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Contrasting dante, petrarch, and boccaccio
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The aim of this essay is to explain the relationship between Dante’s Commedia and Boccaccio’s Decameron. In order to understand this, it is therefore necessary to comprehend the connection between both their authors and characters. Also, the relation of the fictional worlds each author created. Furthermore, it is important to examine the textual structures and the intended purpose of both works.
Dante and Boccaccio both Florentine by origin were two of the founders of Modern literature. They both lived in a century when many were killed by the plague and they were inspired by their future works. Many of Dante’s characters are legendary or historical figures but many others were people who Dante knew. As a child he met Beatrice who was not only
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Periphrasis, personification, repetition, apostrophes and rhetorical questions are all used to raise the level of the language. All these contributed to the epic structure of his work. Purgatory in the Commedia reflects the connection between God and man, and how this can be destroyed by the sins. On the contrary, the Decameron looks at human connections among people of different class race or religion. The Commedia is mostly about the Divine whereas the Decameron is about Earthly things. Furthermore, the purgatory is filled with examples of religious hymns and similarly in the Decameron a song is sung in each of the ten days.
On the other hand, the Decameron is both tragic and comic written in Italian prose. It begins with the fleeing of ten young people to the countryside over a fortnight. They each tell a story each day (hence the title of the book, the Decameron, meaning ten years work). Each of the days end with a song, which includes some of Boccaccio’s most lyrical
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Like the Commedia, the Decameron is also in form of “comedy”. This refers to a composition beginning in sadness and ending in joy. On the other hand, Boccaccio’s prose tales are only loosely connected to each other in the structure of a story, very different from Dante’s epic and tightly structured poetry. Both works reflect common points but Boccaccio’s reflects a different tone than that of Dante’s. Boccaccio wants to entertain the reader whereas Dante wants to edify. Boccaccio’s tone is mockery but Dante’s is more serious. Dante was a genius isolated by his originality. The most obvious merit of the Commedia is that it had more poetic beauty than any poem written since.
Dante’s Divine Comedy shows what lies under appearances. He treated human nature in relation to God and life on this Earth in relation to life beyond the grave. On the other hand, Boccaccio deals with appearances. Dante saw the world as the mirror of his soul. Boccaccio looked at it with “naked eyes”. Dante writes his allegory to underline certain absolute truths. Boccaccio poses questions with no obvious answers, showing that the pleasure of literature is the pleasure of interpretation. Additionally, the Decameron is also an allegorical work and the characters in it each have an allegorical
Dante, an Italian poet during the late middle ages, successfully parallels courtly love with Platonic love in both the La Vita Nuova and the Divine Comedy. Though following the common characteristics of a courtly love, Dante attempts to promote love by elevating it through the lenses of difference levels. Through his love affair with Beatrice, although Beatrice has died, he remains his love and prompts a state of godly love in Paradiso. Dante, aiming to promote the most ideal type of love, criticizes common lust while praises the godly love by comparing his state of mind before and after Beatrice’s death. PJ Klemp essay “Layers of love in Dante’s Vita Nuova” explains the origins of Dante’s love in Plato and Aristotle themes that designate
Through poetry, the reader sees why Will believes he must kill who he thinks killed his brother. Through big picture analysis and close critical analysis of one of the poems in this book, one can see that this author has written a poetic masterpiece. The poetry in this story paints a picture that is not achieved in other forms of written communication. The author uses mostly
Jacoff, Rachel and Jeffrey T. Schnapp. The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s Commedia. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991.
There are many different roles for women shown in “The Canterbury Tales” and “The Decameron”. Both books take place around the same time frame, 1300AD. “The Canterbury Tales”, takes place in London, England and “The Decameron” takes place in Florence, Italy. It would be just to think that since both books take place in a western civilization, both books would reflect the same morals and daily life styles. This is not the case at all. Throughout this paper I will attempt to show how these two books portrayed a totally different lifestyle.
Movement is a crucial theme of the Divine Comedy. From the outset, we are confronted with the physicality of the lost Dante, wandering in the perilous dark wood. His movement within the strange place is confused and faltering; `Io non so ben ridir com'io v'entrai'. Moreover, it is clear that the physical distress he is experiencing is the visible manifestation of the mental anguish the poet is suffering. The allegory of the image is one of mid-life crisis, but it is physically represented by the man losing his way in a dark wood. Such an observation may seem far too simple and obvious to be worthy of comment. However, I would argue that it is from this primary example of the deep connection between the physical and the mental, that one can begin to categorise and explain the varying types of movement in the work. The first section of this essay will be a close analysis of several important moments of physical activity or the absence of such. The final section will be an overview of the whole and a discussion of the general structure of the Comedy, how movement is governed and the implications of this.
Moreover, Dante, the narrator of the Inferno, has succeeded in not only telling the frightening story of the Inferno, but also pointing out the importance of the relationship between human’s sins and God’s retribution, using the monsters as the symbols for each kind of sin and its punishment throughout the progress of the story, which teaches his readers to be well aware of their sins through the literature – a part of humanities; the disciplines that teach a man to be a human.
Thesis- Dante and Virgil have an interesting relationship that changes throughout Dante’s Inferno. They started off very different and Virgil didn’t care much for Dante. Dante looked at Virgil differently after he had heard Beatrice sent him to guide him. Throughout their travels, their relationship changed as they went through every layer of hell. Something happened in each one that changed their relationship either drastically, or barely at all. Their travels are very intriguing and their relationship is very complex. They become very close, so much that Dante acquires a deep trust in Virgil. They are no longer “just friends.” They are both poets and can communicate very well through words and Literature.
In Dante’s Inferno, the relationship between Dante the Pilgrim and Virgil the Guide is an ever-evolving one. By analyzing the transformation of this relationship as the two sojourn through the circles of hell, one is able to learn more about the mindset of Dante the Poet. At the outset, Dante is clearly subservient to Virgil, whom he holds in high esteem for his literary genius. However, as the work progresses, Virgil facilitates Dante’s spiritual enlightenment, so that by the end, Dante has ascended to Virgil’s spiritual level and has in many respects surpassed him. In Dante’s journey with respect to Virgil, one can see man’s spiritual journey towards understanding God. While God loves man regardless of his faults, His greatest desire is to see man attain greater spirituality, in that man, already created in God’s image, may truly become divine, and in doing so, attain eternality.
Decameron is a "fictional record of the stories that ten Florentine men and women told to entertain
“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.” This maxim applies to the poet Dante Alighieri, writer of The Inferno in the 1300s, because it asserts the need to establish oneself as a contributor to society. Indeed, Dante’s work contributes much to Renaissance Italy as his work is the first of its scope and size to be written in the vernacular. Due to its readability and availability, The Inferno is a nationalistic symbol. With this widespread availability also comes a certain social responsibility; even though Dante’s audience would have been familiar with the religious dogma, he assumes the didactic role of illustrating his own version of Christian justice and emphasizes the need for a personal understanding of divine wisdom and contrapasso, the idea of the perfect punishment for the crime. Dante acts as both author and narrator, completing a physical and spiritual journey into the underworld with Virgil as his guide and mentor. The journey from darkness into light is an allegory full of symbolism, much like that of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which shows a philosopher’s journey towards truth. Therefore, Dante would also agree with the maxim, “Wise men learn by others’ harms; fools scarcely by their own,” because on the road to gaining knowledge and spiritual enlightenment, characters who learn valuable lessons from the misfortunes of others strengthen their own paradigms. Nonetheless, the only true way to gain knowledge is to experience it first hand. Dante’s character finds truth by way of his own personal quest.
...taneously praises Virgil (Dante, 1.2.82-87) and then provides evidence that he himself is a type of Virgil. He refers to “Dante” as a type of Aeneas in the scene with Cacciaguida; therefore, by extension, Dante too would be a type of Virgil. Dante shows himself to be a new (and better) Virgil at the allegorical level upon which the Divine Comedy can be seen as guiding every Christian to salvation. Dante uses typology in order to make this point– for him, Virgil is not only a great poet, but a figure in literature that prefigures or foreshadows another, greater figure. So Dante is, in this way, a fulfillment of Virgil, both as a character and a poet.
... Moreover, such belief in human reason signifies Dante's hope towards a bright society and the pursuit of God’s love as the other part of self-reflection. In conclusion, a great deal of tension and contrast between “dark” and “light” in The Inferno helps us to explore Dante’s self portrait—he fears dangerous desires and sinful darkness, but shows much courage and hope towards life since he nevertheless follows his guide Virgil to dive into horrible Hell. As shown in Canto I, such emotional reaction to dark and light symbols lays a great foundation for developing Dante’s broad and universal traits as his journey progresses.
The Divine Comedy, written in the 14th century by Dante Alighieri, is a heroic epic. Throughout Dante’s literary work, he outlines his scientific understandings of the world, his political views and provides the reader with a moral compass and spiritual map of which to follow. This poem is written in three parts, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradisio, each of which is broken down into individual cantos. Inferno includes 34 cantos, whereas Purgatrio and Paradiso each contain 33 cantos, however, the first canto of Inferno is really an introduction to the poem.
In The Decameron, Boccaccio’s different themes discussed in the novelles are able to interconnect with one another. In the novelles 1.1 and 6.10, I argue that Boccaccio encourages deception through the use of rhetoric and discourages the worshipping and validity of relics.
Thus, during the course of this essay it is best not to think of allegory in terms of the size of a body of writing, but as writing with a “second distinct meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visible meaning”(Baldick 6). Whilst reading for political and religious allegory is key in understanding Spenser’s message, reading for moral allegory also provides readers with detailed insight into the text. It is because of this that I have chosen to focus not only on political and religious allegory but also the moral allegory that accompanies episodes in Book One focused on Una and Duessa. The two characters represent a multitude of allegories; truth and falseness, and Protestantism and Catholicism being the most prominent. Una and Duessa represent a binary opposition, and it is because of this that they help to produce a wealth of allegory when read closely. The characters represent conflicting ideas, yet neither of which would be conceivable without the other. Both characters can only function in the poem when supported by one another, if one character were to be removed, the binary opposition would be removed and the allegory drawn from either Una or Duessa would be less productive. The two episodes I will be investigating are Canto I, Stanzas 4...