Notes

Introduction: Dante as Poet, Prophet, and Exile

1. A note on notes: throughout this book I have included bibliographical references. They are not included for the scholar or specialist (there are many studies, especially in foreign languages, that I have left out). These notes are also not for the general reader, who will be content with what is written in the main text. I designed the book, then, so that it can be read without consulting any notes, if that is preferable. When I wrote the notes, I had in mind students (undergraduates and graduates) who would be arrested by some observation. I want to provide them with a path to continue to pursue that particular inspiring idea.
     Throughout this book I have used my own translation, based on the Italian text: Commedia, ed. Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, 3 vols. (Bologna: Zanchelli, 2000). For readers who are interested in a full translation of the Comedy, I recommend the translations of Robert and Jean Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2002, 2004, 2008). Some translations are more poetic, such as the ones by Robin Kirkpatrick (Penguin) and Anthony Esolen (Modern Library). There is an older, more literal translation by Charles Singleton (Princeton University Press). However, I like the Hollanders’ translation because it balances fidelity to the Italian original with a sense for the music of the poetry. I also appreciate Robert Hollander’s notes, although they are sometimes overwhelming for first-time readers.

2. See, e.g., John Demaray, Dante and the Book of the Cosmos (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1987); and Nino Pirrotta, “Dante Musicus: Gothicism, Scholasticism, and Music,” Speculum 43, no. 2 (1968): 245–57. See also Otto Von Simson’s references to Dante in his Gothic Cathedral (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

3. Although scholars now think that his book has limitations, Otto Von Simson’s Gothic Cathedral is still the best introduction to appreciating the geometrical order of the cathedral.

4. Marc Cogan, The Design in the Wax: The Structure of the Divine Comedy and Its Meaning (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999).

5. Roberto Antonelli, “Come (e perché) Dante ha scritto la Divina Commedia?,” in Dante Oggi, ed. Roberto Antonelli, Annalisa Landolfi, and Aríanna Punzi, special issue, Critica del Testo 14 (2011): 3–23.

6. For a fascinating and readable study about how Florence responded to Dante in the centuries after his death, see Simon Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

7. For more on this, see John Freccero, “The Significance of Terza Rima,” in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 258–74; and Zygmunt Baranski, “The Poetics of Meter: Terza rima, ‘canto,’ ‘canzon,’ ‘cantica,’” in Dante Now: Current Trends in Dante Studies, ed. Theodore Cachey (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 3–41.

8. For a beautiful example of how medieval monks realized sacred space in the ritualistic performance of sacred time, see Kristina Krueger, “Monastic Customs and Liturgy in the Light of the Architectural Evidence,” in From Dead of Night to End of Day: Medieval Customs of Cluny, ed. S. Boynton and I. Cochelin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 191–220. But see also Neil Roy’s more accessible “The Galilee Chapel: A Medieval Notion Come of Age?,” in Benedict XVI and Beauty in Sacred Art and Architecture, ed. D. Vincent Twomey and Janet Rutherford (Dublin: Four Courts, 2011), 143–62; and Margot Fassler, The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
     For Dante and “sacred time,” see Ronald Martinez, “Dante and the Poem of the Liturgy,” in Reviewing Dante’s Theology, ed. Claire Honess and Matthew Treherne (Oxford: Lang, 2013), 2:89–157.

9. George Duby’s assessment, in The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980–1420 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), as cited in Demaray, Dante and the Book of the Cosmos, 1.

10. For the playfulness of the gothic style, see Mary Carruthers, “Varietas,” in The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 135–65; and Paul Binski, Gothic Wonder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

11. In total, there are 128 speaking characters in the Comedy, and another 236 characters who have some nonspeaking action assigned to them. For other exciting statistics such as these, see Bernard Delmay, I personaggi della “Divina Commedia”: Classificazione e regesto (Florence: Olschki, 1986). One of the most useful tools for navigating this huge list of characters, in addition to Robert Hollander’s notes, is the old but newly reprinted work by Paget Toynbee, A Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante, revised by Charles S. Singleton (1898; rev., Oxford: Clarendon, 1968). As it is now in the public domain, it is easily accessible. See the first edition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1898) at http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/pdf/enh149b2446413.pdf.

12. There are many good books that give basic biographical information. I recommend Stephen Bemrose, A New Life of Dante, rev. and updated ed. (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2000); and John Scott, Understanding Dante (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004). I am indebted to these works for the following summary of Dante’s life.

13. For the medieval poetic “science” of love, the best place to start is to read the bizarre but influential medieval text by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. and ed. Frances Horgan, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also Linda Paterson, The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c. 1100–c. 1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

14. For Dante’s lyric poetry, I have used an older edition: Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). You can also read Dante’s lyric poems in a more recent edition: Dante’s Lyric Poetry, ed. Teodolinda Barolini, trans. Richard Lansing (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014).
     For two brilliant introductions to Dante’s lyric poems and their relationship to Vita Nuova, see Teodolinda Barolini, “Dante’s Lyric Past,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 14–33; and Manuele Gragnolati, “Authorship and Performance in Dante’s Vita Nuova,” in Aspects of the Performative in Medieval Culture, ed. Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 125–41. But the most important study on Dante and his lyric poetry is now Tristan Kay, Dante’s Lyric Redemption: Eros, Salvation, Vernacular Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

15. For the text, see Foster and Boyde, Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 3a.

16. See Ronald G. Witt, The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

17. Dante’s Vita Nuova, trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973). In this and subsequent citations, I cite the section number from the Vita Nuova followed by the page number(s) in Musa.

18. For a discussion of Dante’s explanation of the providential nature of his exile, see Albert Ascoli, “Language: Neminem ante nos,” in Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 130–74.

Chapter 1  Zooming In and Zooming Out

1. Most notably, Charles Singleton, “In Exitu Israel de Aegypto,” Dante Studies 118 (2000): 167–87; and Robert Hollander, Allegory in Dante’s Commedia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).

2. See Valentina Atturo, “Contemplating Wonder: ‘Ad-miratio’ in Richard of St. Victor and Dante,” Dante Studies 129 (2011): 99–124.

3. Mary Carruthers, The Medieval Experience of Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 148. See also Caroline Walker Bynum, “Wonder,” in Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone, 2001), 37–71.

4. Carruthers, Medieval Experience of Beauty, 142.

5. See Susan McNamer, “The Origins of the Meditationes Vitae Christi,” Speculum 84 (2009): 905–55.

6. Guglielmo Gorni, “Canto I,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Inferno, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone (Firenze: Cesati, 2000), 27–38 (at 34).

7. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961).

8. For translations of Virgil, I have used A. S. Kline’s beautiful and free translation, online at http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Virgilhome.htm.

Chapter 2  The Fear of Hell and the Fear of God

1. My translation slightly modifies that found in Linda Seidel, Legends in Limestone: Lazarus, Gislebertus, and the Cathedral of Autun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2–7.

2. For more on the pagan poet’s limitations concerning the Christian afterlife, see Robert Hollander, “Dante’s Virgil: A Light That Failed,” Lectura Dantis Virginiana 4 (1989): 3–9, https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/LD/numbers/04/hollander.html; and Lloyd Howard, Virgil the Blind Guide (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).

3. Dorothy Sayers, “The Other Six Deadly Sins,” in Creed or Chaos? (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), 81.

4. For more on the medieval attitude toward the authors of antiquity, see Jan Ziolkowski, “Cultures of Authority in the Long Twelfth Century,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 108, no. 4 (2009): 421–48.

5. See Ronald Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients (Leiden: Brill, 2003). For Dante’s relationship to the classical world, see Michelangelo Picone, “Dante and the Classics,” in Dante: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Amilcare Iannucci (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 51–73.

6. See Teodolinda Barolini, “Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno V in Its Lyric Context,” Dante Studies 116 (1998): 31–63, http://italian.columbia.edu/files/italian/pdf/Barolini%20Dante%20and%20Cavalcanti.pdf; and Elena Lombardi, Wings of the Doves: Love and Desire in Dante and Medieval Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012).

7. This is what Aquinas calls “swelling of the mind” (Summa theologiae II-II, q. 158, a. 7).

8. See Erich Auerbach, “Camilla, or the Rebirth of the Sublime,” in Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 181–234.

Chapter 4  White-Collar Criminals and Sins against Words

1. I borrow the terminology of “cold” and “hot” sins from Dorothy Sayers, “The Other Six Deadly Sins,” in Creed or Chaos? (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), 63–88.

2. Evagrius, “Praktikos,” in Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, trans. Robert E. Sinkewicz, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 95–96.

3. John Scott, “Inferno XXVI: Dante’s Ulysses,” Lettere Italiane 23, no. 2 (1971): 145–86 (at 185–86).

Chapter 5  Icy Hearts and Frozen Souls

1. For more on Dante’s controversial relationship with Islam, see Jan Ziolkowski, ed., Dante and Islam (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).

2. See John Freccero, “The Sign of Satan,” Modern Language Notes 80 (1965): 11–26.

3. See Zygmunt Baranski, “The ‘Marvelous’ and the ‘Comic’: Toward a Reading of Inferno XVI,” Lectura Dantis 7 (1990): 72–95.

Chapter 6  Waiting for God

1. For more on the medieval understanding of purgatory, see the classic by Jacques LeGoff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

2. For the nature of medieval affective spirituality, see Dennis Martin, introduction to Carthusian Spirituality: The Writings of Hugh of Balma and Guigo de Ponte, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 1–66. “Various words have been employed by translators: feeling, sentiment, disposition, inclination, movement, devotion. Most of these call for the active voice in their accompanying verbs. ‘Movedness’ rather than ‘movement,’ ‘devotedness’ rather than ‘devotion,’ or ‘disposedness’ rather than ‘disposition’ would better capture the Latin noun’s meaning, but they are all extremely awkward. The present translation resorts most often to ‘affection’ . . . hoping the reader will not forget the intended actively passive thrust of these words—the affective soul has been moved, swayed, impacted toward God” (6–7).

3. See Ronald Martinez, “Dante and the Poem of the Liturgy,” in Reviewing Dante’s Theology, ed. Claire Honess and Matthew Treherne, 2 vols. (Oxford: Lang, 2013), 2:89–155. For Dante and the “spirituality” of monophony, see Francesco Ciabattoni, Dante’s Journey to Polyphony (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).

4. Peter of Celle, “The School of the Cloister,” in Selected Works, trans. Hugh Feiss (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1987), 73.

Chapter 7  The People outside the Gate

1. Shepherd of Hermas, in The Apostolic Fathers, ed. Michael Holmes (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002), 359.

2. See Jacques LeGoff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 137–38.

3. See LeGoff, Birth of Purgatory, chap. 8, “The Scholastic Systematization,” 237–88.

4. As cited in John Scott, Understanding Dante (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 247.

5. Translation of the English Dominican Fathers, as found on NewAdvent.org.

6. See Richard of St. Victor: “The Twelve Patriarchs,” “The Mystical Ark,” “Book Three of the Trinity,” trans. Grover Zinn, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1979).

Chapter 8  In Search of Deep Cleansing

1. For a work that traces the historical roots of the seven deadly sins to the desert monastic tradition, see Morton Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967). For Dante in particular, see Siegfried Wenzel, “Dante’s Rationale for the Seven Deadly Sins (Purgatorio XVII),” Modern Language Review 60 (1965): 529–33; Patrick Boyde, Human Vices and Human Worth in Dante’s Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

2. See Marc Cogan, The Design in the Wax: The Structure of the Divine Comedy and Its Meaning (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999).

3. See Marion Habig, ed., St. Francis of Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies; English Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St. Francis, vol. 1 (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983), 128–29.

4. Treherne’s lecture “Dante’s Theology in Poetry, Practice, and Society” was given at University College Cork, February 2012, and is available on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk9z94jyPtM). For David Ford’s discussion of the moods of theology, see The Future of Christian Theology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 68–83. See also Matthew Treherne, “Art and Nature Put to Scorn: On the Sacramental in Purgatorio,” in Nature and Art in Dante: Literary and Theological Essays, ed. Daragh O’Connell and Jennifer Petrie (Dublin: Four Courts, 2013), 187–210.

5. Dante is on the brink of a major social transformation. See Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2015).

6. For Aquinas on anger, see his Summa theologiae II-II, q. 158.

7. Mary Carruthers, The Medieval Experience of Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 147.

8. Evagrius, “Eight Thoughts,” in Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, trans. Robert E. Sinkewicz, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 79.

9. Ibid.

10. Throughout, I have used my own translation of the Latin text of Guigo’s Scala claustralium in Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, vol. 184. For another English translation, see Guigo II: Ladder of Monks and Twelve Meditations, trans. James Walsh and Edmund Colledge (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1981).

11. Francois Petit, Spirituality of the Premonstratensians: The Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, trans. Victor Szczurek (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011), 281.

12. See Se Mai Continga . . . : Exile, Politics, and Theology in Dante, ed. Claire E. Honess and Matthew Treherne (Ravenna: Longo, 2013).

13. Crassus was the third member of the triumvirate with Pompey and Julius Caesar. He was nicknamed “Dives” (wealthy one) and died a gruesome death when the Parthian king poured molten gold into his open mouth. The story of Heliodorus comes from 2 Maccabees. He was ordered to steal the treasure from the temple in Jerusalem but was cut down by a divinely sent horseman. This event is pictured in one of Raphael’s rooms near the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican Museum.

Chapter 9  Returning to Humanity’s First Home

1. See Zygmunt Baranski, “Dante Alighieri: Experimentation and (Self-)Exegesis,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 561–82.

2. Translated by Daniel Stevenson, at http://classics.mit.edu/Virgil/eclogue.mb.txt.

3. As cited in Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 64.

4. “Al cor gentil rempaira,” in German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages, trans. Frederick Goldin (New York: Anchor, 1973), 286–91.

5. For more on this, see Peter Dronke, “Dante’s Earthly Paradise: Towards an Interpretation of Purgatorio XXVIII,” in The Medieval Poet and His World (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1984), 387–407.

Chapter 10  As the Heavens Are Higher Than the Earth

1. Zygmunt Baranski, “‘New Life’ of ‘Comedy’: The Commedia and the Vita Nuova,” Dante Studies 113 (1995): 1–29 (at 1, 4).

2. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 6.

3. See Peter Dronke, “The Phantasmagoria in Earthly Paradise,” in Dante and Medieval Latin Traditions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 55–82.

Chapter 11  Great Fires Come from Tiny Sparks

1. For the technical information, see Patrick Boyde, “Concerning the Heavens,” in Dante: Philomythes and Philosophe; Man in the Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 132–72.

2. Cicero, The Republic and the Laws, trans. Niall Rudd, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 90.

3. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Canto ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 111.

4. Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 44, 12.

5. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, trans. David R. Slavitt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 84–85 (metrum 3.9).

6. For more on this, see David Chamberlain, “Philosophy of Music in the Consolatio of Boethius,” Speculum 45, no. 1 (1970): 80–97.

7. Otto Von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 51–52.

8. For the text of the Mystical Theology that I cite here, see Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 133–43. For more on this, see Gregory Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004). See also the multivolume series The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, by Bernard McGinn: The Foundations of Christian Mysticism, The Growth of Mysticism, The Flowering of Mysticism, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany, and The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1991–2012).

9. Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, 140 (trans. Luibheid).

10. Ibid., 139.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., 136.

13. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. S. Kline, available online at http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Ovhome.htm.

Chapter 12  “In His Will Is Our Peace”

1. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, trans. David R. Slavitt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–20 (metrum 1.5).

2. Francesco Ciabattoni, Dante’s Journey to Polyphony (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).

3. Giacomo da Lentini, “Io m’aggio posto in core a Dio servire,” in German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages, trans. Frederick Goldin (New York: Anchor, 1973), 216–17.

4. You can find the Italian text of Giacomo da Lentini’s canzonetta “Meravigliosamente” in Goldin, German and Italian Lyrics, 210–15: “Al cor m’arde una doglia, / Com’om che ten lo foco / A lo suo seno ascoso, / E quando più lo’nvoglia, / Allora arde più loco / E non pò stare incluso: / Similmente eo ardo / Quando pass’e non guardo / A voi, vis’amoroso.” The translation provided above is mine.

5. “Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona,” in Dante’s Lyric Poetry, ed. and trans. Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 1:59–60.

6. For such Dominican teaching, see Michael Sherwin, By Knowledge and by Love: Charity and Knowledge in the Moral Theology of Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011).

7. See Zygmunt Baranski, “Dante and Doctrine (and Theology),” in Reviewing Dante’s Theology, ed. Claire Honess and Matthew Treherne, 2 vols. (Oxford: Lang, 2013), 1:9–64.

8. See Angela Meekins, “Reflection on the Divine: Notes on Dante’s Heaven of the Sun,” The Italianist 18 (1998): 28–70.

Chapter 13  Intellectual Fasting and the Test of Love

1. Special thanks to Isaac Owen.

2. See, e.g., http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/43.106.1/.

3. Paul Griffiths, Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), ix.

Chapter 14  The Canti of Surprise

1. Christian Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5.

2. For Aquinas’s thought on lumen gloriae, see Summa theologiae I, q. 12, a. 11.

3. Bernardus Silvestris, Poetic Works, ed. and trans. Winthrop Wetherbee, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 99.

4. Alan of Lille, “Anticlaudianus,” in Literary Works, ed. and trans. Winthrop Wetherbee, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 219–519.

5. See John Ahern, “Binding the Book: Hermeneutics and Manuscript Production in Paradiso 33,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 97, no. 5 (1982): 800–809; Piero Boitani, “The Sibyl’s Leaves: Reading Paradiso XXXIII,” in The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 223–50.

Conclusion: The Wonder of the Comedy

1. See Barbara Newman, “Latin and the Vernaculars,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Amy M. Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 225–39; and Alison Morgan, Dante and the Medieval Other World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For accounts of visions of the afterlife, I have used the anthology Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante, ed. Eileen Gardiner (New York: Italica, 2008).

2. Lotario dei Segni (Pope Innocent III), De miseria condicionis humane, ed. and trans. Robert Lewis (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978).

3. It’s even better in the original. Just read it aloud to get an idea of the intensity of the language: “Ibi erit fletus et stridor dentium, gemitus et eiulatus, luctus et ululatus et cruciatus, stridor et clamor, timor et tremor, dolor et labor, ardor et fetor, obscuritas et anxietas, acerbitas et asperitas, clamitas et egestas, angustia et tristitia . . .” (ibid., 232–33).

4. Ibid., 236.

5. See, e.g., “Frescoes in Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome (The Last Judgement),” Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu/html_m/c/cavallin/lastjudg/.

6. See Jason Baxter, “Through the Eyes of Landino: Dante, Natura, and the Poetics of Varietas,” L’Alighieri 43 (2014): 65–89.