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Dante's Divine Comedy, a Pre-Renaissance Classic

© Anika Scott

Imagine a Hollywood version of Dante's Inferno: The opening credits fade into the dark wood where the poet flees from a lion, leopard and she-wolf. He encounters the ghost of the Roman poet Virgil, who reveals that Dante has been called by the angelic Beatrice - Dante's youthful love in heaven-to travel the circles of hell. They descend into the pit, pass where the virtuous pagans dwell (Virgil's home), and progress through scenes of violence narrated by souls reeping their just rewards. Lovers battered about by storms, heretics in burning tombs, suicides in the shape of poisonous trees eaten by harpies, and at the end of the descent, a 3-headed Lucifer whose teeth crunch the traitors Judas Iscariot, Brutus and Cassius.

That's drama. It's also allegory, in which things like the lion and she-wolf have symbolic meanings. The trilogy of the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso that make up the Commedia, has fascinated artists and scholars for 700 years. It has influenced poets as diverse as Chaucer and T.S. Eliot. Scholars have tried to understand the richness of this poetic work, its political opinions and predictions, its cosmology, its tough terza rima (triple rhyme) in the original Italian.

The Divine Comedy is one of those rare works of genius that reflect the times in which they were written, but also reveal something entirely new. By dates alone, Dante and his work sprang from the Middle Ages. But Paolo Milano, who edited a 1947 English translation of the work, argued that calling the Divine Comedy "medieval" is misleading.

"Dante's contribution to poetry is parallel to his friend Giotto's in painting. They do not perfect a dying art; they cross the threshold onto a new one. And the cultural temper of their age is well defined in the term "pre-Renaissance."

In a contrary view, Norman F. Cantor in his 1994 edition of "The Medieval Reader" said Dante illustrated retromedievalism, a refinement of the topics and traits that were authentically medieval: aristocratic heroism, hierarchic authority and middle class sentimentality.

Poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) spent half his life embroiled in Florentine and Italian political debates, centered especially around the conflict between the Guelfs and Ghibellines. The Guelfs supported the popes and fought the influence of the Holy Roman Empire in Italian affairs. The Ghibellines favored the imperial presense on the peninsula. Florence had a particular interest in this clash because right around Dante's birth, the city expelled the feudal (traditionally Ghibelline) lords and established a Guelf-backed republic. The faction-loving republican Florentines, however, soon split into opposing forces known as the Blacks and the Whites. Mixed in with Florentine family rivalries, this new split in the Guelf party was essentially between the Blacks who favored dealing with the popes to gain power, and the Whites who wanted nothing to do with the empire or the church. Dante was a White. When the White party was defeated, Dante was expelled from Florence and soon banned for life. A decree declared if he was found in the territories of Florence, he would be burned alive. He died still in exile 20 years later.