HIST-338 Lecture Notes - Lecture 52: Pope Boniface Viii, Purgatory, Aeneid
24 Nov 2020
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Document Summary
It took him many years to write, tradition has it that he penned the last lines only a few days before his death in september. Among its other attributes, the comedy is without a doubt the single greatest poem ever written about a mid-life crisis; it begins with the middle-aged poet lost in a dark forest of confused ideas, desires, goals, and temptations. As he stumbles about in this opening section, the roman poet virgil, the author of the aeneid and here the symbol of human reason, appears to him with a promise to lead him out of the darkness. The bad news is that the only way out of the forest is to pass, through hell and purgatory and to witness the dire suffering of innumerable sinners. As the two poets proceed, the comedy offers an encyclopedic view of medieval society: Dante not only designs and structures the afterworld, he apportions the eternal fates deserved by everyone in it.
