando la turba che giace; né ci addemmo di lei, sì parlò pria, dicendo: «O frati miei, Dio vi déa pace». [And just as Luke writes to us that Christ appeared to the two who were on the way, already risen from the sepulchral cave, a shade appeared to us, and came on behind us, gazing at the prostrate crowd at its feet, nor did we perceive it until it spoke to us, saying, “My brothers, God give you peace”. (Purg XXI. 7–13)]
On the road to Compostela, a pilgrimage road that Brunetto Latino had taken on embassy to Alfonso X el Sabio and that Guido Cavalcanti then took to avoid conflict with Corso Donati, at the Benedictine monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos, we see Christ as a pilgrim, beside him Cleopas pointing to the sun and Luke as author/pilgrim who carries the book of his Gospel—which he does not yet understand (Luke 24.16–27), Christ being the unknown Pilgrim with the Compostela cockle shell on his scrip. The music in the Benedictine liturgical drama for the part of Luke cannot be sung by a man, only by a boy, by an oblate whose voice has not yet cracked. This abbey at Silos, like those at Fleury and at Winchester, performed this play.Footnote 28 In the BAV lat. 4776 manuscript of Dante’s Commedia, at folio 39r, we see the young immature apprentice Dante as Luke in blue carrying the book of Virgil’s Aeneid, that will turn into his own Gospel Commedia, beside the aged Virgil as Cleophas. They are still in Hell and Christ/Statius has not yet joined them as the Third to their two (Plate LXII Pilgrims at Emmaus, a, Silos Cloister sculpture, b, Dante and Virgil, BAV lat. 4776, fol. 39r,Footnote 29 c, d, e, Botticelli’s drawings for Purgatorio XXI).
That meeting with Statius by Virgil and Dante is embedded within the context of the Benedictine drama of the Officium Peregrinorum, such as Dante could have seen enacted at the 21. Badia (Plate XXVIII), adjacent to his 25. childhood home (Plate XXXI), where he had learned the Gregorian chanting in Latin of the Psalms, perhaps he himself before his voice cracked as a boy singing that part of Luke. I have had my students act it at Princeton and Dallas,Footnote 30 and also we included it in the Musica della Commedia concerts Federico Bardazzi’s Ensemble San Felice performed in Cologne, Graz, Avila, Ravenna, and Florence,Footnote 31 to explain not only Purgatorio XXI, but also the entire Commedia. Botticelli would illustrate this encountering most movingly, dramatically, and joyfully, between 1482 and 1503, while having the pagan poets be exotically garbed like the Greeks who had come to the 1437 Council of Florence (Plate LXII c, d, e).Footnote 32
“Sì come ne scriva Luca” (Purg XXI,7), Dante writes of that playful dramatic encountering where Christ as the Stranger, the Other, the Pilgrim, the Third Man, is unrecognized at first by Cleopas and the younger disciple with him, while telling of himself and of all the prophets who had spoken of his coming, Dante here, the youthful Luke, Virgil, the older Cleopas, and Statius, the risen Christ, and their conversation about the Hebrew prophets metamorphosed to Latin and Greek pagan poets.Footnote 33 Moreover each encounter by the two with a Third is a shadowy Emmaus encountering, ourselves in God’s image,Footnote 34 fractalled also among so many poets, the ancient pagan ones we have already discussed, David and Solomon throughout, and also the modern poets among the sinners in Hell (Pier delle Vigne, XIII, Bertran de Born, XXVIII), the repentant in Purgatory (Casella, II, Sordello, VI-VIII, Forese Donati, XXII, Bonagiunta da Lucca, Jacopo da Lentini, Guittone d’Arezzo, Guido Guinizelli, XXIV, Arnaut Daniel, XXVI), and the saved in Paradise (Carlo Martello, VIII, Folco of Marseilles, IX, Francis, XI, Dante, XXXIII).
In this way Dante reconciles the “Allegory of the Poets” with the “Allegory of the Theologians” in play, in a liturgical drama that he embeds in his text, he himself becoming the paradigm of the Evangelist Luke, who initially does not understand, but who becomes the disciple who will proclaim Christ’s Resurrection. Vincenzo Placella, writing on anagogy in Dante, discusses the use in Luke’s Gospel where the risen Christ speaks to the disciples—Et incipiens a Moyse et omnibus prophetis interpretabatur illis in omnibus Scripturis, quae de ipso erant (Luke 24.27)—kindling their hearts with new hope, Christ himself being the true Magister, the anagnorisis, ἀναγνώρισις, of the fourfold exegesis of lectio divina, the théia anágnosis, the “Divine Recognition”.Footnote 35 Elsewhere I have argued that Dante’s major paradigms in both the Vita nova and the Commedia are those of Exodus (in particular of the Exodus in David’s prophetic Psalm 113, sung to its ancient tonus peregrinus by Hebrew Pilgrims at the Temple in Jerusalem), and the tale of the Emmaus Pilgrims in the New Testament’s Gospel of Luke 24, “come ne scriva Luca’ (Purg XXI.7–13).Footnote 36
This Gospel tale of dramatic irony was typically sung by the Abbot and the Oblates of Benedictine monasteries, to teach them their Gospel, their Latin, their Gregorian chant, as at Winchester, Fleury, Silos, and in Florence. These are sung plays also to be found in the vernacular Florentine manuscripts of the Compagnie dei Laudesi.Footnote 37 Both iconography and music give Cleophas as Aged, the other Pilgrim on the Road to Emmaus as a Youth, singing in the treble clef, even as the Gospeler Luke, holding the Gospel he will write but who does not yet know the outcome of the story. Neither of them comprehends that the Third who joins them is Christ, who chides them for being fools and slow of heart to believe, then reveals himself in the Eucharist at the secular Inn at Emmaus, not in the sacred Temple in Jerusalem. Similarly Dante has each Third the two encounter, aged Virgil as Cleopas, young Dante as Luke, be a shadowy Christ, even those in Hell, like Pier delle Vigne or Farinata degli Uberti or Ugolino della Gherardesca. All, as Julian of Norwich said, have God’s Word in them, and all having God’s Word in them, shall be, she declares, saved.Footnote 38 Particularly where their sinning self has enabled the sinning reader to undo our sins, where they serve to save the Commedia’s “Freedom Readers” from the damnation of Virgil’s wrongful guiding into High Tragedy (“alta mia tragedìa”, Inf XX.113).
We see this in the cloister sculpture at Silos on the pilgrim route to Compostela, the two saying to the Third, “Tu solus peregrinus es?” [“Surely you must be a pilgrim and stranger, not to know of the events that have occurred in Jerusalem?”] (Plate LXII a).Footnote 39 This marvelous mix of folly and wisdom, of dramatic irony, projected back and forth as in tailors’ mirrors, is the game that Luke/Dante play. Within the text, often in apprentice blue and mocked at by Beatrice for being beardless, Dante, like the later Pinocchio, fails his lessons. He had fallen asleep over Virgil’s Aeneid, in which he had read of the Polydorus episode, yet still plucks the bleeding, hissing, sobbing leaves of the suicide Pier delle Vigne’s tree. While outside the text, he is in the red toga that within it his fallible teacher, Virgil as an aged Cleophas, dons. Dante is double, both Author and Pilgrim persona, both magister and schoolboy, both mature and immature. He is Leopard, Lion, and Wolf all in one. Even, in his text, his teachers fail him. Even Dante, teaching us, textually, deliberately, fails us. To teach Truth, Christ is the sole and only Rabbi (Matthew 23.8).
The Emmaus shadows are everywhere. Dante, as his son Pietro tells us, uses the Comedies of the freed African slave Terentius Publius Afer, in which so often one or two characters meet with a third or even fourth at the threshold of their various stage mansions in the round Roman theater, their masks/personae given as the initial list of characters. In Dante’s List of Characters, the Dramatis Personae, we find himself as the young apprentice in the blue of so many manuscript illuminations, side by side with Virgil in his red magisterial toga, even as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice to medieval Virgil as Necromancer.Footnote 40 In this his work echoes with so many other false mentors, such as Pandarus to Troilus, whether in Boccaccio or Chaucer or Shakespeare, as Mephistopheles to Faust, whether in Marlowe or Goethe or Mann, whether as Falstaff to Prince Hal, or Iago to Othello, again in Shakespeare, or as Mozart and Byron’s shared Don Juan, or as Giuseppe/Joseph the carpenter to Pinocchio/Jesus of the Infancy Gospels, the Fairy with Blue Hair as Athena and Beatrice, or as Sherlock Holmes to Dr Watson. Then, with his soul-selling mentor, Dante encounters presumably lost souls, Francesca and Paolo, Farinata and Cavalcanti, Brunetto Latino, Pier delle Vigne, Ulysses, Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri, among so many others, all fractals of his own “lost” one. Dante’s text is drama and makes use of dramatic irony. While his use of Psalm 113 as sovrasenso is to save our souls from bondage, we as “Freedom Readers”.
II. Dante’s Music
Dante insists that poetry is sung. He states that “si poesim recte consideremus, que nichil aliud est quam fictio rethorica musicaque posita” [poetry is nothing other than a verbal construct composed according to the rules of rhetoric and music] (DVE II.iv.2). He divides, as does Solomon, his hundred Cantos into Canticles, as the “Song of Songs”, the Shir ha-Shirim, to his Beatrice. Far more than a mere sonnet of fourteen lines! When the Società Dantesca Italiana scholars recorded the Cantos fifty years ago they read them as prose. I recorded Carlo Poli, actor son of contadini from the Mugello who recited them cantastorie, as Dante would have wished.Footnote 41 In 2014–2016, Federico Bardazzi’s Ensemble San Felice of musicologists and early music performers further took up my suggestion of researching and producing the music mentioned in the Commedia, taking each reference to what was sung in the text, using the manuscripts of the period for both the sacred and profane pieces, the liturgical music being retrievable, while we used contrafactum for the lost music of Dante’s secular lyrics, matching their metrics to music of the period that has survived, referenced below.Footnote 42
I had already perceived the juxtaposition of Psalm 113, “In exitu Israel de Aegypto”, and Dante’s secular love lyric, “Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona” as a motet, while in the performing we came to see more such motets that Dante had crafted musically into his Song of Songs. These are the seven polyphonic motets in the Commedia which juxtapose and combine in a Bakhtinian way the doubleness of Latin and vernacular, Gregorian chant and profane love lyric.Footnote 43 And one can even think of those profane love lyrics, such as sung by Casella (Purg II. 106–117), as to Belacqua’s lute (Purg IV.106–135), and of Adam’s bloated belly in Inferno as like a lute (Inf XXXX.49–51), that instrument, the oud, that came from the Islamic world, along with its seductive Averroïsm and Sufism (Canzoniere Palatina, BNCF Banco Rari 217, fol. 58r).Footnote 44 I then gave this presentation at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, on Dante as Timotheus, in 2015:
Verse
Verse
I. Purgatorio II’s Polyphony: The First Motet of Seven
On the shores of Purgatory Dante and Virgil pause from their pilgrimage to listen to the seductive and vainglorious words of Dante’s own “Amor, che ne la mente mi ragiona” sung solo in the dolce stil nuovo of the Tuscan vernacular by his friend Casella, just arrived from Ostia.Footnote
Augustine, Confessions IX.x. Augustine’s mystical discourse with his mother at Ostia centers on their arriving at a mutual and global silence. At her death, chapter xi, a psalm is sung. While Dante has Casella disturb the holy island mountain with lecherous song of Dante’s own composing, until Cato breaks its Sirenic spell. 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. Nicolino Applauso observes that Casella is fined, 13 July 1282, Biccherna 84 c. 1r, Archivio di Stato di Siena: “Casella homine curiae quia fuit inventus de nocte post tertium sonum campanae Comunis”, “S’i fosse foco ardere’ il mondo’: L’esilio e la politica nella poesia di Cecco Angiolieri”, Letteratura Italiana Antica, p. 226. The document is on display in Siena’s Archivio di Stato. JB Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book, pp. 145–162, Plate Xa. Fernand Mossé, Handbook of Middle English, Plate II, pp. 201–202, 369; Yvonne Rokseth, Polyphonies du XIIIe siècle: Le manuscript H 196 de la faculté de médicine de Montpellier, 4 vols, passim. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World; Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol, passim. ‘|Che due cose contrarie quando sono insieme/l’una contra l’altra. elle sono più cognoscenti’ [Tesoro, 6ra], and ‘I|N questo libro ci ae mostrato el mastro L’insegnamenti de le uirtù e de uitij. L’uno per operare. e l’altro per schifare. che questa e la cagione per che l’uomo de sapere bene e male. |Et tutto chello libro parli più de le uirtù ke de uitij. non pertanto la oue lo bene sia comandato a farlo. secondo che aristotile dice. |Vno medesimo insegnamento è in due contrarie cose [Tesoro, 72ra]. Boethius, De Institutione musica. Once I called up a manuscript of the De Musica in Verona’s Biblioteca Capitolare to find its complex visual images of these harmonies gloriously color-coded. Also manuscripts of Dante’s Vita nova and those of Provençal lyrics, from which Ezra Pound’s appunti fell to the floor. Francesco Ciabattoni, Dante’s Journey to Polyphony, p. 36. Catherine S. Adoyo, “Dante decrypted: Musica universalis in the textual architecture of the ‘Commedia’”, Bibliotheca Dantesca, 1 (2018): 37–69, https://repository.upenn.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/b846b6ef-8b19-4060-a22b-2d7f8b1d6597/content Giovanni Boccaccio, Trattattello in lauda di Dante Alighieri, XX, “Sommamente si dilettò in suoni e in canti nella sua giovanezza, e a ciascuno che a que’ tempi era ottimo cantatore o sonatore fu amico e ebbe sua usanza; e assai cose, da questo diletto tirato, compose, le quali di piacevole e maestrevole nota a questi cotali facea rivestire”; Leonardo Bruni, Della vita, studi e costumi di Dante, “Dilettossi di musica e di suoni, e di sua mano egregiamente disegnava; fu ancora scrittore perfetto, ed era la lettera sua magra e lunga e molto corretta, secondo io ho veduto in alcune epistole di sua mano propria scritte”. Il Canzoniere Palatino: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Banco Rari 217, ex Palatino 418, ed. Lino Leonardi. La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB7XtVjxXz0&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=2 https://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt3001.htm and https://mechon-mamre.org/mp3/t3001.mp3 La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC0p1DfaPsI&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=6 La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-AvJ7UWRII&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=14 JB Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book, “Veni Creator Spiritus”, pp. 73, 83–84. La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGNtqVGz7pc&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=15 La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHSTr40Se7k&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=16 BAV, lat 3793, fol. 99v. La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eTX-6v2fiw&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=17 La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3sTJJ0RcGk&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=18 La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwHTvUJsmB8&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=20 La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4un0OSNUSQ&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=21 La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN9DU59huyc&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=25 La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJODKHZ3f5g&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=26 Immanuello Romano, L’Inferno e Il Paradiso, ed. Giorgio Battistoni; Giorgio Battistoni, Verona, ‘Il Libro della Scala, Dante Alighieri, La Commedia, e Immanuello Romano, L’Inferno e il Paradiso’, The City and the Book International Conference II, The Manuscript, The Illumination, Accademia delle Arte del Disegno, Via Orsanmichele 4, Florence, 4–7 September 2002, http://www.florin.ms/beth3.html La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5hx9Glbt1k&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=32 La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93dVA8zy7Jg&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=33 La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49RShu1A_3Q&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=11 La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR3XJAOSgtA&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=40 Arnolfo alle origini del Rinascimento fiorentino, ed. Enrica Neri Lusanna, pp. 260–261. This is an instance where sculpture, known by Dante, explains his lyric and its music, sight, sound, and touch. Orcagna’s tabernacle in 30. Orsanmichele similarly gives the Dormition of the Virgin, a scene the Master of the Dominican Effigies, connected with Francesco da Barberino, illustrated in an Impruneta manuscript.
Study Questions
Read a Terence play, of which there are six Comedies, preferably in a Loeb edition with the Latin and English on facing pages, to see how young people, both men and women, learned Latin “playfully” in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It is possible for a class to perform the Officium Peregrinorum in Latin Gregorian chant and its text can be retrieved from https://www.umilta.net/peregrinus.html. The two-hour concert of the music Dante mentions in the Commedia is accessible on YouTube as “La Musica della Commedia Playlist”. Think of Dante’s secular lyrics as like those of modern Rock concerts. Discuss multiculturalism in the music of Dante’s period and of our own. Study how his juxtaposition of these with sacred chant creates medieval polyphony.
Notes
- 1.
British Library website gives the digitized version of BLEgerton 943, Commedia: https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?index=5&ref=Egerton_MS_943. The “Master of the Paduan Antiphoners” is of the first half of the fourteenth century; he also illustrates Francesco da Barberino’s commissioned 1313 BRicc 1538, Miscellany, http://teca.riccardiana.firenze.sbn.it/index.php/it/?option=com_tecaviewer&view=showimg&collocazione=Ricc.1538&pagina=c.%2010r&search= when Francesco is still in exile from Florence. The late fourteenth century, Neapolitan, BL, Additional 19587, Commedia is at: https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?index=1&ref=Add_MS_19587
Other late and magnificent illuminations are in BLYates Thompson 36, Commedia
https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Yates_Thompson_MS_36
and the Paris-Imola Commedia, this last studied especially by Carlo Illuminati:
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10509601v.r=MS%20Italian%202017Dante%20Aligheri%20Dante%20Aligheri?rk=21459;2. Maria Grazia Ciardi DuPrè Dal Poggetto discussed the relationship between the miniatures of the BLM Strozz. 146 Tesoretto at the bottom of the pages, as here with the Commedia miniatures, with manuscripts of Roman comedies. The Dante illuminated manuscripts are clearly theatrical in the same mode as are Terentian illuminated manuscripts.
- 2.
Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, illustrated, Sandro Botticelli.
- 3.
Richard de Fournival, Le Bestiare d’Amour; Reponse de la Dame, ed. Celestin Hippeau.
- 4.
Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq
- 5.
Dunstan Tucker, OSB, “Dante’s Reconciliation in the Purgatorio”, American Benedictine Review 20 (1969), 75–92. I wrote to him about my concern over the muddled footnote, and he in turn sent me Father Gerard Farrell, OSB, their monastery’s Chant Master then out of a job following Vatican II, who helped me direct Princeton University students perform Benedictine sung liturgical dramas and who next found a teaching post with Westminster Choir College in Princeton.
- 6.
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.
- 7.
Pietro Alighieri, Commentarium, on Andreas Capellanus, Inferno V, p. 89, “Unde Gualterius definit sic talem amorem”.
- 8.
Letter to Can Grande, trans. James Marchand, https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/cangrande.english.html
- 9.
BAV Ottoboniana lat. 2867, retrievable from the Vatican website, VatDigLib.
- 10.
- 11.
Selected Terence Manuscripts through Christine de Pizan’s Dates that I examined:
Italy:
Vatican
BAV Vat.lat.3226. 5th C. Rustic capitals. “Bembino”. Used by Angelo Poliziano.
BAV Vat.lat.3868. 9th C. Magnificent miniatures
Florence
BML Biblioteca Laurenziana
[In the original Laurentian library, Terence’s works were shelved under “Poetae Latini”, following those of Statius, as “P. Terentii Afri Comedia VI”.]
BML Laur. Plut.38.17. 14th C. Boccaccio’s holograph manuscript “Incipit liber terrentij”
[BML Plut.54.32. Apuleius. 14th C. Boccaccio’s holograph manuscript]
BML Plut.38.27. 12th C.
BML Plut.38.34. Colophon date, 1397.
Biblioteca Riccardiana
BRicc 528. Siglum E.
Biblioteca Nazionale
BNCF Banco Rari 97. Angelo Poliziano’s manuscript making use of the Bembino codex.
BNCF II.IV.6. 14th C. From Santa Maria Nuova. School book, different hands, speeches on Florentine, Roman, Athenian liberty.
BNCF II.IV.333. Dated 1393. A Buondelmonte book, fols. 60–61, on how one can live in time of pestilence.
France: Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale
BNF lat. 2322. 11th C. Fol. 77, last two leaves, lost, destroyed, illustrated, glossed Terence. Micio/Demea.
BNF lat. 7899. Siglum P. 9th C. Illustrated Terence, reproduced in Madame Dacier’s editions of Terence.
BNF lat. 7900. Siglum Y. 10th C. Fleury MS. Drawings in brown ink, interlinear gloss.
BNF lat. 7900A. 11th C. Some photographs of pages now at University of Hamburg, torn out before 17th C. Terence not illustrated, though Martianus Capella is.
BNF lat. 7901. 11th C. Unfinished manuscript, not illustrated.
BNF lat. 7902. 11th C. Glossed, rustic capitals.
BNF lat. 7903. 11th C. Begins with drawings related to lat. 7899.
BNF lat. 7904. 12th C.
BNF lat. 7905. 13th C.
BNF lat. 7906. 13th C.
BNF lat. 7907. 14th C. Fol 30, illustration from Eunuchus.
BNF lat. 8193. 15th C. Duc de Berry MS, according to Henry Martin. Illuminated, copying Terence des Ducs MS.
BNF lat. 9345. Siglum Pb. 11th C.
BNF lat. 10304. Siglum p. 11th C.
BNF lat. 16235. 11th C. Mentions another ancient Terence manuscript at St. Remi de Rheims as burned in the 17th C. Glossed, author portrait, fol. 41.
Bibliothèque de l’Arsenale 664. Terence des Ducs, Duc de Guyenne. 15th C. Magnificently illuminated.
England: London
British Library
BLBurney 261. 14th C. Parchment.
BLEgerton 167. Terence in Irish. Owned Luca Smith. Paper MS.
BLHarleian 2456. 14th C. Paper and parchment.
BLHarleian 2475. Paper MS, dated 1297. Catalogue dates 15th C.
BLHarleian 2524. Humanist, 15th C. Catalogue dates 13th C.
BLHarleian 2525. 14th C.
BLHarleian 2562. 14th C. Paper.
BLHarleian 2656. 12th C.
BLHarleian 2670. 10th C. “in usum Colegii Buslidiani”.
BLHarleian 2689. 14th C. Parchment.
BLHarleian 2750. 10th C. Silver capitals.
BLHarleian 5443. 11th C, before 13th C.
BLRoyal A.VIII. 12th, 13th C.
BLRoyal 15.A.XII. 12th C., English hand.
BLRoyal 15.B.VIII. Figure of Christ at bottom of page.
BLAdd. 31,827. 13th C. Monastic MS.
Oxford Bodleian Library
Auct. F.2.13. 12th C. At St. Albans, 13th C. Published in Major Treasures in the Bodleian Library: Medieval Manuscripts in Microform, 9, ed. W.O. Halsall, Oxford, 1978.
Auct. F.6.27. 11th C. Codex Ebnerianus. At Nuremberg.
Bodl. 678. Dover Priory. From France. 13th C. Schoolbook.
Brasenose 18. Fine Humanist MS. “ex Petri Bembi, doctissimi olim Cardinalis MS: quos Henricus Wottonius apud eiusdem Haeredes Venetiis coemerat”. 1491.
E.D. Clarke 28. Written by Florentine notary, 1366/1466?
Douce 347. Fr. Douce, “They pretend to have a MS of Terence, in the Vatican Library written by his own hand… In the library of the Acad, of Altdorf there is a MS of Terence with a long speech by Pamphilus in the 5th Act of Andria, not printed in any of the editions”. 1439. Italy.
Laud Lat. 76. 12th C? Belonged to Laud, 1635. Magdalen 23. Annotated by Francesco Petrarch.
- 12.
A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad.
- 13.
See also Dennis Looney, Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy, and the Dante education program in Attica State Prison by Ronald Herzman and Bill Cook, which witness to Dante’s efficacy in the face of racism. Sadly, I find this “whitewashing” everywhere. Recently, the tomb of the Indian Prince in the Cascine was restored, but the Soprintendenza insisted that the original dark coloring of his complexion be ignored and left only as white marble. Likewise our plaque to Sarah Parker Remond, the Afro-American Abolitionist who, with a letter from Giuseppe Mazzini, studied cutting-edge obstetrical medicine at Santa Maria Nuova Hospital in 1866–1868, following medical studies at the University of London, its marble hand-chiseled by Daniel-Claudiu Dumitrescu, who had already incised that to Frederick Douglass, her friend, who helped restore Donatello’s pulpit in Prato, who created the facsimile of the Libro del Chiodo, and who is descended from Roma slaves in Europe, was rejected for a machine-made plaque stating she was merely a nurse.
- 14.
Suetonius, De viris illustris (circa 106–113, CE), lists Terence first, followed by the other poets, Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Perseus, and Lucan.
- 15.
[Hrotswitha] Roswitha, Plays, trans. Christopher St John. London: Chatto and Windus, 1923; Rosvita, Dialoghi drammatici.
- 16.
Boccaccio (1313–1375) copied out all six Comedies in his own hand in the Laurentian manuscript of them, BML Plut.38.17, “Incipit liber terrentij”, giving the same spelling to the author’s name as had Brunetto and Dante in their writings; Florence was performing Terence’s plays, for instance, the Andria in 1476;
- 17.
JB Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer, pp. 28–55; trans. as Il Pellegrino e il libro: Uno studio su Dante Alighieri, pp. 33–61; Musica della Commedia dell’Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej0t2br5P2o&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=4.
- 18.
- 19.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky. However, in the case of Terence, the Carnivalesque playfulness of the world-upside-down in the vernacular against Latin’s official solemnity of Latin instead irrupts even into the Latin texts the schoolchildren were studying.
- 20.
Dante Alighieri, La Vita nuova, trans. Barbara Reynolds, p. 11.
- 21.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Il Carnefice pietoso”, Nove Saggi danteschi, p. 54.
- 22.
Millard Meiss. French Painting in the time of Jean de Berry: The Limbourgs and their Contemporaries.
- 23.
https://www.florin.ms/OpereBrunettoLatino.html, Vol II, Tesoro I and II, giving transcriptions of BML, Plut,42.19.
- 24.
Leonardo Bruni, Le Vite di Dante e del Petrarca, pp. 13–14.
- 25.
Carl Kerényi, “The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology”; Carl G. Jung, “On the Psychoanalysis of the Trickster Figure”; Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Myths.
- 26.
Mary Hatch Marshall. “Boethius’ Definition of Persona and Medieval Understanding of the Roman Theater”, Speculum 26 (1950).
- 27.
Carl Kerényi, Asklepios: Archetypal Image of the Physician’s Existence.
- 28.
JB Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book, pp. 27–55: https://www.umilta.net/peregrinus.html
- 29.
DigiVatLib, BAV lat. 4776, fol. 39r.
- 30.
JB Holloway, “Fleury Easter Liturgical Plays”, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 21 (1978), 95–96; “Medieval Liturgical Drama, the Commedia, Piers Plowman, and the Canterbury Tales”, American Benedictine Review, 32 (1981), 114–121; Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi, “La Musica della Commedia”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej0t2br5P2o&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=4
- 31.
JB Holloway, “Medieval Liturgical Drama, the Commedia, Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales”, American Benedictine Review, 32 (1981), 114–121; “Monks and Plays.” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (SMART/RALPH) 10 (1983), 10–12.
- 32.
Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, illustrated, Sandro Botticelli, pp. 279–280; my friend and colleague, Juliana Dresvina, noted that the Russian delegates at the Council of Florence wrote of witnessing liturgical dramas performed at the Santissima Annunziata and the Badia: Juliana Dresvina, “The Unorthodox Itinerary of an Orthodox Bishop: Abraham of Suzdal and His Journey to Western Europe 1437–1441”, The Mediaeval Journal 1 (2014), 91–127.
- 33.
This too has an interesting afterlife: Lucius in Lucius Apuleius, Golden Ass; in HH in Herman Hesse’s Journey to the East; in Graham Greene’s The Third Man.
- 34.
JB Holloway, “La Vita Nuova: Paradigmi di pellegrinaggio”, Lectura Dantis 2002–2009. Omaggio a Vincenzo Placella per i suoi settanta anni, pp. 1181–1204; “‘Come ne scriva Luca’: Anagogy in Vita nova and Commedia”, Divus Thomas 115 (2012), 150–170.
- 35.
Vincenzo Placella, “Dante e l’Anagogia”, Studi medievali e moderni 1 (2003), 70–86.
- 36.
JB Holloway, Pilgrim and Book; trans. Il pellegrino e il libro: Uno studio su Dante Alighieri, De strata francigena 20/1 (2012); “The Poet in the Poem”, Allegoresis, ed. Stephen J. Russell, pp. 109–132; republ. Jerusalem: Essays on Pilgrimage and Literature, pp. 121–141.
- 37.
Laudario di Sant’Egidio, fol. 9 “Onde ne vien tu pellegrino amore”, cited by Ursula Betka, “Marian Images and Laudesi Devotion in Late Medieval Italy, 1260–1350”, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Melbourne, Melbourne 2001, p. 588.
- 38.
Julian of Norwich, Showing of Love: Extant Texts and Translations, eds. Sr Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P. and JB Holloway, XIII.xxxiii.59v, p. 262.
- 39.
Originally my 1974 Berkeley dissertation, “The Figure of the Pilgrim in Medieval Poetry”, this became the book, The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer; trans into Italian as Il Pellegrino e il Libro: Uno studio su Dante Alighieri, in De strata francigena 20/1, as well as several articles.
- 40.
John Webster Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer: Studies in Virgilian Legends, pp. 136–197, 256; Domenico Comparetti, Virgilio nel Medio Evo, 3 vols. Vergil, seen as magician, warranted the spelling change to Virgil, as virga, wand, staff.
- 41.
The recordings of these readings can be accessed at the beginnings of each canto in. https://www.florin.ms/Dantevivo.html
- 42.
La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi e Marco di Manno, performed in Orsanmichele, Graz, Cologne, Avila, Ravenna and Florence’s Duomo: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq
- 43.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky; Yvonne Rokseth, Polyphonies du XIIIe siècle: Le manuscript H 196 de la faculté de médicine de Montpellier, 4 vols.
- 44.
- 45.
Augustine, Confessions IX.x. Augustine’s mystical discourse with his mother at Ostia centers on their arriving at a mutual and global silence. At her death, chapter xi, a psalm is sung. While Dante has Casella disturb the holy island mountain with lecherous song of Dante’s own composing, until Cato breaks its Sirenic spell.
- 46.
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.
- 47.
Nicolino Applauso observes that Casella is fined, 13 July 1282, Biccherna 84 c. 1r, Archivio di Stato di Siena: “Casella homine curiae quia fuit inventus de nocte post tertium sonum campanae Comunis”, “S’i fosse foco ardere’ il mondo’: L’esilio e la politica nella poesia di Cecco Angiolieri”, Letteratura Italiana Antica, p. 226. The document is on display in Siena’s Archivio di Stato.
- 48.
JB Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book, pp. 145–162, Plate Xa.
- 49.
Fernand Mossé, Handbook of Middle English, Plate II, pp. 201–202, 369; Yvonne Rokseth, Polyphonies du XIIIe siècle: Le manuscript H 196 de la faculté de médicine de Montpellier, 4 vols, passim.
- 50.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World; Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol, passim.
- 51.
‘|Che due cose contrarie quando sono insieme/l’una contra l’altra. elle sono più cognoscenti’ [Tesoro, 6ra], and ‘I|N questo libro ci ae mostrato el mastro L’insegnamenti de le uirtù e de uitij. L’uno per operare. e l’altro per schifare. che questa e la cagione per che l’uomo de sapere bene e male. |Et tutto chello libro parli più de le uirtù ke de uitij. non pertanto la oue lo bene sia comandato a farlo. secondo che aristotile dice. |Vno medesimo insegnamento è in due contrarie cose [Tesoro, 72ra].
- 52.
Boethius, De Institutione musica.
- 53.
Once I called up a manuscript of the De Musica in Verona’s Biblioteca Capitolare to find its complex visual images of these harmonies gloriously color-coded. Also manuscripts of Dante’s Vita nova and those of Provençal lyrics, from which Ezra Pound’s appunti fell to the floor.
- 54.
Francesco Ciabattoni, Dante’s Journey to Polyphony, p. 36.
- 55.
Catherine S. Adoyo, “Dante decrypted: Musica universalis in the textual architecture of the ‘Commedia’”, Bibliotheca Dantesca, 1 (2018): 37–69, https://repository.upenn.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/b846b6ef-8b19-4060-a22b-2d7f8b1d6597/content
- 56.
Giovanni Boccaccio, Trattattello in lauda di Dante Alighieri, XX, “Sommamente si dilettò in suoni e in canti nella sua giovanezza, e a ciascuno che a que’ tempi era ottimo cantatore o sonatore fu amico e ebbe sua usanza; e assai cose, da questo diletto tirato, compose, le quali di piacevole e maestrevole nota a questi cotali facea rivestire”; Leonardo Bruni, Della vita, studi e costumi di Dante, “Dilettossi di musica e di suoni, e di sua mano egregiamente disegnava; fu ancora scrittore perfetto, ed era la lettera sua magra e lunga e molto corretta, secondo io ho veduto in alcune epistole di sua mano propria scritte”.
- 57.
Il Canzoniere Palatino: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Banco Rari 217, ex Palatino 418, ed. Lino Leonardi.
- 58.
La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB7XtVjxXz0&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=2
- 59.
- 60.
La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC0p1DfaPsI&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=6
- 61.
La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-AvJ7UWRII&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=14
- 62.
JB Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book, “Veni Creator Spiritus”, pp. 73, 83–84.
- 63.
La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGNtqVGz7pc&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=15
- 64.
La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHSTr40Se7k&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=16
- 65.
BAV, lat 3793, fol. 99v.
- 66.
La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eTX-6v2fiw&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=17
- 67.
La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3sTJJ0RcGk&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=18
- 68.
La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwHTvUJsmB8&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=20
- 69.
La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4un0OSNUSQ&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=21
- 70.
La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN9DU59huyc&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=25
- 71.
La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJODKHZ3f5g&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=26
- 72.
Immanuello Romano, L’Inferno e Il Paradiso, ed. Giorgio Battistoni; Giorgio Battistoni, Verona, ‘Il Libro della Scala, Dante Alighieri, La Commedia, e Immanuello Romano, L’Inferno e il Paradiso’, The City and the Book International Conference II, The Manuscript, The Illumination, Accademia delle Arte del Disegno, Via Orsanmichele 4, Florence, 4–7 September 2002, http://www.florin.ms/beth3.html
- 73.
La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5hx9Glbt1k&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=32
- 74.
La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93dVA8zy7Jg&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=33
- 75.
La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49RShu1A_3Q&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=11
- 76.
La Musica della Commedia, Ensemble San Felice di Federico Bardazzi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR3XJAOSgtA&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=40
- 77.
Arnolfo alle origini del Rinascimento fiorentino, ed. Enrica Neri Lusanna, pp. 260–261. This is an instance where sculpture, known by Dante, explains his lyric and its music, sight, sound, and touch. Orcagna’s tabernacle in 30. Orsanmichele similarly gives the Dormition of the Virgin, a scene the Master of the Dominican Effigies, connected with Francesco da Barberino, illustrated in an Impruneta manuscript.
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Bolton Holloway, J. (2024). Chapter 6: Dante’s Theater, Dante’s Music. In: Dante and His Circle. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44093-9_6
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