Date: Fri, 21 Nov 1997 19:34:54 -0800
From: "Thad Q. Alexander" <rattler-AT-inreach.net>
Subject: Re: PLC: Book Burning: Dante & Cervantes




Gregory {Greg} Downing wrote:

> At 04:36 PM 11/21/97 -0800, you (Thad Q. Alexander (rattler-AT-inreach.net)) wrote:
> >Could this passage in Dante's Inferno [Canto V] been influential to Cervantes
> >in writing Don Quixote in the manner that he did, making books of chivalry
> >and courtly love to be the seed of his soul's madness?
>
> Yes -- but mature Dante has a mixed attitude (both negative and positive)
> toward 12th-cent-and-following courtly love (see his treatment of Beatrice
> from the end of Purgatorio and on through the Paradiso).

I shall look more into this, I'm just now reading Dante's Inferno, but all I have is
the Norton edition and I am not sure if the whole is here.

> Cervantes OTOH is
> helping to create modernity by making sometimes gentle and sometimes harsh
> fun of that crucial high- and late-medieval cultural phenomenon of CL.

Well, yes. But I keep coming back to all the discussion of these books in the
Quixote.  Ok, so he creates a modern approach to all that CL stuff in fun, then the
priest represents the church, and the book burning represents the wrong approach to
censoring these books. That genres and art changes and that is how to weed out bad
literature? Yes? I'm probably off the road on this.


--
Thad Q. Alexander
(rattler-AT-inreach.net)
OCC Undergraduate
Long Beach, CA.
USA
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