February 28 - Dante

February 28 – Dante

Dante Alighieri was born to a prominent family from Florence and at the age of twelve was contracted in marriage to one woman, but had fallen head over heels in love at the age of nine with Beatrice, whom he featured in both The Divine Comedy and another poem. Though they ended up being married to others, his love for her became the force that began the idea of ‘courtly love,’ pure and passionate. She was murdered at the age of 24 and Dante immersed himself in Latin literature, then studying philosophy with the Domincans.

He became embroiled in the politics of the region and ended up being exiled to Rome. He spent time in other parts of Italy, but when the demands for reparations and apologies came that would allow him to return to Florence were too great, he refused and knew he might never see his home again.

His Divine Comedy was a work in three parts: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Hell describes the nine circles of the pit of hell and he is guided through this by Virgil, the Roman poet. He meets interesting people there – none the least of whom was Pope Boniface VIII. Purgatory describes their journey up a mountain made of nine tiers where souls are working off their sins. On the fourth to last tier, Beatrice takes over from Virgil to act as his guide. Virgil was a pagan. Though he represented the best of humanity, he was not allowed into Paradise. She leads him through the nine circles of heaven where he encounters saints of God.

Dante’s images of heaven overwhelmed even his capacity for description and the text portrays many of the beliefs regarding how people will live out eternity from the Middle Ages.

While this was an amazing piece of religious literature, one of the other great things that came from Dante’s writing was the establishment of the Italian language for publication. Up until this point, Latin was the language used for publication. Dante chose a dialect from Tuscany and actually built a beautiful language for his work called ‘Italian.’ All of a sudden, people were able to read published works in a language that was familiar to them. While there were hundreds of dialects in Italy, with his use of this, a national language was established, one that was beautiful and accessible to everyone.