Medieval Interpretation of Phonation Through the Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri

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.

Interpreting Dante's code in art

The purpose of the article is to study the interpretational possibilities of Dante's code in artistic samples of various types of art. Methodology. Methods of observation, modeling, comparison, analysis, and synthesis were used in the methodology of the work. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that the analysis of interpretations of Dante's code on the example of fine art, computer games, cartoons, musical arrangement in a ballet performance is carried out. Conclusions. Dante's code is a kind of cultural code that contains common information. The observation method was applied to fix the perception of works of art in order to study Dante's code. Modeling and comparison methods allowed us to determine the features of Dante's code in different genres and types of art. In the history of the visual arts, Dante's code is interpreted both in the works of artists and becomes a creative process with a generalized content of D. Alighieri's works, but with the exact use of the code name (S. Dali). Comparing the use of Dante's code in computer games, cartoons, we state that in the visual arts and modern video series, Dante's code is reproduced in accordance with the content of D. Alighieri's works. In the history of music, in the musical design of a ballet performance, Dante's code is reproduced in a generalized form, where the reference to the name and title of D. Alighieri's works dominates. In the libretto of the Kyiv ballet of the same name, Dante's code is embodied in two appeals: to a love story and fragmentarily and generally to the work "The Divine Comedy". The musical series of the ballet "Dante" is not directly related to Dante's code, but there are attempts by the authors to find allusions, reminiscences in the music of composers (A. Dvořák, R. Wagner, Ezio Bosso). Keywords: Dante's code, interpretation, ballet, fine arts, musical arrangement of a ballet performance, computer game, cartoon.

Introduction

The year 2021 has come exactly 700 years after the death of Dante Alighieri, one of the greatest authors of world literature. The Polish Classical, Romantic and Catholic traditions had been drawing from his works by the handful, and especially from the Divine Comedy. Dante was near and dear to many generations of our ancestors, accompanying them on the various levels of education, throughout middle school, high school and university. For the learning youth, he was a mentor and teacher who presented human nature in its all dimensions, from atrocity to heroism and holiness. In times of confusion that we are living through, when not only as individuals and communities, but as the entire Western civilization we have found ourselves in the “dark woods” (una selva oscura) to be preyed upon by the three beasts (le tre fiere): pride, greed and lust, Dante remains a beacon and inspiration for all those who believe that there is an objective truth and universal values that apply to all people regardless of race, nationality or social status.

ICON OF THE APOCALYPSE FROM THE DORMITION CATHEDRAL OF THE KREMLIN. DATE AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The “Apocalypse” icon from the Domition Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin has long been in the field of view of researchers, but still there is no common opinion about its dating, and therefore there is no context in which this monument would take its place. The icon has many inscriptions, all of which correspond to the text of the Revelation of John the Theologian. In the construction of the composition, the master of the “Apocalypse” could not rely on the Byzantine tradition of illustrating the Revelation, since it actually did not exist. So what could the author of the iconography of the Moscow Apocalypse have been inspired by? The process of penetration of Renaissance influences into Russian culture, which began in the reign of Ivan III, reached its highest point at the beginning of the XVI century. The coincidence of certain motives of the iconographic program of the «Apocalypse» with the motives of Botticelli’s illustrations for the Divine Comedy, as well as the role of the line in both works, indicate the penetration of Renaissance art influences into iconеpainting. The discovered parallels do not allow us to date the icon from the Domition Cathedral earlier than 1491-1500, the icon was most likely written after 1500, in the first decade of the XVI century. The icon became the “banner” of a new period of understanding of eschatological ideas.

An Academic Sin: The Use of Ser Brunetto Lantini in The Divine Comedy

On his journey through The Inferno, Dante Alighieri is shocked to encounter his beloved former teacher, Ser Brunetto Latini, in the third ring of the seventh circle of Hell where Latini is eternally tormented with other men of his ilk—academics, poets, and learned men of rhetoric—are punished as sodomites. The question then, is why has Latini been placed there and what can be inferred about Dante’s understanding of the nature of medieval sodomy as academic blasphemy? The findings presented here indicate that one of the most offensive readings of sodomy is an unsexual one. Sins of fleshy sensuality are presented blatantly in both the Inferno and Purgatory, but I argue that Dante places Brunetto among the eternally damned not only to privilege the rhetoric of humility but to serve as a cautionary tale on how our teachers fail us. Dante’s disassociation with Latini’s need for cerebral acclaim forms the foundational pad for which Dante cautions himself against the ultimate heresy of pride, while Latini continually presses the immodest approach for both himself and his pupil. Intellectual sodomy is a crime that is valued higher in Dante’s penal hierarchy than any sexual sin is, with less chance for redemption, as is shown with the direct bridging of desexualized sodomy in Inferno 15 with the explicitly sexualized sodomy of Purgatory 27. The fact that Inferno XV does not contain obvious allegory or simply stated sins renders it one of the most enigmatic cantos. The position that Brunetto’s sin is hubristic supports Dante’s conflicted relationship with his own pride—the sin on which Dante dedicates his journey.

Wer ist Fra Dolcino?

This paper investigates the image of the heretic fra’ Dolcino as presented in both medieval documentary sources and modern literature. Using a wide range of documentary and literary sources, at least two images of fra’ Dolcino can be outlined: the first is the ‚sharply defined‘ image of the legendary figure featuring in literary texts such as the „Divine Comedy“ by Dante Alighieri or „The Name of the Rose“ by Umberto Eco. The second, which emerges from historical documents, is the ‚blurred‘ image of Dolcino from Novara, the leader of a heretical sect that prospered between the 13th and the 14th centuries. This paper offers a study of the events linked to the figure of fra’ Dolcino and to his group of heretics, considering both the historical perspective and the quality of the information conveyed by literary and documentary sources.

Fan fiction and premodern literature: Methods and definitions

It is a cliché of any introduction to fan fiction to claim its precursors in canonical authors, including Virgil, Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, and Milton. But what does it mean to call the Aeneid or the Divine Comedy fan fiction? What kinds of analyses might such an approach generate? A survey of the nascent field of premodern fan fiction studies reveals three main axes of approaches to reading premodern literature through the lens of fan fiction (poaching, transformation, and affect), which are organized in turn around different definitions of fan fiction, suggesting one possible interdisciplinary theoretical model. Rather than focusing on the selection of canonical texts, this burgeoning and vibrant field of study must instead focus on developing its methodology.

“The lantern of the world rises to mortals by varied paths”: Paul Laffoley (1935–2015) and Dante

American artist and architect Paul Laffoley (1935–2015) had a life-long fascination with Dante. Not only did he refer to Dante and the Commedia throughout his writings and paintings, but he created a large-scale triptych illustrating the poem, as well as sketched out plans for a full-immersion Dante study center on a planetoid orbiting the Sun, complete with a to-scale replica of the medieval Earth, Mount Purgatory, the material heavens, and the Empyrean through which a “Dante Candidate” could re-enact the Pilgrim’s journey. Laffoley’s work is often placed by art critics within the visionary tradition and Laffoley himself embraced that label, even as he deconstructed the term in his writing. Among the many visionary artists, poets, and philosophers Laffoley studied, Dante was central. He was, for Laffoley, a model seeker of knowledge, a seer beyond the illusions of everyday life. The essay that follows offers a brief biography of Laffoley and his works; an overview of his two main Dante projects ( The Divine Comedy triptych [1972–1975] and The Dantesphere [1978]); and initial considerations on how Dante’s works and thought fit into Laffoley’s larger epistemological project.

Syllabification of the Divine Comedy

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.