by A. N. Wilson
VII LATE TEENS – THE DREAM
1 Gianfranco Contini (ed.), Opere Minori : Il Fiore e Il ditto d’Amore, Dante Alighieri, vol. 1, part 2, Milan, 1995, pp. 555–63.
2 We are lucky in the early twenty-first century to have two superb, learned editions, with parallel Italian text and translations – see A Translation of Dante’s Il Fiore (‘The Flower’) by John Took, Lewiston and Lampeter, 2004, and The Fiore and the Detto d’Amore, tr. with notes Santa Casciani and Christopher Kleinhenz, Notre Dame, 2000.
3 See Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1941.
4 The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman, 3rd edn, London, 1947, p. 305.
5 Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, tr. Montgomery Belgion, Princeton, 1986, p. 34, quoting from Claude Fauriel, Histoire de la poésie provençale, Paris, 1846, vol. 1, p. 512.
6 De Rougemont, p. 42.
7 De Rougemont, p. 51.
8 John C. Barnes and Jennifer Petrie (eds.), Dante and His Literary Precursors: Twelve Essays, Dublin, c.2007, p. 14.
9 De Rougemont, p. 7.
10 Mircea Eliade, Techniques du Yoga, Paris, Gallimard, 1948, quoted de Rougemont, p. 115.
11 Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, vol. 1, Edinburgh, 1908–26, p. 279.
12 Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, p. 280.
13 Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition, vol. 1, New York, 1906, p. 235.
14 Lea, vol. 1, pp. 551–3.
15 J. N. Stephens, ‘Heresy in Medieval and Renaissance Florence’, Past and Present, Oxford, 54, 1972, p. 28.
16 Stephens, p. 31.
17 Par. IX.94.
18 Purg. XXVI.
19 Toynbee, Dante Dictionary, p. 60.
20 See Gertrude Leigh, New Light on the Youth of Dante, London, 1929, for the notion that the poems of Il Fiore are coded heresy.
21 Ragg, p. 78.
22 Antonetti, p. 68.
23 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Oxford, 1944, p. 81.
VIII A POET’S APPRENTICESHIP
1 Guido Cavalcanti’s dates. Robert Pogue Harrison says ‘Six or seven years older than Dante’, The Body of Beatrice, Baltimore and London, 1988, p. 83.
2 Compagni, p. 26.
3 For an especially ingenious development of this reading of Shakespeare’s life, see Ungentle Shakespeare by Katherine Duncan-Jones, London, 2001.
4 ‘Dante da Maiano’s interpretation of Dante’s Vision’ in New Life, tr. J. G. Nichols, London, 2003, p. 79.
5 Guido Cavalcanti, Complete Poems, tr. Anthony Mortimer, London, 2010.
6 The Early Italian Poets, from Ciullo d’Alcamo to Dante Alighieri, 1100–1200–1300, in the original metres together with Dante’s Vita Nuova, tr. D. G. Rossetti, London, n.d., p. 253.
7 Guido Cavalcanti: The Complete Poems, tr. Marc A. Cirigliano, New York, 1992, p. 99.
8 Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot, London, 1954, p. 149.
9 Ibid.
10 Boccaccio, Decameron VI, 9, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, vol. 4, Milan, 1976, p. 564.
11 Antonio Gagliardi, Guido Cavalcanti e Dante: Una questione d’amore, Catanzaro, 1992, p. 127.
12 Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, vol.2 Courtly and Romantic, Chicago and London, 1984, pp. 143–4.
13 So Singer, who is under the impression that the picture (una figura) is a statue.
14 Guido Cavalcanti, tr. Cirigliano, p. 125.
15 Bruno Nardi, Dante e la cultura medievale, Bari, 1990, p. 54. See also G. Tanturli, ‘Guido Cavalcanti contro Dante’ in Le Tradizione del testo. Studi di Letteratura Italiana offerto a Domenico de Robertis, ed. F. Gavezzeni and G. Gorni, Milan and Naples, 1993, p. 3.
16 Vita Nuova, tr. Musa, p. 32.
17 The exact date of Cavalcanti’s birth is unknown.
IX THE WARRIOR WHO FOUGHT AT CAMPALDINO
1 Richard Thayer Holbrook, Portraits of Dante, from Giotto to Raffael, London and Boston, 1921, p. 244.
2 For most of what follows, in the account of the Battle of Campaldino, I rely on the account of Federico Canaccini in Campaldino, 11 giugno 1289, Terni, 2006.
X DEATH OF BEATRICE
1 The Vita Nuova and Canzoniere of Dante Alighieri, tr. Thomas Okey and Philip H. Wicksteed, Temple Classics, London, 1924, pp. 111, 338.
2 Vincent Foster Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism, New York, 1938, p. 109.
3 Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante, London, 1943, p. 35.
XI THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY
1 Bemrose, p. 111.
2 Quoted by Williams, The Figure of Beatrice, p. 37 – but his book contains no reference notes.
3 An articulate modern doubter is Carl Stange (Beatrice in Dantes Jugenddichtung, Göttingen, 1959), who points out that Boccaccio, our only source for identifying the Beatrice-figure in Dante’s poems with the historical figure of Beatrice Portinari, got his information by talking to various members of the Portinari clan in 1373, i.e. a good hundred years after Beatrice was born.
4 Unless otherwise stated, I owe my knowledge of Dante’s astronomy to the superb Dante and the Early Astronomers by M. A. Orr, a great work of scholarship, first published in 1913, but republished in 1956 in slightly revised form by the doyenne of modern Dante scholarship, Barbara Reynolds. Also of help has been the relevant chapter (‘The Heavens’) in C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image, Cambridge, 1964, his posthumously published Cambridge lectures, and Simek, Heaven and Earth in the Middle Ages.
5 See Orr, p. 131.
6 See David Levering Lewis, God’s Crucible, Islam and the Making of Europe, 570–1215, New York, 2008, p. 370.
7 Quoted by Dante in De Monarchia II, vii. The passage is from the Aeneid VI.
8 His calculation was that when the moon is half full, the angle sun–moon–earth is a right-angle and if the angle sun–moon–earth is measured by pointing the astrolabe first to the sun and then to the moon, the third angle, at the sun, may be computed, and the ratio sun–earth and moon–earth can be calculated. The methodology is perfect; but a very small error in calculating the angle at the sun would cause a miscalculation of the distance by millions of miles. Aristarchus made the angle at earth 87 degrees instead of 89 degrees 50, and this gives the sun a distance of about nineteen times as far away as the moon as opposed to 400 times, which is the true value.
9 Orr, p. 101.
10 Lewis, p. 98.
11 Lewis, p. 99.
12 Purg. VI.100; XX.13–14; XXXIII.40–45.
13 The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 2nd edn, Harlow, 1987, vol. 1, p. 618.
14 Antonio Gagliardi, La tragedia intellettuale di Dante, Catanzaro, 1994.
15 Lewis, p. 75.
16 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, London, 1973, I. iv.73.
17 Boethius, I.iv.90.
18 Boethius, II.i.60.
19 Kenelm Foster, The Two Dantes and Other Studies, London, 1977.
20 Francis secured approval for his order from Pope Innocent III in 1209–10 and the order was finally organized into provinces in 1217.
21 E. L. Mascall, He Who Is. A Study of Traditional Theism, London, 1943, p. 7.
22 Auberon Waugh, ‘Must A. N. Wilson suffer the eternal torment of hell fire?’, Spectator, 27 July 1985.
23 Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World: Europe 1100–1350, tr. Janet Sondheimer, London, 1962 (1990 reprint), p. 213.
24 The best account in English which I have read of his famous Five Ways is Mascall’s He Who Is. A Study of Traditional Theism.
25 Herbert McCabe, On Aquinas, London, 2008, pp. 3–4.
26 Purg. XX. 69; Villani, tr. Selfe, p. 218.
27 Heer, p. 219.
28 Quoted Abbé Hippolyte Geyraud, L’Anti-Sémitisme de St Thomas d’Aquin, Paris, 1896, p. 85.
29 John Y. B. Hood, Aquinas and the Jews, Philadelphia, 1995, p. 92.
30 Etienne Gilson, Le Thomisme, tr. Edward Bullough,
Cambridge, 1924, p. 7.
31 McCabe, p. 1.
32 William Anderson, Dante the Maker, London, Boston and Henley, 1980, p. 81.
33 New Revised Standard Version.
34 Summa theologiae 2a2ae, 175, 1.
35 Summa theologiae 1a, 12, 11.
36 Summa theologiae 1a, 12, 1.
37 Summa theologiae vol. VI, 1a1, p. 124. The words are those of Thomas Gilby OP.
38 James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, Oxford, 1957, p. 333.
39 Summa contra gentiles ad litt. XII. PL 34, 458.
40 See the excellent analyses by Robert Pogue Harrison in his essay on the Vita Nuova in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. Jacoff, and in his book The Body of Beatrice.
XII THE DARK WOOD
1 Alexander Passerin D’Entrèves, The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought, London, 1939, p. 51.
2 D’Entrèves, p. 53.
3 The date of the treatise De Monarchia is one of the battlefields of Dante scholarship.
4 Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450, Cambridge, 1992, p. 96, quoted by Prue Shaw in her Introduction to her translation of Monarchy, Cambridge, 1996, p. xi.
5 Notably, Boccaccio.
6 In the allegorical method of reading the planets, the heavenly bodies possess qualities associated with the seven stages of learning in the Liberal Arts. The three planets closest to earth represent the Trivium, the subjects of grammar (the moon), dialectic (Mercury) and rhetoric (Venus). After this come the four subjects of the Quadrivium – arithmetic (the sun), music (Mars), geometry (Jupiter) and astrology/astronomy (Saturn).
7 Vernon, Readings on the Paradiso, vol. 1, London, 1909, p. 255.
8 Najemy, p. 80.
9 For all above, and for all other details unless mentioned, Bemrose, pp. 37–63.
10 Catherine Keen, Dante and the City, Stroud, 2003, p. 33.
11 Vita Nuova.
12 Harrison, The Body of Beatrice, pp. 81–2.
13 Cavalcanti, Complete Poems, tr. Mortimer, p. 71.
14 Tr. Mortimer, p. 73.
15 Tr. Mortimer, p. 81.
16 Tr. Mortimer, p. 81.
17 Guido Cavalcanti, tr. Cirigliano, p. 91.
18 The canzone beginning ‘Amor da cché convien pur ch’ io mi doglia’, where he imagines the poem returning to Florence by the waters of the Arno and saying, ‘Non vi può fare il mio fattor più Guerra’ – ‘My maker can no longer make war on you’.
19 Bemrose, pp. 65–6.
20 Augustus J. Hare, Days Near Rome, London, 1875, p. 263.
21 Ibid.
XIII DANTE AND THE PAINTED WORD. GIOTTO AT PADUA
1 Antonio Pucci states that Giotto was seventy at his death in 1337.
2 Quoted Corrado Gizzi, Giotto e Dante, Milan, 2001, p. 31.
3 Gizzi, p. 104.
4 Quoted Edmund G. Gardner, Dante and the Mystics, London, 1912, p. 30.
5 Thomas of Celano, Analecta Franciscana, quoted Ragg, p. 118.
6 Rossetti, The Early Italian Poets, pp. 351–2.
7 Rona Goffen, Spirituality in Conflict: Saint Francis and Giotto’s Bardi Chapel, University Park and London, 1988, p.127.
8 J. K. Hyde, Padua in the Age of Dante, Manchester and New York, 1966, p.40.
9 Hyde, p. 188.
10 Hyde.
11 Hyde, p. 190.
12 Ragg, p. 291.
13 Ragg, p. 294.
14 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1, London, 2001, p. 80.
15 Ragg, p. 294.
16 Williams, p. 11.
17 Millard Meiss et al., The Great Age of Fresco: Giotto to Pontormo, New York, 1968, p. 60.
18 John Ruskin, Praeterita, London, 2005, p.310.
19 Amédée Margerie, quoted Théodore Delmont, Dante et la France, Revue de Lille, 1901, pp. 875–7.
20 Villani, tr. Selfe, p. 360.
21 Leslie Stephen, History of Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols., London, 1876, vol. 1, p. 15.
22 Benvenuto, quoted Vernon, Inferno, vol. 1, p. 401.
23 Epitaph for a gentleman falling off his horse from William Camden’s Remains Concerning Britain, 1605, quoted in Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Elizabeth Knowles, Oxford, 2004, p. 310.
XIV THE COMMON TONGUE
1 The calculation is that of the linguist Tullio De Mauro, Storia linguistica dell’ Italia unita, Bari, 1963, p. 135.
2 Quoted Alison Milbank, Dante and the Victorians, Manchester, 1998, p. 91.
3 Quoted Milbank, p. 59.
4 J. A. Symonds, ‘Dante’, Cornhill Magazine, XII, July 1865, p. 244.
5 Domenico Venturini, Dante Alighieri e Benito Mussolini, Rome, p.5.
6 Venturini, p.22.
7 Is it? It would seem to be.
8 Roger Wright, A Sociophilological Study of Late Latin, Turnhout, 2002, p. 154.
9 Rebecca Posner, ‘Latin or Romance (again!): change or genesis’ in papers from The 10th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, ed. J. Van Marle, Amsterdam, 1993, pp. 265–79.
10 Wright, p. 155.
11 Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, London, 1953, p. 355.
12 Venturini, p. 51.
13 Bemrose, p. 67.
XV MEDIEVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY
1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, ed. Pierre Richard, 18th edn, Paris, 1952, p. 17, my translation.
2 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton, 1957, p. 307.
3 ‘Philippe de Novare veut, à travers l’exemple d’une vie entière, nous montrer un miroir tendu à chacun’, quoted Marie-Geneviève Grossel, ‘Le Moi dans les Mémoires de Philippe de Novare’, in Danielle Buschinger and Wolfgang Spiewok, Die Autobiographie im Mittelalter, Greifswald, 1995, p. 51.
4 Gardner, Dante and the Mystics, p. 51.
5 Gardner, The Cell of Self-Knowledge, Seven Early English Mystical Treatises edited with an Introduction and Index by Edmund G. Gardner, London, 1911, p. xvii.
6 Gardner, Dante and the Mystics, p. 60.
7 Ibid.
8 Augustine, Confessions IX.x – I have adapted the William Watts translation in the Loeb Classical Library edition. See also Gardner, Dante and the Mystics, from whom I adopt the distinction between two ways of mysticism.
9 Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum, VII.9.PL 2, 20.
10 For example, Gagliardi in Ulisse e Sigieri, Catanzaro, 1992, and La tragedia intellettuale di Dante.
11 Confessions X.35.
12 Summa theologiae 2a2ae, 166, 2.
XVI DANTE IN LOVE WITH A WOMAN IN CASENTINO
1 Vernon, Paradiso, vol. 1, p. 88.
2 The Dante experts, naturally, differ about almost every aspect of his work. Compare the views of Stephen Bemrose (A New Life of Dante, p. 110) – ‘never before in Italian literature had there been so forceful a projection of the terrifying power of sensual love’ – and of H. S. Vere-Hodge in his Clarendon Press edition of the Odes of Dante (Oxford, 1963) – ‘This Ode is a piece of display, not a poem of genuine feeling’ (p. 235).
3 Boccaccio, Life of Dante, tr. Nichols, p. 59.
4 Subject of Browning’s strange early poem of which Tennyson said he only understood two lines, the first and the last, and they were both lies.
5 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur, London, 1966, p. 108.
6 Bemrose, p. 10.
7 Le Goff, p. 287.
8 Le Goff, p.268.
9 Le Goff, p. 269.
10 Le Goff, p. 334.
11 Vernon, Inferno, vol. 2, p. 428.
12 Vernon, Inferno, vol. 2, p. 505. 13 Vernon, Inferno, vol. 2, p. 37.
XVII CROWN IMPERIAL 1310–13
1 Ragg, p. 79.
2 Villani, tr. Selfe, p. 562.
3 Ragg, p. 128.
4 Villani, tr. Selfe, p. 453.
5 Gustav Sommerfeldt, Die Romfahrt Kaiser Heinrichs VII, 1310–1313, Köningsberg, 1888, p. 120.
6 Villani, tr. Selfe, p. 563.
7 Schevill, p. 192.
8 Pe
ter Herde, ‘From Adolf of Nassau to Lewis of Bavaria’ in Michael Jones (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume VI, 1300–1415, Cambridge, 2000, p.537.
9 Schevill, p. 195.
10 The Early Lives of Dante, tr. Wicksteed, pp. 128–9.
11 Ibid.
12 Both quoted in Le Goff, p. 149.
XVIII DANTE IN LOVE AGAIN WITH BEATRICE
1 Boccaccio, Life of Dante, tr. Nichols, p. 29.
2 Toynbee, Dante Dictionary, p. 132.
3 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Writings, ed. Jan Marsh, London, 1999, p. 208.
4 From Aquinas’s hymn Pange Lingua, Gloriosi: ‘Let faith make good the deficiency of the senses’.
XIX RAVENNA AND VENICE
1 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, London, 1994, vol. 2, p. 140.
2 Ibid.
3 Boethius, (Loeb) Introduction by H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand, p. xii.
4 Boccaccio, Life of Dante, tr. Nichols, p. 12.
5 Quoted Ragg, p. 342.
6 Boccaccio, Life of Dante, tr. Nichols, p. 29.
7 Moore’s Oxford Dante, Ioannes de Virgilio Danti Alagerii, 1903, l.44, p. 187.
8 Wicksteed, Temple Classics, p. 379.
9 Bemrose, p. 215.
10 Quoted Ragg, p. 351.
11 Quoted Bemrose, p. 218.
12 Boccaccio, Life of Dante, tr. Nichols, p. 32.
13 Augustus J. Hare, Cities of Central Italy, London, 1884, vol. 2, p. 29.
XX IN PARADISUM
1 Boccaccio, Life of Dante, XIV.
2 From Aquinas’s hymn Pange Lingua, Gloriosi.
3 F. J. E. Raby, The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse, Oxford, 1959, p. 196.
4 Lea, vol. 1, p. 306.
5 Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, London and New York, 1963, vol. 1, p. 212.
6 Graef, vol. 1, p. 237.
7 Graef, vol. 1, p. 235.
8 Pope Innocent III specifically condemned the doctrine in his Sermon XII on the Feast of the Purification of the BVM, see Lea, vol. 1, p. 596.
