Dante between Hope and Despair: The Tradition of ... · Ronald L. Martinez Dante between Hope and...

Ronald L. Martinez

Dante between Hopeand Despair: The Tradition

of Lamentationsin the Divine Comedy

During the interfaith service conducted at the WashingtonCathedral September , , Rabbi Joshua Haberman read versesfrom the book of Lamentations, traditionally attributed to theprophet Jeremiah. As the book laments the fall of Jerusalem to Neb-uchadnezzar in b.c., its choice as a text after September washighly pertinent; chapter three, from which Rabbi Haberman’sexcerpts were taken, offers some of the few expressions of hope ina book that primarily expresses grief. In addition to the verses readon that occasion, book three includes a cluster of sentiments thathave been widely shared in the United States as the nation has grap-pled with the meaning of the disaster. Americans have felt dismay atthe savage blow inflicted by shadowy enemies, and experienced theproblematic reflex desiring that vindication, even revenge, which aGod involved in history might be entreated to compass on behalf ofthose believing in Him; but they have also engaged in anguishedspeculation on why such a fell stroke was visited upon the nation,and in some few cases reflected on where our own responsibilitiesmight lie in provoking such wrath. The text of Lamentations

l o g o s 5 : 3 s u m m e r 2 0 0 2

02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 45

strikes all these notes: astonishment at the magnitude of the losses(v. –), penitential sorrow (v. ), a mixture of doubt that Godmay have turned away his face (v. –) with confidence that divineassistance is forthcoming (vv. –, ), that vindication will besecured (v. ). Such a use of the text of Lamentations to reflect, fil-ter, and assuage catastrophe has of course a long history; in thispaper I will discuss the use made of Lamentations by Dante Alighieri,poet and citizen of Florence. Of the special fitness of Dante for par-ticipating in this history there can be little doubt. Of the major longpoems of the Western traditions Dante’s Comedy is the most imme-diately and concretely embedded in the historical context thataccompanied its composition; for this reason, Dante is perhaps theforemost poet in the West of a history that is lived and understoodas a contest in progress, an agon in the Greek sense, through whicha providential order struggles to assert itself.

In Jewish worship, the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar andthe Babylonians—as well as the destruction of the city and templeby the Roman emperor Titus, in A.D.—are collectively lament-ed on the th of Ab, corresponding to a date in late July or Auguston the Gregorian calendar. This was, according to the Talmud, theanniversary of both destructions of the Temple and the city.1 InDante’s day, Christians also commemorated the fall of Jerusalem: theth or th Sunday after Pentecost was “Destruction of JerusalemSunday,” but was an occasion of mourning only in a very qualifiedsense, as for medieval Christians the destruction of Jerusalem by theRoman legions was held to be divine vengeance for the crucifixionof Christ by the Jews of Jerusalem, a view Dante explicitly shared.2

But a liturgy of mourning drawing on Lamentations was prominentin Catholic liturgy of the late thirteenth century, as it is still: this isthe use of chanted extracts from all five chapters of Lamentationsdistributed over the first Nocturns of the Matins office on Thursday,Friday, and Saturday of Holy week.3 In close association with theextinguishing of candles, the service of tenebrae, the chanting of

logos


Lamentations during the deliberately truncated liturgies of theseoffices testifies to the mourning of the congregation for the death ofChrist;4 as rendered liturgically, the extracts also impart a strongpenitential theme, as each concludes with a refrain (adapted fromHosea :) calling on Jerusalem to return to her lord. Anotherimplication of the liturgical use of these extracts is that certain pas-sages, such as Lam. :—“O you who pass by, attend and see, isthere any sorrow like unto my sorrow”—spoken, in the biblicaltext, by the personified city of Jerusalem herself—are, when used asliturgical verses and responses, clearly understood as spoken byChrist on the cross: and indeed in late medieval devotional texts onthe passion this verse is typically ascribed to the crucified Christ.5

In addition to its prominent liturgical use, the book of Lamenta-tions had a rich tradition of commentary; for my purposes, this tra-dition begins with the great Carolingian revival in the ninth centuryand culminates with commentaries by major scholastics of the thir-teenth and early fourteenth centuries—the Dominicans AlbertusMagnus, Thomas Aquinas, Hugh of St. Cher, and the FranciscansJohn Pecham and Peter John Olivi.6 In the more elaborate of thesecommentaries, the ancient and somewhat daunting practice ofuncovering three and even four distinct levels of meaning in thetext of the Bible is applied to explaining the fall of Jerusalem. Thefirst level is historical, and this is manifested in Jerusalem twicebesieged and destroyed, by Nebuchadnezzar and by the RomanEmperor Titus. Another level of meaning, the moral, treatsJerusalem as the human soul, alienated from God and surrounded byhostile enemies (such as the vices, or Satan himself). The greatestinterpretive virtuosity is reserved for the allegorical level, by virtueof which Jerusalem can represent both Christ, the head, and theChurch, the body of the mystical community of the faithful. To givean example of all the possibilities: a line such as Lam. : might betaken as spoken by the church besieged by enemies—persecutors orheretics; or it might be taken as spoken by Christ, suffering on the

lamentations in the


cross; or it might be taken as spoken by the Synagogue, the rejectedfaith community in the medieval Christian view. In this case the alle-gorical and the historical sense would coincide, as the destruction ofthe Temple and a diaspora of the Jewish people did in fact ensueupon the Roman siege of A.D.

And there is a fourth level of meaning that medieval interpretersdiscerned as implied by Lamentations: this is the so-called anagogi-cal meaning, which means that it concerns the transition from thislife to the next. This meaning can be found by expanding the frameof reference and juxtaposing the sorrowful book of Lamentations toits opposite number among poetic texts of the Bible: the Canticle ofCanticles. If, these interpreters reasoned, Lamentations furnishessorrowful dirges suited to life in this “vale of tears,” the nuptial songsof Canticles suitably accompany the joy of restoration, after bodilydeath, to the homeland of heaven. The implication of this view forthe personified Jerusalem is that however desperate her presentcase, she can hope for a future reconciliation with her Spouse—which, in the standard interpretation of the Song of Songs, was ofcourse none other than Christ.7 What is suggestive about this dimen-sion of the meaning of Lamentations is that it generalizes the textinto a theory of all mortal life on pilgrimage toward its final desti-nation: and this generality makes it peculiarly suitable for adaptationto Dante’s poem of a pilgrim on a journey from the sorrows of thepresent life to the joys of heaven; or as it is put in the poem, from thefractious city of Florence, corrupted by pursuit of the almightyflorin, to “a people just and hale” (Paradiso .).

For this and for other reasons that will presently emerge, Dante’sinterest in the text of Lamentations was lifelong. He might well havewished it otherwise, for his uses of the book mark the profound pri-vate and public tragedies of his life. Three examples will graph thistrend. When about thirty years old, Dante wrote the Vita nova, or“New Life,” a prose narrative, including carefully ordered lyricpoems, about the dramatic effects on his life resulting from his

logos

02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM 8

youthful encounter with Beatrice. When Beatrice died on June, Dante marked her death in his book with a citation of Lam.:, “How doth the city sit solitary, she that was full of people; howis the mistress of provinces become as a widow.” The announce-ment is especially dramatic in that it interrupts the composition ofa poem already in progress and reorganizes how the book is puttogether from that point forward: in short, the book is subjected toa shake-up of its arrangement proportional to the impact of Beat-rice’s death on the author.8 Not many years later, probably about, when Dante had been in exile from Florence for several years,he wrote an ode in which the abstract figure of Justice is personifiedas a woman in abject mourning, cast out from the city that hadunjustly condemned the poet and forced him into exile: again thetext of Lamentations nourishes the poet’s inspiration.9 Late in life,in , Dante again turned to the first line of Lamentations tobegin a letter to a group of six Italian cardinals preparing to elect anew pope after the death of Clement V. In this letter, Lam. :announces not the poet’s sorrow for Beatrice, but for the state of theChurch. In Dante found himself contemplating a Rome de-prived of both chief sources of authority, the Holy Roman Emperor—who had died suddenly in when attempting to reassert hisauthority in northern Italy—and the pope, who in the person ofClement V had vacated Rome in and installed himself in Avi-gnon, in southern France, by , sending the Church into whatmany felt was a new Babylonian captivity. Such a Rome, deprived ofboth her spouses, had thus assumed the role of widowed Jerusalem.As Dante puts it in his Latin letter, she was “destitute of both herlights,” and I do not think it forced to see in this phrase the image ofa head—Rome was after all caput mundi, the head of the world—with both its eyes put out.10

Beyond the relevance of Lamentations to a world where, fromDante’s perspective, authority had been tragically and unjustly with-drawn from Rome, there are at least two additional reasons why

lamentations in the


Dante—as a poet, as an admirer of ancient Rome, and as a son of theChurch—might have been interested in representing his experiencethrough the text attributed to Jeremiah. First: as I mentioned earli-er, Lamentations is a series of dirges; in fact, from the Glossa ordinariaof the twelfth-century Renaissance to the Scholastics, the text ofLamentations was presented not just as a collection of sorrowful can-ticles, but as an exhaustive treasury of poetic and rhetorical devicesthat could be used to move an audience to both pity and furiousindignation. These devices were labeled and listed using terminol-ogy straight out of the rhetorical manuals of antiquity, such asCicero’s De inventione: in the examples I gave above from the text, thepersonification, rather prosopopeia of the widow Jerusalem and heraddress, or rather apostrophe of witnesses, are precisely instances ofthese devices.11

The second reason Dante had Lamentations in mind when hebegan to make his reputation as a writer after Beatrice’s death, isthat with the fall of Acre, the last Christian outpost in Palestine, tothe Mamluk Sultan Al-Ashraf in , public laments for Jerusalemand the Holy Land, in the form of papal bulls, royal edicts, propos-als for crusade, crusade excitatoria, and lyric poetry, returned inforce to European discourse.12 Growing up, Dante would haveheard of the short-lived capture of Damietta, in Egypt, by KingLouis IX of France in , and later of the disastrous Eighth Cru-sade, led again by Saint Louis, which culminated with his death atTunis in . It is even possible that Dante associated the firstanniversary of the death of Beatrice, that is, June , with thenews of the fall of Acre, besieged in May and June , althoughnews of its capture could not have reached Italy until some weekslater, even carried by the quickest of Venetian galleys. At which,according to the chronicler Ludolph of Suchem, the entire Christ-ian Mediterranean littoral went into deep mourning for decades,13

while the anonymous contemporary chronicle de excidio Acconis,although sharply critical of the failures of leadership that led to loss

logos


of the city, concluded by lamenting it in terms drawn from Lamen-tations and Baruch.14 Dante’s personal loss of Beatrice was thusreflected on a world scale with the loss of the Holy Land: privateand public grief, the sorrows of Florence and those of all Christen-dom, were part of a continuous fabric.

But if the text of Lamentations marked Dante’s great disappoint-ments—as the devotee of Beatrice, as a citizen of Florence, as a sub-ject of the Empire, and as a son of the Church—it is also clear thatthese moments of crisis and near-desperation, when the very designof Providence seemed to be unintelligible if not absent, also func-tioned as challenges to ever more ambitious trials of the poet’s art inorder to realize his vision of how the world ought to be governed. Iwill now consider three episodes from Dante’s masterwork, the Com-edy, in which the text of Lamentations plays a significant role. The firstof these, from the Inferno, is the depiction of Maometto among thesowers of discord and schism; since he is a defamatory caricature, Iwill use Dante’s Italian name for him to distinguish him from the his-torical Muhammad.15 By speaking words from Lamentations,Maometto comes to personify the historical Jerusalem as defeated andenslaved by a rival (and, in medieval Christian terms, spurious) reli-gion, and so consigned to Hell. My second instance is from the Pur-gatorio, the second part of the Comedy, where in a rhetorically chargeddigression, Dante mourns the violence and chaos of contemporaryItaly: here the words of Lamentations characterize the perilous stateof Italy, Rome, and Florence. In my final example, from Dante’s alle-gorical biography of St. Francis in the last part of the poem, the Par-adiso, I will suggest why Francis’s dearly beloved, Lady Poverty, herselfyet another manifestation of the widow of Lamentations, is a key toDante’s acceptance of a world changing, as he saw it, dramatically forthe worse—a world in which only the example of Francis’s austerelove of poverty seemed to hold promise for reform and transforma-tion. For Dante, Francis becomes the definitive, though by no meansfacile, example of how to sweeten the uses of adversity.

lamentations in the


We need not spend much time demonstrating that Dante’s Hellcan be thought of as built in the image of the reprobate Jerusalem,guilty of rejecting her Savior’s call to repentance. That Dante mayeven have thought of his Hell as, in a sense, captive to the Saracenenemy is strongly suggested by the fact that, as Virgil, Dante’s guide,and the pilgrim, Dante’s protagonist, approach the walls of the lowercity of Hell, the pilgrim turns to his guide and comments: “Master,already I discern its mosques there clearly within the moat”(Inf..–). Even before this, the very first impression the readerreceives of the infernal city is provided by the notorious inscriptionover Hellgate: “Through me the way into the grieving city”(Inf. .).In Italian, this text, with its mention of “la città dolente,” is verballystrongly reminiscent of personified Jerusalem, who asks us in Lam.: to see if there “is any sorrow like unto my sorrow? [est dolor sicutdolor meus]”. Even the menacing conclusion of the inscription, “aban-don every hope, you who enter,” seems to recall the address, fromthat same verse, of “all you who pass by.” With such verbal and archi-tectural framing of Hell in terms of the Lamentations text, it doesnot then surprise to find close paraphrases of two verses, Lam. :

and :, in canto of the Inferno, which Dante reserved for explic-it identification of the legal principle determining punishment in hisHell: the contrapasso, or counter-suffering, sometimes described asDante’s principle of poetic justice, by which the punishment is madeto fit the crime.16 It is to that canto that my argument now turns.

Deep in Hell, among the worst of the fraudulent, Dante placesthe sowers of discord and schism. After a long opening descriptionin which the poet renounces his ability to account in prose or versefor the heaps of lacerated bodies that he sees, Dante enumerates fivespecific sowers of discord, beginning with a defamatory portrait ofMaometto:

Surely a barrel, losing centerpiece or half-moon, is not so broken as one I saw torn open from the chinto the farting-place.

logos


Between his legs dangled his intestines; the pluck was visible, and the wretched bag that makes shitof what is swallowed.

While I was all absorbed in the sight of him, he,gazing back at me, with his hands opened up his breast, saying: “Now see how I spread myself!

See how Maometto is torn open! Ahead of me Alì goes weeping, his face cloven from chin to forelock.

And all the others you see here were sowers ofscandal and schism while they were alive, andtherefore are they cloven in this way. (Inf. .–)17

The image of a broken container, a barrel, to describe the humanbody cut asunder and spilling its contents, are poetic devices for reg-istering religious schism as the division of what should be united andwhole. This view of Maometto as a schismatic arose among Christ-ian polemicists who constructed for Muhammad a fictitious identi-ty as the disciple of a Nestorian Christian monk, thus a heretic; andas a belligerent seeker for power who exploited religious ideas cyn-ically, thus a fraud. Even well-informed Christians, such as Peter theVenerable, Abbot of Cluny in the mid-twelfth century, who hadoverseen an ambitious project of translating Arabic sources for bothpolemical and evangelizing purposes, saw in the expansion of Islamnot merely a military and cultural threat but a schismatic division ofthe body of the Christian faithful.18

Dante’s portrait reflects these slanders and misconceptions. It ishowever also historically grounded in that it is couched in the lan-guage of crusading warfare, after all the chief manner in whichChristian Europe had encountered Islam, from the reconquista inSpain to the Crusades in Palestine. In Dante’s canto, a number ofdetails are drawn from the twelfth-century southern French poetBertran de Born, the fifth and last of those Dante names. Bertran’spoetry celebrates the heavy-mounted warfare used by crusading

lamentations in the


knights, including the use of the broadsword, notorious in crusaderepics, such as the Song of Roland, for its ability to cut an opponent inhalf from crown to fork.

Maometto—and Alì, his cousin and son-in-law and eventual suc-cessor as the fourth of the caliphs—thus bear wounds to body andhead respectively that are meant to remind readers of the crusadingwarfare orchestrated by Christendom in response to the reconquestof Jerusalem by Islam. These wounds, which in Dante’s canto aredealt by an avenging demon wielding a large sword, represent God’sown specific punishment, or contrapasso, for the worldwide schismsupposedly introduced by Islam: putting the founder of Islam to thesword probably also reflects the Christian view that Islam was a reli-gion devoted to conquest with the sword.19 But like so much inDante, we can read considerably more in the hideous spectacle ofMaometto’s evisceration. He also recalls the death of Judas, thearchtraitor, whose “bowels gushed forth,” according to the Gospeltext (Acts :), when he hanged himself following the betrayal ofChrist, an important parallel to which I will return. At a deeperlevel, Maometto’s body probably also recalls, but in a negative,inverted form, what for Christians were positive examples ofwounds to the body: those of martyrs, for example, and more cen-trally the image of the wounded Christ himself. When Maomettodisplays his own viscera as if opening an overcoat, crying out

“. . . vedi com’io mi dilacco! vedi come storpiato è Maometto!”[Now see how I spread myself see how Mohammed is torn open]

he acts out a parody of the language of Christian meditations on thepassion, which describe in detail how Christ’s body was dilatatus, dis-tended, by being placed on the cross.20

For my purposes in this essay, what is significant is that the self-ostentation of Maometto’s wound is done in words that echo the text

logos


of Lamentations. Nor is this the only use of Lamentations in thecanto. Dante closely paraphrases Lam. : when he has Bertran deBorn—the poet I mentioned just now, and the last of Dante’s fivenamed sowers of schism—call attention to the spectacular division ofhis head from his trunk, which he carries like a lantern. Bertran says:

“. . . Now see my wretched punishment,you who go still breathing to view the dead: see if any is great as this.” (Inf. .–)

The echo of Lam. : is perfectly clear: “Attend and see if there isany sorrow that is like unto my sorrow.” With the invitation to com-pare degrees of pain, Bertran’s verse also ties the end of the canto toits beginning, where Dante had said that he could not give an ade-quate account of the ghastly accumulation of bodies—and this sug-gests how fundamental Lam. : is for the whole canto.

But to get back to Maometto’s echo of the Biblical text: it is tothe verse that immediately precedes Lam. :, Lam. :, whichis as follows:

Vide, domine, et considera, quia facta sum vilis.[See, O Lord, and consider, for I am become vile.]

As I already pointed out, Lam. : is among the first verses ofLamentations that medieval readers thought spoken by the person-ified figure of widowed Jerusalem. But in fact the very first verseactually so spoken is the preceding one, Lam. :. Precisely therethe change of voice occurs, from that of the lamenting prophet tothat of the personified lamenting city.21 Dante’s version replaces thephrase “I am become vile” by the even stronger storpiato, which lit-erally means mangled and deformed, a usage that underscores withparticular force the brutal desecration of Maometto’s image andmemory; in allegory, the abjection of the city enslaved by the enemy.But if we can say with some confidence that Dante’s Maometto alle-gorically takes on the voice of a fallen, infernal Jerusalem, this iden-

lamentations in the


tification can be deepened and confirmed with a specific historicalparallel that again embroils us in the violence of the Crusades.

For Dante’s milieu, the most complete and important historicalaccount of the Roman siege of Jerusalem in A.D. was that of Flav-ius Josephus’s Jewish War. While Josephus’s account was already ten-dentious because of its notoriously apologetic treatment of Romanmotives, some Christian retellings of Josephus’s history added adetail intended to further increase both the suffering and the culpa-bility of the besieged Jewish population.22 This is the assertion thatJews fleeing the city, which was torn by factions as well as sur-rounded by the Romans, swallowed their gold in hopes of avoidinglosing their wealth as they escaped. But, the story goes, Syrian troopsamong the Romans were on to the trick, and cut open the bellies ofthe escapees from the city in order to pluck the gold “even fromamong the flowing wastes of their bowels.”23 This lurid, defamato-ry episode was retained and adapted by Christian Crusade chroni-clers describing the fall of Jerusalem to the crusaders in ,attributed not of course to escaping Jews, but to the Islamic popu-lation. The chronicle of the First Crusade written by Fulcher ofChartres gives the following account, which may also have suggest-ed Dante’s presentation of the gruesome effects of schism as a seriesof ghastly spectacles:

And you would have seen something amazing, when some ofour poorer squires and footsoldiers, knowing the tricks of theSaracens, cut open their bellies when they were dead, so thatthey might remove the gold coins from their intestines, whichtheir loathsome jaws had swallowed when they were alive.24

In terms of the fierce logic of contrapasso, or counter-suffering, theevisceration of Mahomet closely associates the founder of Islam withthe historical record, such as it was, of the several conquests ofJerusalem: an emphasis possibly inspired by the presence of theLamentations text itself.

logos


The anecdote from the crusading chronicle also adds furthermeaning to Dante’s depiction, in that the transformation of what isswallowed into waste serves as a likely figure for the negative trans-formation of Christian and Jewish teachings by the hereticalMaometto as claimed in the defamatory biographies. Indeed, a latefourteenth-century commentator on the Comedy, Benvenuto daImola, gives a closely analogous explanation of Dante’s emphasis onMaometto’s digestion, which presumably absorbed orthodox dogmaand transformed it into heretical error.25 The emphasis on viscera isgiven a different but related interpretation by one of the early com-mentators on Dante’s poem, Fra Guido da Pisa, writing only a fewyears after the poet’s death. For Fra Guido, the focus on the ventralregion of Maometto’s body suggests his cutting away of the uterinefunction of the Church in generating offspring destined for salvationthrough baptism.26 Strikingly, a similar account is given of the deathof Judas in medieval Christian commentary, as Ann Derbes hasrecently pointed out, in which the rupture of Judas’s belly (describedas both venter and uter, womb) is designed to contrast with the divinefertility of Mary’s virginal body—in this way closing the circle oficonographic suggestions offered by Dante’s grisly portrait.27

In assessing this kind of polemical ingenuity, we must not under-estimate the depth of Dante’s loathing for his caricatured Maomet-to, nor attempt to palliate the extent to which Dante, along withvirtually all Christendom, was prepared to brutally revile thefounder of a religion and a nation that had historically threatened theChristian West. There is a sense, however, in which the ferocity ofthe representation has, for Dante, a local origin: by this I mean thatbehind the distorted image of Maometto stands the longstanding andexquisitely Florentine tradition of the willfully defamatory por-trait—and here I use the term literally, rather than figuratively—which was a kind of visual malediction or curse designed to heapopprobrium on, indeed literally expel, the designated enemies of thecommunity. And it comes as perhaps no surprise that the visual logic

lamentations in the


guiding these portraits often followed the principle of “poetic jus-tice,” or contrapasso, that we have already noted above, as is madeexplicit precisely in Dante’s canto .28 The application of contrapassoin Maometto’s case is probably the more ironic in that a version ofthe same logic is propounded as characterizing the Islamic hell in theKitab Al-miraj, known in its medieval Latin translation by Bonaven-tura of Siena as the Liber scalae machometi, a text Dante could easilyhave read, and which a number of scholars believe influenced thecomposition of the Comedy; not only that, one of the groups chosenfor punishment in the Islamic Hell of the Liber scalae are, precisely,sowers of scandal and schism.29 The technique of defaming eitherthe local or exotic adversarial Other in a poetically fitting mannerthus had, for Dante, a strictly native origin, just as medieval Chris-tendom found itself constrained to understand Islam through the dis-torting lenses offered by its own millennial struggles with heresy andschism—a point made in Dante’s own canto by Maometto’s offer ofstrategic advice to Fra Dolcino (Inf. .–), the head of theapostolic brethren finally reduced to starvation and defeat by cru-saders during the winter of in the mountains north of Novara,in northern Italy.30 From Dante’s perspective, Maometto’s mostprominent continuing role is as a heresiarch who abets schism in Italyitself.

For in the final analysis Dante was probably no more than con-ventionally interested in the military ambitions of the Crusades inOutremer, beyond the sea. He unquestionably shared the widespreaddesire of fourteenth-century Christian Europeans to recuperate theHoly Land as the legitimate feudal inheritance Christ had won by hissacrifice, as the contemporary justification for taking up the crosswas wont to put it. But Dante’s constant and pressing concern wasthe state of Italy and of Florence, torn by factional warfare betweenGuelphs and Ghibellines, that is, between supporters of the papacyand supporters of Imperial authority, a conflict that, in Dante’s his-toriography, dated back to the early years of the thirteenth century

logos


and that had also led to his own painful separation from his nativecity. For this reason, Dante also includes in his canto of the schis-matics Mosca de’ Lamberti (.–), universally reviled by Flo-rentines as having caused, with a violent murder, the outbreak offactional strife in the city. In fact, Dante’s chief interest in crusadingwas polemical and negative: this was his explicit disapproval of its useas a papal instrument against Christian political enemies, such as thefollowers of the Imperial party, as had been done by Pope BonifaceVIII in prosecuting attempts to regain Sicily, seized in by theAragonese from the Pope’s French allies, the Angevin house ofFrance. This is why, although the battle imagery and biblical languageof canto evokes crusading warfare in the Holy Land, all the bat-tles Dante names in the list at the beginning of the canto(.–)—from those between the Trojans and Latins to thoseinvolving Frederick II, Manfred, and Conrad of Hohenstaufen,defenders of the Imperial cause during the generation before Dante’sbirth—were fought in Italy: all the blood spilled had been spilled onItalian soil. So it is to the specifically Italian embodiments of afflict-ed Jerusalem in the second part of Dante’s poem that I now turn.

The heaping up of the dead in Italian wars so graphically displayedin Inferno is recalled in the fifth and sixth cantos of the Purgatorio.As the first day in Purgatory draws to a close, the pilgrim, Dante’sprotagonist, arrives at an agreeable mountain valley where he willeventually spend the night. Like the rest of the groups the readermeets during the first day of the journey up the mountain—includ-ing souls who have been excommunicated, or have just been lazy inpursuing their salvation, or delayed repentance to the lastmoment—the inhabitants of the valley are in some way negligent:in this case, sovereigns who have failed to safeguard the peace andsafety of their subjects. The list of irresponsible rulers begins withemperors and winds down to marquesses and counts. As Dante’s pil-grim approaches this valley he is surrounded by persons whose vio-

lamentations in the


lent deaths had cut off their chance to repent, thus increasing thelength of their stays in Purgatory but also testifying to how civil vio-lence can retard progress toward salvation (Purg. .–). Thisgauntlet of victims also furnishes the occasion for what, if intensityof language is any indication, is probably the most heartfelt pleaDante ever made for a providential intervention in Italian affairs, andhis sharpest reproach to the movers and shakers of the world for hav-ing refused to become instruments of such intervention. Strolling inthis valley of negligent rulers, Dante and Virgil meet Sordello, anItalian from Mantua who wrote in the poetic idiom of southernFrance known as lingua d’Oc, or old Provençal. When Sordello asksthe wayfarers of their origins, Virgil answers that he is from Mantua,and Sordello rushes to embrace him merely because both are nativesof the same city. At this demonstration of spontaneous civic frater-nity, the narrator is overcome with both admiration and chagrin:

. . . and my sweet leader began: “Mantua . . .” and the shade, all gathered in itself,

rose toward him from the place where it had been,saying, “O Mantuan, I am Sordello from your city!”and each embraced the other.

Ah, slavish Italy, dwelling of grief, ship without a pilot in a great storm, not a ruler of provinces, but awhore!

That noble soul was so quick, merely for the sweet sound of his city, to make much of his fellow-citizen there;

and now in you the living are not without war,and of those whom one wall and one moat lock in, each gnaws at the other. (Purg. .–)

Speaking as the narrator and not as the character, Dante then assignsresponsibility for Italian civil wars directly to the Holy Roman

logos


Emperors-elect, who had abandoned Italy; he addresses Albert ofHapsburg, who like his father Rudolf of Hapsburg had been elect-ed Holy Roman Emperor but had never come to Rome to becrowned, and he further warns the unnamed “successor” of Albert,who was to be Henry VII of Luxembourg, to take fair warningfrom the future deaths of Albert’s son and of Albert himself, whowas murdered by an assassin. Considering the following passage, itis important to realize that Dante is writing in about , after theforetold events have taken place, but that the journey narrated inthe poem is fictionally occurring in , before the events havetaken place:

O German Albert, who abandon her, so that she becomes untamed and wild, while you should mount between her saddle-bows,

may just judgment fall from the stars onto your blood, and let it be strange and public, so that your successor may fear it!

For you and your father, held fast by your greed for things up there [on earth], have suffered the garden of the empire to be laid waste. (Purg. .–)

The entire outburst, seventy-six lines long—exactly half the canto,and beginning exactly at the halfway point—is technically a digres-sion; in terms of medieval literary genres, it mixes satire and lament,a hybrid lyric form that writers in Old Provençal, like Sordello him-self, had brought to a high level of refinement. We know Dante’s out-burst is a lament because it begins with a vivid expression ofpain—Ahi; and like the interruption of the Vita nova at Beatrice’sdeath, the sudden interruption of the narrative and the narrator’sindulgence in a long digression alert us to the poet’s special invest-ment in the passage. As the poet laments the state of Italy, he har-nesses no less than three times the language of biblical lamentation:

lamentations in the


once to address “slavish Italy, no longer mistress of provinces, but awhore”—which again echoes the first verse of Lamentations, “theprincess of provinces is made a tributary”; once to address Rome,whom he compares to an abandoned widow, as again, in Lam. ::“how the mistress of the Gentiles is become as a widow”; and onceto address Florence, the object of Dante’s withering irony as he con-cludes the digression (Purg. .–).31

But it is real human agents, not literary figures of speech, whoearn Dante’s most sharply focused scorn: the emperors Rudolf ofHapsburg and Albert, his son, who lacked the courage to come andtake Italy in hand. Using traditional metaphors of governancederived from horsemanship and navigation, Dante chastises theirfailure to have taken up the reins of the untamed horse that is Italy,or the tiller of the ship of state. The highest rhetorical pitch, how-ever, is reserved for another borrowing from the Biblical text:addressing the negligent Emperor Albert, Dante includes yet anoth-er apostrophe—giving us apostrophe twice over, one within theother—this time spoken by Rome personified, who calls out to theabsent Emperor:

Come and see your Rome, which weeps widowed and alone, and day and night calls out: “My Caesar,why do you not keep me company?”

Come and see how the people love each other! And if no pity for us moves you, come to be ashamed at your reputation.

And if it is permitted me, O highest Jove, who were crucified on earth for us,are your just eyes turned elsewhere?

Or is it a preparation that in the abyss of your counsel you are making, for some good utterly severed from our perception?

For the cities of Italy are all filled with tyrants . . .(Purg. . –)

logos


As many readers will immediately recognize, the language, includ-ing the emphatic use of apostrophe and personification, derives inpart from Lamentations, where the city is she who “sits solitary. . . .she is become a widow” and in part from the Song of Songs, wherethe bride calls out to her bridegroom in desire: “arise, my love, mybeautiful one, and come” (Canticles :). As I noted earlier, the twobooks were coordinated in Lamentations commentary; they werealso coordinated, as it happens, in Imperial propaganda, includingDante’s own examples of it, in which the Emperor was thought tobe the ideal bridegroom of Rome, the bride.32 This idea of the rela-tionship of the sovereign to his state or city went back to the time ofCharlemagne and was to persist through the Renaissance.33 InDante’s use, however, the pathos of Rome’s appeal is raised yetanother power, however: Rome’s words upbraiding Caesar for hisabsence,

“My Caesar, why do you not keep me company?”[Cesare mio, perchè non m’accompagni?]

also echo the voice of Christ calling out from the cross; note espe-cially the persistence of the pronoun, which in these passages marksnot possession, but dispossession:

“My God, why have you abandoned me?”[Deus meus, ut quid dereliquisti me?] (Matt. :)

A few lines later Dante makes so bold as to wonder if Christ, whowas willing to be crucified for mankind, is any longer paying atten-tion; perhaps he has turned away, Dante wonders aloud, or perhapshis purposes are so inscrutable that a mere mortal cannot see into theabyss of his providential design.

Although Dante’s language here is in part conventional, weshould not for that reason minimize its importance. In addition tothe uniquely charged rhetoric of this passage, and the fact that it is

lamentations in the


the longest single outburst in the poem spoken in the poet’s narra-tive voice, there are other reasons for thinking that the anguish sug-gested here is uniquely heartfelt. The writing, or possibly therevision, of these cantos was probably contemporary with the after-math of the failed expedition of Henry VII to Italy in –.This expedition, the first since the days of Frederick II—the empirehad been technically vacant for over half a century—had beenDante’s great last hope for the political reform of Italy; and weknow, from letters he wrote heralding the Emperor’s advent, thatDante’s enthusiasm had been literally unbounded. But the Emperor,after encountering bitter resistance from Northern cities such asBrescia, subsequently found himself checked by Guelph Florence andthe forces of Robert of Anjou: both were doing the bidding of PopeClement V, who although having originally sanctioned Henry’s expe-dition, turned coat and conspired to compass Henry’s ruin once hewas on Italian soil.34 When Henry died suddenly of fever at Buon-convento, near Siena, in , Dante’s disappointment, not to men-tion his fury at the papal betrayal, were, to put it mildly, very great.An important reader of this canto, Maurizio Perugi, suggests that theentire outburst, in its genre of satire-lament and its tone of desola-tion, represents Dante’s personal funeral plaint for Henry.35 Be thatas it may, it is interesting that when Dante’s son Pietro sat down towrite a political poem in the late s, when the struggle betweenPope John XXII and Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria suggested this samesad history might be repeating itself, he quoted liberally fromDante’s lines in canto six, wondering if God had ceased to disciplinepopes and prelates who usurped the temporal authority; as if tomark that he lacked any sympathetic human auditor, Pietroaddressed his poem at the outset to God; by the end, he fears themockery of unbelievers who witness God’s abandonment of Italy:“Where is your God, o Christian people? (cf. Ps. :).36 It waslines from Dante’s great digression, too, that Renaissance Italiansquoted when complaining of the French and Spanish invasions of

logos


Italy in the sixteenth century,37 and that Italian patriots—lookingforward to independence from a position of political servitude—intoned to themselves like a mantra during the Italian risorgimento ofthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The digression in Purgatorio canto six thus constitutes the nadir ofDante’s political despair. There is an implicit equation of the mourn-ing over the absent Emperor Henry VII with a profound anxiety overan absent or unresponsive Providence, and of the voice of desolateRome with the voice of the poet himself. That Dante’s voice simul-taneously adopts the voice of the Bridegroom during his moment ofhuman weakness on the cross, and the voice of the bride of Canti-cles consumed with desire for her spouse—who does not yetcome—is what perhaps gives this line its great suggestiveness as anexpression of desolation and dispossession.

After the failure of Henry VII’s expedition no comparable oppor-tunity presented itself during the poet’s lifetime that could reasonablypromise a positive transformation of Italian politics. Dante did not ofcourse cease to take an interest in politics, however; we now knowthat his great political tract in defense of secular world-government,the Monarchia, was written as late as or , after the Paradiso,the last part of the Comedy, was well underway, and probably writ-ten to buttress the claims of Can Grande della Scala, the lord ofVerona and Dante’s then patron, to the imperial vicarage, an officethat Pope John XXII had forbidden him from taking up. It was in alllikelihood this political function of the treatise that some ten yearslater, in , earned Dante’s Monarchia a refutation by the Domini-can Fra Guido Vernani, and that motivated the burning of all dis-coverable copies; the treatise remained on the Index of ForbiddenBooks until .38

Nevertheless, after the failure of the Imperial option Dante’sconception of how the world was to be reformed was bound to shiftsomewhat. It is very striking that Dante’s last evocation of the bookof Lamentations in his career is found in the third and last part of the

lamentations in the


Comedy, the Paradiso, in the poet’s account of the life of Francis ofAssisi. Traveling through the planetary spheres, Dante and Beatriceencounter Thomas Aquinas among the theologians and wise menDante places in the heaven of the Sun, and it is this famous Domini-can Scholastic who relates the life of Francis of Assisi as part of amore extensive critique of the decay of both mendicant orders. Inlooking to Francis and the mendicant orders for significant reformof the Church and of Christendom more generally, Dante, of course,had plenty of company. By Dante’s day, however, the controversybetween the relaxed and the rigorist factions—the zelanti or spiri-tuals—was bidding fair to get out of hand. The spirituals held in-creasingly uncompromising views regarding Francis’s originalintentions concerning absolute poverty; views that included, at theextreme, defiance of the authority of the papacy to modify the Rule.These were positions with which Dante was probably sympathetic:after all, Dante identified avarice, acquisitiveness of temporal pos-sessions, as the besetting evil of both early modern mercantile city-states like Florence and of the medieval Church and papacy to boot.According to Niccolò Mineo, the period when Dante was writingthe cantos of the Paradiso (–) where Francis is discussed maywell have coincided with the crisis that led, in , to the burningat the stake of a group of Franciscan spirituals who had refused tosubmit to papal authority. From this perspective, despite a likely sol-idarity with the rigorists regarding the centrality of poverty, Dante’saccount of the founder of the order appears to be a counsel of mod-eration to the two factions, which Dante characterizes by chastisingboth Matthew of Acquasparta, general of the order until anda conventual, and Ubertino da Casale, the zelante and biographer ofFrancis who eventually went so far as to abandon the order entire-ly.39 But there is also reason to think that with his biography of Fran-cis Dante was once again reconstructing his own imaginative groundsfor hope during a crisis that threatened to place the reforming poten-tial of Franciscanism itself in jeopardy. Dante begins his account of

logos


the two lives of mendicant founders by recalling that their comingto earth was ordained by divine Providence, as if answering his ques-tion regarding God’s level of attention to earthly affairs in the sixthcanto of the Purgatorio; and it is implicit in the very project of the Par-adiso itself that the heavens, driven by celestial intelligences as theycircle above the earth, influence and even direct, even if they do notdetermine, what happens here below. In fact, the sense in whichFranciscan ideals replace the hopes for Imperial reform is quite spe-cific: when Henry VII had entered Italy in , Dante had writtenletters in Latin heralding his advent and comparing him to a risingSun that would bring comfort to Italy; here in the heaven of the Sunit is with the image of Francis as the sun rising from Assisi thatThomas’s eulogistic narrative begins (Par. .–).40

Dante casts the life of Francis in terms of an allegorical narrativeof the courtship between Francis and “the one whom his soul loved,”Lady Poverty. To summarize Francis’s whole life in relation to a per-sonified Lady Poverty was traditional, at least since the Sacrum com-mercium Sancti Francisci cum domina paupertate [Sacred commerce of SaintFrancis with lady Poverty]. The Sacred commerce—English translatorshave avoided the direct transposition, but it seems to me exactlyright—is a text of uncertain date and authorship, but clearly influ-ential; parts of it were also incorporated into the biographies ofFrancis written by Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure during themiddle and later thirteenth century.41 The text relates how Pover-ty, who had lived with Adam in the garden and kept close companywith Christ even to the point of ascending the cross with him, hadlived in neglect and exile since the days of Constantine the Great,when the war between the Church and the secular power hadceased; until Francis and his brothers seek her out and coax heraway from her high mountain back to the world of men. The narra-tive is thus a figurative way of speaking of how for Francis the questfor absolute poverty, the “queen of virtues,” is the chief vector of hisimitation of Christ and so the dominant motive of his life; and in this

lamentations in the


strong emphasis the Sacrum commercium is, despite some scholarlyskepticism, arguably a direct influence on Dante’s equally single-minded account.

As I noted earlier, Thomas begins the biography proper by speak-ing of Francis as a sun, rising from Assisi, that has come to givecomfort to the world:

He was not yet far from his rising, when he began to make the earth feel some strengthening from his great virtue;

he incurred the enmity of his father, still a youth, for a certain lady, to whom no one unlocks the gate of pleasure, any more than to death;

and before the spiritual court et coram patre [in his father’spresence] he was

joined with her; and then from day to day he loved her more.

She, deprived of her first husband, [Christ] had waited a thousand years and more, despised and dark, without invitation, until this man;. . . nor had it availed her to have been constant and fierce in her love, so that, when Mary stayed below, she wept with Christ upon the cross.

But so that I proceed not too obscurely, take Francis and Poverty for these two lovers now in my furtherspeech.

Their love and admiration and sweet glances caused their harmony and their cheerful look to be the occasion of holy thoughts;

so much that the venerable Bernard took off his shoes first, and ran after such great peace, and, running,thought himself slow.

Oh unrecognized riches! oh fruitful possession! Egidio goes barefoot, Silvestro, too, following the bridegroom, so pleasing was the bride. (Par. .–, –)

logos


And at the end of the biography:

When he who chose him for such good pleased to draw him up to the reward he merited by making himself lowly,

to his brothers, as to just heirs, he handed over his dearest lady, and commanded them to love her faithfully;

and from her bosom his soul chose to set forth,returning to its kingdom, and for his body he wished no other bier. (Par. .–)

Dante writes that before her union with Francis, Lady Poverty hadbeen “despised and dark, without invitation” and “deprived of herfirst husband,” Christ (though he is not named)—and this echoes thelanguage of the Sacrum commercium (or of the subsequent biogra-phies drawing from it) where Francis is recommending to his broth-ers an attachment with the long-despised Lady. With startling, evendisturbing rhetorical effect, Francis presents the prospect of findingand enjoying Lady Poverty in terms more in keeping with a medievalbrigand promising his troops the spoils of war:

Brothers, the espousal with poverty is wonderful, and we mayeasily enjoy her embraces, for “the mistress of peoples isbecome as a widow” and the queen of virtues “is become con-temptible” before all. None in these parts will dare to cry out,none will oppose us, no one will by right forbid us to havecommerce with her. “All her friends have despised her andhave become her enemies.” And when he had spoken this way,all began to walk after Holy Francis. (Habig, ).

We immediately recognize the language of widowed Jerusalem inLam. : and .: three times quoted in the passage I just cited: “themistress of peoples is become as a widow”;“she is made vile”; and “allher friends have despised here, they have all become her enemies.”

lamentations in the


That, in Dante’s account, she has been deprived of her first husbandalso reminds us of Lamentations commentary, which identify thewidow as deprived of Christ, but with expectations of a futurereturn of the bridegroom. So it is that in Dante’s allegory, as in theSacrum commercium, Francis and his brothers restore the widow’s sta-tus as a spouse: and so the second part of the allegorical biographyends with a flurry of evocations of Canticles, which, allegoricallyspeaking, are songs of nuptial love exchanged between the Soul andChrist, or Christ and the Church.

Egidio goes barefoot, Silvestro, too, following the bridegroom, so pleasing was the bride.

Which leads to the observation that—with the exception of Dante’sfictional reunification with Beatrice at the end of the Purgatorio—itis in the biography of Francis, and only there in Dante’s poem, thatwe find completed the sequence of sorrow leading to joy thatLamentations commentators posit as the universal context of thebook. In an Italy where both pope and emperor have abandoned theirRoman bride, only in the life of Francis does a widowed spouse findagain her bridegroom, only in following the poverello are nuptialrites actually celebrated. Only in Dante’s life of Francis are sandalskicked off in pursuit of the embraces of the bride, in a verse whichErich Auerbach, in his pathfinding reading of the canto, recognizedas scandalous and which approaches the implications of the passagefrom the Sacrum commercium I cited above.42

In a way we sometimes come to expect with Dante, then, the useof the widow of Lamentations is in part governed by the part of thepoem where we find her. In Hell, she is the city conquered by theadversary—Satan, Dante’s Maometto, take your pick—given overto God’s wrath; in Purgatorio, where penitential and redemptivefunctions of the poem overlap, she is, as widowed Rome and Italyenslaved, the civic community that desires union with the emperor

logos


for the sake of universal peace, but which feelingly suffers theabsence of legitimate authority; in the Paradiso, she becomes the rig-orous, ascetic ideal of absolute poverty, overwhelmingly desirableprecisely because of her outcast and abject status. She is the loathlylady for whom Francis sacrifices wealth, family, and when his rigor-ous imitation of Christ is crowned by the quasi martyrdom of thestigmata, even bodily health. Indeed, to my knowledge hithertounremarked in discussion of Dante’s version is the repeated equiva-lence between devotion to Lady Poverty and the embrace of death:some six instances in ninety lines. Francis comes to succour a Churchoriginally espoused to Christ in the death of the cross; Poverty her-self, Dante’s text points out, is about as popular as death itself, towhom none willingly opens the door of pleasure; and when Francisis about to die, he has himself placed on the ground, identified in thetext again with the bosom of Lady Poverty, but also, metaphorical-ly, as his bier. If Bernardo and Egidio and Silvestro run after herembraces, shedding their sandals all the while, Francis himself findsthe quietus of his courtship only when he receives the third seal, thatof the wounds of Christ, and makes of his own body the embodiedRule of Poverty, the Rule made flesh, sealed with the red seals ofblood.43 Repeatedly then, in Dante’s account the place of Poverty isthe place of bodily death; from this viewpoint, Lady Poverty is sis-ter to “Sora nostra morte corporale,” “sister bodily death” of Francis’sfamous Canticle of the Sun. We would be justified in concluding thatthis emphasis in Dante’s account registers Francis’s known thirst formartyrdom and for the imitation of Christ, which is only fulfilledwith the stigmata signifying death on the cross. But from the pointof view of the poet’s biography, commerce with a Lady Poverty whosealter ego is the widow of Lamentations might appear to be some-thing slightly different: as an espousal of loss, of mourning. Survey-ing his life from the vantage point of , Dante might well haveconcluded that his own espousal of mourning had been lifelong.There are of course many reasons to see a strong identification

lamentations in the


between Dante and Francis. Some are biographical: in Florence,Dante had probably studied with the Franciscans of Santa Croce; hemay have been a member of the tertiary, lay order of Franciscans; hisdaughter Antonia became the Franciscan nun Suor Beatrice; andwhen he died in Ravenna in , he was buried in the church of SanFrancesco. It certainly suggests a bias. What is probably more impor-tant, as Ronald Herzman has argued, Dante would have seen in theFranciscan virtue of humility the exemplary remedy for the pridethat beset the whole Alighieri clan, as we are reminded several timesin the poem (e.g., Purg. ; Par. ).44 An appreciation of Franciscanpoverty, on the other hand, might have helped him better endure theindigence of exile; if Dante did know the Sacrum commercium, heprobably read with great interest the surprising description of LadyPoverty herself as an exile, couched in the biblical language describ-ing none other than wandering Cain: “vaga et profuga super terram”[“a fugitive and a vagabond . . . upon the earth”] (Gen. :).45

Francis’s legacy to Dante thus includes Lady Poverty as a persistentcompanion of the poet’s exile, and, in her guise as the widow ofLamentations, his acquaintance with the vocation of mourning.

To be sure, where Francis zealously sought out Lady Poverty,Dante’s poverty was involuntary and much regretted: his vocation ofmourning was not elected, but thrust upon him by circumstances—by the death of Beatrice, by his exile, by the death of the Emperor,by the Babylonian captivity of the church. Still, making virtue ofnecessity did become one of Dante’s chief strategies for confrontinghis deep disappointments. Implicit throughout my essay is theassumption that the chief virtue Dante made of necessity was hisgreat poem: for if his private and public life kept coming up astragedy, he nevertheless had his Comedy to write, and to use to tryand set things right.

logos


Notes

1. See the Encyclopaedia Judaica (New York: Macmillan, ): “Av, th of,” vol. I, cols.–.

2. For “Destruction of Jerusalem Sunday,” see Amnon Linder, “Jews and Judaism in theeyes of Christian Thinkers of the Middle Ages: The Destruction of Jerusalem inMedieval Christian Liturgy,” in From Witness to Witchcraft, Jews and Judaism in MedievalChristian Thought, ed. Jeremy Cohen (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, ), –.Dante points to the providentiality of the destruction of Jerusalem at Purg. .–

and .– and Paradiso .– and .–; it is clearly a cardinal moment inthe poem’s historiographical vision.

3. For the shape of this liturgy in Dante’s day, see, most usefully, Sources of the ModernRoman Liturgy:The Ordinals by Haymo of Faversham and Related Documents (1243–1307),ed. S. J. P. Van Dijk, vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, ), , –.

4. This is brought out by Dante’s contemporary Durandus of Mendes, in his Rationaledivinorum officiorum (Naples: Dura, ); see .. (), where the truncation ofthe offices is identified as signifying the “widowing” of the community (viduati) by thedeath of Christ.

5. See, for example, such uses in St. Bernard of Clairvaux [attr.], Meditatio in Passionemet Resurrectionem Domini (PL .) and the Vitis mystica (PL .) attributedto St. Bonaventura. For this literature, see Thomas Bestul, Texts of the Passion: LatinDevotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of PennsylvaniaPress, ).

6. For full bibliography, see R. L. Martinez, “Lament and Lamentations in Purgatorio andthe Case of Dante’s Statius,” Dante Studies (): –, esp. .

7. All four of the levels are distinguished throughout the tradition, from Rabanus Mau-rus and Paschasius in the ninth century through Hugh of St. Cher and John Pechamin the mid- and late thirteenth century. See Martinez, “Lament and Lamentations,”–, –.

8. This passage, beginning chapter of the book, has been demonstrated to be theprincipal articulation of the work in the manuscript tradition; see Guglielmo Gorniin his recent edition of the Vita nova (Florence: Einaudi, ), xxi–xxvii, –.

9. For the text and commentary, see Dante’s Lyric Poetry, ed. Kenelm Foster and PatrickBoyde, vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), :– and :–.

10. The text of Dante’s Epistle XI. reads, “utroque lumine destitutam.” See DantisAlagherii Epistolae:The Letters of Dante,ed. Paget Toynbee (Oxford: Clarendon Press,), – (including text and English translation; in Toybee’s numbering andparagraphing, it is Epistle .).

11. For the inclusion of Ciceronian rhetoric in the Glossa ordinaria commentary onLamentations by Gilbert the Universal, see Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in theMiddle Ages, nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, ), –.The Ciceronian prefaces were retained in many of the later commentaries, includ-ing that of Hugh of St. Cher and John Pecham.

lamentations in the


12. For the proliferation of this literature, see Maurizio Perugi, “Il Sordello di Dante ela tradizione mediolatina dell’invettiva,” Studi danteschi (): –, esp.–; Crusade preaching is discussed by Christoph T. Maier, Preaching the Crusade:

Mendicant friars and the cross in the thirteenth century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, ) and illustrated in his Crusade Propaganda and Ideology:Model Sermons

for the Preaching of the Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); see alsoSylvia Schein, Fideles Crucis: The Papacy, the West, and the Recovery of the Holy Land,

1274–1314 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), esp. – and –.13. For an extract from Ludolph of Suchem’s Description of the Holy Land, see The Crusades:

A Documentary Survey, ed. James A. Brundage (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Marquette Uni-versity Press, ), –.

14. The de excidio Acconis is discussed by Sylvia Schein, “Babylon and Jerusalem: The Fallof Acre –,” in From Clermont to Jerusalem:The Crusades and Crusader Societies

1095–1500, ed. Alan V. Murray (Turnout: Brepols, ), –.15. To this day, translations of Dante into Arabic and other languages used in the Islamic

world suppress canto as intolerably offensive in its representation of Muhammad.See the entry “Islam” in the Enciclopedia dantesca, vols. (Rome: UTET, ), .

16. For the Aristotelian and Thomistic background to this idea in Dante, see Inferno

. and notes.17. Texts and translations of Dante’s Comedy are from Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. by

Robert M. Durling, with Introduction and Notes by Ronald L. Martinez and RobertM. Durling (New York: Oxford, ); from Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, trans. byRobert M. Durling, with Introduction and Notes by Ronald L. Martinez and RobertM. Durling (New York: Oxford, forthcoming October ); and from DanteAlighieri, Paradiso, trans. by Robert M. Durling, forthcoming.

18. The Christian treatment of Islam in the Middle Ages is outlined by Norman Daniel,Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,). Representative texts by Peter the Venerable are edited and discussed byJames Kritzeck, Peter the Venerable and Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UniversityPress, ).

19. See Kritzeck, Peter the Venerable, , as well as a widely known account like that ofGiovanni Villani’s Chronicle (.); Peter the Venerable’s own writing against Islam wasdescribed by contemporaries as attacks with the “sword of the Word,” see Kritzeck,, . That Alì became the titular head of the Shia, or schismatic branch ofIslam, in distinction to the Sunni branch, was in all likelihood known to Dante; thedivision is carefully spelled out in Book , chap. of William of Tyre’s late twelfth-century account of the First Crusade, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, ed. E.A. Babcock and A. C. Krey (New York: Columbia University Press, ),:–, as well as in subsequent accounts such as Villani’s Chronicle.

20. For Christ’s body as distensus, see the Vitis mystica, PL . and ; for dilatatus

(said of Christ’s offer of charity, as if opening his breast or arms) see the Sermon on

the Seven Last Words of Ernoldus Bonaevallis, PL ..

logos


21. See for example the laconic commentary of Pecham, Expositio threnorum, : “Cumhactenus Propheta planxerit civitatem, hic, mutata persona, introducit ipsam civi-tatem se ipsam plangentem.” [Whereas up to this point the Prophet bewailed the city,here, with a change of person, the city itself is introduced, lamenting for itself. (trans-lation mine)]

22. I refer chiefly to the text known as Hegesippus, edited in Migne among the worksof St. Ambrose (PL ) but in fact an anonymous work; there is a modern editionby V. Ussani, Hegesippi qui dicitur historiae libri V (CSEL , vols). For discussion ofthis and other Christian versions of Josephus, see Amnon Linder and Heinz Schreck-enberg, Die Flavius-Josephus-Tradition in Antike und Mittelalter (Leiden: E. J. Brill,).

23. See Hegesippus . (PL .), my translation.24. See Fulcher of Chartres, A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem, trans. F. R. Ryan

(Knoxville, Tenn., ), . The anecdote was widespread; it is found also in thetwelfth-century Old French epic on the fall of Jerusalem, La venjance nostre seigneur,vv. –, –. See Loyal A. T. Gryting, The Oldest Version of the Twelfth Cen-

tury Poem ‘La venjánce Nostre Seigneur’ (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of MichiganPress, ).

25. Benvenuto’s comment is translated in Daniels, Islam and the West, : “all the doc-trine which entered [Muhammad’s] mind produced horrible error with which hesoiled and infected nearly all the world.”

26. “And because he violated the womb of the Church, he is represented by the authordivided in his belly from his chin to his anus . . .” [my translation]. See Guido da Pisa,Commentary on Dante’s ‘Inferno’, ed. Vincenzo Cioffari (Albany, N.Y.: State Universi-ty of New York Press, ), .

27. The text attributed to Bernard is as follows: “suspensus crepuit medius: plenus eratventer, et ruptus est uter.” [“and, being hanged, split open in the middle: his belly wasfilled, and his bowel burst” (my trans.)], PL .. Uter also denotes the womb,however. See Ann Derbes and Mark Sandona, “Barren Metal and Fruitful Womb: TheProgram of Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua,” Art Bulletin (): –, esp.–, .

28. The defamatory portrait in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Tuscany and its con-

trapasso-like logic are discussed in Samuel Y. Edgerton, Pictures as Punishment (Ithaca,N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), –.

29. For the Islamic form of contrapasso, see the Libro della scala e La questione delle fonti

arabo-spagnole, ed. Enrico Cerulli (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,), . Parallels with Dante’s Inferno, including that with the sowers of schism,are discussed by Cerulli, – and by Maria Corti, “La ‘Commedia’ di Dante el’oltretomba islamico,” Belfagor (): –.

30. The historical evidence on Fra Dolcino is surveyed by Rainieri Orioli, Venit perfidus

heresiarcha: Il movimento apostolico dolciniano dal 1260 al 1303 (Rome: Istituto storicoper il medioevo, ).

lamentations in the


31. Purg. ., which I do not discuss here, is “finds no rest,” from Lam. :, “nec inven-it requiem.”

32. See Dante’s Epistles and , which can be found with English translation in Toynbee,Dantis Alagherii Epistolae, – and –.

33. For its late medieval and early Renaissance uses, see Gordon Kipling, Enter the King:

Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon Press,).

34. For Henry’s expedition, see William S. Bowsky, Henry VII in Italy: The Conflict of

Empire and City-State, 1310–1313 (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press,).

35. Perugi, “Il Sordello di Dante,” –.36. For Pietro’s poem, see Giovanni Crocioni, Le rime di Piero Alighieri (Città di Castel-

lo: Lapi, ), –.37. Testimonials can be found in André Chastel, The Sack of Rome, trans. Beth Archer

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ).38. See Anthony K. Cassell’s entry, Monarchia, in the Dante Encyclopedia, ed. Richard

Lansing (New York: Garland, ), –.39. The best and fullest account of Dante’s treatment of Francis and Franciscanism are

Niccolò Mineo’s two essays, “Il canto XI del ‘Paradiso’: La ‘vita’ di San Francesco nella‘festa di paradiso,’” in Lectura dantis metelliana: I primi undici canti del ‘Paradiso,’ ed.Attilio Mellone, O.F.M. (Rome: Bulzoni, ), –, and “Ancora su ‘Paradiso’XII, –,” in Miscellanea di studi in memoria di Silvio Pasquazi, ed. A. Paolella etal, vols. (Naples: Federico & Ardia, ), :–. For the history of the Orderduring this period, see John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order from its Ori-

gins to the Year 1517 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), esp. – and –.40. For the Emperor as sun, see Epistle :–, in Toynbee, Dantis Alagherii Epistolae, .41. There is a recent critical text, Sacrum commercium sancti Francisci cum domina Pauper-

tate, ed. Stefano Brufani (Assisi: Porziuncola, ). For English translation of thistext and the lives of Francis see St.Francis of Assisi:Writings and Early Biographies;Eng-

lish Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St.Francis, ed. Marion A. Habig (Chicago: Fran-ciscan Herald Press, ), including Sacrum Commercium, or Francis and his Lady

Poverty, trans. with introduction and notes by Placid Hermann O.F.M. (–).42. See Erich Auerbach, “St. Francis of Assisi in Dante’s ‘Commedia’” in Six Scenes from

the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian, ), –, esp. .43. For this image, see Ronald Herzman, “Dante and Francis,” in Franciscan Studies

(): –, esp. , .44. For Dante’s self-reflexive emphases on a “Franciscan” humility, see ibid., ,

–.45. For the text, see Habig, Omnibus, –.

logos


Dante between Hope and Despair: The Tradition of ... · Ronald L. Martinez Dante between Hope and...

Documents

Transcript of Dante between Hope and Despair: The Tradition of ... · Ronald L. Martinez Dante between Hope and...