Dante

Dante: His Times and His Work is by Arthur John Butler, and the list of books at the front includes The Purgatory of Dante, edited with translation and notes by A. J. Butler, and The Paradise of Dante and The Hell of Dante by the same. The text says it may be safely assumed that few intelligent students will rest content with this amount of study, since they will find at every turn allusions calling for explanation, philosophical doctrines to be traced to their sources, and judgements on contemporary persons and events to be verified.

The text names the Bible, Virgil, Augustine, Aquinas and Aristotle as the more obvious quarries from which Dante obtained the materials for his mighty structure, which have no doubt been pretty thoroughly examined. The text takes up Otto of Freising’s Annals and finds the good bishop moralising on the mutability of human affairs. The text says that a brutal joviality seems to characterise the malefactors met with in one region, among whom are many Florentines, a fact which prompts Dante to an apostrophe full of bitter irony.