Page 304 - Western Civilization A Brief History, Volume I To 1715 9th - Jackson J. Spielvogel

Dante’s Vision of Hell
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri is regarded as one of the greatest literary works of all time. Many people consider it the supreme summary of medieval thought, combining allegory with a remarkable amount of contemporary history. Indeed, forty-three of the seventy-nine people consigned to Hell in the “Inferno” were Florentines. This excerpt is taken from canto 18 of the “Inferno,” in which Dante and Virgil visit the eighth circle of Hell, which is divided into ten trenches containing those who had committed malicious frauds upon their fellow human beings.
Dante, “Inferno,” Divine Comedy
We had already come to where the walk crosses the second bank, from which it lifts another arch, spanning from rock to rock.
Here we heard people whine in the next chasm, and knock and thump themselves with open palms, and blubber through their snouts as if in a spasm.
Steaming from that pit, a vapor rose
over the banks, crusting them with a slime
that sickened my eyes and hammered at my nose.
That chasm sinks so deep we could not sight its bottom anywhere until we climbed
along the rock arch to its greatest height.
Once there, I peered down; and I saw long lines of people in a river of excrement
that seemed the overflow of the world’s latrines.
I saw among the felons of that pit
one wraith who might or might not have been
tonsured—
one could not tell, he was so smeared with shit.
He bellowed: “You there, why do you stare at me more than at all the others in this stew?”
And I to him: “Because if memory
serves me, I knew you when your hair was dry. You are Alessio Interminelli da Lucca.
That’s why I pick you from this filthy fry.”
And he then, beating himself on his clown’s head: “Down to this have the flatteries I sold
the living sunk me here among the dead.”
And my Guide prompted then: “Lean forward a bit and look beyond him, there—do you see that one scratching herself with dungy nails, the strumpet
who fidgets to her feet, then to a crouch?
It is the whore Tha€ıs who told her lover
when he sent to ask her, ‘Do you thank me much?’
‘Much? Nay, past all believing!’ And with this Let us turn from the sight of this abyss.”
Q How does Dante’s vision of Hell reflect medieval religious thought? Why were there Florentines in Hell? What lessons do you think this work was intended to teach its readers?
Source: From The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, translated by John Ciardi. Copyright 1954, 1957, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1965, 1967, 1970 by the Ciardi Family Publishing Trust. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
European life at the same time that the effects of plague were felt in many areas of medieval towns and cities.
The Development of Vernacular
Literature
Although Latin remained the language of the church liturgy and the official documents of both church and state, the fourteenth century witnessed a surge in liter- ature written in vernacular languages, especially in Italy. By the late fifteenth century, vernacular literary forms had become so celebrated that they could com- pete with and would eventually replace works in Latin.
Dante Alighieri (DAHN-tay al-ee-GYER-ee) (1265– 1321) came from an old Florentine noble family that had fallen on hard times. His masterpiece in the Italian vernacular was the Divine Comedy, written between 1313 and 1321. Cast in a typical medieval framework, the Divine Comedy is basically the story of the soul’s progression to salvation, a fundamental medieval pre- occupation. The lengthy poem is divided into three major sections corresponding to the realms of the afterworld: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven or Paradise. In the “Inferno” (see the box above), Dante is led by his guide, the classical author Virgil, who is a symbol of human reason. But Virgil (or reason) can lead the poet
266 Chapter 11 The Later Middle Ages: Crisis and Disintegration in the Fourteenth Century
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