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By Root 2854 0

while it was about the recovery and understanding of ancient Greek and Latin texts and the writing of elegant Latin, it was also about the maturing, ordering and use of vernacular languages, especially Italian. We know little about Dante’s early life, except that his parents died before he was eighteen. He was betrothed at twelve and married in 1293, when he was twenty-eight. In typical Italian fashion, this was a family matter of little emotional significance. His emotional life began in 1274, aged nine, it is believed, when he first glimpsed his Beatrice (Bice Portinari, the daughter of a respectable Florentine citizen). His poetical life was devoted to her presence and after 1290, when she died, to her memory; in a sense, his entire life and work were dedicated to her.

There were three key elements in Dante’s education. One was the Florentine Dominicans, with whom he studied in the 1290s. By then the great Dominican teacher and writer St. Thomas Aquinas was dead, his work complete, so Dante was able to absorb the whole Aristotelian philosophy, as received and Christianized by Aquinas. Thomist Aristotelianism gives a structure to his oeuvre, bringing to it internal consistency and intellectual rigor. Second, Dante had as mentor the classical scholar Brunetto Latini. He too was an Aristotelian, and the first part of Book Two of his main work, Li Livres dou trésor, written in French because Italian was not yet regarded as a suitable tongue for a serious work, contains a translation of Aristotle’s Ethics, one of the first in a European vernacular. It was thanks to Brunetto Latini that Dante was able to understand the importance of rhetoric, that is, the ability to present a case and to use Latin—or any other language—with force and elegance. Through Latini, too, Dante got to know at least part of the works of Cicero and Seneca. Virgil, and especially his Aeneid, the epic successor to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, had never gone out of use even in the more harassed period of the Dark Ages, and had always found Christian defenders. But other Christians, including some of the weightiest, like St. Jerome and St. Augustine, had condemned him as a pagan archetype. Latini, however, taught Dante that Virgil was to be used as well as enjoyed, and in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which can be seen as a Christian successor to the Aeneid, Virgil appears as his guide through Hell and Purgatory, though Dante is sufficiently orthodox a Christian to exclude him from Paradise, allowing the Latin poet to sink into Limbo instead.

The third element in Dante’s education was the influence and encouragement of his friend and near contemporary Guido Cavalcanti, another classical scholar but a man whose passion was the promotion of Italian. It was he who persuaded Dante to write in the Tuscan or Florentine version of the Italian tongue. In due course, Dante provided in his Convivio, written in Italian, and in his De vulgari eloquentia, written in Latin, the first great Renaissance defense of the vernacular as a suitable language for works of beauty and weight. The De vulgari contains a sentence that prophesies of Italian: “This shall be the new light, the new sun, which rises when the worn-out one shall set, and shall give light to them who are in shadow and darkness because of the old sun, which did not enlighten them”—a shrewd recognition, on his part, that the masses would never acquire a significant grasp of Latin but could be taught to read their own spoken tongue. More important than his arguments, however, was the example he provided in The Divine Comedy, written throughout in Italian, that the common Tuscan tongue could be used to write the most exquisite poetry and to deal with matter of the highest significance. Before Dante, Tuscan was one of many Italian dialects and there was no Italianate written language that was accepted throughout the peninsula. After Dante, however, written Italian (in the Tuscan mode) was a fact. Indeed, Italians of the twenty-first century, and foreigners who have some grasp of Italian, can read most of The Divine Comedy