5 - Dante's Commedia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
Dante's great poem may seem an unlikely subject for the present study. His encounters in hell, purgatory, and paradise are too numerous to allow leisurely or large-scale treatment in the manner of Troilus or Sir Gawain; and the persons he encounters have no ordinary bodies with which to express themselves, for they are all awaiting the general resurrection. In fact, however, the poem proves to be exceptionally rich in non-verbal acts of communication. Dante himself is the only person who has his own real body, capable of casting a shadow or weighing down a boat; yet the visible presence of the shades he meets is most vividly imagined, everywhere except in parts of the Paradiso. Thus, one critic has observed the poet's remarkably ‘corporeal’ representations of the other world, attending to bodies ‘in the finest detail of movement and response’. Dante's ferocious economy and concentration of expression allows him to find room for such details, sometimes even in the briefest of encounters; and it is often through small bodily movements that his characters communicate their thoughts and feelings – by gestures, glances, and the like, as well as by what they say.
Unlike most, perhaps all, of the medieval writers considered elsewhere in this book, Dante can be shown to have been acquainted with learned thinking about signa, as found in Augustine's De Doctrina and in scholastic writings on the subject.
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- Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative , pp. 156 - 179Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002