I find that people tend to either be all about the middle ages or to find them totally dull and retrograde, a wasted eon between the end of antiquity and early modernity. That’s an interesting point about the beard. I almost feel that Dante to borrow a phrase from the 2024 invisible college is so much “in his babygirl energy” or at least that’s how he seems to us now, that it’s somehow strange to think about him as someone who had a wife and three children, never mind a beard. As someone who has suffered through the Cantos, very much agreed about him being a bad influence on the modernists…
Yes I’m in the “jump from Ovid to Shakespeare” camp myself. I often find the medieval mentality too alienating to appreciate the art, more so almost than the classics, given the obdurate taste for allegory. In academia (in English anyway), medievalists are either the only right-wingers around or some of the wokest people in BritLit, in both cases seeking a redemptive “other” of modernity-liberalism. I like Dante (and Chaucer) because they’re half in and half out.
Very babygirl in Vita Nuova. I think I say in the Purgatorio episode that by the Comedy he’s all male, like Milton, who had been called the Lady at college. So there appears to be some kind of progression here for a certain kind of epic Christian poet. Dante the character still cries for his mother-fathers Virgil and Beatrice all the time in the Comedy, but Dante the poet is in rational and sublime command, as if a certain journey to mature manhood, following his anima’s rather forceful integration of him, were part of what he intended to narrate. But again, perhaps I just don’t understand something about this somewhat culturally alien text.
I find that people tend to either be all about the middle ages or to find them totally dull and retrograde, a wasted eon between the end of antiquity and early modernity. That’s an interesting point about the beard. I almost feel that Dante to borrow a phrase from the 2024 invisible college is so much “in his babygirl energy” or at least that’s how he seems to us now, that it’s somehow strange to think about him as someone who had a wife and three children, never mind a beard. As someone who has suffered through the Cantos, very much agreed about him being a bad influence on the modernists…
Yes I’m in the “jump from Ovid to Shakespeare” camp myself. I often find the medieval mentality too alienating to appreciate the art, more so almost than the classics, given the obdurate taste for allegory. In academia (in English anyway), medievalists are either the only right-wingers around or some of the wokest people in BritLit, in both cases seeking a redemptive “other” of modernity-liberalism. I like Dante (and Chaucer) because they’re half in and half out.
Very babygirl in Vita Nuova. I think I say in the Purgatorio episode that by the Comedy he’s all male, like Milton, who had been called the Lady at college. So there appears to be some kind of progression here for a certain kind of epic Christian poet. Dante the character still cries for his mother-fathers Virgil and Beatrice all the time in the Comedy, but Dante the poet is in rational and sublime command, as if a certain journey to mature manhood, following his anima’s rather forceful integration of him, were part of what he intended to narrate. But again, perhaps I just don’t understand something about this somewhat culturally alien text.