My dissertation is an investigation of the two masterpieces of medieval, allegorical literature from the perspective of the Latin moral tradition of their time. Discussing Jean de Meun and Dantes obsessive concern with the sinfulness of speech, I relate the numerous verbal transgressions treated in the Romance of the Rose and the Divine Comedy to what historians of moral philosophy have called the golden age of the sins of the tongue (1190-1260), a time span during which moralists, theologians and canonists wrote a great number of Latin texts on peccata linguae. I argue that the radical inclusion of the sins of speech among the other classes of sins treated in the Romance of the Rose and the Divine Comedy is to be accounted for in light of the major thirteenth-century treatises on peccata linguae. While Jean de Meun, in the wake of Alain of Lille, treats the sins of the tongue in a dispersed manner, without regard to a classification based on the gravity of the sins, Dante follows a scholastic approach and assigns most of the sins of tongue he is dealing with to the infernal area of Fraud, in a hierarchical order. Taking up elements from William Peraldus's Summa vitiorum and Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, both very popular at the time, Dante constructs his own micro-system of peccata linguae, a system within a system. Written shortly after the golden age of the sins of the tongue, the Romance of the Rose and the Divine Comedy extend this cultural period and transfer the preoccupation with sinfulness of human speech from the exclusive sphere of Latin moral tracts to the realm of vernacular poetry.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-07092007-125443 |
| Date | 19 September 2007 |
| Creators | Baika, Gabriella Ildiko |
| Contributors | Bruce Venarde, Dennis Looney, Diana Meriz, Renate Blumenfeld Kosinski |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-07092007-125443/ |
| Rights | restricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
Page generated in 0.0117 seconds