At 08:45 15.12.98 -0500, you wrote:
>To answer to your
>question, in my dissertation I am arguing that Boethius' mythological
>poems (3M12 on Orpheus, 4M3 on Ulysses and Cyrce, 4M7 on Hercules) are
>the (distant) subtexts for Dante's purgatorial dreams -- an idea which
>I presented at the AAIS convention in Chicago, and will present in
>Kalamazoo this May -- so the dreams and surroundings are the main focus
>of my study, but of course the whole of Boethius in Dante can be of
>relevance. That's why I left my query as open as possible. Maybe this
>provides more ammunitions...?
Dear Umberto,
In this case you might be interested in Bodo Guthmu"ller's unpublished
paper which deals with 4m3 (and the preceding prose) not in D's dream but
in his tirade against the inhabitants of the valley of the Arno,
transformed into pigs (Casentino), dogs (Arezzo), wolves (Florence) and
treacherous and fraudulent foxes (Pisa), "che par che Circe li avesse in
pastura" (Pg 14,42). Guthmu"ller demonstrates that in his choice of animals
D follows not Ovid or Vergil (who have pigs, wolves, lions and bears) but
rather Boethius by picking up from B's more fully developed moral fauna the
violent wolves and fraudulent foxes together with the moral interpretations
given in 4p3, while not adopting also B's view that Circe changed only the
physical nature of Ulysses' companions. It is not really correct what I
stated or suggested in my earlier message when quoting from memory, that
Guthmu"ller derives D's partly distinct moral understanding from Arnulf of
Orleans' gloss on Ovid, but G. rather adduces Arnulf as only one
representative of a similar understanding widely current in late ancient
and in medieval glosses on Vergil and Ovid. Yet he does not compare with
glosses on Boethius. Nevertheless it's a very interesting paper, also in
its interpretation of how D's rearrangement of the Boethian order of
animals (by putting the luxurious pigs at the beginning) serves to create
an order which corresponds to the moral order of D's Inferno and thus gives
additional emphasis to the character of the earthly valley of the Arno as
an 'infernum morale'. If you want to contact Guthmu"ller, I am sure that he
will supply you with a copy of his paper (which was written in Italian) and
that he can also give you a wealth of info regarding medieval
interpretations of the myth of Circe, because he is an outstanding expert
for medieval (and Renaissance) interpretations of Ovid and has done
extensive research with unpublished materials. I have no email address for
him, but you can reach him by snail mail under the address Prof. Dr. Bodo
Guthmu"ller, Universitaet Marburg, Institut fu"r Romanische Philologie,
Wilhelm-Ro"pke-Straße 6 D, D-35032 Marburg.
Btw, if you find the time, I would greatly appreciate to receive a brief
(or preferably long) description of your dissertation project for my Dante
webpage _Work in Progress_.
Best wishes,
Otfried
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