5 ms·
> Dante is clearly writing in the expectation that his intended audience of learned men will know these references and understand their relevance, We just repl
by liontwist 2y ago
> Dante is clearly writing in the expectation that his intended audience of learned men will know these references and understand their relevance,
We just replaced the Bible and Homeric texts with Star Wars and marvel. Everybody at the time would know the biblical allusions even if they were illiterate.
> many conditions that nowadays are routinely cured or prevented would have been inevitably fatal; not all of the souls in the Comedy who died in their thirties and forties
Are they confusing average lifespan for typical lifespan? Isn’t this contradicted by the later paragraph in the same article?
- yCombLinks 2y agoI don't see that error being made. What makes you think that? Tons of people died in their 30s and 40s from curable illnesses before modern medicine. Life expectancy of people that reached adulthood was still under 50 during that time period.
- zusammen 2y ago[dead]
- garethrees 2y agoI am not sure that "Dante is clearly writing in the expectation that his audience will know these references" as claimed in the article. He put a lot of learning into the work, and maybe he had in mind an ideal reader who could follow the most obscure of references, and appreciate all the allegorical meanings, but it's noticeable that the narrator of the poem is always asking naïve questions and getting rebuked for his ignorance by Virgil and Beatrice. Readers who don't understand everything in the poem can thus feel that they are in a similar position to the narrator. And as soon as the poem was published, people started writing explanations for the difficult bits. Dante's son Jacopo wrote a commentary in 1322, Graziolo Bambaglioli wrote another in 1324, and by the end of the 14th century there were at least fifteen. This shows that the poem quickly found an audience that was not familiar with all the references.
- liontwist 2y agoGood info. But is the difficulty detecting the references? Or interpreting the meaning and metaphor?
- mistercheph 2y agoIn serious reading of anything, there is no difference
- liontwist 2y agoWe are discussing a book where the author intentionally fills the world with historical figures. This is not the structure of every work.
- mistercheph 2y agoHistorical figures aren't the only exogenous things in written works, and historical figures are far from the extent of the external structures and themes that are present in Dante's Comedy, I would go as far as to say that the historical connections in the comedy are not that significant, and serve mostly to distract one particular class of reader.
- liontwist 2y agoOk, but you aren’t participating in the discussion being had here.
- mistercheph 2y agoI responded directly to your comment where you suggested that the work of identifying and/or interpreting "references" was unique to or characteristic of Dante. And I am adding that while always interesting and rewarding for those that are obsessed with a work, "getting" the references in Dante's Comedy or any other work of merit is not the point, and they are not all that important in the work. And further, since I am near the subject, I am engraving my personal ad hominem, that it is the characteristic mark of a certain class of readership (which I hold in low regard) to fixate on which 7th century monk in which manuscript first introduced some mentioned doctrine before having (and never-to-have) attempted to commune with the work itself.
- throw_pm23 2y agoI will sound awfully smug, but I tend to understand most of the biblical and homeric references, only some of the star wars ones (those referring to the original trilogy) and absolutely none of those about marvel films of which I haven't seen any. It means I can go enjoy some Dante :)