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Ronald L. Martinez

Dante between Hope and Despair: The Tradition of Lamentations in the

During the interfaith service conducted at the Washington Cathedral September , , Rabbi Joshua Haberman read verses from the book of Lamentations, traditionally attributed to the prophet Jeremiah.As the book laments the fall of to Neb- uchadnezzar in  b.c., its choice as a text after September  was highly pertinent; chapter three, from which Rabbi Haberman’s excerpts were taken, offers some of the few expressions of hope in a book that primarily expresses grief. In addition to the verses read on that occasion, book three includes a cluster of sentiments that have been widely shared in the United States as the nation has grap- pled with the meaning of the disaster.Americans have felt dismay at the savage blow inflicted by shadowy enemies, and experienced the problematic reflex desiring that vindication, even revenge, which a God involved in history might be entreated to compass on behalf of those believing in Him; but they have also engaged in anguished speculation on why such a fell stroke was visited upon the nation, and in some few cases reflected on where our own responsibilities might lie in provoking such wrath. The text of Lamentations  logos 5:3 summer 2002 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 46

 logos strikes all these notes: astonishment at the magnitude of the losses (. –), penitential sorrow (v. ), a mixture of doubt that God may have turned away his face (v. –) with confidence that divine assistance is forthcoming (vv. –, ), that vindication will be secured (v. ). Such a use of the text of Lamentations to reflect, fil- ter, and assuage catastrophe has of course a long history; in this paper I will discuss the use made of Lamentations by Alighieri, poet and citizen of . Of the special fitness of Dante for par- ticipating in this history there can be little doubt. Of the major long poems of the Western traditions Dante’s Comedy is the most imme- diately and concretely embedded in the historical context that accompanied its composition; for this reason, Dante is perhaps the foremost poet in the West of a history that is lived and understood as a contest in progress, an agon in the Greek sense, through which a providential order struggles to assert itself. In Jewish worship, the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians—as well as the destruction of the city and temple by the Roman emperor Titus, in  A.D.—are collectively lament- ed on the th of Ab, corresponding to a date in late July or August on the . This was, according to the Talmud, the anniversary of both destructions of the Temple and the city.1 In Dante’s day,Christians also commemorated the fall of Jerusalem: the th or th Sunday after Pentecost was “Destruction of Jerusalem Sunday,” but was an occasion of mourning only in a very qualified sense, as for medieval Christians the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman legions was held to be divine vengeance for the crucifixion of Christ by the Jews of Jerusalem, a view Dante explicitly shared.2 But a liturgy of mourning drawing on Lamentations was prominent in Catholic liturgy of the late thirteenth century, as it is still: this is the use of chanted extracts from all five chapters of Lamentations distributed over the first Nocturns of the Matins office on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of Holy week.3 In close association with the extinguishing of candles, the service of tenebrae, the chanting of 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 47

lamentations in the    Lamentations during the deliberately truncated liturgies of these offices testifies to the mourning of the congregation for the death of Christ;4 as rendered liturgically, the extracts also impart a strong penitential theme, as each concludes with a refrain (adapted from Hosea :) calling on Jerusalem to return to her lord. Another implication of the liturgical use of these extracts is that certain pas- sages, such as Lam. :—“O you who pass by, attend and see, is there any sorrow like unto my sorrow”—spoken, in the biblical text, by the personified city of Jerusalem herself—are, when used as liturgical verses and responses, clearly understood as spoken by Christ on the cross: and indeed in late medieval devotional texts on the passion this verse is typically ascribed to the crucified Christ.5 In addition to its prominent liturgical use, the book of Lamenta- tions had a rich tradition of commentary; for my purposes, this tra- dition begins with the great Carolingian revival in the ninth century and culminates with commentaries by major scholastics of the thir- teenth and early fourteenth centuries—the Dominicans Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Hugh of St. Cher, and the Franciscans John Pecham and Peter John Olivi.6 In the more elaborate of these commentaries, the ancient and somewhat daunting practice of uncovering three and even four distinct levels of meaning in the text of the Bible is applied to explaining the fall of Jerusalem. The first level is historical, and this is manifested in Jerusalem twice besieged and destroyed, by Nebuchadnezzar and by the Roman Emperor Titus. Another level of meaning, the moral, treats Jerusalem as the human soul, alienated from God and surrounded by hostile enemies (such as the vices, or Satan himself). The greatest interpretive virtuosity is reserved for the allegorical level, by virtue of which Jerusalem can represent both Christ, the head, and the Church, the body of the mystical community of the faithful. To give an example of all the possibilities: a line such as Lam. : might be taken as spoken by the church besieged by enemies—persecutors or heretics; or it might be taken as spoken by Christ, suffering on the 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 48

 logos cross; or it might be taken as spoken by the Synagogue, the rejected faith community in the medieval Christian view.In this case the alle- gorical and the historical sense would coincide, as the destruction of the Temple and a diaspora of the Jewish people did in fact ensue upon the Roman siege of  A.D. And there is a fourth level of meaning that medieval interpreters discerned as implied by Lamentations: this is the so-called anagogi- cal meaning, which means that it concerns the transition from this life to the next. This meaning can be found by expanding the frame of reference and juxtaposing the sorrowful book of Lamentations to its opposite number among poetic texts of the Bible: the Canticle of Canticles. If, these interpreters reasoned, Lamentations furnishes sorrowful dirges suited to life in this “vale of tears,” the nuptial songs of Canticles suitably accompany the joy of restoration, after bodily death, to the homeland of heaven. The implication of this view for the personified Jerusalem is that however desperate her present case, she can hope for a future reconciliation with her Spouse— which, in the standard interpretation of the Song of Songs, was of course none other than Christ.7 What is suggestive about this dimen- sion of the meaning of Lamentations is that it generalizes the text into a theory of all mortal life on pilgrimage toward its final desti- nation: and this generality makes it peculiarly suitable for adaptation to Dante’s poem of a pilgrim on a journey from the sorrows of the present life to the joys of heaven; or as it is put in the poem, from the fractious city of Florence, corrupted by pursuit of the almighty florin, to “a people just and hale” ( .). For this and for other reasons that will presently emerge, Dante’s interest in the text of Lamentations was lifelong.He might well have wished it otherwise, for his uses of the book mark the profound pri- vate and public tragedies of his life. Three examples will graph this trend. When about thirty years old, Dante wrote the Vita nova,or “New Life,” a prose narrative, including carefully ordered lyric poems, about the dramatic effects on his life resulting from his 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 49

lamentations in the    youthful encounter with Beatrice. When Beatrice died on  June , Dante marked her death in his book with a citation of Lam. :, “How doth the city sit solitary, she that was full of people; how is the mistress of provinces become as a widow.” The announce- ment is especially dramatic in that it interrupts the composition of a poem already in progress and reorganizes how the book is put together from that point forward: in short, the book is subjected to a shake-up of its arrangement proportional to the impact of Beat- rice’s death on the author.8 Not many years later, probably about , when Dante had been in exile from Florence for several years, he wrote an ode in which the abstract figure of Justice is personified as a woman in abject mourning, cast out from the city that had unjustly condemned the poet and forced him into exile: again the text of Lamentations nourishes the poet’s inspiration.9 Late in life, in , Dante again turned to the first line of Lamentations to begin a letter to a group of six Italian cardinals preparing to elect a new pope after the death of Clement V. In this letter, Lam. : announces not the poet’s sorrow for Beatrice, but for the state of the Church. In  Dante found himself contemplating a de- prived of both chief sources of authority,the Holy Roman Emperor— who had died suddenly in  when attempting to reassert his authority in northern —and the pope, who in the person of Clement V had vacated Rome in  and installed himself in Avi- gnon, in southern , by , sending the Church into what many felt was a new Babylonian captivity.Such a Rome, deprived of both her spouses, had thus assumed the role of widowed Jerusalem. As Dante puts it in his Latin letter, she was “destitute of both her lights,” and I do not think it forced to see in this phrase the image of a head—Rome was after all caput mundi, the head of the world— with both its eyes put out.10 Beyond the relevance of Lamentations to a world where, from Dante’s perspective, authority had been tragically and unjustly with- drawn from Rome, there are at least two additional reasons why 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 50

 logos Dante—as a poet, as an admirer of ancient Rome, and as a son of the Church—might have been interested in representing his experience through the text attributed to Jeremiah. First: as I mentioned earli- er,Lamentations is a series of dirges; in fact, from the Glossa ordinaria of the twelfth-century Renaissance to the Scholastics, the text of Lamentations was presented not just as a collection of sorrowful can- ticles, but as an exhaustive treasury of poetic and rhetorical devices that could be used to move an audience to both pity and furious indignation. These devices were labeled and listed using terminol- ogy straight out of the rhetorical manuals of antiquity, such as Cicero’s De inventione: in the examples I gave above from the text, the personification, rather prosopopeia of the widow Jerusalem and her address, or rather apostrophe of witnesses, are precisely instances of these devices.11 The second reason Dante had Lamentations in mind when he began to make his reputation as a writer after Beatrice’s death, is that with the fall of Acre, the last Christian outpost in Palestine, to the Mamluk Sultan Al-Ashraf in , public laments for Jerusalem and the Holy Land, in the form of papal bulls, royal edicts, propos- als for crusade, crusade excitatoria, and lyric poetry, returned in force to European discourse.12 Growing up, Dante would have heard of the short-lived capture of Damietta, in Egypt, by King Louis IX of France in , and later of the disastrous Eighth Cru- sade, led again by Saint Louis, which culminated with his death at Tunis in . It is even possible that Dante associated the first anniversary of the death of Beatrice, that is,  June , with the news of the fall of Acre, besieged in May and June , although news of its capture could not have reached Italy until some weeks later, even carried by the quickest of Venetian galleys. At which, according to the chronicler Ludolph of Suchem, the entire Christ- ian Mediterranean littoral went into deep mourning for decades,13 while the anonymous contemporary chronicle de excidio Acconis, although sharply critical of the failures of leadership that led to loss 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 51

lamentations in the    of the city,concluded by lamenting it in terms drawn from Lamen- tations and Baruch.14 Dante’s personal loss of Beatrice was thus reflected on a world scale with the loss of the Holy Land: private and public grief, the sorrows of Florence and those of all Christen- dom, were part of a continuous fabric. But if the text of Lamentations marked Dante’s great disappoint- ments—as the devotee of Beatrice, as a citizen of Florence, as a sub- ject of the Empire, and as a son of the Church—it is also clear that these moments of crisis and near-desperation, when the very design of Providence seemed to be unintelligible if not absent, also func- tioned as challenges to ever more ambitious trials of the poet’s art in order to realize his vision of how the world ought to be governed. I will now consider three episodes from Dante’s masterwork, the Com- edy, in which the text of Lamentations plays a significant role. The first of these, from the , is the depiction of Maometto among the sowers of discord and schism; since he is a defamatory caricature, I will use Dante’s Italian name for him to distinguish him from the his- torical .15 By speaking words from Lamentations, Maometto comes to personify the historical Jerusalem as defeated and enslaved by a rival (and, in medieval Christian terms, spurious) reli- gion, and so consigned to . My second instance is from the Pur- gatorio, the second part of the Comedy, where in a rhetorically charged digression, Dante mourns the violence and chaos of contemporary Italy: here the words of Lamentations characterize the perilous state of Italy,Rome, and Florence. In my final example, from Dante’s alle- gorical biography of St. Francis in the last part of the poem, the Par- adiso, I will suggest why Francis’s dearly beloved, Lady Poverty,herself yet another manifestation of the widow of Lamentations, is a key to Dante’s acceptance of a world changing, as he saw it, dramatically for the worse—a world in which only the example of Francis’s austere love of poverty seemed to hold promise for reform and transforma- tion. For Dante, Francis becomes the definitive, though by no means facile, example of how to sweeten the uses of adversity. 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 52

 logos We need not spend much time demonstrating that Dante’s Hell can be thought of as built in the image of the reprobate Jerusalem, guilty of rejecting her Savior’s call to repentance. That Dante may even have thought of his Hell as, in a sense, captive to the Saracen enemy is strongly suggested by the fact that, as , Dante’s guide, and the pilgrim, Dante’s protagonist, approach the walls of the lower city of Hell, the pilgrim turns to his guide and comments: “Master, already I discern its mosques there clearly within the moat”(Inf. .–). Even before this, the very first impression the reader receives of the infernal city is provided by the notorious inscription over Hellgate:“Through me the way into the grieving city”(Inf. .). In Italian, this text, with its mention of “la città dolente,” is verbally strongly reminiscent of personified Jerusalem, who asks us in Lam. : to see if there “is any sorrow like unto my sorrow? [est dolor sicut dolor meus]”. Even the menacing conclusion of the inscription,“aban- don every hope, you who enter,” seems to recall the address, from that same verse, of “all you who pass by.”With such verbal and archi- tectural framing of Hell in terms of the Lamentations text, it does not then surprise to find close paraphrases of two verses, Lam. : and :, in canto  of the Inferno, which Dante reserved for explic- it identification of the legal principle determining punishment in his Hell: the , or counter-suffering, sometimes described as Dante’s principle of poetic justice, by which the punishment is made to fit the crime.16 It is to that canto that my argument now turns. Deep in Hell, among the worst of the fraudulent, Dante places the sowers of discord and schism. After a long opening description in which the poet renounces his ability to account in prose or verse for the heaps of lacerated bodies that he sees, Dante enumerates five specific sowers of discord, beginning with a defamatory portrait of Maometto:

Surely a barrel, losing centerpiece or half-moon, is not so broken as one I saw torn open from the chin to the farting-place. 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 53

lamentations in the    Between his legs dangled his intestines; the pluck was visible, and the wretched bag that makes shit of what is swallowed. While I was all absorbed in the sight of him, he, gazing back at me, with his hands opened up his breast, saying: “Now see how I spread myself! See how Maometto is torn open! Ahead of me Alì goes weeping, his face cloven from chin to forelock. And all the others you see here were sowers of scandal and schism while they were alive, and therefore are they cloven in this way. (Inf. .–)17

The image of a broken container, a barrel, to describe the human body cut asunder and spilling its contents, are poetic devices for reg- istering religious schism as the division of what should be united and whole. This view of Maometto as a schismatic arose among Christ- ian polemicists who constructed for Muhammad a fictitious identi- ty as the disciple of a Nestorian Christian monk, thus a heretic; and as a belligerent seeker for power who exploited religious ideas cyn- ically,thus a fraud. Even well-informed Christians, such as Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny in the mid-twelfth century, who had overseen an ambitious project of translating sources for both polemical and evangelizing purposes, saw in the expansion of not merely a military and cultural threat but a schismatic division of the body of the Christian faithful.18 Dante’s portrait reflects these slanders and misconceptions. It is however also historically grounded in that it is couched in the lan- guage of crusading warfare, after all the chief manner in which Christian had encountered Islam, from the reconquista in to the Crusades in Palestine. In Dante’s canto, a number of details are drawn from the twelfth-century southern French poet Bertran de Born, the fifth and last of those Dante names. Bertran’s poetry celebrates the heavy-mounted warfare used by crusading 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 54

 logos knights, including the use of the broadsword, notorious in crusader epics, such as the Song of Roland, for its ability to cut an opponent in half from crown to fork. Maometto—and Alì, his cousin and son-in-law and eventual suc- cessor as the fourth of the caliphs—thus bear wounds to body and head respectively that are meant to remind readers of the crusading warfare orchestrated by Christendom in response to the reconquest of Jerusalem by Islam. These wounds, which in Dante’s canto are dealt by an avenging demon wielding a large sword, represent God’s own specific punishment, or contrapasso, for the worldwide schism supposedly introduced by Islam: putting the founder of Islam to the sword probably also reflects the Christian view that Islam was a reli- gion devoted to conquest with the sword.19 But like so much in Dante, we can read considerably more in the hideous spectacle of Maometto’s evisceration. He also recalls the death of Judas, the archtraitor, whose “bowels gushed forth,” according to the Gospel text (Acts :), when he hanged himself following the betrayal of Christ, an important parallel to which I will return. At a deeper level, Maometto’s body probably also recalls, but in a negative, inverted form, what for Christians were positive examples of wounds to the body: those of martyrs, for example, and more cen- trally the image of the wounded Christ himself. When Maometto displays his own viscera as if opening an overcoat, crying out

“...vedi com’io mi dilacco! vedi come storpiato è Maometto!” [Now see how I spread myself see how Mohammed is torn open]

he acts out a parody of the language of Christian meditations on the passion, which describe in detail how Christ’s body was dilatatus, - tended, by being placed on the cross.20 For my purposes in this essay, what is significant is that the self- ostentation of Maometto’s wound is done in words that echo the text 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 55

lamentations in the    of Lamentations. Nor is this the only use of Lamentations in the canto. Dante closely paraphrases Lam. : when he has Bertran de Born—the poet I mentioned just now, and the last of Dante’s five named sowers of schism—call attention to the spectacular division of his head from his trunk, which he carries like a lantern. Bertran says:

“...Now see my wretched punishment, you who go still breathing to view the dead: see if any is great as this.” (Inf. .–)

The echo of Lam. : is perfectly clear: “Attend and see if there is any sorrow that is like unto my sorrow.”With the invitation to com- pare degrees of pain, Bertran’s verse also ties the end of the canto to its beginning, where Dante had said that he could not give an ade- quate account of the ghastly accumulation of bodies—and this sug- gests how fundamental Lam. : is for the whole canto. But to get back to Maometto’s echo of the Biblical text: it is to the verse that immediately precedes Lam. :, Lam. :, which is as follows:

Vide, domine, et considera, quia facta sum vilis. [See, O Lord, and consider, for I am become vile.]

As I already pointed out, Lam. : is among the first verses of Lamentations that medieval readers thought spoken by the person- ified figure of widowed Jerusalem. But in fact the very first verse actually so spoken is the preceding one, Lam. :. Precisely there the change of voice occurs, from that of the lamenting prophet to that of the personified lamenting city.21 Dante’s version replaces the phrase “I am become vile” by the even stronger storpiato, which lit- erally means mangled and deformed, a usage that underscores with particular force the brutal desecration of Maometto’s image and memory; in allegory,the abjection of the city enslaved by the enemy. But if we can say with some confidence that Dante’s Maometto alle- gorically takes on the voice of a fallen, infernal Jerusalem, this iden- 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 56

 logos tification can be deepened and confirmed with a specific historical parallel that again embroils us in the violence of the Crusades. For Dante’s milieu, the most complete and important historical account of the Roman siege of Jerusalem in  A.D. was that of Flav- ius Josephus’s Jewish War. While Josephus’s account was already ten- dentious because of its notoriously apologetic treatment of Roman motives, some Christian retellings of Josephus’s history added a detail intended to further increase both the suffering and the culpa- bility of the besieged Jewish population.22 This is the assertion that Jews fleeing the city, which was torn by factions as well as sur- rounded by the Romans, swallowed their gold in hopes of avoiding losing their wealth as they escaped. But, the story goes, Syrian troops among the Romans were on to the trick, and cut open the bellies of the escapees from the city in order to pluck the gold “even from among the flowing wastes of their bowels.”23 This lurid, defamato- ry episode was retained and adapted by Christian Crusade chroni- clers describing the fall of Jerusalem to the crusaders in , attributed not of course to escaping Jews, but to the Islamic popu- lation. The chronicle of the First Crusade written by Fulcher of Chartres gives the following account, which may also have suggest- ed Dante’s presentation of the gruesome effects of schism as a series of ghastly spectacles:

And you would have seen something amazing, when some of our poorer squires and footsoldiers, knowing the tricks of the Saracens, cut open their bellies when they were dead, so that they might remove the gold coins from their intestines, which their loathsome jaws had swallowed when they were alive.24

In terms of the fierce logic of contrapasso, or counter-suffering, the evisceration of Mahomet closely associates the founder of Islam with the historical record, such as it was, of the several conquests of Jerusalem: an emphasis possibly inspired by the presence of the Lamentations text itself. 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 57

lamentations in the    The anecdote from the crusading chronicle also adds further meaning to Dante’s depiction, in that the transformation of what is swallowed into waste serves as a likely figure for the negative trans- formation of Christian and Jewish teachings by the heretical Maometto as claimed in the defamatory biographies. Indeed, a late fourteenth-century commentator on the Comedy, Benvenuto da Imola, gives a closely analogous explanation of Dante’s emphasis on Maometto’s digestion,which presumably absorbed orthodox dogma and transformed it into heretical error.25 The emphasis on viscera is given a different but related interpretation by one of the early com- mentators on Dante’s poem, Fra Guido da Pisa, writing only a few years after the poet’s death. For Fra Guido, the focus on the ventral region of Maometto’s body suggests his cutting away of the uterine function of the Church in generating offspring destined for salvation through baptism.26 Strikingly,a similar account is given of the death of Judas in medieval Christian commentary, as Ann Derbes has recently pointed out, in which the rupture of Judas’s belly (described as both venter and uter, womb) is designed to contrast with the divine fertility of Mary’s virginal body—in this way closing the circle of iconographic suggestions offered by Dante’s grisly portrait.27 In assessing this kind of polemical ingenuity,we must not under- estimate the depth of Dante’s loathing for his caricatured Maomet- to, nor attempt to palliate the extent to which Dante, along with virtually all Christendom, was prepared to brutally revile the founder of a religion and a nation that had historically threatened the Christian West. There is a sense, however, in which the ferocity of the representation has, for Dante, a local origin: by this I mean that behind the distorted image of Maometto stands the longstanding and exquisitely Florentine tradition of the willfully defamatory por- trait—and here I use the term literally, rather than figuratively— which was a kind of visual malediction or curse designed to heap opprobrium on, indeed literally expel, the designated enemies of the community.And it comes as perhaps no surprise that the visual logic 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 58

 logos guiding these portraits often followed the principle of “poetic jus- tice,” or contrapasso, that we have already noted above, as is made explicit precisely in Dante’s canto .28 The application of contrapasso in Maometto’s case is probably the more ironic in that a version of the same logic is propounded as characterizing the Islamic hell in the Kitab Al-miraj, known in its medieval Latin translation by Bonaven- tura of Siena as the Liber scalae machometi, a text Dante could easily have read, and which a number of scholars believe influenced the composition of the Comedy; not only that, one of the groups chosen for punishment in the Islamic Hell of the Liber scalae are, precisely, sowers of scandal and schism.29 The technique of defaming either the local or exotic adversarial Other in a poetically fitting manner thus had, for Dante, a strictly native origin, just as medieval Chris- tendom found itself constrained to understand Islam through the dis- torting lenses offered by its own millennial struggles with heresy and schism—a point made in Dante’s own canto by Maometto’s offer of strategic advice to Fra Dolcino (Inf. .–), the head of the apostolic brethren finally reduced to starvation and defeat by cru- saders during the winter of  in the mountains north of Novara, in northern Italy.30 From Dante’s perspective, Maometto’s most prominent continuing role is as a heresiarch who abets schism in Italy itself. For in the final analysis Dante was probably no more than con- ventionally interested in the military ambitions of the Crusades in Outremer, beyond the sea. He unquestionably shared the widespread desire of fourteenth-century Christian Europeans to recuperate the Holy Land as the legitimate feudal inheritance Christ had won by his sacrifice, as the contemporary justification for taking up the cross was wont to put it. But Dante’s constant and pressing concern was the state of Italy and of Florence, torn by factional warfare between Guelphs and Ghibellines, that is, between supporters of the papacy and supporters of Imperial authority, a conflict that, in Dante’s his- toriography, dated back to the early years of the thirteenth century 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 59

lamentations in the    and that had also led to his own painful separation from his native city. For this reason, Dante also includes in his canto of the schis- matics Mosca de’ Lamberti (.–), universally reviled by Flo- rentines as having caused, with a violent murder, the outbreak of factional strife in the city.In fact, Dante’s chief interest in crusading was polemical and negative: this was his explicit disapproval of its use as a papal instrument against Christian political enemies, such as the followers of the Imperial party, as had been done by Pope Boniface VIII in prosecuting attempts to regain Sicily, seized in  by the Aragonese from the Pope’s French allies, the Angevin house of France. This is why,although the battle imagery and biblical language of canto  evokes crusading warfare in the Holy Land, all the bat- tles Dante names in the list at the beginning of the canto (.–)—from those between the Trojans and Latins to those involving Frederick II, Manfred, and Conrad of Hohenstaufen, defenders of the Imperial cause during the generation before Dante’s birth—were fought in Italy: all the blood spilled had been spilled on Italian soil. So it is to the specifically Italian embodiments of afflict- ed Jerusalem in the second part of Dante’s poem that I now turn.

The heaping up of the dead in Italian wars so graphically displayed in Inferno  is recalled in the fifth and sixth cantos of the . As the first day in Purgatory draws to a close, the pilgrim, Dante’s protagonist, arrives at an agreeable mountain valley where he will eventually spend the night. Like the rest of the groups the reader meets during the first day of the journey up the mountain—includ- ing souls who have been excommunicated, or have just been lazy in pursuing their salvation, or delayed repentance to the last moment—the inhabitants of the valley are in some way negligent: in this case, sovereigns who have failed to safeguard the peace and safety of their subjects. The list of irresponsible rulers begins with emperors and winds down to marquesses and counts.As Dante’s pil- grim approaches this valley he is surrounded by persons whose vio- 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 60

 logos lent deaths had cut off their chance to repent, thus increasing the length of their stays in Purgatory but also testifying to how civil vio- lence can retard progress toward salvation (Purg. .–). This gauntlet of victims also furnishes the occasion for what, if intensity of language is any indication, is probably the most heartfelt plea Dante ever made for a providential intervention in Italian affairs, and his sharpest reproach to the movers and shakers of the world for hav- ing refused to become instruments of such intervention. Strolling in this valley of negligent rulers, Dante and Virgil meet , an Italian from who wrote in the poetic idiom of southern France known as lingua d’Oc, or old Provençal. When Sordello asks the wayfarers of their origins, Virgil answers that he is from Mantua, and Sordello rushes to embrace him merely because both are natives of the same city. At this demonstration of spontaneous civic frater- nity, the narrator is overcome with both admiration and chagrin:

...and my sweet leader began: “Mantua . . .” and the shade, all gathered in itself, rose toward him from the place where it had been, saying, “O Mantuan, I am Sordello from your city!” and each embraced the other. Ah, slavish Italy, dwelling of grief, ship without a pilot in a great storm, not a ruler of provinces, but a whore! That noble soul was so quick, merely for the sweet sound of his city, to make much of his fellow- citizen there; and now in you the living are not without war, and of those whom one wall and one moat lock in, each gnaws at the other. (Purg. .–)

Speaking as the narrator and not as the character,Dante then assigns responsibility for Italian civil wars directly to the Holy Roman 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 61

lamentations in the    Emperors-elect, who had abandoned Italy; he addresses Albert of Hapsburg, who like his father Rudolf of Hapsburg had been elect- ed Holy Roman Emperor but had never come to Rome to be crowned, and he further warns the unnamed “successor” of Albert, who was to be Henry VII of , to take fair warning from the future deaths of Albert’s son and of Albert himself, who was murdered by an assassin. Considering the following passage, it is important to realize that Dante is writing in about , after the foretold events have taken place, but that the journey narrated in the poem is fictionally occurring in , before the events have taken place:

O German Albert, who abandon her, so that she becomes untamed and wild, while you should mount between her saddle-bows, may just judgment fall from the stars onto your blood, and let it be strange and public, so that your successor may fear it! For you and your father, held fast by your greed for things up there [on earth], have suffered the garden of the empire to be laid waste. (Purg. .–)

The entire outburst, seventy-six lines long—exactly half the canto, and beginning exactly at the halfway point—is technically a digres- sion; in terms of medieval literary genres, it mixes satire and lament, a hybrid lyric form that writers in Old Provençal, like Sordello him- self, had brought to a high level of refinement.We know Dante’s out- burst is a lament because it begins with a vivid expression of pain—Ahi; and like the interruption of the Vita nova at Beatrice’s death, the sudden interruption of the narrative and the narrator’s indulgence in a long digression alert us to the poet’s special invest- ment in the passage. As the poet laments the state of Italy, he har- nesses no less than three times the language of biblical lamentation: 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 62

 logos once to address “slavish Italy, no longer mistress of provinces, but a whore”—which again echoes the first verse of Lamentations, “the princess of provinces is made a tributary”; once to address Rome, whom he compares to an abandoned widow, as again, in Lam. :: “how the mistress of the Gentiles is become as a widow”; and once to address Florence, the object of Dante’s withering irony as he con- cludes the digression (Purg. .–).31 But it is real human agents, not literary figures of speech, who earn Dante’s most sharply focused scorn: the emperors Rudolf of Hapsburg and Albert, his son, who lacked the courage to come and take Italy in hand. Using traditional metaphors of governance derived from horsemanship and navigation, Dante chastises their failure to have taken up the reins of the untamed horse that is Italy, or the tiller of the ship of state. The highest rhetorical pitch, how- ever, is reserved for another borrowing from the Biblical text: addressing the negligent Emperor Albert, Dante includes yet anoth- er apostrophe—giving us apostrophe twice over, one within the other—this time spoken by Rome personified, who calls out to the absent Emperor:

Come and see your Rome, which weeps widowed and alone, and day and night calls out: “My Caesar, why do you not keep me company?” Come and see how the people love each other! And if no pity for us moves you, come to be ashamed at your reputation. And if it is permitted me, O highest Jove, who were crucified on earth for us, are your just eyes turned elsewhere? Or is it a preparation that in the abyss of your counsel you are making, for some good utterly severed from our perception? For the cities of Italy are all filled with tyrants . . . (Purg. . –) 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 63

lamentations in the    As many readers will immediately recognize, the language, includ- ing the emphatic use of apostrophe and personification, derives in part from Lamentations, where the city is she who “sits solitary.. . . she is become a widow” and in part from the Song of Songs, where the bride calls out to her bridegroom in desire: “arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come” (Canticles :).As I noted earlier,the two books were coordinated in Lamentations commentary; they were also coordinated, as it happens, in Imperial propaganda, including Dante’s own examples of it, in which the Emperor was thought to be the ideal bridegroom of Rome, the bride.32 This idea of the rela- tionship of the sovereign to his state or city went back to the time of Charlemagne and was to persist through the Renaissance.33 In Dante’s use, however, the pathos of Rome’s appeal is raised yet another power, however: Rome’s words upbraiding Caesar for his absence,

“My Caesar, why do you not keep me company?” [Cesare mio, perchè non m’accompagni?]

also echo the voice of Christ calling out from the cross; note espe- cially the persistence of the pronoun, which in these passages marks not possession, but dispossession:

“My God, why have you abandoned me?” [Deus meus, ut quid dereliquisti me?] (Matt. :)

A few lines later Dante makes so bold as to wonder if Christ, who was willing to be crucified for mankind, is any longer paying atten- tion; perhaps he has turned away, Dante wonders aloud, or perhaps his purposes are so inscrutable that a mere mortal cannot see into the abyss of his providential design. Although Dante’s language here is in part conventional, we should not for that reason minimize its importance. In addition to the uniquely charged rhetoric of this passage, and the fact that it is 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 64

 logos the longest single outburst in the poem spoken in the poet’s narra- tive voice, there are other reasons for thinking that the anguish sug- gested here is uniquely heartfelt. The writing, or possibly the revision, of these cantos was probably contemporary with the after- math of the failed expedition of Henry VII to Italy in –. This expedition, the first since the days of Frederick II—the empire had been technically vacant for over half a century—had been Dante’s great last hope for the political reform of Italy; and we know, from letters he wrote heralding the Emperor’s advent, that Dante’s enthusiasm had been literally unbounded. But the Emperor, after encountering bitter resistance from Northern cities such as , subsequently found himself checked by Guelph Florence and the forces of Robert of Anjou: both were doing the bidding of Pope Clement V,who although having originally sanctioned Henry’s expe- dition, turned coat and conspired to compass Henry’s ruin once he was on Italian soil.34 When Henry died suddenly of fever at Buon- convento, near Siena, in , Dante’s disappointment,not to men- tion his at the papal betrayal, were, to put it mildly, very great. An important reader of this canto, Maurizio Perugi, suggests that the entire outburst, in its genre of satire-lament and its tone of desola- tion, represents Dante’s personal funeral plaint for Henry.35 Be that as it may, it is interesting that when Dante’s son Pietro sat down to write a political poem in the late s, when the struggle between Pope John XXII and Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria suggested this same sad history might be repeating itself, he quoted liberally from Dante’s lines in canto six,wondering if God had ceased to discipline popes and prelates who usurped the temporal authority; as if to mark that he lacked any sympathetic human auditor, Pietro addressed his poem at the outset to God; by the end, he fears the mockery of unbelievers who witness God’s abandonment of Italy: “Where is your God, o Christian people? (cf. Ps. :).36 It was lines from Dante’s great digression, too, that Renaissance Italians quoted when complaining of the French and Spanish invasions of 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 65

lamentations in the    Italy in the sixteenth century,37 and that Italian patriots—looking forward to independence from a position of political servitude— intoned to themselves like a mantra during the Italian risorgimento of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The digression in Purgatorio canto six thus constitutes the nadir of Dante’s political despair. There is an implicit equation of the mourn- ing over the absent Emperor Henry VII with a profound anxiety over an absent or unresponsive Providence, and of the voice of desolate Rome with the voice of the poet himself. That Dante’s voice simul- taneously adopts the voice of the Bridegroom during his moment of human weakness on the cross, and the voice of the bride of Canti- cles consumed with desire for her spouse—who does not yet come—is what perhaps gives this line its great suggestiveness as an expression of desolation and dispossession. After the failure of Henry VII’s expedition no comparable oppor- tunity presented itself during the poet’s lifetime that could reasonably promise a positive transformation of Italian politics. Dante did not of course cease to take an interest in politics, however; we now know that his great political tract in defense of secular world-government, the Monarchia, was written as late as  or , after the Paradiso, the last part of the Comedy, was well underway, and probably writ- ten to buttress the claims of Can Grande della Scala, the lord of and Dante’s then patron, to the imperial vicarage, an office that Pope John XXII had forbidden him from taking up. It was in all likelihood this political function of the treatise that some ten years later,in , earned Dante’s Monarchia a refutation by the Domini- can Fra Guido Vernani, and that motivated the burning of all dis- coverable copies; the treatise remained on the Index of Forbidden Books until .38 Nevertheless, after the failure of the Imperial option Dante’s conception of how the world was to be reformed was bound to shift somewhat. It is very striking that Dante’s last evocation of the book of Lamentations in his career is found in the third and last part of the 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 66

 logos Comedy, the Paradiso, in the poet’s account of the life of Francis of Assisi. Traveling through the planetary spheres, Dante and Beatrice encounter Thomas Aquinas among the theologians and wise men Dante places in the heaven of the Sun, and it is this famous Domini- can Scholastic who relates the life of Francis of Assisi as part of a more extensive critique of the decay of both mendicant orders. In looking to Francis and the mendicant orders for significant reform of the Church and of Christendom more generally,Dante, of course, had plenty of company. By Dante’s day, however, the controversy between the relaxed and the rigorist factions—the zelanti or spiri- tuals—was bidding fair to get out of hand. The spirituals held in- creasingly uncompromising views regarding Francis’s original intentions concerning absolute poverty; views that included, at the extreme, defiance of the authority of the papacy to modify the Rule. These were positions with which Dante was probably sympathetic: after all, Dante identified avarice, acquisitiveness of temporal pos- sessions, as the besetting evil of both early modern mercantile city- states like Florence and of the medieval Church and papacy to boot. According to Niccolò Mineo, the period when Dante was writing of the Paradiso (–) where Francis is discussed may well have coincided with the crisis that led, in , to the burning at the stake of a group of Franciscan spirituals who had refused to submit to papal authority.From this perspective, despite a likely sol- idarity with the rigorists regarding the centrality of poverty,Dante’s account of the founder of the order appears to be a counsel of mod- eration to the two factions, which Dante characterizes by chastising both Matthew of Acquasparta, general of the order until  and a conventual, and Ubertino da Casale, the zelante and biographer of Francis who eventually went so far as to abandon the order entire- ly.39 But there is also reason to think that with his biography of Fran- cis Dante was once again reconstructing his own imaginative grounds for hope during a crisis that threatened to place the reforming poten- tial of Franciscanism itself in jeopardy. Dante begins his account of 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 67

lamentations in the    the two lives of mendicant founders by recalling that their coming to earth was ordained by divine Providence, as if answering his ques- tion regarding God’s level of attention to earthly affairs in the sixth canto of the Purgatorio; and it is implicit in the very project of the Par- adiso itself that the heavens, driven by celestial intelligences as they circle above the earth, influence and even direct, even if they do not determine, what happens here below. In fact, the sense in which Franciscan ideals replace the hopes for Imperial reform is quite spe- cific: when Henry VII had entered Italy in , Dante had written letters in Latin heralding his advent and comparing him to a rising Sun that would bring comfort to Italy; here in the heaven of the Sun it is with the image of Francis as the sun rising from Assisi that Thomas’s eulogistic narrative begins (Par. .–).40 Dante casts the life of Francis in terms of an allegorical narrative of the courtship between Francis and “the one whom his soul loved,” Lady Poverty. To summarize Francis’s whole life in relation to a per- sonified Lady Poverty was traditional, at least since the Sacrum com- mercium Sancti Francisci cum domina paupertate [Sacred commerce of Saint Francis with lady Poverty]. The Sacred commerce—English translators have avoided the direct transposition, but it seems to me exactly right—is a text of uncertain date and authorship, but clearly influ- ential; parts of it were also incorporated into the biographies of Francis written by Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure during the middle and later thirteenth century.41 The text relates how Pover- ty, who had lived with Adam in the garden and kept close company with Christ even to the point of ascending the cross with him, had lived in neglect and exile since the days of Constantine the Great, when the war between the Church and the secular power had ceased; until Francis and his brothers seek her out and coax her away from her high mountain back to the world of men. The narra- tive is thus a figurative way of speaking of how for Francis the quest for absolute poverty,the “queen of virtues,” is the chief vector of his imitation of Christ and so the dominant motive of his life; and in this 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 68

 logos strong emphasis the Sacrum commercium is, despite some scholarly skepticism, arguably a direct influence on Dante’s equally single- minded account. As I noted earlier, Thomas begins the biography proper by speak- ing of Francis as a sun, rising from Assisi, that has come to give comfort to the world:

He was not yet far from his rising, when he began to make the earth feel some strengthening from his great virtue; he incurred the enmity of his father, still a youth, for a certain lady, to whom no one unlocks the gate of pleasure, any more than to death; and before the spiritual court et coram patre [in his father’s presence] he was joined with her; and then from day to day he loved her more. She, deprived of her first husband, [Christ] had waited a thousand years and more, despised and dark, without invitation, until this man; . . . nor had it availed her to have been constant and fierce in her love, so that, when Mary stayed below,she wept with Christ upon the cross. But so that I proceed not too obscurely, take Francis and Poverty for these two lovers now in my further speech. Their love and admiration and sweet glances caused their harmony and their cheerful look to be the occasion of holy thoughts; so much that the venerable Bernard took off his shoes first, and ran after such great peace, and, running, thought himself slow. Oh unrecognized riches! oh fruitful possession! Egidio goes barefoot, Silvestro, too, following the bridegroom, so pleasing was the bride. (Par. .–, –) 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 69

lamentations in the    And at the end of the biography:

When he who chose him for such good pleased to draw him up to the reward he merited by making himself lowly, to his brothers, as to just heirs, he handed over his dearest lady, and commanded them to love her faithfully; and from her bosom his soul chose to set forth, returning to its kingdom, and for his body he wished no other bier. (Par. .–)

Dante writes that before her union with Francis, Lady Poverty had been “despised and dark, without invitation” and “deprived of her first husband,” Christ (though he is not named)—and this echoes the language of the Sacrum commercium (or of the subsequent biogra- phies drawing from it) where Francis is recommending to his broth- ers an attachment with the long-despised Lady.With startling, even disturbing rhetorical effect, Francis presents the prospect of finding and enjoying Lady Poverty in terms more in keeping with a medieval brigand promising his troops the spoils of war:

Brothers, the espousal with poverty is wonderful, and we may easily enjoy her embraces, for “the mistress of peoples is become as a widow” and the queen of virtues “is become con- temptible” before all. None in these parts will dare to cry out, none will oppose us, no one will by right forbid us to have commerce with her. “All her friends have despised her and have become her enemies.”And when he had spoken this way, all began to walk after Holy Francis. (Habig, ).

We immediately recognize the language of widowed Jerusalem in Lam. : and .: three times quoted in the passage I just cited: “the mistress of peoples is become as a widow”;“she is made vile”; and “all her friends have despised here, they have all become her enemies.” 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 70

 logos That, in Dante’s account, she has been deprived of her first husband also reminds us of Lamentations commentary, which identify the widow as deprived of Christ, but with expectations of a future return of the bridegroom. So it is that in Dante’s allegory, as in the Sacrum commercium, Francis and his brothers restore the widow’s sta- tus as a spouse: and so the second part of the allegorical biography ends with a flurry of evocations of Canticles, which, allegorically speaking, are songs of nuptial love exchanged between the Soul and Christ, or Christ and the Church.

Egidio goes barefoot, Silvestro, too, following the bridegroom, so pleasing was the bride.

Which leads to the observation that—with the exception of Dante’s fictional reunification with Beatrice at the end of the Purgatorio—it is in the biography of Francis, and only there in Dante’s poem, that we find completed the sequence of sorrow leading to joy that Lamentations commentators posit as the universal context of the book. In an Italy where both pope and emperor have abandoned their Roman bride, only in the life of Francis does a widowed spouse find again her bridegroom, only in following the poverello are nuptial rites actually celebrated. Only in Dante’s life of Francis are sandals kicked off in pursuit of the embraces of the bride, in a verse which Erich Auerbach, in his pathfinding reading of the canto, recognized as scandalous and which approaches the implications of the passage from the Sacrum commercium I cited above.42 In a way we sometimes come to expect with Dante, then, the use of the widow of Lamentations is in part governed by the part of the poem where we find her. In Hell, she is the city conquered by the adversary—Satan, Dante’s Maometto, take your pick—given over to God’s wrath; in Purgatorio, where penitential and redemptive functions of the poem overlap, she is, as widowed Rome and Italy enslaved, the civic community that desires union with the emperor 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 71

lamentations in the    for the sake of universal peace, but which feelingly suffers the absence of legitimate authority; in the Paradiso, she becomes the rig- orous, ascetic ideal of absolute poverty, overwhelmingly desirable precisely because of her outcast and abject status. She is the loathly lady for whom Francis sacrifices wealth, family, and when his rigor- ous imitation of Christ is crowned by the quasi martyrdom of the stigmata, even bodily health. Indeed, to my knowledge hitherto unremarked in discussion of Dante’s version is the repeated equiva- lence between devotion to Lady Poverty and the embrace of death: some six instances in ninety lines. Francis comes to succour a Church originally espoused to Christ in the death of the cross; Poverty her- self, Dante’s text points out, is about as popular as death itself, to whom none willingly opens the door of pleasure; and when Francis is about to die, he has himself placed on the ground, identified in the text again with the bosom of Lady Poverty, but also, metaphorical- ly, as his bier. If Bernardo and Egidio and Silvestro run after her embraces, shedding their sandals all the while, Francis himself finds the quietus of his courtship only when he receives the third seal, that of the wounds of Christ, and makes of his own body the embodied Rule of Poverty, the Rule made flesh, sealed with the red seals of blood.43 Repeatedly then, in Dante’s account the place of Poverty is the place of bodily death; from this viewpoint, Lady Poverty is sis- ter to “Sora nostra morte corporale,” “sister bodily death” of Francis’s famous Canticle of the Sun.We would be justified in concluding that this emphasis in Dante’s account registers Francis’s known thirst for martyrdom and for the imitation of Christ, which is only fulfilled with the stigmata signifying death on the cross. But from the point of view of the poet’s biography,commerce with a Lady Poverty whose alter ego is the widow of Lamentations might appear to be some- thing slightly different: as an espousal of loss, of mourning. Survey- ing his life from the vantage point of , Dante might well have concluded that his own espousal of mourning had been lifelong. There are of course many reasons to see a strong identification 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 72

 logos between Dante and Francis. Some are biographical: in Florence, Dante had probably studied with the Franciscans of Santa Croce; he may have been a member of the tertiary,lay order of Franciscans; his daughter Antonia became the Franciscan nun Suor Beatrice; and when he died in in , he was buried in the church of San Francesco. It certainly suggests a bias.What is probably more impor- tant, as Ronald Herzman has argued, Dante would have seen in the Franciscan virtue of humility the exemplary remedy for the pride that beset the whole Alighieri clan, as we are reminded several times in the poem (e.g., Purg. ; Par. ).44 An appreciation of Franciscan poverty,on the other hand, might have helped him better endure the indigence of exile; if Dante did know the Sacrum commercium,he probably read with great interest the surprising description of Lady Poverty herself as an exile, couched in the biblical language describ- ing none other than wandering Cain:“vaga et profuga super terram” [“a fugitive and a vagabond . . . upon the earth”] (Gen. :).45 Francis’s legacy to Dante thus includes Lady Poverty as a persistent companion of the poet’s exile, and, in her guise as the widow of Lamentations, his acquaintance with the vocation of mourning. To be sure, where Francis zealously sought out Lady Poverty, Dante’s poverty was involuntary and much regretted: his vocation of mourning was not elected, but thrust upon him by circumstances— by the death of Beatrice, by his exile, by the death of the Emperor, by the Babylonian captivity of the church. Still, making virtue of necessity did become one of Dante’s chief strategies for confronting his deep disappointments. Implicit throughout my essay is the assumption that the chief virtue Dante made of necessity was his great poem: for if his private and public life kept coming up as tragedy, he nevertheless had his Comedy to write, and to use to try and set things right. 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 73

lamentations in the    Notes

1. See the Encyclopaedia Judaica (New York:Macmillan, ):“Av, th of,” vol. I, cols. –. 2. For “Destruction of Jerusalem Sunday,” see Amnon Linder,“Jews and Judaism in the eyes of Christian Thinkers of the Middle Ages: The Destruction of Jerusalem in Medieval Christian Liturgy,” in From Witness to Witchcraft,Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought, ed. Jeremy Cohen (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, ), –. Dante points to the providentiality of the destruction of Jerusalem at Purg. .– and .– and Paradiso .– and .–; it is clearly a cardinal moment in the poem’s historiographical vision. 3. For the shape of this liturgy in Dante’s day, see, most usefully, Sources of the Modern Roman Liturgy:The Ordinals by Haymo of Faversham and Related Documents (1243–1307), ed. S. J. P.Van Dijk,  vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, ), , –. 4. This is brought out by Dante’s contemporary Durandus of Mendes, in his Rationale divinorum officiorum (: Dura, ); see .. (), where the truncation of the offices is identified as signifying the “widowing” of the community (viduati) by the death of Christ. 5. See, for example, such uses in St. Bernard of Clairvaux [attr.], Meditatio in Passionem et Resurrectionem Domini (PL .) and the Vitis mystica (PL .) attributed to St. Bonaventura. For this literature, see Thomas Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ). 6. For full bibliography,see R. L. Martinez,“Lament and Lamentations in Purgatorio and the Case of Dante’s Statius,” Dante Studies  (): –, esp. . 7. All four of the levels are distinguished throughout the tradition, from Rabanus Mau- rus and Paschasius in the ninth century through Hugh of St. Cher and John Pecham in the mid- and late thirteenth century. See Martinez, “Lament and Lamentations,” –, –. 8. This passage, beginning chapter  of the book, has been demonstrated to be the principal articulation of the work in the manuscript tradition; see Guglielmo Gorni in his recent edition of the Vita nova (Florence: Einaudi, ), xxi–xxvii, –. 9. For the text and commentary,see Dante’s Lyric Poetry, ed. Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde,  vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), :– and :–. 10. The text of Dante’s Epistle XI. reads, “utroque lumine destitutam.” See Dantis Alagherii Epistolae:The Letters of Dante,ed. Paget Toynbee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), – (including text and English translation; in Toybee’s numbering and paragraphing, it is Epistle .). 11. For the inclusion of Ciceronian rhetoric in the Glossa ordinaria commentary on Lamentations by Gilbert the Universal, see Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, ), –. The Ciceronian prefaces were retained in many of the later commentaries, includ- ing that of Hugh of St. Cher and John Pecham. 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 74

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12. For the proliferation of this literature, see Maurizio Perugi, “Il Sordello di Dante e la tradizione mediolatina dell’invettiva,” Studi danteschi  (): –, esp. –; Crusade preaching is discussed by Christoph T.Maier, Preaching the Crusade: Mendicant friars and the cross in the thirteenth century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, ) and illustrated in his Crusade Propaganda and Ideology:Model Sermons for the Preaching of the Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); see also Sylvia Schein, Fideles Crucis: The Papacy, the West, and the Recovery of the Holy Land, 1274–1314 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), esp. – and –. 13. For an extract from Ludolph of Suchem’s Description of the Holy Land, see The Crusades: A Documentary Survey, ed. James A. Brundage (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Marquette Uni- versity Press, ), –. 14. The de excidio Acconis is discussed by Sylvia Schein,“Babylon and Jerusalem: The Fall of Acre –,” in From Clermont to Jerusalem:The Crusades and Crusader Societies 1095–1500, ed. Alan V.Murray (Turnout: Brepols, ), –. 15. To this day, translations of Dante into Arabic and other languages used in the Islamic world suppress canto  as intolerably offensive in its representation of Muhammad. See the entry “Islam” in the ,  vols. (Rome: UTET, ), . 16. For the Aristotelian and Thomistic background to this idea in Dante, see Inferno . and notes. 17. Texts and translations of Dante’s Comedy are from , Inferno, trans. by Robert M. Durling, with Introduction and Notes by Ronald L. Martinez and Robert M. Durling (New York: Oxford, ); from Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, trans. by Robert M. Durling, with Introduction and Notes by Ronald L. Martinez and Robert M. Durling (New York: Oxford, forthcoming October ); and from Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, trans. by Robert M. Durling, forthcoming. 18. The Christian treatment of Islam in the Middle Ages is outlined by Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ). Representative texts by Peter the Venerable are edited and discussed by James Kritzeck, Peter the Venerable and Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ). 19. See Kritzeck, Peter the Venerable, , as well as a widely known account like that of Giovanni Villani’s Chronicle (.); Peter the Venerable’s own writing against Islam was described by contemporaries as attacks with the “sword of the Word,” see Kritzeck, , . That Alì became the titular head of the Shia, or schismatic branch of Islam, in distinction to the Sunni branch, was in all likelihood known to Dante; the division is carefully spelled out in Book , chap.  of William of Tyre’s late twelfth- century account of the First Crusade, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, ed. E. A. Babcock and A. C. Krey (New York: Columbia University Press, ), :–, as well as in subsequent accounts such as Villani’s Chronicle. 20. For Christ’s body as distensus, see the Vitis mystica, PL . and ; for dilatatus (said of Christ’s offer of charity, as if opening his breast or arms) see the Sermon on the Seven Last Words of Ernoldus Bonaevallis, PL .. 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 75

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21. See for example the laconic commentary of Pecham, Expositio threnorum, :“Cum hactenus Propheta planxerit civitatem, hic, mutata persona, introducit ipsam civi- tatem se ipsam plangentem.” [Whereas up to this point the Prophet bewailed the city, here, with a change of person, the city itself is introduced, lamenting for itself. (trans- lation mine)] 22. I refer chiefly to the text known as Hegesippus, edited in Migne among the works of St. Ambrose (PL ) but in fact an anonymous work; there is a modern edition by V.Ussani, Hegesippi qui dicitur historiae libri V (CSEL ,  vols). For discussion of this and other Christian versions of Josephus, see Amnon Linder and Heinz Schreck- enberg, Die Flavius-Josephus-Tradition in Antike und Mittelalter (Leiden: E. J. Brill, ). 23. See Hegesippus . (PL .), my translation. 24. See Fulcher of Chartres, A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem, trans. F. R. Ryan (Knoxville, Tenn., ), . The anecdote was widespread; it is found also in the twelfth-century Old French epic on the fall of Jerusalem, La venjance nostre seigneur, vv. –, –. See Loyal A. T.Gryting, The Oldest Version of the Twelfth Cen- tury Poem ‘La venjánce Nostre Seigneur’ (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, ). 25. Benvenuto’s comment is translated in Daniels, Islam and the West, : “all the doc- trine which entered [Muhammad’s] mind produced horrible error with which he soiled and infected nearly all the world.” 26. “And because he violated the womb of the Church, he is represented by the author divided in his belly from his chin to his anus . . .” [my translation]. See Guido da Pisa, Commentary on Dante’s ‘Inferno’, ed. Vincenzo Cioffari (Albany, N.Y.: State Universi- ty of New York Press, ), . 27. The text attributed to Bernard is as follows: “suspensus crepuit medius: plenus erat venter,et ruptus est uter.” [“and, being hanged, split open in the middle: his belly was filled, and his bowel burst” (my trans.)], PL .. Uter also denotes the womb, however.See Ann Derbes and Mark Sandona,“Barren Metal and Fruitful Womb: The Program of Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua,” Art Bulletin  (): –, esp. –, . 28. The defamatory portrait in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Tuscany and its con- trapasso-like logic are discussed in Samuel Y.Edgerton, Pictures as Punishment (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), –. 29. For the Islamic form of contrapasso, see the Libro della scala e La questione delle fonti arabo-spagnole, ed. Enrico Cerulli (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ), . Parallels with Dante’s Inferno, including that with the sowers of schism, are discussed by Cerulli, – and by Maria Corti, “La ‘Commedia’ di Dante e l’oltretomba islamico,” Belfagor  (): –. 30. The historical evidence on Fra Dolcino is surveyed by Rainieri Orioli, Venit perfidus heresiarcha:Il movimento apostolico dolciniano dal 1260 al 1303 (Rome: Istituto storico per il medioevo, ). 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 76

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31. Purg. ., which I do not discuss here, is “finds no rest,” from Lam. :,“nec inven- it requiem.” 32. See Dante’s Epistles  and , which can be found with English translation in Toynbee, Dantis Alagherii Epistolae, – and –. 33. For its late medieval and early Renaissance uses, see Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). 34. For Henry’s expedition, see William S. Bowsky, Henry VII in Italy: The Conflict of Empire and City-State, 1310–1313 (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, ). 35. Perugi, “Il Sordello di Dante,” –. 36. For Pietro’s poem, see Giovanni Crocioni, di Piero Alighieri (Città di Castel- lo: Lapi, ), –. 37. Testimonials can be found in André Chastel, The Sack of Rome, trans. Beth Archer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ). 38. See Anthony K. Cassell’s entry, Monarchia, in the Dante Encyclopedia, ed. Richard Lansing (New York: Garland, ), –. 39. The best and fullest account of Dante’s treatment of Francis and Franciscanism are Niccolò Mineo’s two essays,“Il canto XI del ‘Paradiso’: La ‘vita’di San Francesco nella ‘festa di paradiso,’” in Lectura dantis metelliana: I primi undici canti del ‘Paradiso,’ ed. Attilio Mellone, O.F.M.(Rome: Bulzoni, ), –, and “Ancora su ‘Paradiso’ XII, –,” in Miscellanea di studi in memoria di Silvio Pasquazi, ed. A. Paolella et al,  vols. (Naples: Federico & Ardia, ), :–. For the history of the Order during this period, see John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order from its Ori- gins to the Year 1517 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), esp. – and –. 40. For the Emperor as sun, see Epistle :–, in Toynbee, Dantis Alagherii Epistolae, . 41. There is a recent critical text, Sacrum commercium sancti Francisci cum domina Pauper- tate, ed. Stefano Brufani (Assisi: Porziuncola, ). For English translation of this text and the lives of Francis see St.Francis of Assisi:Writings and Early Biographies;Eng- lish Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St.Francis, ed. Marion A. Habig (Chicago: Fran- ciscan Herald Press, ), including Sacrum Commercium, or Francis and his Lady Poverty, trans. with introduction and notes by Placid Hermann O.F.M. (–). 42. See Erich Auerbach, “St. Francis of Assisi in Dante’s ‘Commedia’” in Six Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian, ), –, esp. . 43. For this image, see Ronald Herzman, “Dante and Francis,” in Franciscan Studies  (): –, esp. , . 44. For Dante’s self-reflexive emphases on a “Franciscan” humility, see ibid., , –. 45. For the text, see Habig, Omnibus, –.