Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. All biblical quotations are from the King James Bible.
1. “Infants talk, in part, to re-establish ‘being-with’ experiences . . . or to re-establish the ‘personal order’”: Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: HarperCollins, 1985), p. 171.
2. Michel de Montaigne, “An Apology for Raymond Sebond,” 2.12, in The Complete Essays, trans. and ed. M. A. Screech (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1991), p. 591. According to Pausanias (2nd century C.E.), the sayings “Know Thyself” and “Nothing Too Much” were inscribed on the front of the Temple of Delphi and dedicated to Apollo. See Pausanias, Guide to Greece, vol. 1: Central Greece, trans. Peter Levi (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1979), 10.24, p. 466. There are six Platonic dialogues which discuss the Delphic saying: Charmides (164D), Protagoras (343B), Phaedrus (229E), Philebus (48C), Laws (2.923A), I. Alcibiades (124A, 129A, and 132C). See The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).
3. Michel de Montaigne, “On Physiognomy,” 3.12, in Complete Essays, p. 1176.
4. Michel de Montaigne, “On Educating Children,” 1.26, in Complete Essays, p. 171.
5. Job 28:20. The book of Job provides no answers but poses a series of “real questions” that are, according to Northrop Frye, “stages in formulating better questions; answers cheat us of the right to do this.” See Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, ed. Alvin A. Lee, volume 19 in the Collected Works (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 217. Michel de Montaigne, “On Democritus and Heraclitus,” 1.50, in Complete Essays, p. 337.
6. See Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th anniversary ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 63–65.
7. Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (London: John Calder, 1983), p. 46.
8. Honoré de Balzac, Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (Paris: Editions Climats, 1991), p. 58.
9. Francis Bacon, New Atlantis, in The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis, ed. Arthur Johnston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 245.
10. Putting a question into words distances our own experience and allows it to be explored verbally. “Language forces a space between interpersonal experience as lived and as represented”: Stern, Interpersonal World of the Infant, p. 182.
11. MS lat. 6332, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, reproduced in M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 32–33.
12. Paradiso, XXV:2, “al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra.”
13. Giovanni Boccaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, ed. Luigi Sasso (Milan: Garzanti, 1995), p. 81; Jorge Luis Borges, “Prólogo,” in Nueve ensayos dantescos, ed. Joaquín Arce (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1982), pp. 85–86; Giuseppe Mazzotta, Reading Dante (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 1; Osip Mandelstam, “Conversation on Dante,” in The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004), p. 151; Olga Sedakova, “Sotto il cielo della violenza,” in Esperimenti Danteschi: Inferno 2008, ed. Simone Invernizzi (Milan: Casa Editrice Mariett, 2009), p. 107.
14. This text was never written, but in 1965 I witnessed Borges and Bioy discuss their intention to write it as part of their collection of mock essays, Crónicas de Bustos Domecq (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1967).
15. Paradiso, XVIII:20–21, “Volgiti e ascolta; / ché non pur ne’ miei occhi è paradiso.”
16. Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, vol. 1, trans. Olga Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 76.
17. Inferno, I:91, “A te convien tenere altro vïaggio.”
18. Montaigne, “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” 2.12, p. 512, quoting Purgatorio XXVI:34–36, “così per entro loro schiera bruna / s’ammusa l’una con l’altra formica, / forse a spïar lor via e lor fortuna.”
19. Michel de Montaigne, “On Educating Children,” 1.26, in Complete Essays, p. 170; Inferno XI:93, “Non men che saver, dubbiar m’aggrata.”
20. Paradiso II:1–4, “O voi che siete in piccioletta barca, / desiderosi d’ascoltar, seguiti / dietro al mio legno che cantando varca, // tornate a riveder li vostri liti.”
Chapter opener: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) (London: John Murray, 1971), p. 28.
1. Roger Chartier, “El nacimiento del lector moderno. Lectura, curiosidad, ociosidad, raridad,” in Historia y formas de la curiosidad, ed. Francisco Jarauta (Santandor: Cuadernos de la Fundación Botín, 2012), pp. 183–210; The Jerusalem Bible: Reader’s Edition, gen. ed. Alexander Jones (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), p. 905.
2. Plato, Theaetetus 149A–B, trans. F. M. Cornford, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 853–54.
3. Inferno, VIII:1, “Io dico, seguitando, che assai prima.”
4. Giovanni Boccaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, ed. Luigi Sasso (Milan: Garzanti, 1995), p. 70.
5. Ibid., pp. 71–72. Luigi Sasso notes that these verses come from the letter from Brother Ilaro to Uguccione della Faggiuola preserved in Boccaccio’s own Zibaldone Laurenziano; the letter itself is most probably the creation of Boccaccio himself.
6. Francesco Petrarca, Familiares, 21:15, quoted in John Ahern, “What Did the First Copies of the Comedy Look Like?” in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolina Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), p. 5.
7. Gennaro Ferrante, “Forme, funzioni e scopi del tradurre Dante da Coluccio Salutati a Giovanni da Serravalle,” in Annali dell’Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 25 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010), pp. 147–82.
8. Inferno I:114, “per loco etterno”; II:31–32, “Ma io, perché venirvi? o chi ’l concede? / Io non Enea, io non Paulo sono.”
9. Apocalypse de Pierre, 16:2–3, and Apocalypse de Paul, 32 a–b, in Écrits apocryphes chrétiens, vol. 1, ed. François Bovon and Pierre Geoltrain (Paris: Gallimard, 199), pp. 773, 810.
10. Dante Alighieri, Vita nova, II:5, in Le opere di Dante: testo critico della Società dantesca italiana, ed. M. Barbi et al. (Florence: Bemporad, 1921), p. 3.
11. Dante Alighieri, Questio de aqua et terra, I:3, in Opere di Dante, p. 467.
12. Paradiso, XXXIII:33, “sì che ’l sommo piacer li si dispieghi”; Convivio III:XI, 5, in Opere di Dante, p. 229.
13. Paradiso X:89, “la tua sete”; X:90, “se non com’acqua ch’al mar non si cala.”
14. G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 59.
15. Ibid., p. 21.
16. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, prologue, 5 vols., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1948; repr. Notre Dame, Ind.: Christian Classics, 1981), vol. 1, p. xix.
17. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 980.a.21; Thomas Aquinas, “Exposition of Metaphysics,” 1.1–3, in Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Ralph McInerny (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1998), pp. 721–24.
18. Saint Augustine, The Retractions, 2.24, in The Fathers of the Church, vol. 60, ed. and trans. Sister Mary Inez Bogan (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1968), p. 32; Saint Augustine, De Morib. Eccl. 21, quoted in Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. 2.2, q. 167, art. 1, vol. 4, p. 1868.
19. Aquinas quotes Jerome (Epist. XXI ad Damas): “We see priests forsaking the Gospels and the prophets, and reading stage-plays, and singing the love songs of pastoral idylls” (Summa Theologica, pt. 2, art. 1, vol. 4, p. 1869).
20. Bernard de Clairvaux, Sermones super Canticum Canticorum, Ser. 36, in S. Bernardi Opera II, ed. J. Leclerq (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1958), p. 56; Alcuin, De Grammatica, PL 101, 850 B, quoted in Carmen Lozano Guillén, “El concepto de gramática en el Renacimiento,” Humanistica Lovaniensia: Journal of Neo-Latin Studies 41 (1992): 90.
21. Bruno Nardi, “L’origine dell’anima umana secondo Dante,” in Studi di filosofia medievale (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1960), p. 27.
22. Paradiso XXXIII:142–45, “All’ alta fantasia qui mancò possa; / ma già volgeva il mio disiro e il velle, / sì come rota ch’ egualmente è mossa, / l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.”
23. David Hume, “My Own Life” (1776), quoted in Ernest C. Mossner, “Introduction,” in Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1969), p. 17.
24. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London, 1739), title page; Hume, “My Own Life,” quoted in Mossner, “Introduction,” p. 17.
25. Hume, “My Own Life,” quoted in Mossner, “Introduction,” p. 17.
26. Isaiah Berlin, The Age of Enlightenment: The Eighteenth Century Philosophers (1956), quoted in Mossner, “Introduction,” p. 7; Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Mossner, p. 41.
27. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Mossner, pp. 499–500; Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. 2.2, q. 167, vol. 4, p. 1870.
28. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, pp. 495, 497.
29. The chevalier de Jaucourt, “Curiosité,” in Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Encyclopédie; ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris, 1751), vol. 4, pp. 577–78.
30. Inferno, XXVIII:139–41, “Perch’ io partii così giunte persone, / partito porto il mio cerebro, lasso! / dal suo principio ch’ è in questo troncone.”
31. Boccaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, p. 51.
32. Inferno, XX:19–21, “Se Dio ti lasci, lettor, prender frutto / di tua lezione, or pensa per te stesso / com’ io potea tener lo viso asciutto.”
33. See Denise Heilbronn, “Master Adam and the Fat-Bellied Lute,” Dante Studies 101 (1983): 51–65.
34. Inferno, XXX:131–32, “Or pur mira! / che per poco è teco non mi risso”; 148, “ché voler ciò udire è bassa voglia.”
35. Seneca, “On Leisure,” 5.3, in Moral Essays, vol. 2, trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 190–91. I have slightly altered the translation.
Chapter opener: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile; ou, De l’éducation, bk. 1, ed. Charles Wirz and Pierre Burgelin (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 89.
1. Inferno, XXVI:25, 29, “Quante ’l villan ch’al poggio si riposa, / . . . vede lucciole giù per la vallea”; 52–53, “chi è ’n quel foco che vien sì diviso / di sopra”; 82, “quando nel mondo li alti verse scrissi”; 93, “prima che sí Enea la nomasse.”
2. Ibid., 97–98, “dentro a me l’ardore / ch’i’ ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto”; Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses” (1842), in Selected Poems, ed. Michael Millgate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 88.
3. Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, ed. Lanfranco Caretti, XV:25 (Milan: Mondadori, 1957), p. 277.
4. ‘Abd-ar-Rahmân b. Khaldûn Al-Hadramî, Al-Muqaddina: Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle, translated from the Arabic and edited by Vincent Monteil, 3rd ed., 6.39 (Paris: Sinbad/Actes Sud, 1997), p. 948. Ibn Khaldun quotes Qur’an 2:142.
5. Inferno, XI:60, “e simile lordura”; XXVI:58–63, “e dentro da la lor fiamma si geme / l’agguato del caval che fé la porta / onde uscì de’ Romani il gentil seme. // Piangesvisi entro l’arte per che, morta, / Deîdemìa ancor si duol d’Achille, / e del Palladio pena vi si porta.” Leah Schwebel, “‘Simile lordura,’ Altra Bolgia: Authorial Conflation in Inferno 26,” Dante Studies 133 (2012): 47–65.
6. See Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the “Divine Comedy” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 66–106.
7. It is not clear whether Dante’s Ulysses left on his last fatal journey after his return to Ithaca (as Tennyson believed) or whether he never returned and kept on traveling after his Homeric adventures.
8. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (London: Nick Hern Books, 1995), p. 32.
9. “Philo,” in Louis Jacob, The Jewish Religion: A Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 377.
10. Saint Augustine, On Genesis (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 2002), p. 83.
11. Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, trans. Dorothea Wender (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1973), pp. 42, 61; Joachim du Bellay, Les Antiquitez de Rome, quoted in Dora and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 58–59.
12. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letter to Mrs. Thomas Stevenson, December 26, 1880, in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to His Family and Friends, vol. 1, ed. Sidney Colvin (New York: Scribner’s, 1899), pp. 227–29.
13. Paradiso XXXIII:94–96, “Un punto solo m’è maggior letargo / che venticinque secoli a la ’mpresa / che fé Nettuno ammirar l’ombra d’Argo.”
14. Cited in “Questions,” in Jacob, Jewish Religion, p. 399.
15. Paradiso, XXXIII:85–87, “Nel suo profondo vidi che s’interna, / legato con amore in un volume, / ciò che per l’universo si squaderna.”
16. See Agostino Ramelli, Diverse et artificiose macchine (Paris, 1588). Discussed in Lina Bolzoni, La stanza della memoria: modelli letterari e iconografici nell’età della stampa, (Milan: Einaudi, 1995), p. 64.
17. Orazio Toscanella, Armonia di tutti i principali retori (Venice, 1569). Discussed in Bolzoni, Stanza della memoria, pp. 69–73.
18. “La scienza del perché,” quoted in Bolzoni, Stanza della memoria, p. 48.
19. Purgatorio, II:11–12, “gente che pensa suo cammino / che va col core, e col corpo dimora.” The canto ends with a simile of the opposite impulse: “come uom che va, nè sa dove riesca” (132), “like a man who goes, but doesn’t know where he’ll come out.”
20. Carlo Ossola, Introduzione alla Divina Commedia (Venice: Marsilio, 2012), p. 40.
21. Dante Alighieri, Epistola XIII:72, in Le opere di Dante: testo critico della Società dantesca italiana, ed. M. Barbi et al. (Florence: Bemporad, 1921), p. 440; Inferno, I:91, “A te convien tenere altro viaggio”; V:22, “Non impedir lo suo fatale andare.”
22. Seneca, Epistulae morales, ed. and trans. R. M. Gummere, vol. 1, Ep. 88 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); Héraclite, Allégories d’Homère, 70:8, translated from the Greek by Félix Buffière (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1962), p. 75; Dio Chrysostom, “Discourse 71,” in Discourses 61–80, trans. H. Lamar Crosby (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 165; for Epictetus see Silvia Montiglio, From Villain to Hero: Odysseus in Ancient Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), pp. 87–94.
23. See Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1964), p. 77.
Chapter opener: Fernando de Rojas y “Antiguo Autor,” La Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, 3.3, ed. Francisco J. Lobera, Guillermo Serés, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Carlos Mota, Iñigo Ruiz Arzaluz, and Francisco Rico (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2011), p. 110; Simone Weil, quoted in Roberto Calasso, I quarantanove gradini (Milan: Adelphi, 1991), p. 121.
1. Paradiso, XXIV:25–27, “Però salta la penna e non lo scrivo: / ché l’imagine nostra a cotai pieghe, / non che ’l parlare, è troppo color vivo.”
2. Ibid., 40, “ama bene e bene spera e crede”; 46–51, “Sí come il baccialier s’arma e non parla / fin che l’maestro la question propone, / per approvarla, non per terminarla, // cosí m’armava io d’ogne ragione / mentre ch’ella dicea, per esser presto / a tal querente e a tal professione.”
3. Ibid., 79–81, “Sé quantunque s’acquista / giú per dottrina, fosse cosí ’nteso, / non lí avria loco ingegno di sofista.”
4. Bonaventure, Les Sentences 2, in Les Sentences; Questions sur Dieu: Commentaire du premier livre de sentences de Pierre Lombard, translated from the Latin by Marc Ozilou (Paris: PUF, 2002), p. 1.
5. See Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House, 1955), pp. 246–50.
6. Aristotle, Topics, Books I and VIII with Excerpts from Related Texts, trans. Robin Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), p. 101 (slanderers and thieves); Aristotle, On Sophistical Refutations; On Coming-to-be and Passing Away; On the Cosmos, trans. E. S. Forster and D. J. Furley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 13–15 (leading others into error); Aristotle, Topics, p. 127 (irrelevant premise).
7. G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 1.
8. Thomas Mautner, The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 2005), p. 583; Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 169; Lucian, “The Passing of Peregrinus,” in Lucian, ed. and trans. A. M. Harmon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), vol. 5, chap. 13.
9. Quoted in Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España, translated from the French by Antonio Alatorre (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007), p. 506.
10. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, bk. 1, chap. 19, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Pierre Le Motteux (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 66.
11. See Lucien Febvre, Le problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle: La religion de Rabelais (Paris: Albin Michel, 1942).
12. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 362–63.
13. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, bk. 5, chap. 48, p. 806; chap. 37, p. 784; chap. 48, p. 807.
14. Deleuze, quoted in Barbara Cassin, L’Effet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 20.
15. See W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 282.
16. See Kerferd, Sophistic Movement, p. 38.
17. The Greek Sophists, ed. and trans. John Dillon and Tania Gregel (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 2003), pp. 119–32.
18. Plato, Lesser Hippias, 363c–d, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 202.
19. W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers from Thales to Aristotle (London: Routledge, 1960), p. 66.
20. I. F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), pp. 41–42; Harry Sidebottom, “Philostratus and the Symbolic Roles of the Sophist and the Philosopher,” in Philostratus, ed. Ewen Bowie and Jas Elsner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 77–79.
21. Xenophon, “On Hunting” 13, quoted in Jacqueline de Romilly, Les Grands Sophistes dans l’Athène de Périclès (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1988), p. 55.
22. Philostratus, quoted in Sidebottom, “Philostratus and the Symbolic Roles of the Sophist and the Philosopher,” p. 80; Lucian of Samosata, The Rhetorician’s Vade Mecum, 15, in The Works of Lucian of Samosata, trans. H. W. and F. Fowler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905), p. 52.
23. See Mario Untersteiner, I sofisti (1948; repr. Milan: Mondadori, 2008), p. 280.
24. Plato, The Republic, bk. 5, 462c–e, 463a–e, trans. Paul Shorey, in Collected Dialogues of Plato, pp. 701–3.
25. Plato, Protagoras, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie, in Collected Dialogues of Plato, pp. 319–20.
26. Plato, Lesser Hippias, 365b, p. 202.
27. Ibid., 376a–b, p. 214.
28. Ibid., 376c, p. 214.
29. Stone, Trial of Socrates, p. 57.
30. Michel de Montaigne, “An Apology for Raymond Sebond,” 2.12, in The Complete Essays, trans. and ed. M. A. Screech (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1991), p. 656.
31. George Steiner, “Where Was Plato?” Times Literary Supplement, 26 July 2013, p. 11.
32. Plato, Theaetetus, 149A–B, trans. F. M. Cornford, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, pp. 853–54.
Chapter opener: Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, edited and translated from the Latin by Vittorio Coletti (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), p. 25.
1. R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), p. 75.
2. Paradiso, XVIII:73–78, “E come augelli surti di rivera, / quasi congratulando a lor pasture, / fanno di sé or tonda or altra schiera, // sí dentro ai lumi sante creature / volitando cantavano, e faciensi / or D, or I, or L in sue figure.”
3. In Fariduddin Attar’s Conference of the Birds (twelfth century), the birds set out to seek their king, the Simurgh. After many adventures, they realize that they all are the Simurgh and the Simurgh is all of them. Jorge Luis Borges made the association between the two birds in “El Simurgh y el águila,” in Nueve ensayos dantescos (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe: 1982), pp. 139–44.
4. Purgatorio, X:95, “visibile parlare”; Inferno, III:1–9, “Per me si va ne la città dolente, / per me si va ne l’etterno dolore, / per me si va tra la perduta gente. // Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore; / fecemi la divina podestate, / la somma sapïenza e ’l primo amore. // Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create / se non etterne, e io etterno duro. / Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.”
5. Inferno, III:17, “genti dolorose”; 21, “dentro alle segrete cose.”
6. Purgatorio, IX:112–14; 131–32, “Intrate; ma facciovi accorti / che di fuor torna chi ’n dietro si guata.”
7. Saint Augustine, De Magistro, 8, in Les Confessions, précedées de Dialogues philosophiques, bk. 1, ed. Lucien Jerphagnon (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), p. 370.
8. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).
9. Plato, Phaedrus, 274d–e, trans. R. Hackforth, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 520; G. K. Chesterton, “A Defense of Nonsense,” in The Defendant (London: Dent, 1901), p. 14.
10. Nic Dunlop, The Lost Executioner: A Journey to the Heart of the Killing Fields (New York: Walker, 2005), p. 82.
11. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales, in Obras completas del Inca Garcilaso, vol. 2 (Madrid: Colección Rivadeneira, 1960).
12. Ibid., p. 67.
13. All the information on Sansevero comes from the superb edition of Sansevero’s Apologetic Letter, translated into Spanish and edited by José Emilio and Lucio Adrián Burucúa: Raimondo di Sangro, Carta Apologética (Buenos Aires: UNSAM Edita, 2010).
14. This is true in both written and oral societies. “All societies known as ‘oral’ employ two different and parallel communication systems: one based on language, the other on sight”: Anne-Marie Christin, L’Image écrite ou la déraison graphique (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), p. 7.
15. Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style (Vancouver: Hartley and Marks, 1992) p. 9.
16. See Marcia and Robert Ascher, Code of the Quipu: A Study in Media, Mathematics and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), p. 102.
17. Pedro Cieza de León, Crónica del Perú: Cuarta parte, vol. 3, ed. Laura Gutiérrez Arbulú (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú y Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1994), p. 232.
18. Bringhurst, Elements of Typographic Style, p. 19.
Chapter opener: Solomon Volkov, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky: A Poet’s Journey Through the Twentieth Century, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 139; Joseph Brodsky, “The Condition We Call Exile,” in On Grief and Other Reasons: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), p. 33; Brodsky, “Venetian Stanzas I,” in To Urania (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), p. 90.
1. Purgatorio, III:34–42, “Matto è chi spera che nostra ragione / possa trascorrer la infinita via / che tiene una sustanza in tre persone. // State contenti, umana gente, al quia: / ché, se potuto aveste veder tutto, / mestier no era parturir Maria; // e disïar vedeste sanza frutto / tai che sarebbe lor disio quetato, / ch’ etternalmente è dato lor per lutto.”; 43–44, “io dico d’Aristotile e di Plato / e di molt’ altri.”
2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. 1, q. 2, art. 2, 5 vols., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1948; repr. Notre Dame, Ind.: Christian Classics, 1981), vol. 1, p. 12; Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, I:v.8, in The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis, ed. Arthur Johnston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 35.
3. Paradiso, XXVI:115–17, “non il gustar del legno / fu per sé la cagion di tanto esilio, / ma solamente il trapassar del segno”; 124–32, “La lingua ch’io parlai fu tutta spenta / innanzi che a l’ovra iconsummabile / fosse la gente di Nembròt attenta: // ché nullo effetto mai razïonabile, / per lo piacere uman che rinovella / seguendo il cielo, sempre fu durabile. // Opera naturale ’ch’uom favella; / ma cosí o cosí, natura lascia / poi fare a voi secondo che v’abbella.”
4. Ibid., 132–38.
5. Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, edited and translated from the Latin by Vittorio Coletti (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), pp. 14–15.
6. See Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols., vol. 1: From the Creation to Jacob, trans. Henrietta Szold (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 5–8.
7. Quoted in Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Dorset, 1974), p. 12. In the Jewish tradition, the Mishnah is held to be infallible.
8. Cf. Matthew 6:22–23: “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”
9. Jorge Luis Borges, “La biblioteca de Babel,” in Ficciones (Buenos Aires: Sur, 1944), pp. 85–95.
10. The ten sefirot are the Crown, wisdom, understanding, loving kindness, power or judgment, beauty, victory, splendor, foundation, and sovereignty. There are said to be 613 mitzvot, of which 365 are negative (“do not”) and 248 positive (“do this”). See Louis Jacobs, The Jewish Religion: A Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 450, 350.
11. Purgatorio, XXII:137–38, “cadea de l’alta roccia un liquor chiaro / e si spandeva per le foglie suso.” In Dante’s condemnation of the Epicureans in Inferno VI, only their notion that the soul dies with the body is mentioned, not the Epicurean exaltation of pleasure.
12. On the spring, see Purgatorio, XXII:65; Purgatorio, XXI:97–98, “mamma / fumi, e fummi nutrice, poetando.”
13. Purgatorio, XXI:131–32, “Frate / non far, ché tu se’ ombra e ombra vedi”; 136, “trattando l’ombre come cosa salda”; Inferno, I:82–84, “lungo studio e ’l grande amore / che m’ ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume.”
14. See Sandra Debenedetti Stow, Dante e la mistica ebraica (Florence: Editrice La giuntina, 2004), pp. 19–25.
15. Umberto Eco, La ricerca della lingua perfetta (Rome: Laterza, 1993), pp. 49–51.
16. See Stow, Dante e la mistica ebraica, pp. 41–51; Paradiso, XXXIII:140, “la mia mente fu percossa.”
17. See Plato, The Republic, bk. 2, 376d–e, trans. Paul Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 623; Purgatorio, XV:117.
18. See Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa, Cima da Conegliano: Maître de la Renaissance vénitienne, translated from the Italian by Renaud Temperini (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2012), p. 32.
19. H. Strack and G. Stemberger, Introducción a la literatura talmúdica y midrásica (Valencia: Institución San Jerónimo, 1988), p. 76.
20. See B. Netanyahu, Don Isaac Abravanel, Statesman and Philosopher, 5th ed., rev. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 122.
21. See Herbert A. Davidson, Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 72.
22. Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer: The Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer the Great According to the Text of the Manuscript Belonging to Abraham Epstein of Vienna, trans. Gerald Friedlander (New York: Sepher Hermon Press, 1981), p. 63.
23. See Eco, Ricerca della lingua perfetta, p. 50.
24. See Attilio Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1963), p. 668; Rainer Maria Rilke, “Eine Szene aus dem Ghetto von Venedig,” in Geschichten vom lieben Gott (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1955), p. 94.
25. The mathematically backed promise of salvation conjured up by Abravanel (which no doubt Abravanel himself would have repudiated with horror) cast its lengthy shadow over the next centuries of Jewish patience, so that, as late as 1734, the rabbinical council of Venice had to issue a decree of excommunication against a certain Mosè Chaím Luzzatto for proclaiming one of his associates to be the expected Messiah, his arrival inexplicably delayed for 231 years since Abravanel’s calculation. See Riccardo Calimani, The Ghetto of Venice, trans. Katherine Silberblatt Wolfthal (New York: M. Evans, 1987), pp. 231–35.
26. Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 358–59.
27. See Marvin J. Heller, Printing the Talmud: A History of the Earliest Printed Editions of the Talmud (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Im Hasefer, 1992), p. 7.
28. Bomberg, quoted in Calimani, Ghetto of Venice, pp. 81–82.
29. Editoria in ebraico a Venezia, catalogo de la mostra organizzata da Casa di Risparmio di Venezia, Comune di Sacile (Venice: Arsenale Editrice, 1991).
30. Heller, Printing the Talmud, pp. 135–82.
31. Quoted ibid., p. 142.
32. Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Invito al Talmud, trans. Roberto Salvadori (Turin: Bottati Boringhieri, 2009), p. 56; for the map, see the front endpaper in Calimani, Ghetto of Venice.
33. Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane, 1909), p. 108.
34. I am grateful to Arthur Kiron, of the Jewish Institute Collections at the University of Pennsylvania, for this information. Mr. Kiron referred me to George M. Stratton, “The Mnemonic Feat of the ‘Shass Pollak,’” Psychological Review 24, no. 3 (May 1917): 181–87.
35. Saint Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaemeron, 13.12, quoted in Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), p. 73.
36. See, e.g., Marina del Negro Karem, “Immagini di Potere: Il Leone Andante nel Battistero di San Marco di Venezia,” Atti dell’Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arte 162 (2003–4): 152–71.
37. Mishneh Torah: The Book of Knowledge by Maimonides, edited according to the Bodleian codex, with introduction, Biblical and Talmudical references, notes, and English translation by Moses Hyamson (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1981).
Chapter opener: Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, in The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1960), p. 269; Paradiso, XXXIII:140–41, “la mia mente fu percossa / da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne”; Inferno, XXVIII:139–41.
1. See, e.g., Inferno, XXX:130–32; Purgatorio, XIII:133–41.
2. Inferno, XXVIII:4–6, “Ogne lingua per certo verria meno / per lo nostro sermone e per la mente / c’hanno a tanto comprender poco seno.”
3. Ovide, Les Métamorphoses, 6.382–400, bilingual edition, edited and translated from the Latin by Danièle Robert (Paris: Actes Sud, 2001), pp. 246–49; Paradiso, I:19–21, “Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue / sí come quando Marsïa traesti / de la vagina de le membra sue.”
4. Inferno, I:1–7.
5. Though there is no proof that Cervantes read the Commedia, some of its episodes were well known in the seventeenth century, and the scene in which Don Quixote attacks the towering windmills which he believes are giants may have been inspired by the episode in which Dante believes that the giants are towers.
6. Genesis 6:4; Dante’s source for the story, other than Genesis itself, is Saint Augustine’s commentary; see The City of God, 15.23, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1984), p. 639. Inferno, XXXI: 76–81, “Elli stessi s’accusa; / questi è Nembrotto per lo cui mal coto / pur un linguaggio nel mondo non s’usa. // Lasciànlo stare e non parliamo a vòto; / ché cosí è a lui ciascun linguaggio / come ’l suo ad altrui, ch’a nullo è noto.”
7. Domenico Guerri, Di alcuni versi dotti della “Divina Commedia” (Città di Castello: Casa Tipografica-Editrice S. Lappi, 1908), pp. 19–47.
8. Jorge Luis Borges, “La muerte y la brújula,” in La muerte y la brújula (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1951), p. 131.
9. Inferno, VII:1. A brief history of the various interpretations of the line is to be found in Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi’s edition of the Commedia (Milan: Mondadori, 1994), p. 233. (Following medieval tradition, Dante may have confused Pluto, god of the Underworld, and Plutus, god of riches.) Inferno VII:14, “l’alber fiacca.”
10. Herodotus, The Histories, II:2, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt, revised, with an introduction and notes by A. R. Burn (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1972), pp. 129–30.
11. Salimbene de Adam, Chronicle of Salimbene de Adam, ed. and trans. Joseph L. Baid, B. Giuseppe, and J. R. Kane (Tempe: University of Arizona Press, 1986), p. 156.
12. Oliver Sacks, Awakenings, rev. ed. (New York: Dutton, 1983), pp. 188–89; Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Panther,” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1982), pp. 24–25.
13. Inferno, XXXI:127–29, “Ancor ti può nel mondo render fama, / ch’el vive, e lunga vita ancor aspetta / se ’nnanzi tempo grazia a sé nol chiama”; 142–43, “al fondo che divora / Lucifero con Giuda”; 145, “come albero in nave.”
14. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols., vol. 1: From the Creation to Jacob, trans. Henrietta Szold (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 177–80. Ginzberg lists rabbinical sources giving God, at the time of the Creation, as the first ruler. God was followed by seven mortals: Nimrod, Joseph, Solomon, Ahab, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, and Alexander of Macedon. These in turn will be followed by the ninth and last universal ruler, the Messiah. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vol. 5: From the Creation to Exodus, p. 199.
15. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vol. 1, p. 180.
16. Michael A. Arbib, How the Brain Got Language: The Mirror System Hypothesis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. ix.
17. Ibid., pp. 84–85.
18. Franz Kafka, “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie,” in Die Erzählungen, ed. Roger Hermes (Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer Tagebuch Verlag, 2000), pp. 322–33. In 1906, the Argentine writer Leopoldo Lugones imagined a story in which a man tries to teach an ape to speak, convinced that apes are able to speak but that for thousands of years they have not done so in order not be forced to work for humans. In the story, the man first tries a method for teaching deaf-mutes, then resorts to threats and punishments; nothing succeeds. The efforts end up by weakening the poor beast to the point where the man understands that it is dying. Suddenly, in his agony, the ape cries out (“how to explain the tone of a voice that had not spoken for ten thousand centuries?”) the words “Master, water, master, my master.” For Lugones, in the beginning humans and apes shared a common language: Leopoldo Lugones, “Yzur,” in Las fuerzas extrañas (Buenos Aires: Arnoldo Moen y hermanos, 1906), pp. 133–44.
19. Paradiso, I:70–71, “Trasumanar significar per verba / non si poria”; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. 1, q. 12, art. 6, 5 vols., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1948; repr. Notre Dame, Ind.: Christian Classics, 1981), vol. 1, p. 53.
20. From the Nîti Sataka of Bhartrihari. Quoted in Barbara Stoler Miller, ed. and trans., The Hermit and the Love-Thief: Sanskrit Poems of Bhartrihari and Bilhana (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 3.
21. I-Tsing, quoted in Amartya Sen, “China and India,” in The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity (London: Allen Lane, 2005), p. 161.
22. See R. C. Zaehner, ed. and trans., Hindu Scriptures (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. x.
23. The Upanishads, trans. Swami Paramananda (Hoo, U.K.: Axiom, 2004), p. 93; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Brahma,” in Selected Writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman (New York: New American Library, 1965), p. 471.
24. See Romila Thapar, A History of India, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Pelican, 1966), pp. 140–42.
25. K. Raghavan Pillai, ed. and trans., The “Vâkyapadîya”: Critical Text of Cantos I and II, with English Translation, Summary of Ideas and Notes (Dehli: Motilal Banarsidass, 1971), p. 1.
26. B. K. Matilal, The Word and the World: India’s Contribution to the Study of Language (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 52.
27. Jorge Luis Borges, “La biblioteca de Babel,” in El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan (Buenos Aires: Sur, 1941), pp. 85–95;. Cicero, De natura deorum, 2.37.93, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 213, quoted in Jorge Luis Borges, “La biblioteca total,” Sur 59 (August 1939): 13–16.
28. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, p. 251.
29. See Tandra Patnaik: Sabda: A Study of Bhartrihari’s Philosophy of Language (New Delhi: D. K. Print World, 1994).
30. Italo Calvino, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1979), p. 72.
31. Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, edited and translated from the Latin by Vittorio Coletti (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), p. 23.
32. Ibid., p. 99.
Chapter opener: Inferno, XIII:105, “chè non è giusto aver ciò ch’om si toglie.”
1. Inferno, I:66, “qual che tu sii, od ombra od omo certo!”
2. Craig E. Stephenson, “Introduction,” Jung and Moreno: Essays on the Theatre of Human Nature (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 14.
3. Purgatorio, XXII:127–29, “Elli givan dinanzi, ed io soletto / diretro, ed ascoltava i lor sermoni / h’a poetar mi davano intelletto”; XXIII:32–33, “Chi nel viso de li uomini legge ‘omo’ / ben avria quivi conosciuta l’emme”; Pietro Alighieri, Il “Commentarium” di Pietro Alighieri nelle redazioni Ashburnhamiana e Ottoboniana, ed. Roberto della Vedova and Maria Teresa Silvotti (Florence: Olschki, 1978).
4. See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, 3.6, trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), vol. 1, p. 281; Plato, “Cratylus,” trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 422.
5. Paradiso, VI:10, “Cesare fui, e son Giustiniano”; XII:68–69, “quinci si mosse spirito a nomarlo / dal possessivo di cui era tutto”; Vincenzo Presta, “Giovanna,” in Enciclopedia Dantesca, vol. 9 (Milan: Mondadori, 2005), p. 524; Paradiso, XII:79–81, “Oh padre suo veramente Felice! / oh madre sua veramente Giovanna, / se, interpretata, val come si dice!”
6. Purgatorio, XXX: 62–63, “quando mi volsi al suon del nome mio, / che di necessità qui si registra”; 73–75, “Guardaci ben! Ben son, ben son Beatrice. / Come degnasti d’accedere al monte? / non sapei tu che qui è l’uom felice?”
7. Ibid., 76–78, “Li occhi mi cadder giú nel chiaro fonte; / ma veggendomi in esso, i trassi a l’erba, / tanta vergogna mi gravò la fronte.”
8. William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, 4.1.48–49 and 4.3.371–74, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. W. J. Craig (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
9. William Butler Yeats, “A Woman Young and Old,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 308; Plato, Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce, in Collected Dialogues of Plato, pp. 542–45.
10. David Macey, “Mirror-phase,” in The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 2000), p. 255; Arthur Rimbaud, Lettre à Georges Izambard, 13 mai 1871, in Correspondance, ed. Jean-Jacques Lefrère (Paris: Fayard, 2007), p. 64. An almost identical expression is used in Rimbaud’s letter to Paul Demeny, 15 mai 1971.
11. Carl Gustav Jung, “Conscious, Unconscious and Individuation” in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R. F. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 279; Saint Augustine, Confessions, 11.28, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1961), p. 278.
12. Jung, “Conscious, Unconscious and Individuation,” p. 275; Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1965), p. 359.
13. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 318.
14. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1960), p. 22.
15. Ibid., pp. 22–23; Osip Mandelstam, “Conversation on Dante,” in The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004), p. 117.
16. Purgatorio, XXVIII:139–41.
17. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Luther S. Mansfield and Howard P. Vincent (New York: Hendricks House, 1962), p. 54.
18. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, p. 158.
19. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.93, in Complete Works; Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 30, 31.
20. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, p. 161.
21. Ibid., p. 67.
22. Ibid., p. 32; Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, p. 238.
23. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, pp. 37–38, 59, 75; Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, pp. 201, 287; Oscar Wilde, “Narcissus,” in Poems in Prose, in The Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. G. F. Maine (London: Collins, 1948), p. 844.
24. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, p. 39.
Chapter opener: Peter Levi, Virgil: His Life and Times (London: Duckworth, 1998), p. 35; Drieu La Rochelle, L’Homme à cheval (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), p. 15; José Hernández, El gaucho Martín Fierro (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Pardo, 1962), pp. 44, 10 (ellipsis in the original).
1. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 3 (London: Chesterfield Society, n.d.), pp. 208, 209; Purgatorio, XXVIII:2, “foresta spessa”; Inferno, I:2, “selva oscura”; Ruskin, Modern Painters, p. 214.
2. Inferno XIII:1–11, “Non ra ancor di là Nesso arrivato, / quando noi ci mettemmo per un bosco / che da neun sentiero era segnato. // Non fronda verde, ma di color fosco, / non rami schietti, ma nodosi e ’nvolti; / non pomi v’eran, ma stecchi con tòsco. // Non han sì aspri sterpi né sí folti / quelle fiere selvagge che ’n odio hanno / tra Cecina e Cornetto i luoghi cólti.”
3. Inferno, XIII:21, “cose che torrien fede al mio sermone”; 32, “Perché mi schiante?”; 35–39, “ricomociò a dir: ‘Perché mi scerpi? / non hai tu spirto di pietade alcuno? // Uomini fummo, e or siam fatti sterpi: / ben dovrebb’ esser la tua man piú pia / se state fossimo anime di serpe.”; Virgil, Aeneid, 3.19–33, in Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, 2 vols., trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 348–50.
4. Inferno, XIII:52–53, “’n vece / d’alcun’ ammenda”; 72, “ingiusto fece me contra me giusto.”
5. Saint Augustine, City of God, 1.20, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1972), p. 32.
6. Inferno, XIII:37, “uomini fummo”; Olga Sedakova, “Sotto il cielo della violenza,” in Esperimenti Danteschi: Inferno 2008, ed. Simone Invernizzi (Milan: Casa Editrice Marietti, 2009), p. 116; Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, edited and translated from the Latin by Vittorio Coletti (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), p. 9.
7. See Sir Paul Harvey, The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), p. 194.
8. Ruskin, Modern Painters, p. 212.
9. Inferno, I:39–40, “quando l’amor divino / mosse di prima quelle cose belle.” Contrapasso is a term Dante borrowed from Thomas Aquinas to describe the punishment or purgation of a specific sin. For example, thieves, who take what does not belong to them, are punished by losing everything that does belong to them, including their human shape.
10. Virgil, Georgics, 1.155–59, in Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, vol. 1, pp. 90–91.
11. Porphyry, De abstinentia, 1.6, and Pliny the Elder, Naturalis historia, 16.24.62, quoted in J. Donald Hughes, “How the Ancients Viewed Deforestation,” Journal of Field Archeology 10, no. 4 (winter 1983): 435–45.
12. Alfred Wold, “Saving the Small Farm: Agriculture in Roman Literature,” Agriculture and Human Values 4, nos. 2–3 (spring–summer 1987): 65–75. In eighteenth-century England, Samuel Johnson mocked his contemporaries’ bucolic interests. Commenting on a certain Dr. Grainger’s “The Sugar-Cane, a Poem,” he remarked to his biographer and friend James Boswell: “What could he make of a sugar-cane? One might as well write the ‘Parsely-bed, a Poem,’ or ‘The Cabbage-garden, a Poem’”: see James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1811), vol. 3, p. 170. In South America, the classic nineteenth-century example is the Chilean Andrés Bello’s “Silva a la agricutura en la zona tórrida,” “Ode to Agriculture in the Torrid Zone.”
13. Inferno, XI:48, “spregiando Natura, e sua bontade.”
14. Linda Lear, “Afterword,” in Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1999), p. 259; Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (Wood-bridge, U.K.: Boydell and Brewer, 1994), p. 129. Traditionally, the “sinners against nature” are sodomites, who have wilfully forgone intercourse, the “lawful” purpose of sexual congress. However, a number of scholars, notably André Pézard (Dante sous la pluie de feu [Paris: Vrin, 1950]), suggest that the “sinners against nature” have sinned in a different way, through “blindness of judgment” of what is natural. Neither “sodomy” nor “sodomites” are mentioned in the Commedia. In Purgatorio XXVI:40, however, a group of souls cries out, “Sodom and Gomorrah,” in reference to the “great sin” of the Cities of the Plain (Genesis 18:20), to which another group responds in the next two lines with a reference to Pasiphaë, wife of Minos, who copulated with a bull and gave birth to the Minotaur. Both groups belong to the excessively lustful, homosexual and heterosexual, and since they are found on the highest cornice of the mountain (the closest to Eden), they represent for Dante the least serious of the seven sins.
15. Carson, Silent Spring, p. 257.
16. Aristotle, The Politics, 1.8, trans. T. A. Sinclair (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1962), pp. 38–40.
17. “Assessing Human Vulnerability to Environmental Change: Concepts, Issues, Methods, and Case Studies” (Nairobi: United Nations Environmental Programme, 2003), www.unep.org/geo/GEO3/pdfs/AssessingHumanVulnerabilityC.pdf; “Social Issues, Soy, and Defenestration,” WWF Global, http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_forests/deforestation/forest_conversion_agriculture/soy_deforestation_social/.
18. Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Phanes, 1992), p. 2; Ruskin, Modern Painters, p. 155; Anita Barrows, “The Ecological Self in Childhood,” Ecopsychology Newsletter 4 (Fall 1995), quoted in David Suzuki (with Amanda McConnell), The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature (Vancouver: Greystone/Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 1997), p. 179.
19. Inferno, XXIV:1–15, “In quella parte del giovanetto anno / che ’l sole i crin sotto l’Aquario tempra / e già le notti al mezzo dí sen vanno, // quando la brina in su la terra assempra / l’imagine di sua sorella bianca, / ma poco dura a la sua penna tempra, // lo villanello a cui la roba manca, / si leva, e guarda, e vede la campagna / biancheggiar tutta; ond’ ei si batte l’anca, // ritorna in casa, e qua e là si lagna, / come ’l tapin che non sa che si faccia; / poi riede, e la speranza ringavagna, // veggendo ’l mondo avec cangiata faccia / in poco d’ora, e prende suo vincastro / e fuor le pecorelle a pascer caccia.” Virgil, Georgics, 1.145–46, in Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, vol. 1, pp. 90–91; Georgics 2.9–16, ibid., pp. 116–17.
20. Working Group II, AR5, Final Drafts, IPCC, available at http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/report/final-drafts/ (accessed November 2013). The intergovernmental panel was not the first group of world-renowned scientists to issue such a warning. On November 18, 1992, five months after an Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the largest gathering of heads of state in history, 1,600 scientists from all over the world, many of them Nobel Prize winners, issued their “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” which laid out the danger in strong language: “Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about. . . . No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. We the undersigned, senior members of the world’s scientific community, hereby warn all humanity of what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.” In The Sacred Balance (pp. 4–5), the ecologist David Suzuki remarks that when the document was released to the press, few papers took notice. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times rejected it as “not newsworthy”; the papers’ editors wilfully avoided recognition of the warning and of their responsibility in the lack of response that followed it.
21. Inferno IV:131, “maestro di color che sanno.”
Chapter opener: Derek Walcott, “The Star-Apple Kingdom,” in Selected Poems, ed. Edward Baugh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), p. 129; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Random House, 1928), pp. 11–12; Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Die Wahlverwadtschaften, ed. Hans-J. Weitz (Frankfurt-am-Main: Insel Verlag, 1972), p. 174; Lawrence Durrell, Constance; or, Solitary Practices (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), p. 50; Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 2003), p. 30; Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, ed. Martin Gardner (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1967), p. 55; Northrop Frye, “Haunted by Lack of Ghosts: Some Patterns in the Imagery of Canadian Poetry” (26 April 1976), in Northrop Frye on Canada, ed. Jean O’Grady and David Staines (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 476.
1. Inferno, I:5, “selvaggia e aspra e forte”; 7, “amara”; 21, “la notte, ch’i’ passai con tanta pieta.”
2. See Purgatorio II:146, Convivio II:1, 6–8, and Epistola XIII:21, in Le opere di Dante: testo critico della Società dantesca italiana, ed. M. Barbi et al. (Florence: Bemporad, 1921), pp. 172, 438, respectively.
3. The only exception is when Virgil sends his ward off on his own to observe the punishment of the usurers in Inferno, XVII:37–78.
4. Henry James, Substance and Shadow; or, Morality and Religion in Their Relation to Life (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), p. 75.
5. Inferno, XXXII:100–102, “Ond’ elli a me: ‘Perchè tu mi dischiomi, / nè ti dirò ch’io sia, nè mostrerolti, / se mille fiate in sul capo tomi’”; 104, “più d’una ciocca”; 106, “Che hai tu, Bocca”?
6. Ibid., XXXIII:94, “Lo pianto stesso lí pianger non lascia”; 112, “i duri veli”; 116–17, “s’io non ti disbrigo, / al fondo de la ghiaccia ir mi convegna”; 150, “e cortesia fu lui esser villano.”
7. Ibid., VIII:45, “benedetta colei che ’n te s’incinse.”
8. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. 1.2, q. 47, art. 2, 5 vols., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1948; repr. Notre Dame, Ind.: Christian Classics, 1981), vol. 2, p. 785. Among Dante’s defenders are Luigi Pietrobono, “Il canto VIII dell’ Inferno,” L’Alighieri 1, no. 2 (1960): 3–14, and G. A. Borgese, “The Wrath of Dante,” Speculum 13 (1938): 183–93; among his detractors, E. G. Parodi, Poesia e storia nella “Divina Commedia” (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1965), p. 74, and Attilio Momigliano, La “Divina Commedia” di Dante Alighieri (Florence: Sansoni, 1948), pp. 59–60, but there are innumerable voices on both sides of the question.
9. Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Decamerone, 9.8 (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), pp. 685–89.
10. Inferno, V:141–42.
11. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. 1, q. 21, art. 2, vol. 1, p. 119.
12. Ricardo Pratesi, introduction to Galileo Galilei, Dos lecciones infernales, translated from the Italian by Matías Alinovi (Buenos Aires: La Compañía, 2011), p. 12.
13. Galileo Galilei, Studi sulla Divina Commedia (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1855); see also Galileo, Dos lecciones infernales, and Galileo Galilée, Leçons sur l’Enfer de Dante, translated from the Italian by Lucette Degryse (Paris: Fayard, 2008).
14. Inferno, XXXI: 58–59 (Nimrod’s face); XXXIV:30–31 (Lucifer’s arm).
15. Nicola Chiaromonte, The Worm of Consciousness and Other Essays, ed. Miriam Chiaromonte (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), p. 153.
16. Homer, The Odyssey, 8.551, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking Penguin, 1996), p. 207.
17. See François Hartog and Michael Werner, “Histoire,” in Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, ed. Barbara Cassin (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2004), p. 562; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. Hugh Barr Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 27, 560.
18. László Földényi, Dostoyevski lee a Hegel en Siberia y rompe a llorar, translated from the Hungarian by Adan Kovacsis (Madrid: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2006); Max Brod, Franz Kafka (New York: Schocken, 1960), p. 75.
19. Földényi, Dostoyevski lee a Hegel en Siberia y rompe a llorar, p. 42.
20. See John Hendrix, History and Culture in Italy (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2003), p. 130.
21. Al-Biruni, Le Livre de l’Inde, edited and translated from the Arabic by Vincent Mansour-Monteil (Paris: Sinbad/UNESCO, 1996), pp. 41–42; Virgil, The Aeneid, 6.847–53, trans. C. Day Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 154.
22. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), p. 411.
23. Inferno, II:121–23, “Dunque: che è? perché, perché restai, / perché tanta viltà nel core allette? / perché ardire e franchezza no hai?”
24. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, p. 414.
1. Plato, The Republic, 1.20, trans. Paul Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 597.
2. Ibid., 2.1, p. 605; 2.10, p. 614.
3. Ibid., 1.12, p. 589.
4. Virginia Woolf, “Speech to the London and National Society for Women’s Service,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5: 1929–1932, ed. Stuart N. Clarke (London: Hogarth, 2009), p. 640; Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 368–70, in The Theban Plays, trans. David Grene (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 78. The argument about men’s and women’s roles in the Iliad is made by Alessandro Baricco, Omero, Iliade (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2004), pp. 159–60.
5. Homer, The Odyssey, 1.413, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking Penguin, 1996), p. 89; Mary Beard, “Sappho Speaks,” in Confronting the Classics (London: Profile, 2013), p. 31. (In the afterword to her collection, Beard noted that, in retrospect, she may have been “perhaps a bit over-enthusiastic” about the different mouths of the Delphic priestess [p. 285].)
6. Saint Augustine, The City of God, 18.9, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1984), pp. 771–72; Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 213.
7. Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 31; Paradiso, I:109–14, “Ne l’ordine ch’io dico sono accline / tutte nature, per diverse sorti, / più al principio loro e men vicine; // onde si muovono a diversi porti / per lo gran mar de l’essere, e ciascuna / con istinto a lei dato che la porti.”
8. Purgatorio, V:130–36, “Siena mi fé, disfecemi Maremma.”
9. Inferno, V:142, “E caddi come corpo morto cade.” The thirteenth-century romances Lancelot du lac and Mort Artu have both been suggested as possibilities for Paolo and Francesca’s book.
10. Paradiso, III:117, “non fu dal vel del cor già mai disciolta”; 123, “come per acqua cupa cosa grave.”
11. Lerner, Creation of Patriarchy, p. 222.
12. Inferno, II:94–95, “che si compiange / di questo’mpedimento”; 98, “il tuo fedele”; 104, “ché non soccori quei che t’ amò tanto.”
13. Marina Warner related this story in a personal communication.
14. “S’il y a cent femmes et un cochon, le cochon l’emporte.” Nicole Brossard, “The Volatility of Meaning,” the Paget/Hoy lecture delivered on 11 March 2013 at the University of Calgary.
15. Robespierre, “Discours du 15 mai,” in Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, 10 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010), vol. 6, p. 358.
16. J.-P. Rabaut Saint-Etienne, Précis historique de la Révolution (Paris, 1792), p. 200, quoted in Jeremy Jennings, “The Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen and Its Critics in France: Reaction and Idéologie,” Historical Journal 35, no. 4 (1992): 840.
17. The comte d’Antraigues, quoted ibid., p. 841; Archives parlemantaires, VIII (Paris, 1875), p. 453, quoted ibid.
18. Ibid., pp. 842–43.
19. Chaumette, quoted in Joan Wallach Scott, “French Feminists and the Rights of ‘Man,’” History Workshop 28 (Autumn 1989): 3; Marquis de Condorcet, Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cité (1790), in Oeuvres, ed. A. Condorcet O’Connor and A. F. Arago, 3 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1847), vol. 2, pp. 126–27.
20. Convention of 1893, quoted in Benoîte Groult, Ainsi soit Olympe de Gouges (Paris: Grasset, 2013), p. 57.
21. Ibid., p. 50; Voltaire en sa correspondence, ed. Raphaël Roche, vol. 8 (Bordeaux: L’Escampette, 1999), p. 65.
22. Olympe de Gouges, Mémoire de Mme de Valmont (Paris: Côté-Femmes, 2007), p. 12.
23. Pompignon, quoted in Groult, Ainsi soit Olympe de Gouges, pp. 25–26.
24. The anti-slavery movement in America read in the Commedia arguments to sustain their struggle, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, African American writers found in it inspiration and guidance. See Dennis Looney, Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the “Divine Comedy” (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011).
25. Jules Michelet, Les Femmes de la Revolution, 2nd rev. ed. (Paris: Adolphe Delahays, 1855), p. 105.
26. Groult, Ainsi soit Olympe de Gouges, pp. 75–77.
27. Ms 872, fols. 288–89, Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, quoted in Olympe de Gouges, Écrits politiques, 1792–1793, vol. 2 (Paris: Côté-femmes, 1993), p. 36.
28. Miguel de Cervantes, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, 1.13.
29. Plato, The Republic, 10.15, p. 835.
Chapter opener: Barry Holstun Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Scribner’s, 1978), pp. 4, 284; Pablo Neruda, “Si Dios está en mi verso,” in Crespuculario (1920–1923), in Obras Completas, vol. 1 (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, Círculo de Lectores, 1999), pp. 131–32.
1. Inferno, VIII:42, “via costà con li altri cani”; XIII:125, “nere cagne, bramose e correnti”; XVII: 49–51, “non altrimenti fan di state i cani / or col ceffo or col piè, quando son morsi / o da pulci o da mosche o da tafani”; XXI:44, “mastino sciolto”; XXI:68, “cani a dosso al poverello”; XXIII:18, “’l cane a quella lievre ch’elli acceffa”; XXX:20, “si come cane”; XXXII:71, “visi cagnazzi”; XXXII:105, latrando”; XXXIII:77–78, “co’ denti, / che furo a l’osso, come d’un can, forti”; Purgatorio, XIV:46–47, “botoli . . . ringhiosi.”
2. Paradiso, VIII:97–148.
3. Guillaume Mollet, Les Papes d’Avignon, 9th rev. ed. (Paris: Letouzey and Ané, 1950), p. 392.
4. Paradiso, XXXIII:145.
5. Ibid., II:8–9, “Minerva spira, e conducemi Appollo, / e nove Musi mi dimostran l’Orse”; XXII:152; XXXIII:143.
6. Purgatorio, XX:13–14, “nel cui girar par che si creda / le condizion di qua giù trasmutarsi”; Inferno, I:101; Purgatorio, XX:13–15.
7. “D’enz de sale uns veltres avalat”: La Chanson de Roland, 57.730, edited and translated into modern French by Joseph Bédier (Paris: L’Edition d’art, 1922), p. 58; Giovanni Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, ed. Giorgio Padoan, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: Mondadori, 1900), vol. 6, p. 73; Inferno, I:102, “che la farà morir con doglia”; Dante Alighieri, Epistola VII:5, in Le opere di Dante: testo critico della Società dantesca italiana, ed. M. Barbi et al. (Florence: Bemporad, 1921), p. 426.
8. Purgatorio I:13, “dolce color d’oriental zaffiro.”
9. Dante Alighieri, Epistola XIII:10, in Opere di Dante, p. 437.
10. Inferno, III:9, “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.”
11. Ismail Kadare, Dante, l’incontournable, translated from the Albanian by Tedi Papavrami (Paris: Fayard, 2005), pp. 38–39.
12. Inferno, V:121–23, “Nessun maggior dolore / che ricordarsi del tempo felice / ne la miseria”; XXIV:151, “E detto l’ho perché doler ti debbia!”; Paradiso, XVII:55–60, “Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta / più caramente; e questo è quello strale / che l’arco de lo essilio pria saetta. // Tu proverai sì come sa di sale / lo pane altrui e come è duro calle / lo scendere e ’l salir per l’altrui scale.”
13. Ibid., XXXIII:55–56, “maggio / che ’l parlar mostra.”
14. Dante Alighieri, Convivio I:3, in Opere di Dante, p. 147; Inferno, XV:88, “Ciì che narrate di mio corso scrivo”; Paradiso, XVII:98–99, “s’infutura la tua vita / via più là che ’l punir di lor perfidie.”
15. Paradiso, XV:97–126.
16. Franco Sacchetti, Trecentonovelle (Rome: Salerno, 1996), p. 167; Leon Battista Alberti, Il libro della famiglia, ed. Ruggiero Romano and Alberto Tenenti; rev. ed., ed. Francesco Furlan (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1996), p. 210.
17. Brunetto Latini, Li Livres dou tresor (The Book of the Treasure), trans. Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin (New York: Garland, 1993), pp. 133–34; Pierre de Beauvais, Bestiaire, in Bestiaires du Moyen Age, set in modern French by Gabriel Bianciotto (Paris: Editions Stock, 1980), p. 65; San Isidoro de Sevilla, Etimologías, chap. 12, ed. J. Oroz Reta and M. A. Marcos Casquero (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, la Editorial Católica, 2009).
18. Tobit 5:16 and 11:4; David Gordon White, Myths of the Dog-Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 44.
19. Inferno, I:4, “dir qual era è cosa dura.”
20. Inferno, XVII:74–75; XVIII:28–33; Purgatorio, XVII:1–9; Paradiso, XII:86–87.
21. Inferno, XXV:58–66.
22. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. 1, q. 102, art. 2, 5 vols., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1948; repr. Notre Dame, Ind.: Christian Classics, 1981), vol. 1, p. 501; Saint Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will, 3.23.69, in On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Peter King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 52 (animals do not suffer); Saint Augustine, The City of God, 2.4, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1984), p. 475; Cicero, De natura deorum, 2.53.133, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 251; Pierre Le Hir, “8,7 millions d’espèces,” Le Monde, 27 August 2011.
23. Saint Ambrose, Hexameron, chap. 4, trans. John. J. Savage (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1961), p. 235.
24. Marie de France, “Le Lai de Bisclavret,” in Lais, ed. G. S Burgess (London: Bristol Classical Press, G. Duckworth, 2001); Inferno, VI:18, “graffia li spiriti ed iscoia ed isquatra”; Paradiso, XII:58–60.
25. Paradiso, XXX:22, “vinto mi concedo”; X:27, “quella materia ond’io son fatto scriba.”
26. Inferno, I:85, “lo mio maestro”; Purgatorio, XXVII:86; XXVII:139–40, “Non aspettar mio dir più né mio cenno; / libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio”; XXVIII:2, “la divina foresta.”
Chapter opener: Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir, ed. Henri Martineau (Paris: Editions Garnier Frères, 1958), p. 376; obituary of General Jorge Rafael Videla, El País, 17 May 2013; Andrew Kenny, “Giving Thanks for the Bombing of Hiroshima,” The Spectator, 30 July 2005.
1. Purgatorio, III:76–77, “dove la montagna giace, / sì che possibil sia l’andare in suso”; 79–87, “Come le pecorelle escon del chiuso / a una, a due, a tre, e altre stanno / timedette atterando l’occhio e l’muso; // e ciò che fa la prima, e l’altre fanno, / addossandosi a lei, s’ella s’arresta, / semplici e quete, e lo ’mperché non sanno; // sí vid’ io muovere a venir la testa / di quella mandra fortunata allotta, / pudica in faccia e ne l’andare onesta.”
2. Ibid., 107–8, “biondo era e bello e di gentile aspetto / ma l’un de’ cigli un colpo avea diviso”; Paradiso, III:109–20.
3. Inferno, X:119. Friedrich Rückert, “Barbarossa” (1824), in Kranz der Zeit (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1817), vol. 2, pp. 270–71.
4. Purgatorio, III:132, “a lume spento.” “Sine croce, sine luce” (without cross, without light) was a medieval incantation used for the burial of excommunicants.
5. Paradiso, XXVII:22–27, “Quelli ch’usurpa in terra il luogo mio, / il luogo mio, il luogo mio che vaca / ne la presenza del Figliuol di Dio, // fatt’ ha del cimitero mio cloaca / del sangue e de la puzza; onde ’l perverso / che cadde di qua sú, là giú si placa.”
6. Christ’s injunction appears three times: Mark 12:17, Matthew 22:21, and Luke 20:25; Inferno, XXVIII:30, “vedi com’io mi dilacco.”
7. Lorenzo Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, trans. G. W. Bowersock (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Purgatorio, XXXIII:55–57; Paradiso, XX:56, “sotto buona intenzion che fé mal frutto.”
8. Purgatorio, III:120, “piangendo, a quei che volontier perdona”; 137, “al fin si penta.” The Catholic Encyclopedia defines anathema thus: “The Roman Pontifical distinguishes three sorts of excommunication: minor excommunication, formerly incurred by a person holding communication with anyone under the ban of excommunication; major excommunication, pronounced by the Pope in reading a sentence; and anathema, or the penalty incurred by crimes of the gravest order, and solemnly promulgated by the Pope. In passing this sentence, the pontiff is vested in amice, stole, and a violet cope, wearing his mitre, and assisted by twelve priests clad in their surplices and holding lighted candles. He takes his seat in front of the altar or in some other suitable place, and pronounces the formula of anathema which ends with these words: ‘Wherefore in the name of God the All-powerful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of the Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the saints, in virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on earth, we deprive N— himself and all his accomplices and all his abettors of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lord, we separate him from the society of all Christians, we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth, we declare him excommunicated and anathematized and we judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate, so long as he will not burst the fetters of the demon, do penance and satisfy the Church; we deliver him to Satan to mortify his body, that his soul may be saved on the day of judgment.’ Whereupon all the assistants respond: ‘Fiat, fiat, fiat.’ The pontiff and the twelve priests then cast to the ground the lighted candles they have been carrying, and notice is sent in writing to the priests and neighboring bishops of the name of the one who has been excommunicated and the cause of his excommunication, in order that they may have no communication with him” ([New York: Appleton, 1905–14], vol. 1).
9. John Freccero, “Manfred’s Wounds,” in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 200–201.
10. Purgatorio, III:121–41, “Orribili furon li peccati miei; / ma la bontà infinita ha sí gran braccia, / che prende ciò che si rivolge a lei. // . . . Per lor maladizion sí non si perde, / che non possa tornar, l’etterno amore, / mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde. // Vero è che quale in contumacia more / di Santa Chiesa, ancor ch’al fin si penta, / star li convien da questa ripa in fore, // per ognun tempo ch’elli è stato, trenta, / in sua presunzïon, se tal decreto / piú corto per buon prieghi non diventa.”
11. Purgatorio, III:25–27, 124–32; Ezekiel 37:3.
12. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung, Le Roman de la rose, Continuation par Jean de Meung, vv. 6705–6726, ed. Daniel Poition (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1974), p. 204; The Mabinogion, trans. Lady Charlotte Guest (London: Dent, 1906), pp. 142–50; Charles of Anjou, quoted in Arno Borst, Medieval Worlds: Barbarians, Heretics and Artists, trans. Eric Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 209.
13. See Charles W. C. Oman, The Art of War in the Middle Ages, A.D. 378–1515, rev. and ed. John H. Beeler (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1953), pp. 7–9.
14. Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Giovanni Porta (Parma: Ugo Guanda, 1991).
15. Joseph Needham, with the collaboration of Ho Ping-Yü, Lu Gwei-Djen, and Wang Ling, Chemistry and Chemical Technology: Military Technology; The Gunpowder Epic, vol. 5, pt. 7 of Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 1–7 and 579.
16. Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, 10 vols. (London: W. Baynes and Son/Dublin: R. M. Tims, 1824), vol. 9, p. 167.
17. James Burke, Connections (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 70.
18. Inferno, XXI:7–18.
19. Ibid, 88–90, “E ’l duca mio a me: ‘O tu che siedi / tra li scheggion del ponte quatto quatto, / sicuramente omai a me to riedi.’”
20. Proust, quoted in Ray Monk, J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center (New York: Anchor, 2012), p. 114.
21. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Knopf, 2005).
22. “A Petition to the President of the United States,” 17 July 1945, U.S. National Archives, Record Group 77, Records of the Chief of Engineers, Manhattan Engineer District, Harrison-Bundy File, folder 76, available at http://www.dannen.com/decision/45-07-17.html.
23. Oppenheimer, quoted in Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists, trans. James Cleugh (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1960).
24. Tibbets, quoted in Monk, J. Robert Oppenheimer, p. 462, ellipsis in original.
25. Father Siemes, quoted in John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Knopf, 1946), pp. 117–18; Paradiso, XVIII:91–93.
26. Oppenheimer, quoted in Monk, J. Robert Oppenheimer, p. 115, ellipsis in original.
Chapter opener: Bruno Ducharme, Estelle Lemaître, and Jean-Michel Fleury, eds., ABCD: Une collection d’Art Brut, ouvrage réalisé à l’occasion de l’exposition “Folies de la beauté,” au Musée Campredon de l’Isle-sur-la Sorgue, du 8 juillet au 22 octobre 2000 (Arles: Actes Sud, 2000), pp. 282–83; James Buchan, Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), pp. 18, 269; Inferno, XV:37–39, “qual di questa gregga / s’arresta punto, giace poi cent’ anni / sanz’ arrostarsi quando ’l foco il feggia”; World Bank indicators in Le Monde diplomatique, February 2002, p. 13; Félix Luna, Argentina: de Perón a Lanusse, 1943–1973 (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2000), p. 43.
1. Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine People, 1.2.30, ed. and trans. James Hankins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 141; Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Giovanni Porta (Parma: Ugo Guanda, 1991), vol. 2, p. 52.
2. Dante Alighieri, Epistola XIII, in Le opere di Dante: testo critico della Società dantesca italiana, ed. M. Barbi et al. (Florence: Bemporad, 1921), pp. 436–46.
3. Inferno, I:32–33, “leggera e presta molto, / che di pel macolato era coverta”; on the leopard as Venus’s familiar see Virgil, Aeneid, 1.323; Inferno, I:47, “con la test’ alta, e con rabbiosa fame”; 49–54, “Ed una lupa, che di tute brame / sembiava carca ne la sua magrezza, / e molte genti fé già viver grame, // questa mi porse tanto di gravezza / con la paura ch’uscia di sua vista, / ch’io perdei la speranza de l’altezza.”
4. Ibid., 94–99, “ché questa bestia, per la qual tu gride, / non lascia altrui passar per la sua via, / ma tanto lo ’mpedisce che l’uccide; // e ha natura sì malvagia e ria, / che mai non empie la bramosa voglia, / e dopo ’l pasto ha più fame che pria.”
5. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. 2, q. 32, art. 5, 5 vols., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1948; repr. Notre Dame, Ind.: Christian Classics, 1981), vol. 3, p. 1322.
6. Inferno, VII:8, “maledetto lupo”; 30, “‘Perchè tieni?’ e ‘Perchè burli?’”; 53–54, “la sconoscente vita che i fé sozzi, / ad ogne conoscenza or li fa bruni”; 64–66, “tutto l’oro ch’è sotto la luna / e che già fu, di quest’ anime stanche / non potrebbe fare posare una.”
7. Purgatorio, XXII:43–45, “Allor m’accorsi che troppo aprir l’ ali / potean le mani spendere, e pente’ mi / così di quel come de li altri mali.”
8. Inferno, XVII:46–51, “Per li occhi fora scoppiava lor duolo; / di qua, di là soccorrien con le mani / quando a’ vapori, e quando al caldo suolo: // non altrimenti fan di state i cani / or col ceffo o col piè, quando son morsi / o da pulci o da mosche o da tafani.”
9. Gerard of Siena, “On Why Usury Is Prohibited,” translated from MS 894, fol. 68r–68v, Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, quoted in Medieval Italy, ed. Katherine L. Jansen, Joanna Drell, and Frances Andrews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), p. 106; Jorge Manrique, “Coplas a la muerte de su padre,” in Obras completas, ed. Augusto Cortina (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1979), p. 117.
10. John T. Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 218.
11. Ibid., p. 221.
12. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, in The Complete Works of Charles Dickens, vol. 25 (New York: Society of English and French Literature, n.d.), p. 34.
13. Ibid., pp. 5, 4; Pseudo-Macarius, Spiritual Homilies, quoted in Jacques Lacarrière, Les Hommes fous de Dieu (Paris: Fayard, 1975), p. 1.
14. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, in Complete Works of Charles Dickens, vol. 25, pp. 171, 352.
15. Paul Krugman, “Bits and Barbarism,” New York Times, 22 December 2013.
16. Aristotle, The Politics, 1.8 and 1.11, trans. T. A. Sinclair (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1962), pp. 42–43, 46.
17. Dante Alighieri, Convivio, IV:XVII, 10, in Opere di Dante, p. 285.
18. Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998), pp. 250–51; Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990), p. 487.
19. Sebastião Salgado, Trabalhadores: Uma arqueologia da era industrial (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), pp. 318–319; Inferno, III:112–17, “Come d’autunno si levan le foglie / l’una appresso de l’altra, fin che ’l ramo / vede a terra tutte le sue spoglie, // similmente il mal seme d’Adamo / gittansi di quel lito ad una ad una / per cenni come augel per suo riciamo.” The image appears in Homer; Dante probably took it from Virgil.
20. Oscar Wilde, “The Young King,” in A Garden of Pomegranates (1891), in The Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. G. F. Maine (London: Collins, 1948), p. 232.
21. Ibid., p. 229.
1. Inferno, III:5–6, “fecemi la divina podestate, / la somma sapïenza e ’l primo amore.”
2. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 7.1–6.
3. Purgatorio, XVII:94–96, “Lo naturale è sempre sanza errore, / ma l’altro puote errar per mal obietto / o per troppo o per poco di vigore.”
4. Paradiso, III:70–72, “Frate, la nostra volontà quïeta / virtù di carità, che fa volerne / sol quel ch’avemo, e d’altro non ci asseta”; 85, “E ’n la sua volontade è nostra pace.”
5. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures in Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), pp. 62, 31, 257, 303.
6. Ashmolean Museum catalogue, quoted in Jan Morris, The Oxford Book of Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 110–11.
7. George R. Marek, The Bed and the Throne: The Life of Isabella d’Este (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 164.
8. Francis Bacon, Gesta Grayorum (1688) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914), p. 35; Roger Chartier, ed. A History of Private Life, vol. 3: Passions of the Renaissance, trans. Arthur Golhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 288; Patrick Mauriès, Cabinets of Curiosities (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011), p. 32.
9. Lorenza Mochi and Francesco Solinas, eds. Cassiano dal Pozzo: I segreti di un Collezionista (Rome: Galleria Borghese, 2000), p. 27; Marsilio Ficino, Book of Life, trans. Charles Boer (Irving, Tex.: Spring, 1980), p. 7.
10. Luciano Canfora, La biblioteca scomparsa (Palermo: Sellerio, 1987), p. 56; Mustafa El-Abbadi, La antigua biblioteca de Alejandría: Vida y destino, translated from the Arabic by José Luis García-Villalba Sotos (Madrid: UNESCO, 1994), p. 34.
11. Otlet, quoted in Françoise Levie, L’Homme qui voulait classer le monde: Paul Otlet et le Mundaneum (Brussels: Impressions Nouvelles, 2006), p. 33.
12. Ibid., pp. 107, 271.
13. Paradiso, XXXIII:124–126, “O luce etterna che sola in te sidi, / sola t’intendi, e da te intelleta / e intendente te ami e arridi!”
14. See Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (New York: Schocken, 2011).
15. Quoted in Levie, L’Homme qui voulait classer le monde, p. 72.
16. Ibid., pp. 69–70.
17. Henry James, Letter of 4 April 1912, in Letters, vol. 4, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 612; Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton (London: Bodley Head, 1967), pp. 38, 44.
18. Levie, L’Homme qui voulait classer le monde, p. 225.
19. Quoted in W. Boyd Rayward, “Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868–1944) and Hypertext,” Jasis 45 (1994): 242.
20. Levie, L’Homme qui voulait classer le monde, pp. 293–308.
21. Ibid., pp. 47–48.
22. Jorge Luis Borges, “El congreso,” in El libro de arena (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1975).
Chapter opener: The Book of Common Prayer (1662), 90:10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 463; Jakob und Wilhelm Grimm, “Die Boten des Todes,” Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1910), pp. 294–95; May Swenson, “The Centaur,” in To Mix with Time: New and Selected Poems (New York: Scribner’s, 1963), p. 86; Francesco Petrarca, Le familiari, vol. 3: bks. 12–19, 22:2, ed. Vittorio Rossi (Florence: Casa editrice Le Lettrere, 2009), p. 68; Seneca, “On the Shortness of Life,” in The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca, trans. Moses Hadas (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958), p. 73; Samuel L. Knapp, The Life of Lord Timothy Dexter, with Sketches of the Eccentric Characters That Composed His Associates, Including His Own Writings (Boston: J. E. Tilton, 1858).
1. Purgatorio, III:26, “dentro al quale io facea ombra”; Purgatorio, XXX:124–25, “su la soglia fui / di mia seconda etade”; Inferno, XXXIII: 13–75; “The famous verse 75 of the penultimate canto of the Inferno has created [for Dante’s commentators] a problem that stems from a confusion between art and reality. . . . In the gloom of his Tower of Hunger, Ugolino devours and does not devour the beloved corpses, and that wavering imprecision, that uncertainty, is the strange matter of which he is made. Thus, with two possible agonies, Dante dreamt him and thus shall dream him the generations to come” (Jorge Luis Borges, “El falso problema de Ugolino,” in Nueve ensayos dantescos [Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1982]), pp. 105 and 111; Inferno, XIII:31–151; Paradiso, XXI:124; see Chapter 12, above.
2. Inferno, I:116–17, “li antichi spiriti dolenti / ch’a la seconda morte ciascun grida.”
3. Yukio Mishima, La ética del samurái en el Japón moderno, translated from the Japanese by Makiko Sese y Carlos Rubio (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2013), p. 108.
4. Anagata Vamsadesance: The Sermon of the Chronicle-To-Be, trans. Udaya Meddagama, ed. John Clifford Holt (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2010), p. 33.
5. Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 56–70.
6. Talmud Megillah 15a.
7. The Koran, sura 76, trans. N. J. Dawood, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1993), p. 413–14; Ibn ‘Arabi, quoted in Mahmoud Ayoub, The Qur’an and Its Interpreters (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), vol. 1, p. 125; Abu Huraryra, quoted ibid., vol. 1, p. 89.
8. Koran, sura 75, p. 412; sura 33, p. 299; sura 6, p. 97; sura 17, p. 200; Imam Muslim, Sahih Muslim, vols. 1–4, trans. Abdul Hamid Sidiqi (Dehli: Kitab Bharan, 2000), p. 67.
9. Miguel Asín Palacios, Dante y el Islam (1927) (Pamplona: Urgoiti, 2007), p. 118; Louis Massignon, “Les recherches d’Asín Palacios sur Dante,” Ecrits mémorables, vol. 1 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2009), p. 105; Abu l-’Ala’ al-Ma’arri, The Epistle of Forgiveness, vol. 1: A Vision of Heaven and Hell, ed. and trans. Geert Jan van Gelder and Gregor Schoeler (New York: New York University Press, 2013), pp. 67–323.
10. “Why We Die,” in Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa (The Epistles of the Sincere Brethren), in Classical Arabic Literature: A Library of Arabic Literature Anthology, select. and trans. Geert Jan van Gelder (New York: New York University Press, 2013), pp. 221–22.
11. G. B. Caird, A Commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 11.
12. “Victorinus,” in The New Catholic Encyclopedia (Farmington Hills, Mich.: CUA Press and the Gale Group, 2002).
13. See Crawford Gribben and David George Mullan, eds., Literature and the Scottish Reformation (Cape Breton, Canada: Ashgate, 2009), p. 15. The Scientologist L. Ron Hubbard and his followers also adopt this apocalyptic reading,
14. See E. Ann Matter, “The Apocalypse in Early Medieval Exegesis,” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1992), pp. 38–39.
15. Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1984), pp. 906–18, 907, 918.
16. Philippe Ariès, Essais sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident du Moyen Age à nos jours (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975), p. 21.
17. Fernando de Rojas y “Antiguo Autor,” La Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, 4.5, ed. Francisco J. Lobera, Guillermo Serés, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Carlos Mota, Iñigo Ruiz Arzalluz, and Francisco Rico (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2011), p. 110. The image of the inn also appears in Cicero’s “On Old Age” (De senectute): “When I leave life, therefore, I shall feel as if I am leaving a hostel rather than a home.” In Cicero, Selected Works, trans. Michael Grant, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1971), p. 246.
18. Ariès, Essais sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident, p. 30.
19. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in On Poetry and the Poets, vol. 6 of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. E. C. Stedman and G. E. Woodberry (New York: Scribner’s, 1914), p. 46.
20. Ariès, Essais sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident, p. 67; Isherwood, quoted in Gore Vidal, “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” Nation, 14 October 1981.
21. Tim Radford, “A Prize to Die For,” The Guardian, 19 September 2002. For those winners who preferred not to wait for the resurrection prize, the alternative was a trip to Hawaii. Freezing the body to be resurrected in the future is the subject of a Howard Fast story, “The Cold, Cold Box,” in Time and the Riddle (Pasadena, Calif.: Ward Ritchie Press, 1975), pp. 219–31.
22. Cicero, “On Old Age,” p. 247.
23. Paradiso, XXXIII:32–33, “ogne nube li disleghi / di sua mortalità co’ prieghi tuoi.”
24. Inferno, IV:141, “Seneca morale”; Seneca, “On the Shortness of Life,” p. 48.
25. The Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL) is a comprehensive collection of ancient Latin inscriptions from all corners of the Roman Empire. Public and personal inscriptions throw light on all aspects of Roman life and history. The Corpus continues to be updated with new editions and supplements by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, and can be accessed at http://cil.bbaw.de/cil_en/index_en.html.
26. Inferno, IX:112–20.
27. Giorgio Bassani, Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1962), p. 3.
1. Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (Milan: Einaudi, 1958), p. 10.
2. Inferno, XXVI:85–90, “Lo maggior corno de la fiamma antica / cominciò a crollarsi mormorando / pur come quella cui vento affatica. // Indi, la cima in qua e in là menando / come fosse la lingua che parlasse, / gittò voce di fuori e disse: ‘Quando . . . ’”; 100 (“ma misi . . .”).
3. Levi, Se questo è un uomo. The episode appears in pages 102–5; Inferno, XXVI:118–20, “Considerate la vostra semenza: / fatti non foste a viver come bruti, / ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.”
4. Inferno, XXVI:133–35, “quando n’apparve una montagna, bruna / per la distanza, e parvemi alta tanto / quanto veduta non avëa alcuna.”
5. Inferno, XXVI:139–41, “Tre volte il fé girar con tutte l’acque; / a la quarta levar la poppa in suso / e la prora ire in giù, com’ altrui piacque.”
6. Inferno, XVI:142, “infin che ’l mar fu sovra noi richiuso.”
7. Dante, De vulgare eloquentia, I:v, edited and translated from the Latin by Vittorio Coletti (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), pp. 10–11.
8. Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 7 vols., vol. 1: From the Creation to Jacob, trans. Henrietta Szold (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 5–8. For more on this legend of creation, see Chapter 5, above.
9. Philip Friedman, Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust, ed. Ada June Friedman (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1980), p. 393.
10. Levi, Se questo è un uomo, p. 25.
11. Angelus Silesius, Cherubinischer Wandersmann, bk. 1, sect. 289, ed. Louise Gnädinger (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1984), p. 69.
12. Inferno, I:4, “dir qual era è cosa dura”; 8, “per trattar del ben ch’i’ vi trovai”; Paradiso, XV: 79–81, “Ma voglia e argomento ne’ mortali . . . diversamente son pennuti in ali.”
13. Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, vol. 1, trans. Mark Sebac (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 41. Lubac says that Musaeus was Orpheus’s master, not his disciple.
14. Paradiso, X:131; Richard de Saint-Victor, Liber exeptionum, pt. 1, bk. 1, chap. 23, p. 3, ed. Jean Châtillon (Paris: Vrin: Paris, 1958), p. 12.
15. Giles Constable, The Letters of Peter the Venerable, 2 vols., vol. 1, bk. 4:21 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).
16. Inferno, IV:80, “Onorate l’altissimo poeta”; 94, “bella scuola.”
17. Virgil, Aeneid, 4.23, “ veteris vestigia flammae”; Purgatorio, XXX:48, “cognosco i segni de l’antica fiamma.”
18. Inferno, XXVI:117, “di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente”; 133–34, “bruna / per la distanza.”
19. Homer, The Iliad, 5.279–81, 526, 384, trans. Robert Fagles (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Viking/Penguin, 1990).
20. Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, trans. Olga Marx (New York: Schocken, 1991), pp. 258–59.
21. Inferno, XXVI:114, “picciola vigilia.”
22. Ibid., 125, “folle volo.”
23. Franz Kafka, “In der Strafkolonie,” in Die Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa, ed. Roger Hermes (Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer Verlag, 2000).
24. Primo Levi, “Caro Orazio,” in Racconti e saggi (Turin: La Stampa, 1986), p. 117.
25. “Lord, let Your light,” in George Appleton, ed., The Oxford Book of Prayer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 275.
26. Purgatorio, I:133, “com’ altrui piacque”; II:23, “un non sapeva che bianco”; Inferno, XXVI:125, “de’ remi facemmo ali”; Purgatorio, II:10–12, “Noi eravam lunghesso mare ancora, / come gente che pensa a suo cammino, / che va col cuore e col corpo dimora.”
27. Purgatorio, II:110–11, “l’anima mia, che, con la sua persona / venendo qui, è affannata tanto!”; 106–8, “Ed io: ‘Se nuova legge non ti toglie / memoria o uso a l’amoroso canto / che mi solea quetar tutte mie voglie”; the poem is in Convivio, bk. 3: “Amor che ne la mente mi raggiona”; Purgatorio, II:118–19, “ . . . tutti fissi e attenti / a le sue note”; Exodus 34:3.
Chapter opener: The sisters told their story a few months after their release. See Laurence and Micheline Levesque, Les Valises rouges (Ottawa: Editions JCL, 1987).
1. Gershom Scholem, Dix propositions anhistoriques sur la Cabale (Paris: Editions de l’éclat, 2012), p 43.
2. Bruno Nardi, Saggi e note di critica dantesca (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1966), p. 333; see, for example, Isaiah 11:5: “And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins.” In the Catholic Church, before mass the priest puts on the girdle and prays, “Gird me, O Lord, with the girdle of purity.”
3. Inferno, XVI: 118–120, “Ahi quanto cauti li uomini esser dienno / presso a color che non veggion pur l’ovra, / ma per entro i pensier miran col senno!”
4. Boccaccio speaks of Geryon in the feminine, “daughter of Erebus and Night” (Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, bk. 1, chap. 21, ed. and trans. Jon Solomon [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011], pp. 137–39). William Blake, in one of his illustrations for the Commedia, gave Geryon a beardless, androgynous face.
5. Inferno, XVI:124–30, “Sempre a quel ver c’ha faccia di menzogna / de’ l’uom chiuder le labbra fin ch’el puote, / però che sanza colpa fa vergogna; // ma qui tacer non posso; e per le note / di questa comedìa, lettor, ti giuro, / s’elle non sien di lunga grazia vòte, // ch’i’ vidi . . .”
6. Purgatorio, XXIX:94, “ognuno era pennuto di sei ali”; 100, “ma leggi Ezechïel, che li dipigne”; 104–5, “salvo ch’a le penne, / Giovanni è meco e da lui si diparte.”
7. Inferno, I:85, “lo mio maestro, e il mio autore”; 86–87, “tu se’ solo colui da cu’io tolsi / lo bello stilo che m’ha fatto onore.”
8. John Freccero, “Allegory and Autobiography,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, 2nd ed., ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 174–75.
9. Dante Alighieri, Epistola XIII:5 in Le opere di Dante: testo critico della Società dantesca italiana, ed. M. Barbi et al. (Florence: Bemporad, 1921), p. 436.
10. Inferno, XXIII:144, “bugiardo e padre di mensogna”; Saint Augustine, Confessions, 10.35, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1961), p. 242.
11. Jerome, quoted in Jean-Yves Boriaud, note to “Le Mensonge” in Saint Augustin, Les Confessions, précédées de Dialogues philosophiques, vol. 1, édition publiée sous la direction de Lucien Jerphagnon (Paris: Pléiade, 1998), p. 1363.
12. Augustine, Confessions, 1.13, pp. 33, 34.
13. Inferno, XVI:132, “meravigliosa ad ogni cor sicuro”; XVII:1–3, “Ecco la fiera con la coda aguzza, / che passa i monti e rompe muri e l’armi! / Ecco colei che tutto ’l mundo apuzza!”; Herodotus, The Histories, 1.205–16, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt, revised, with an introduction and notes, by A. R. Burn (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1972), pp. 123–26; for the legend of Geryon see Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, bk. 1, chap. 22, vol. 1, p. 139.
14. Purgatorio, XVI:67–81, “Voi che vivete ogne cagion recate / pur suso al cielo, pur come se tutto / movesse seco di necessitate. // Se così fosse, in voi fora distrutto / libero arbitrio, e non fora giustizia / per ben letizia, e per male aver lutto. // Lo cielo i vostri movimenti inizia; / non dicco tutti, ma posto ch’i ’l dica, / lume v’è dato a bene e a malizia, // e libero voler; che, se fatica / ne le prime battaglie col ciel dura, / poi vince tutto, se ben si notrica. // A maggior forza e a miglior natura / liberi soggiacete; e quella cria / la mente in voi, che ’l ciel non ha in sua cura.”
15. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 3.2.8, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1969), p. 594.
16. Ibid., p. 594.
17. Julian Borger, “World Leaders Not Ready for Reconciliation with Mandela,” Guardian, 6 December 2013; Jason Beattie, “Tory Grandee Smears Nelson Mandela,” Daily Mirror, 9 December 2013.
18. Dwight Garner, “An Interview with Nadine Gordimer,” Salon, 9 March 1998.
19. Nelson Mandela, Long Road to Freedom (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2000), p. 176.
20. Garner, “Interview with Nadine Gordimer.”
21. Purgatorio, XVI:94–96, “Onde convenne legge per fren porre; / convenne rege aver, che discernesse / de la vera cittade almen la torre.”
22. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 4.573–74, in Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 313.
23. Carlo Collodi, Le avventure di Pinocchio, bilingual edition, trans. Nicolas J. Perella (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 211.
24. Paradiso, V:6, “così nel bene appreso move il piede”; John Freccero, “The Firm Foot on a Journey Without a Guide,” in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 29–54.
25. Inferno, I:28–30, “Poi ch’èi posato un poco il corpo lasso, / ripresi via per la pieaggia diserta, / sì che ’l piè fermo sempre era ’l più basso”; Freccero, “Firm Foot on a Journey Without a Guide,” p. 31.
26. Paradiso, V:1, “caldo d’amore”; 7–9, “Io veggio ben sì come già resplende / ne l’intelletto tuo l’etterna luce, / che, vista, sola e sempre amore accende.”
27. Purgatorio, XV:117, “non falsi errori.”
28. Gustave Flaubert, La Tentation de Saint Antoine, ed. Claudine Gothot-Mersch (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), p. 214.