The long awaited angel finally arrives and ushers Dante and Virgil to the stairway up to the third terrace of Purgatory. As the two climb this easier ascent, Dante takes a moment to get Virgil to gloss two lines spoken by Guido del Duca in Canto XIV. Both in Dante’s question and in Virgil’s answer, we can sense the changing notion of COMEDY as we enter the middle cantos of the poem.
Read MoreDante and Virgil walk away from the envious on the second terrace of Purgatory . . . and straight into the sun. Meanwhile, we walk straight into Dante’s poetics, which are becoming more and more complex as we enter the liminal space that forms the central cantos of COMEDY.
Read MoreWith Guido del Duca lost to his tears, Dante the pilgrim and Virgil begin to walk on to find a way up to the third terrace of Purgatory. Before they go very many steps, two more voices on the wind strike them head-on: Cain, after his fratridice and banishment; and Aglauros, laded with the sickness of envy from Ovid’s METAMORPHOSES.
Read MoreDante finally finds out who these two penitent souls are on the terrace of envy: Guido del Duca and Rinier (or Rinieri) da Calboli. Knowing who they are forces back up to the top of PURGATORIO, Canto XIV, to reassess what’s the political strife underlying its theology and to reinterpret their relation to each other and to Dante.
Read MoreDante has been quite cagey in saying where he’s from. His coy game has led him to use periphrasis, one of his favorite poetic techniques. He’s about to learn his lessons. One of the envious penitents is going to beat him at his periphrastic game and bring the entire prophetic denunciation of Tuscany into incredibly complicated metaphoric space.
Read MoreThe two envious penitent souls of PURGATORIO, Canto XIV, make a mess out of Dante’s fancy rhetorical skills and one of them sets into a typical Dantean diatribe against Tuscany . . . all the while making hash out of the very theology of Purgatory itself.
Read MoreTwo envious penitents interrupt the action of PURGATORIO at the opening of Canto XIV. They seem to be gossiping about Dante the pilgrim, then they turn to him and use some of his own words to get what they want, all the while dividing his soul from his body. Dante replies with one of his favorite rhetorical techniques: periphrasis. And he engages in modesty . . . or maybe reticence . . . or maybe truth-telling.
Read MoreA coda to our episodes with Sapia, one of the most complex and intriguing souls in all of Dante’s COMEDY. Is this passage incredibly uneven or textured with a great deal of irony? How does it reflect back to INFERNO, Canto XIII? And how does it set us up for the canto ahead, PURGATORIO XIV?
Read MoreDante the pilgrim gets more than he asked for: Sapia’s incredible monologue, a master stroke of rhetoric, part honesty, part manipulation, all wrapped around one of the most blasphemous lines in all of COMEDY. The terrace of envy is full of surprises . . . none bigger than this woman who matches wits with Dante.
Read MoreDante the pilgrim, goaded by Virgil, has worked up the courage (or the flattery) to prompt one of the souls to speak on Purgatory’s second terrace, the landscape of the envious. She does . . . and gives Dante both more and exactly what (or in fact, perhaps a bit less) than he asked for. Her reticence, her generosity: the combined tension inside the human problem of envy.
Read MoreDante tiptoes by the envious on Purgatory’s second terrace, thinking he’s making some gaffe by staying silent. But Virgil is having none of it. He tells Dante to be brief . . . and Dante launches into overblown flattery (reminiscent of a certain moment for Virgil in INFERNO XIII). How much irony is found in the texture of this seemingly simple passage from PURGATORIO.
Read MoreDante the pilgrim finally sees the penitents on the second terrace of PURGATORIO. They’re huddled against each other, leaning back against the mountain’s cliff, and clothed in livid haircloth. But they also have their eyelids stitched shut with wire, blinded because of this sin that we have reinterpreted and tamed as jealousy but that entails so much more.
Read MoreA read-through of the second terrace of Purgatory proper, the terrace of envy, in the second canticle of Dante’s masterwork COMEDY. We’ll cover the ground from PURGATORIO, Canto XIII, Line 1, though Canto XV, Line 84, walking among the ranks of the envious and asking some initial questions before we dig into it passage by passage in our slow walk across Dante’s known universe.
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