And the “Divine Comedy”
LINGUA INDISCIPLINATA. A STUDY OF TRANSGRESSIVE SPEECH IN THE “ROMANCE OF THE ROSE” AND THE “DIVINE COMEDY” by Gabriella Ildiko Baika BA, “Babes-Bolyai-University,” Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 1991 MA, “Babes-Bolyai-University,” Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 1992 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Pittsburgh in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh, 2007 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Gabriella Ildiko Baika It was defended on December 1, 2006 and approved by Dissertation Advisor: Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Department of French and Italian Co-Advisor: Dennis Looney, Associate Professor, Department of French and Italian Diana Mériz, Associate Professor, Department of French and Italian Bruce Venarde, Associate Professor, Department of History ii Copyright © by Gabriella Ildiko Baika 2007 iii LINGUA INDISCIPLINATA. A STUDY OF TRANSGRESSIVE SPEECH IN THE “ROMANCE OF THE ROSE” AND THE “DIVINE COMEDY” Gabriella Baika, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2007 My dissertation is an investigation of the two masterpieces of medieval, allegorical literature from the perspective of the Latin moral tradition of their time. Discussing Jean de Meun and Dante’s obsessive concern with the sinfulness of speech, I relate the numerous verbal transgressions treated in the Romance of the Rose and the Divine Comedy to what historians of moral philosophy have called “the golden age of the sins of the tongue” (1190-1260), a time span during which moralists, theologians and canonists wrote a great number of Latin texts on peccata linguae. I argue that the radical inclusion of the sins of speech among the other classes of sins treated in the Romance of the Rose and the Divine Comedy is to be accounted for in light of the major thirteenth-century treatises on peccata linguae.
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