>I hope any of this is helpful/of interest, and I'd love to hear from any other
>list members who share my obsessions with wounded bodies and bleeding saints!
>Best wishes,
>
>Louise Marshall
>
Dear Dr. Marshall,
In my own case it was not an obsession with saints, but I have spent several
years decyphering the wounds of the six damned in Dante's _Inferno_ XXVIII.
There is a lot to discover in this very peculiar treatment of the human
body, if one evades the common cliches that it was D's primary intent to
deter his readers from the sin and sinners described, or that he gave in to
a personal "fascino morboso" for the mutilated body, or that he just wanted
to compete with ancient and medieval traditions of martial poetry, and that
in the end bodily mutilation is somehow very medieval and very Christian and
thus its description by a medieval christian author like D nothing to get
really puzzled about. In a way his text has worked like a kind of Rorschach
test bringing six centuries of D commentary to uncover primarily their own
states of mind (or epochal mental disorders), but with the difference that
Rorschach presented meaningless blots to his patients, whereas D makes his
test with a description and arrangement of mutilated bodies that carry
precise meanings like the letters of a word.
My own interpretation is built on reconstructing a context of biblical and
exegetical sources which a theologically trained minority of readers would
have been able to associate with D's text (at least I believe so, although
none of the extant early commentaries does show such a reader at work). But
I have always neglected -- or, in the case of the cephalophore Bertran de
Born in this canto, dismissed as irrelevant -- its eventual context in
traditions of hagiographical representation and/or devotional contemplation
of martyrdom. So could you or somebody else on this list maybe point me to a
study which might give me some essential historical data about traditions of
this kind?
Sincerely,
Otfried Lieberknecht
Schoeneberger Str. 11
D-12163 Berlin
Tel.: ++49 30 8516675 (fax on demand)
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Homepage for Dante studies: http://members.aol.com/lieberk/welcome.html
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