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Dante

Chapter 24: FOOTNOTES:
By Edmund G. Gardner
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About This Book

A concise, scholarly primer that situates the poet within his political and cultural milieu and summarizes his life, political activity, and long exile. It surveys the shorter vernacular poems and lyrical pieces, outlines the author’s Latin treatises and correspondence, and offers a structured reading of the three-part epic, discussing its moral, allegorical, and political dimensions in Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Chapters combine biographical narrative, textual commentary, and interpretive notes, while bibliographical appendices, diagrams, and indexes guide further study; the volume presents itself as a revision that balances allegorical readings with the poet’s symbolic national role.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] In the recently discovered codex at Berlin—the earliest of the four extant MSS.—the work is entitled Rectorica Dantis (“The Rhetoric of Dante”), which would associate it with the similarly named treatises of the masters of the ars dictandi, such as Boncompagno da Signa, who wrote a Rhetorica novissima.

[20] This southern idiom (nostrum ydioma, i. 10)—from which Dante apparently regards both classical Latin and the modern romance languages derived—would be what we now call Vulgar Latin; but he restricts the phrase vulgare latinum (or latium) to Italian, which—when discussing the rival claims of the three vernaculars to pre-eminence—he rightly recognises to be closest to classical Latin.

[21] Equalium stantiarum sine responsorio ad unam sententiam tragica coniugatio (ii. 8). The sine responsorio distinguishes the true canzone, canzone distesa, from the ballata, canzone a ballo, in which the ripresa of from two to four lines was repeated after each stanza as well as sung as a prelude to the whole. Dante’s example is his own Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore, the poem which began “le nove rime” (Purg. xxiv. 49-51). The tragica coniugatio is most nearly realised in English poetry by the ode, while the closest counterpart to the canzone with stanzas divisible into metrical periods is offered by Spenser’s Epithalamion. The sestina has been employed by English poets from the Elizabethans to Swinburne and Rudyard Kipling.

[22] Cipolla showed that the matter of the first two books more directly controverts the anti-imperialist and anti-Roman arguments of the French political writers of the beginning of the fourteenth century—writers like the Dominican, John of Paris. But these or similar views were now being adduced by Robert of Naples and supported by Clement V.

[23] These two ends are the two cities—the earthly and the heavenly—of St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei; but the earthly city, blessedness of this life, is more significant for Dante than it was for Augustine. Felicity in peace and freedom is in some sort man’s right: Che è quello per che esso è nato (Conv. iv. 4).

[24] For the whole history of the Letters, the reader is referred to Dr. Paget Toynbee’s introduction, Dantis Alagherii Epistolae, Oxford, 1920.

[25] Torraca would assign it to 1311.

[26] Polyphemus, as Biscaro has shown, is most probably Fulcieri da Calboli, the ferocious podestà of Florence in 1303, who had been elected Captain of the People at Bologna for the first six months of 1321 (his predecessor having died in office). Cf. Ecl. ii. (iv.) 76-83 with Purg. xiv. 58-66. See Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, lxxxi. p. 128. Others have taken the person meant as Robert of Naples, or, with Ricci, a kinsman of Venedico Caccianemico whom Dante had covered with infamy in Inf. xviii.

[27] “This illustrious head, for which the Pruner is already hastening to select unwithering leaves from the noble laurel,” or “to decree an everlasting garland in the divine justice,” according to whether the Virgin is taken as Daphne or Astraea.