Dante

 Dante Alighieri, usually known by his first name, is considered the greatest Italian poet ever.  The Renaissance claims him, but he was not a Renaissance figure but a medieval one, born in the mid-thirteenth century (generally dated to 1265), and dying in 1321, well before the traditional date of the beginning of the Renaissance, considered to have begun with the Black Death in 1346.  (In practice of course Renaissance Italy is another name for late medieval Italy.)

 

Dante was a native of Florence, in the region of Tuscany, one of the many city-states that made up medieval Italy.  Although the whole peninsula was (and is) called Italy, Italy became a single country only in the nineteenth century.  In Dante's time Florence was a republic, not a principality, and they were intensely proud of this status, that they felt set them apart from many of the other Italian city-states.  Not surprisingly, however, just as the modern American republic has deep divisions between Democrats and Republicans, the Florentine republic had its own political parties, Guelphs and Ghibbilines, often in open warfare with each other.

But Dante is not known for his politics (though he became embroiled in them) but rather for his literature.  He was especially a proponent of writing in the vernacular, rather than in Latin.  Epics and romances had been written in the vernacular (Old Italian or Old French, etc.) rather than Latin for at least a century and a half before his lifetime, but he argued that the vernacular was suited for elevated literature as well.

His most famous work is the three-part Comedia (usually known in English as the Divine Comedy, although the "divine" was added later).  It was a "comedy" not in the sense of a sit-com, where Uncle Frank comes in, says, "Whatz-upp?" and the laugh track goes Hahaha.  Rather, it was a comedy in the ancient Greek sense of a story that ends well, rather than having the stage littered with dead bodies.

The Comedia is a story of a hero's journey (told in the first person), through hell, purgatory, and heaven.  The character Dante (the poem's hero) is led part of the way by Virgil, an ancient Roman poet.  He meets lost souls in hell, some of whom were the real Dante's enemies, and learns that hell has different circles for sinners, depending on how bad their sin was.

The Inferno, the first third of the long poem, set in hell, is by far the best well known.  Above hell's gate is the inscription, "Abandon all hope ye who enter here," Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.  Dante's circles and vivid imagery of the tortures and regrets of the damned have had a major influence over the next seven centuries, although he was not the first to write about visions of hell.  (When I sent my heroes to hell in Is This Apocalypse Necessary? I based what they saw on pre-Dante visions, though I couldn't resist using Dante's gate inscription.)

After the Inferno come the Purgatorio and Paradiso, generally considered much less interesting, because good people don't excite interest in the same way as sinners.  Because Virgil was a pagan he can't take Dante (the character) all the way through.  When Dante gets to heaven, he is greeted by Beatrice, a woman the real Dante had known slightly and always admired from afar as the epitome of womanhood.

The Comedia was immediately recognized for its genius.  Even today, "correct" Italian is based on the Florentine dialect Dante used, and the language has changed far less since the fourteenth century than has, say, English.  One of Dante's innovations was his rhyme scheme, called terza rima, where the lines rhyme ABA, then BCB, then CDC, and so on.  This is relatively easy to do in Italian but almost impossible to do well in English, without distorting the meaning.  It is said that it is worth learning Italian just to be able to read Dante in the original.

A solid translation into English (preserving the meaning if not the rhyme scheme), with facing Italian, is by Allen Mandelbaum (University of California Press, 1980-84).

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

Clothes and Clothes Moths

 Clothes moths have been with us for a very long time.  They are mentioned in the Bible.  The New Testament urges readers to store up treasures in heaven rather than on earth, preferring a place where thieves cannot break in and steal, and where moths cannot get in and munch holes in the woolens (I'm paraphrasing here).

It's actually not the moth itself but the worm, the larval form, that eats your woolens.  Moths lay eggs in what seems a good place, on your sweater shelf, and the eggs hatch into worms.  The moths themselves are very adept at eluding being swatted.  A human can chase a moth for quite a while, clapping her hands together where the moth was a second ago, without success.  (Handy household tip:  Use a cat.  A cat's reflexes are faster than yours.  Pick up Tabby and aim her at the moth.)

Medieval people, like biblical and modern people, had trouble with clothes moths.  Whereas probably the majority of our modern clothing is cotton or synthetic (polyester, nylon, etc.), the default fabric for medieval people was wool.  The moths thought that was great (well, moths don't think anything, but you know what I mean).  Since most medieval people only had two outfits at any one time, one to wear and one to wash (assuming they didn't just have one), the moths didn't have many opportunities in everyday wear, but a heavier (or fancier) outfit, or a winter cloak, or blankets, anything stored away in a chest in warm weather, might well be full of holes when brought out.

We have moth balls that can be put among the woolens, heavy-duty chemicals that were unknown in the Middle Ages (and are probably carcinogenic, but we needn't go into that now).  We have cedar chests that the moths really do not like.  There is no evidence one way or the other that medieval people knew (or didn't) of the value of cedar chests.  But for most people in the Middle Ages a storage chest would not be lined with nice pieces of cedar, instead being something fairly rough made of plain wood.  We can (and should) take our woolens outdoors in very cold weather, hang them up, and brush them, getting rid of moth eggs and killing them with cold, but this doesn't help when the woolens are being nibbled in the summer.

One medieval response was to try to find cloth that moths wouldn't eat.  Those who could afford it loved silk (on which see more here).  Clothes moths won't touch silk, plus it takes dye well and is smooth and gentle on your skin, unlike wool (unless very carefully prepared).  It was however outrageously expensive.  Silk worms (look! a worm related to cloth! but good this time! let's not get into that now) only became widely known and raised in the West at the end of the Middle Ages, so silk needed to be imported from China via the long, long land route across central Asia (the Silk Road, of which you may have heard).

Cotton first started appearing in Europe with any regularity in the late twelfth or thirteenth century.  It too was a luxury fabric, but not nearly as expensive, because it could be grown (rather than harvested from cocoons, a long and tedious process) and did not have to travel nearly as far.  Clothes moths won't touch cotton either.  But good old wool, with the issue of moths, remained the standard.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023E

For more on life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other ebook retailers.  Also available in paperback!

Is This Apocalypse Necessary?

 As those who read my fiction know, my main fantasy series is "The Royal Wizard of Yurt," six novels plus some novellas and a separate "next generation" series.  The final novel in the series is Is This Apocalypse Necessary?

 

Over the last decade, I've been slowly putting the novels into audio book format, and Apocalypse has just become available, on Audible, iTunes, and Amazon.  These days books can be read (or "read") in a variety of formats, in physical print form, as an ebook (on a computer, smart phone, or e-reader like a Kindle), or as an audio book, and I wanted to make my books available for whatever works best for the reader.  I know a lot of people enjoy audio books on long drives, or while jogging, or even while washing pots and mopping the floor.

The narrator for the whole series is Eric Vincent.  Some authors record their own audio books, but given that Daimbert, the wizard of Yurt who tells the stories, is male but I am not, I really needed a separate narrator.  (To say nothing of the fact that you need professional equipment and a sound studio to do it right.)  Originally it was sort of a shock to hear a voice that isn't the voice in my head doing the first-person narration, but Eric does a terrific job of voicing Daimbert.

For those who would like to try audio books for the first time, here are the Audible links for people in the US and in the UK to get you started.

Or for those of you who prefer a physical book, here's the link to Amazon, which is selling new signed copies.

And if you've never read Apocalypse, here's the opening to give you a taste.

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The midnight knock came sharp and hard.  I had no way of knowing that the knock meant that in two minutes I would be kidnapped and in three weeks dead.

I rolled over, too sleepy to bother with a spell.  It had to be, I thought vaguely, someone from here in the castle, so eager for my wizardly wisdom that he couldn’t wait until morning.  “Mmm?”

The knock came again.  “Come in,” I mumbled, not recalling for the moment how rarely my wisdom was sought this eagerly.  “The door’s unlocked.”

It slowly creaked open, letting in a cool, damp wind but at first nothing else.  It was the darkest hour of the night, the hour when it seems that the sun must this time be gone for good, and the furniture has taken advantage of its absence to metamorphose into something large and predatory.  I sat up, abruptly wide awake.  Through the doorway stepped a pair of hooded figures, barely visible in the shadows.

Just inside, they paused to light a magic lamp, but their hoods hid their faces from the lamp’s glow.  The aura of wizardry emanated from them like heat from a stove.  Two strange wizards, in a kingdom where I was the only one?  My heart slammed against my ribs as I scrambled belatedly for a spell.

“Don’t struggle, Daimbert,” said one, “and don’t make a sound.”  His was no voice I recognized, though he seemed to know who I was.  “Is anyone here with you?”

“No!” I said loudly and stretched out a hand, adding the two quick words that should have knocked them flat.  The words had no effect.

Instead a loop of air around my chest suddenly became solid.  They were using a binding spell on me.
I struggled to free myself, but with two of them joining their magic together I didn’t have a chance.  The binding spell held me tighter than any rope and kept my mouth closed, so I could do no more than thrash and make inarticulate grunts as they advanced toward the bed.

“We told you not to struggle, Daimbert,” said one reprovingly.  “And stop making that sound before we have to paralyze you, too.  Good thing we practiced our binding spells before we came!”

So they wanted me alive.

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© C. Dale Brittain 2023