“Per tatto di vertù”: il tatto dell’anima e il tocco della Grazia nella Divina Commedia

2021 ◽  
pp. 001458582110226
Author(s):  
Anne-Gaëlle Cuif

This contribution aims to identify the notions of “tatto” and “tocco” as main agents for soul health and as vectors of spiritual transcendence in Dante’s thought and in particular in the Divine Comedy. In his path from Hell to Paradise, the pilgrim transforms his physical ability “to touch” and “to be touched” in a form of spiritual sensoriality. In this way, the sensitive phenomenons participate to the intellectual processes, pleasure becomes salvation, and the perception of sweetness allows access to the intangible and ineffable realities of Paradise. We will analyze the functions of tactile feeling and experience in their pathological, pharmacological and finally spiritual aspects. First we show how touch feeling, for Christian thought, corresponds to a general modality through which Grace enters into the intellect and through which the intellect perceives the divine phenomena. In this case, pleasure is synonymous with communication with God and is no more related to a condemnable voluptuousness. From the symptomatic touch of physical suffering of Hell to the ineffable sweetness of Paradise, passing through the acquisition of a new spiritual touch in Purgatory, Dante develops this idea through many similarities. Poetic writing becomes itself the instrument through which the soul could taste the divine “stille” in order to turn back to the “stelle”.

Italica ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 411
Author(s):  
Fabian R. Alfie ◽  
Dante Alighieri ◽  
Stanley Appelbaum

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 227-238
Author(s):  
Marino Alberto Balducci

The sacrilege of Vanni Fucci, the beast of Pistoia, in the Divine Comedy This hermeneutic analysis presents a reflection on the complex nature of the concept of theft in the Christian world, compared to the pagan one. The author develops the idea of the desperate blasphemy of the infernal prisoner as a form of unconscious prayer. Vanni Fucci from Pistoia, the sacrilegious and blasphemous character of Dante’s Inferno, is analyzed by referring to the fundamental difference between the classical and medieval philosophical perception of metamorphosis as a symbol.


Author(s):  
Andrea F. De Carlo

The article analyses Józef Ignacy Kraszewski’s contribution to the development of Polish Dante studies – thanks to his lectures on Dante held in Krakow and Lviv in 1867 and later published under the title Studies on The Divine Comedy, 1869. The article presents other opinions of Dante scholars of the time and more or less critical reviews of the results of Kraszewski’s research.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-65
Author(s):  
Owen Barfield

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Andrea Asperti ◽  
Stefano Dal Bianco

We provide a syllabification algorithm for the Divine Comedy using techniques from probabilistic and constraint programming. We particularly focus on the synalephe , addressed in terms of the "propensity" of a word to take part in a synalephe with adjacent words. We jointly provide an online vocabulary containing, for each word, information about its syllabification, the location of the tonic accent, and the aforementioned synalephe propensity, on the left and right sides. The algorithm is intrinsically nondeterministic, producing different possible syllabifications for each verse, with different likelihoods; metric constraints relative to accents on the 10th, 4th, and 6th syllables are used to further reduce the solution space. The most likely syllabification is hence returned as output. We believe that this work could be a major milestone for a lot of different investigations. From the point of view of digital humanities it opens new perspectives on computer-assisted analysis of digital sources, comprising automated detection of anomalous and problematic cases, metric clustering of verses and their categorization, or more foundational investigations addressing, e.g., the phonetic roles of consonants and vowels. From the point of view of text processing and deep learning, information about syllabification and the location of accents opens a wide range of exciting perspectives, from the possibility of automatic learning syllabification of words and verses to the improvement of generative models, aware of metric issues, and more respectful of the expected musicality.


2021 ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Marina G. Kurgan ◽  

The House of the Dead was repeatedly compared with the first part of Dante’s The Divine Comedy even in F.M. Dostoevsky’s lifetime. However, his contemporaries usually focused on general analogies, while later scholars paid more attention to the narrative features or individual reminiscences. This research studies the main aspects of the artistic structure of the Dante code, constructing the space of Hell in Dostoevsky’s novel. 1. The organization of space. Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, the narrator in The House of the Dead, recreates a three-dimensional image that resembles a gradually narrowing funnel: from a bird’s-eye view, where the prison is seen in its entirety, the focus slowly descends, passing to smaller objects, and finally reaching the “three boards”, which limit Goryanchikov’s personal space. The same principle is employed to construct the space of Hell in Dante’s poem. In The House of the Dead, there is another significant indication of the spatial affinity of Dante’s hell and Dostoevsky’s katorga – active imagery associated with cobwebs and spiders. In the centre of the system of images associated with the designated semantic network is the parade- major, the head of the fortress and the owner of the inmate web. 2. The character system as an element constituting the space of Hell. The character system of The House of the Dead follows the compositional principle of Divine Comedy, where sinners are located in different circles in accordance with their main passion. There are three circles in the prison: the first is formal, according to the court decision; the second is informal, internal, formed by crafts and occupations; the third represents Goryanchikov’s perspective as an exponent of human and humane judgment, which distinguishes another person’s moral state. 3. Torment. The House of the Dead demonstrate a hierarchy in describing the tortures, while freedom becomes a fundamental category to embody the most important motif of physical and moral torment connecting Dostoevsky’s novel with Dante’s experience. The bodily torment ceases to be only the torment of the body to become a pain of the soul, comparable to physical torment, so the soul suffers and burns. Hell as a moral topos was the key for Dostoevsky. In The House of the Dead, he chooses the same way as Dante in The Divine Comedy: vivid corporeality conveys an esoteric metaphor of moral suffering and deep inner movements of the soul.


2022 ◽  
pp. 019459982110730
Author(s):  
Martha Borraccini ◽  
Matteo Marinini ◽  
Michele Augusto Riva

The anatomic and medical knowledge of people throughout history is unexpectedly evident in some of the poems and texts written by intellectuals of the time. This article attempts to understand the conception of laryngology in the Middle Ages by analyzing the Divine Comedy, written by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) at the beginning of the 14th century. In the text, Dante mentions the throat several times. He recognizes that the larynx has the dual functions of allowing respiration (dead souls recognize that the poet is alive through movement of his throat when breathing) and speech (souls with their throat cut cannot speak). However, Dante does not seem to know of the existence of vocal cords, thinking that it is the tongue that allows for word formation. In general, Dante’s poem indicates that the anatomy and function of the throat were known during the medieval period, although this knowledge was not precise.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document