Have met my lifetime quota for medieval Italian politics.
I finally finished Dante's Divine Comedy tonight. I've been slowly working on it since I wrote a paper on Mazzoni's 16th century defense of the work (well, defense of literature really) a couple years ago. I think, in hindsight, I was slogging through a reasonably scholastic and faithful, but not necessarily artful, translation (the Carlyle-Okey-Wicksteed translation, for those few of you who might be in the know). And, wow. So much politics. Honestly, it makes Machievelli look really rudimentary in his political references.
I was working through the last Canto on the way home from class, where Dante, after receiving Mary's blessing, finally gazes upon the triune God Himself. A while ago I put my copy of the book into a nice black cloth bookcover with bookmark. I was passing by a rather belligerent beggar, and (as I was trying to read) said no to his request. To which he made a fuss, about how I was reading the Bible, and I still wasn't willing to help him. I will give money to beggars, not all the time and not consistently, but almost never to a belligerent one. And I wasn't reading the Bible, which made his remark rather insulting. I wonder if I should have queried him and tried to place him in either the fifth layer of hell (anger), or somewhere in the seventh (the violent), or perhaps so fortunate as to simply spend a few hundred years in the second and third layers of purgatory (envy and anger). I contented myself with telling him it wasn't a Bible.
I was working through the last Canto on the way home from class, where Dante, after receiving Mary's blessing, finally gazes upon the triune God Himself. A while ago I put my copy of the book into a nice black cloth bookcover with bookmark. I was passing by a rather belligerent beggar, and (as I was trying to read) said no to his request. To which he made a fuss, about how I was reading the Bible, and I still wasn't willing to help him. I will give money to beggars, not all the time and not consistently, but almost never to a belligerent one. And I wasn't reading the Bible, which made his remark rather insulting. I wonder if I should have queried him and tried to place him in either the fifth layer of hell (anger), or somewhere in the seventh (the violent), or perhaps so fortunate as to simply spend a few hundred years in the second and third layers of purgatory (envy and anger). I contented myself with telling him it wasn't a Bible.