general recap and Dante's inferno

I just realized I've skipped over Everyman and the Canterbury tales.

Anyway, just as a general recap- Everyman is a morality play about how every man will inevitably die and that worldly pleasures can't accompany you into death, just your good deeds. It is pro-church.

The Canterbury Tales were written by Chaucer and are about a group of people telling tales while on a pilgrimage. Chaucer is surprisingly critical of the church, with the only clergy member who is good being the parson.

We are also reading Dante's Inferno, which I have mixed feelings on. It is an exceptionally well-written poem, but it's not really the piece of art its often held up as. The Inferno is part of a larger work known as the Divine Comedy, and it wasn't meant to be art so much a it was an act of revenge.

In Pope Boniface VIII's reign, the republic of Florence was pretty divided over whether or not he was a good person.The Neri (black) Guelphs felt that the pope was good and the Bianchi (white) Guelphs were wary of him. Dante was a Bianchi Guelph. Anyway, when the then-pope appointed Charles De Valois as a general peacemaker for Tuscany, Dante traveled to Rome to talk to the pope about it. while Dante was there, the pope ordered Valois to enter Florence with an armed militia and overthrow the established government with a more religiously appreciative one. It should be pointed out that Dante was a politician. The pope then fined Dante for being in Rome, and the new government of Florence decided to ban him from ever returning. (This decision was not repealed until 2008.)

This is when Dante started to write the Divine Comedy. 

Dante is really good with rhyming and can make things stick in your head, which is one way to ensure his story got remembered.

What is especially important is that there were many dialects of Italian at the time, but there was also another division: there were 2 separate  and very different versions of Italian, both with their own individual dialects. One was spoken primarily by the nobles and one spoken primarily by the commoners.

Dante wrote the Divine Comedy in common Italian.

Even with a lot of people unable to read, and without the printing press, the story still was heard and and passed around. In fact, it's seems likely that Dante himself read it to commoners to ensure that it spread. He was, after all, the one who would primarily benefit from others hearing it.

Now onto the actual story and how it's just a particularly well-written bit of revenge. Dante had every reason to hate Pope Boniface VIII when he wrote the poem. In the poem, the then-pope has a special place in hell: circle 8. Dante comes across Pope Nicholas III in the third sub-ring, the one that represents simony, who mistakes Dante for Pope Boniface VIII. When the confusion is cleared up, Nicholas III comments that he foresees that Boniface VIII will join him soon. Later on in the poem we are reminded of Pope Boniface VIII's feud with the Colonna family, leading to the destruction of the city Palestrina, the death of 6,000 innocents and the destruction of both Julius Caesar's home and a shrine to the Virgin Mary. Boniface VIII's fate is confirmed by Beatrice, when Dante finds her in heaven.

Also in the poem Dante meets St. Peter, who denounces the papacy, calling it a blood-filled sewer with a vacant throne.

It should be pointed out that the 8th circle contains those whose misdeeds are second only to that of Judas. One has to wonder why the pope didn't send an assassin after Dante.

Dante was probably laughing in his grave when Italy became a single state, and had to decide on a single unifying language, because they chose the language of the Divine Comedy for it, ensuring that his work lived on forever. He also, probably, got another laugh when Florence decided to repeal the ban and asked for Ravenna, the city Dante moved to and died in, to exhume his body so it could be buried in Florence. Ravenna has refused to this day.

Sources:

http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/circle8a.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Boniface_VIII#Posthumous_trial

http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/textpopup/inf0601.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/return-of-dante-the-guelphs-and-the-ghibellines-850012.html

http://www.literarytraveler.com/articles/dante_florence/