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The Divine Comedy is an Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed around 1321, shortly before the author's death. It is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of Western literature. The poem's imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval worldview as it existed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan language, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.
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Arnaut Daniel was an Occitan troubadour of the 12th century, praised by Dante as "the best smith" and called a "grand master of love" by Petrarch. In the 20th century he was lauded by Ezra Pound in The Spirit of Romance (1910) as the greatest poet to have ever lived.
Occitan literature is a body of texts written in Occitan, mostly in the south of France. It was the first literature in a Romance language and inspired the rise of vernacular literature throughout medieval Europe. Occitan literature's Golden Age was in the 12th century, when a rich and complex body of lyrical poetry was produced by troubadours writing in Old Occitan, which still survives to this day. Although Catalan is considered by some a variety of Occitan, this article will not deal with Catalan literature, which started diverging from its Southern French counterpart in the late 13th century.
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Dante da Maiano was a late thirteenth-century poet who composed mainly sonnets in Italian and Occitan. He was an older contemporary of Dante Alighieri and active in Florence.
Paradiso is the third and final part of Dante's Divine Comedy, following the Inferno and the Purgatorio. It is an allegory telling of Dante's journey through Heaven, guided by Beatrice, who symbolises theology. In the poem, Paradise is depicted as a series of concentric spheres surrounding the Earth, consisting of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Fixed Stars, the Primum Mobile and finally, the Empyrean. It was written in the early 14th century. Allegorically, the poem represents the soul's ascent to God.
Bondie Dietaiuti was a 13th-century poet from Florence. He was influenced by the Occitan troubadours and known for his animal imagery, including a translation of lines about a lark from the troubadour song Can vei la lauzeta mover. In turn, he has been suggested to be an influence on Dante. Three of his canzoni and four of his sonnets survive. One of his sonnets was included in the Storia della letteratura italiana of Francesco de Sanctis.
References
- ↑ This notation refers to the Bibliographie des Troubadours by Alfred Pillet and Henry Carstens (Halle: Niemeyer, 1933). The 70 refers to Ventadorn, and the 43 is the song number among Ventadorn's works.
- 1 2 Roden, Timothy J.; Wright, Craig; Simms, Bryan R. (2009), "16. Bernart de Ventadorn, Can vei la lauzeta (c.1165)", Anthology for Music in Western Civilization, Volume I, Cengage Learning, p. 29, ISBN 9780495572749 .
- 1 2 Easthope, Antony (1989), "Bernart de Ventadorn: 'Can vei la lauzeta mover' (c. 1170)", Poetry and Phantasy, Cambridge University Press, pp. 75–81, ISBN 9780521355988 .
- ↑ Murray, David (2016), "The clerical reception of Bernart de Ventadorn's 'Can vei la lauzeta mover' (PC 70, 34)", Medium Ævum, 85 (1): 259–267, doi:10.2307/26396373, JSTOR 26396373
- ↑ Paden, William D. (January 1993), "Old Occitan as a lyric language: The insertions from Occitan in three thirteenth-century French romances", Speculum, 68 (1): 36–53, doi:10.2307/2863833
- ↑ Holbrook, Richard Thayer (1902), "Chapter XLI: The Lark", Dante and the Animal Kingdom, Columbia University Press, pp. 266–269
- 1 2 Alighieri, Dante (1984), Musa, Mark (ed.), Dante's Paradise, Indiana University Press, p. 244, ISBN 9780253316196 .
- ↑ Durling, Robert M. (2010), The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Volume 3: Paradiso, Oxford University Press, pp. 413–414, ISBN 9780199723355 .
- ↑ Wilhelm, J. J. (2010), Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, 1925-1972, Penn State Press, p. 50, ISBN 9780271042985 .
- ↑ Bernart de Ventadorn, Quan (Can) vei la lauzeta mover, motet on allmusic.com, 40 versions listed, retrieved 2017-03-22. See also additional variant spellings at allmusic.com.