Who is Dante Alighieri?

Durante “Dante” Alighieri

The greatest Italian poet and

one of the most important

writers in Europian Literature.

was born Durante Alighieri in

Florence, Italy in 1265

In his youth, Dante studied many

subjects, including Tuscan poetry,

painting, and music. He later turned

his attention to philosophy.

He is best known for the epic

poem Commedia and later named

La Divina Commedia.

Commedia was completed just before

the poet’s death. He probably started to

write it in 1307. The Purgatorio was

composed in Verona, where he stayed

more or less continuosly from late 1312 to

mid-1318. In Ravenna, he wrote the final

phases of the Paradiso. By the time the

first two parts of the Comedy had

been sent in circulation, Dante

was being acclaimed

through much of

Tuscany as its greatest

poet.

Dante is credited with “terza

rima”, composed of tercets

woven into a linked rhyme

scheme, and chose to end each

canto of the The Divine Comedy

with a single line that completes

the rhyme scheme with the

end-word of the second line of

the preceding tercet.

The Middle Ages

It began with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and

merged into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery.

It lasted from the 5th to the 15th century.

The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional

divisions of Western history: Antiquity, Medieval period, and

Modern Period.

Birth of an Idea

Starting around the 14th century, European

thinkers, writers and artists began to look

back and celebrate the art and culture of

ancient Greece and Rome. Accordingly, they

dismissed the period after the fall of Rome as

a “Middle” or even “Dark” age in which no

scientific accomplishments had been made,

no great art produced, no great leaders born.

After the fall of Rome, no

single state or government

united the people who lived on

the European continent.

Instead, the Catholic Church

became the most powerful

institution of the medieval

period.

The Catholic Church

Meanwhile, the Islamic world

was growing larger and more

powerful. After the prophet

Muhammad’s death in 632 CE,

Muslim armies conquered large

parts of the Middle East, uniting

them under the rule of a single

caliph. At its height, the

medieval Islamic world was

more than three times bigger than all of Christendom.

The Rise of Islam

The Crusades

Towards the end of the 11th century,

the Catholic Church began to

authorize military expeditions, or

Crusades, to expel Muslim “infidels” from the Holy Land.

Crusaders, who wore red crosses

on their coats to advertise their

status, believed that their service

would guarantee the remission of

their sins and ensure that they could

spend all eternity in Heaven.

Art and Architecture

Another way to show devotion to

the Church was to build grand

cathedrals and other

ecclesiastical structures such as

monasteries. Cathedrals were the

largest buildings in medieval

Europe, and they could be found

at the center of towns and cities

across the continent.

Between the 10th and 13th

centuries, most European

cathedrals were built in the

Romanesque style. Romanesque

cathedrals are solid and

substantial; they have rounded

masonry arches and barrel vaults

supporting the roof, thick stone

walls and few windows.

Around 1200, church builders began to

embrace a new architectural style,

known as the Gothic. In contrast to

heavy Romanesque buildings, Gothic

architecture seems to be almost

weightless. Medieval religious art took

other forms as well. Frescoes and

mosaics decorated church interiors, and

artists painted devotional images of the

Virgin Mary, Jesus and the Saints.

Also, before the invention of the printing press in the

15th century, even books were works of art. Craftsmen

in monasteries (and later in universities) created

illuminated manuscripts: handmade sacred and

secular books with colored illustrations, gold and

silver lettering and other adornments. In the 12th

century, urban booksellers began to market smaller

illuminated manuscripts, like books of hours, psalters

and other prayer books, to wealthy individuals.

Economics and Society

In Medieval Europe, rural life was governed by a

system scholars call “feudalism.” In a feudal society,

the king granted large pieces of land called fiefs to

nobleman and bishops.

Landless peasants known as serfs did most of the

work on the fiefs: They planted and harvested crops

and gave most of the produce to the landowner. In

exchange for their labor, they were allowed to live on

the land. They were also promised protection in case

of enemy invasion.

During the 11th century, however, feudal life began to

change. Agricultural innovations such as the heavy plow

and three-field crop rotation made farming more efficient

and productive, so fewer farm workers were needed. As

a result, more and more people were drawn to towns

and cities.

The very ugly Minos pauses his

perpetual dissing of sinners long

enough to warn Dante and Virgil

to be careful whom they trust.

Virgil shoots back with a "God

protects us" line, but we can see

right through him. He’s as scared

as Dante.

On that note, they come to the

edge of a cliff and see a

hurricane-strength whirlwind

buffeting the souls of the

Lustful. Dante compares them to

birds like starlings, cranes, and

doves because of their helplessness

against the wind and because of

the cacophonous cries they emit.

Dante asks Virgil to identify some of the individual

souls to him, and included there are the following:

Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Paris,

Tristan.

Star-struck by such names, Dante feels sorry for

them and calls out to a couple, wanting to talk to

them.

They approach them and the female soul speaks.

She’s really polite and talks in a highfalutin’ style, as

if she’s stuck in the rhetoric of courtly love. She

thanks Dante for being so kind as to speak nicely to

her, then tells her story.

She’s Francesca da Rimini, an

Italian (from Ravenna) and, in

terms of blood, she is

something like a princess.

During her life, she was forced

into a loveless political marriage

with a guy called Gianciotto

Malatesta.

However, she fell in love

with her husband’s

younger brother Paolo

and had an affair with

him.

Dante is so moved by the unfairness

of it all that he starts crying. He

tends to do this a lot. And he asks

how exactly she fell in love.

Francesca says that one sunny day,

she and Paolo were innocently

reading a book. But not just any

book. This one portrayed the knight

Lancelot being hopelessly smitten by

Queen Guinevere. When they get to

the part where Lancelot kisses

Arthur’s queen, Paolo and Francesca

followed suit and shared a passionate

kiss.

Francesca blames the book for

her sin, calling it a Gallehault

(the character in Arthurian

legend who encourages

Lancelot in his forbidden affair

with Guinevere).

As Francesca concludes her

story, her soul mate Paolo

bawls his eyes out.

Now Paolo and Francesca are

doomed to spend eternity in

the Second Circle of Hell.

Overcome with pity, Dante

faints again.

The true beginning of Hell is in the second circle. It is where the true punishments of Hell begins. Circle II is the circle of carnal lust. This is where Minos judges the sinners must go.

This canto begins in the descriptions of the circles devoted to the sins of incontinence: the sins of the appetite, the sins of self-indulgence, and the sins of passion.

Dante draws the character of Minos both fromthe Aeneid and from ancient mythology, just ashe takes the three-headed dog Cerberus fromGreek stories of the afterlife.

By placing pagan Gods and monsters in anotherwise Christian model of the afterlife, Danteonce again demonstrates his tendency to mixvastly different religious and mythologicaltraditions. It indicates the extent to whichmythological and literary sources share space inDante’s imagination with religious andtheological sources.

Among those whom Dante sees in Circle IIare people such as Cleopatra, Dido, andHelen. Some of these women, besides beingadulteresses, have also committed suicide.

Therefore, the question immediately arisesas to why they are not deeper down in Hellin the circle reserved for suicides. Rememberthat in Dante's Hell, a person is judged byhis own standards, that is, by the standardsof the society in which he lived.

Dante thought of Hell as a place where thesinner deliberately chose his or her sin andfailed to repent. This is particularly true of thelower circles, which include malice and fraud.

Francesca is passionate, certainly capable ofsin, and certainly guilty of sin, but sherepresents the woman whose only concern isfor the man she loves, not her immortal soul.She found her only happiness, and now hermisery, in Paolo's love. Her love was herheaven; it is now her hell.

Dante the poet intends to assert the existence of anobjectively just moral universe; yet he also imbuesPaolo and Francesca with great human feeling, andthe sensual language and romantic style.

Dante’s own life was marked by a deep love, hislove for Beatrice. Still, his damnation of the loverssuggests a moral repudiation of his ownbiographical and poetic past. In a certain sense, TheDivine Comedy as a whole can be read as Dante’sattempt to transpose his earthly love for Beatriceonto a spiritual, Christian, morally perfect plane.

In Hell, sinners retain all those qualities for whichthey were damned, and they remain the samethroughout eternity.

Consequently, as Francesca loved Paolo in thehuman world, throughout eternity she will love himin Hell. But, the lovers are damned because they willnot change, and because they will never cease tolove, they can never be redeemed.

Dante represents this fact metaphorically by placingPaolo close to Francesca and by having the two ofthem being buffeted about together through thiscircle of Hell for eternity.

By reading the story of Francesca, one can perhapsunderstand better the intellectual basis by whichDante depicts the other sins in Hell. He chooses acharacter that represents a sin; he then expressespoetically the person who committed the sin.

Francesca is not perhaps truly representative of thesin of this circle, and "carnal lust" seems a harshterm for her feelings, but Dante chose her story tomake his point: The sin in Circle II is a sin ofincontinence, weakness of will, and falling fromgrace through inaction of conscience. Many timesin Hell, Dante responds sympathetically or withpity to some of these lost souls.

This canto clearly illustrates the difference inthe two Persona: Dante the Pilgrim andDante the Poet.

Dante the Pilgrim weeps and suffers withthose who are suffering their punishments.He reacts to Francesca's love for Paolo, herhorrible betrayal, and her punishment sostrongly that he faints.

Yet it is Dante the Poet who put her in Hell.

Dante

Virgil

Paolo and francesca

Minos

SymbolsA person, object, action, place or event that in addition to its literal or denotative meaning suggests a more complex meaning or range of meanings.

The entire story of The Divine

Comedy itself, symbolizing the

spiritual quest of human life.

Minos

Acts like a judge in Canto V.

The poem shows that our life is a journey. One man must go through his journey and overcome obstacles to achieve the ultimate goal with the Will of God.

this poem focuses mainly on life as a spiritual journey. The obstacles the traveler must overcome are temptation and sin.

Even if a person commit mistakes, he is not lost.

The soul will be restored when one contrite sincerely and repent for all the sin he/she had done. With that, the soul is eligible for entrance into heaven.

Dante creates an imaginative correspondence between a soul’s sin on Earth and the punishment he or she receives in Hell.