handwritten, printed, digital – a blog about ancient, medieval & late-modern book cultures. New posts every Monday, Wednesday & Friday. Don't forget to subscribe
One remarkable thing about Dante's Divine Comedy is that it doesn't try to cancel any voices. Dante has often been accused of settling scores in the Underworld. If only for this, I think the disenchantment of the West has led to an important loss. With the Hell relegated to a merely poetic or idiomatic reality,... Continue Reading →
The reversal of Dante's popularity at the end of the medieval period starts with an apparently popular move: translating the Divine Comedy into Latin. Meant to boost interest in the poet's magnum opus, it signed its decline for at least 200 years. Humanism was about Latin, not the vernacular, about antiquity, not medieval science and... Continue Reading →
Un punto vidi che raggiava lume... One of my favourite scenes in the Commedia is that of Paradiso 28 where Dante, arriving in the proto-heaven of the Primum Mobile, describes his experience of reaching the engine of the universe, a place of strong ontological instability, thus pushing the envelope of poetic expression to the limit. Dante's... Continue Reading →
My developing interest in Dante led a few weeks ago to a reflection on his narrative powers of expression and the way he breaks the canons of storytelling in order to bring out new possibilities and new narrative angles of attack. This is noticeable in the way he programs (or better yet engineers) his own projection in the... Continue Reading →
biblonia 