Editing Dante
Dante Alighieri (Italian: Dante Alighieri, 1265 - September 14, 1321), the founder of the modern Italian language, one of the pioneering figures of the European Renaissance Dante
Generation, famous for his long poem "Divine Comedy". Engels commented: "The end of the feudal Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern capitalist epoch were marked by one great figure, the Italian Dante, the last poet of the Middle Ages and at the same time the first poet of the new age.
Biography
Dante was born in Florence, Italy, in a declining noble family, born in 1265, the date of birth is unclear, according to his own words in the poem "born under the sign of Gemini", it should be late May or early June. 5 years old, his mother died, and his father renewed his marriage. Dante's life is poorly documented. There are few records of Dante's life, but there are many writers, many of whom are unreliable. He probably did not have a formal education (some say he studied in Bologna and Paris, etc.), and learned a lot of things, including Latin, Proven?al, and music, from many famous friends and teachers. He may have been a knight as a young man, and fought in several wars, and he was married by the age of 33, and his wife bore him 6 children, only 4 (3 boys and 1 girl) survived. But his true love was a little girl of 8 years old, named Berejani Color. Statue of Dante outside the entrance to the Dante Museum in Florence... The political scene in Florence was divided into two factions, the Zibellines, who were loyal to the Holy Roman Emperor, and the Guelphs, who were loyal to the Pope. After 1266, the Gelphs were victorious due to the strong power of the Pope, and banished the Zibellines. After the Gelphites came to power, Pope Boniface VIII, who was elected in 1294, wanted to control Florence. Some of the wealthy citizens wanted the independence of the city and did not want to be subjected to the Pope, so they divided into the "White Party", while the other part of the poor families hoped to take advantage of the Pope's power to turn over a new leaf, and became the "Black Party". "The two factions renewed their rivalry. Dante's family belonged to the Guelphs, but Dante was a fervent advocate of independence and freedom, so he became a stalwart of the White Party and was chosen as one of the six members of the Executive Committee of the Supreme Authority. In 1301, the Pope sent Carlo di Valois, brother of the King of France, to Florence to "regulate peace". Suspecting that the trip had another purpose, the White Party sent a delegation headed by Dante to persuade the Pope to retract the order, but to no avail. Carlo arrived in Florence and immediately organized the Black Party to massacre the opposition, took control of Florence, and declared Dante's banishment; once he returned to the city, any Florentine soldier could execute and burn him, and Dante was never able to return to his hometown. In 1308 Henry VII of Luxembourg was elected Holy Roman Emperor and prepared to invade Florence, Dante wrote him letters pointing out where the attack needed to be made, so the White Party began to hate Dante as well. 1313 Henry died and Dante's hopes were dashed. In 1315, Florence was taken over by soldiers, who declared that Dante would be exonerated and returned to his country if he would pay a fine, spread ashes on his head, hang a sword under his neck, and parade around for a week. Dante wrote back, "This is not the way to return to my country! If it damages my honor, I will never set foot in Florence again! Can I not enjoy the light of the sun, moon and stars elsewhere? Can I not touch precious truths without groveling to the citizens of Florence? To be sure, I am not worried about bread!" While in exile, Dante lived in several Italian cities, with some accounts of his visits to Paris, where he expelled his nostalgia with his writings and included all of his life's benefactors and enemies in his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, deriding and mocking the Pope, and where he arranged for his lifelong unrequited love, a beautiful woman named Bayard who died at the age of 25, to be placed in the highest reaches of heaven. Dante died away from home in 1321, in Ravanna, northeastern Italy.
Anecdotes
1. On one occasion, Dante attended a banquet given by the consuls of Venice. The consul brought to the envoys of the Italian city-states a big, fat, fried fish, but to Dante a very, very small fish. Dante did not protest, nor did he eat the fish. He picked up the little fish on the plate one by one with his hand, and listened close to his own ears as if he heard something, and then put them back on the plate one by one. When the consul saw this, he wondered and asked him what he was doing. Dante said aloud, "A few years ago a friend of mine died and was buried at sea, and not knowing whether his remains had been buried at the bottom of the sea, I asked these little fishes one by one to see if they knew the situation." The consul asked, "What did the little fish say?" . Dante said, "They said to me that they were all so young that they did not know the past, and asked me to inquire of the great fish at my table." The consul laughed out loud at this, and commanded his hearer to bring Dante one of the largest fried fish at once. 2. When Dante was young, he liked to sit on his back in the piazza in his hometown of Filippo (Florence). Especially on midsummer nights, he often sat with the stars in the sky until dawn. This lonely young poet had a very amazing memory. One night a stranger approached Dante, bowed down and said: "I have heard of your poetry and know that you are the pride of Filippo. I have promised to answer a question, but I am too ignorant to do so, so I ask for your help. The question I am to answer is: What is the most delicious thing in the world? "Eggs." Dante blurted out. The man nodded and walked away. One day, a few years later, Dante was still sitting in that square looking up at the stars, and the same stranger walked up and continued the conversation from a few years ago, "So, how do you cook it?" Dante gave the visitor a look and without thinking, replied, "A little salt." [1]
Famous works
Love poem The New Birth Philosophical poem The Banquet Lyric poem The Collected Verses Long poem The Divine Comedy Latin essay Treatise on the Vulgar Tongue Political treatise Treatise on the Kingdom Latin poem The Pastoral Dante's collected Epistles Dante's works, written essentially in the Tuscan dialect of Italy, played a considerable role in shaping the modern Italian language to be based on the Tuscan dialect Dante's works were basically written in the Tuscan dialect of Italy, which played a considerable role in the formation of the modern Italian language based on the Tuscan dialect, because, apart from Latin works, only Dante was the earliest to write in a living language in Ancient Italy, and his works played a considerable role in the formation of the Italian literary language, and therefore a forerunner of the Renaissance movement.
Editing Petrarch
Petrarch
Francesco Petrarch (Italian: Francesco Petrarch, July 20, 1304 - July 19, 1374) was a famous Italian poet and scholar of the early Renaissance, a founding father of humanism, and an early bourgeois art and morality were inseparable from him.
Biography
Born July 20, 1304 in the city of Arezzo, he died July 19, 1374 in Alqua. His father was a prominent Florentine and lawyer. He lived in exile in France with his father since childhood and later studied law. After his father's death he concentrated on literary activities and traveled around Europe. He also worked as a priest, and had the opportunity to go in and out of churches and courts, observing life, pursuing knowledge, and proposing to replace "God's thoughts" with "human thoughts", and was known as the "father of humanism". Petrarch's father was originally a lawyer in Florence, but because of his disagreement with the leader of the Black Party, he was expelled from the city in 1302 and moved to Arezzo, where Petrarch was born on July 20, 1304, and later moved several times before moving to Arezzo. After several subsequent moves, in 1312 the family moved to Avignon in the south of France, where the Holy See was then located. Thus Petrarch was in close contact with the Pope and other members of the hierarchy. This situation both concerned his upbringing and contributed to his later humanist activities. As a teenager, Petrarch loved literature and rhetoric, and was particularly interested in the classics; the poetry of Virgil in ancient Rome and the lectures of Cicero appealed strongly to him. His father, however, wanted him to become a jurist. From 1316, therefore, he studied law at Montepulciano in France and at Bologna in Italy, and on the death of his father in 1320 he gave up jurisprudence and was free to develop his hobbies. In the same year he returned to Avignon and took up a secondary teaching post. from 1330 to 1347 he served under Cardinal Vanni Colonna. His work in the Church was not too busy, which allowed him to participate in some political and diplomatic activities of the Holy See on the one hand, and to tirelessly study literature and compose poetry on the other. Petrarch's fame as a poet soon spread, and in 1340 Paris and Rome vied with each other in inviting him to receive the laurels. He decided to go to Rome and on April 8, 1341, he received the title of "Poet Laureate" on the Capitoline Hill in Rome. On July 19, 1374, Petrarch died in a small village called Akwa. When his body was found, his head was still buried in Virgil's manuscript.
Works
Petrarch was the earliest representative of the Renaissance to study classical culture from a humanist point of view. He extensively collected ancient Greek and Roman codices, and dared to break through the theological concepts of the Middle Ages and interpret classical writings with a new age perspective that put people and real life at the center. His study of classical culture influenced both the European Renaissance movement and his own creative work. Petrarch wrote many poems and prose in Latin. These works extolled the nobility and wisdom of man, promoted the idea that man could pursue earthly happiness and enjoy the right to honor, and challenged the doctrine of divine right and asceticism preached in the Middle Ages. He also believed that man's nobility was not determined by birth, but by his behavior. The famous narrative poem Afrikaner (writing began in 1338 or 1339, but was not completed) depicts the heroic victory of the ancient Roman commander Scipio over Hannibal, celebrates the greatness of Rome, and embodies the spirit of patriotism. This work earned him on April 8, 1341, the title of Poet Laureate. The Secrets" is a dialogue between St. Augustine and the poet to promote humanism. The poet passionately defends love and honor, believing that love is the same as love of God, and that the pursuit of earthly happiness is the same as the pursuit of eternal happiness. His masterpiece, the Songbook, is said to be a collection of more than 300 sonnets written by the poet after he met the beautiful girl Laura in 1327, and some lyrical poems written in Italian to express his grief after Laura's death in 1347, mainly love poems. Petrarch stepped out of the box of the old lyric poems, using colorful tones and meticulous strokes to depict the beauty of Laura's form and portray his own complex thoughts, feelings and inner activities. These poems boldly glorify love and express the desire for happiness, reflecting the humanists' contempt for medieval morality and love of life. Petrarch's poems are sonorous and well-structured, often using natural scenery to glorify Laura and convey subtle feelings. He perfected the art of the sonnet, a new poetic form. His lyric poetry, especially the sonnet, opened the way for the development of European lyric poetry. Later generations honored him as the Sage of Poetry. The long poem "My Italy" in the Songbook is a political lyric. The poet condemns the Italian monarchs for using foreign mercenaries to fight in the civil war, allowing "wolves and sheep to live together" and the good people to suffer. His other political lyric poems also attacked the Church violently. Some of Petrarch's poems also reflect his inner conflicts and those of the humanists of the early Renaissance. Petrarch wrote a historical work in Latin, the Biography of Famous Men. Petrarch's poems are rich, of which the Songbook, the Afrikaner, the Ode to Italy, and the Biography of Famous Men are famous.
Sonnets
Petrarch, through his long practice of composition, brought the sonnet to a state of perfection and developed it into a new poetic form, the "Petrarchan style". This style of poetry was later imitated by Chaucer, Shakespeare and other famous literary figures and poets, and opened up a new path for the development of European poetry. Therefore, Petrarch was also honored as the "Saint of Poetry". There are also a few patriotic poems and political satires in the Songbook, among which "My Italy" is the most representative. At that time, Italy was in a permanent state of fragmentation due to papal interference, foreign invasion, and wars among the city-states. Witnessing this reality, the poet wrote: "Behold, my country, my native land, which thou lovest, how cruelly tormented and tormented it is by wars of nameless causes, and by disputes which cannot be restrained! This blood and tears condensed into the poem, full of the poet's deep feelings of concern for the people and the country, and sent a strong desire for the unification of the motherland. [2]
Editing Boccaccio
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) was an Italian Renaissance writer and poet, famous for his collection of stories The Decameron Giovanni Boccaccio
. A translation of Boccaccio, an outstanding representative of the Italian Renaissance movement, humanist. His masterpiece The Decameron criticized religious old-fashioned thinking and advocated "happiness on earth", which was regarded as the manifesto of the Renaissance. Together with Dante and Petrarch, he is known as the "Three Masters of Literature".
Biography
Boccaccio was the son of a Florentine merchant, Carlino Boccaccio, and a French woman. Boccaccio was the illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant, Carlino Boccaccio, and a French woman. There is a lack of precise information to determine his birthplace. He is said to have been born in Cittardo, near Florence, or in Paris. His mother died when he was young and he came to Florence with his father. Soon after, his father remarried and he spent his childhood in the coldness of his strict father and stepmother. Later, he was sent to Naples by his father, where he reluctantly studied business in a trading house in which his father was a shareholder, with no success. His father again made him study law and religious rules instead, but neither business nor law interested him. Having loved literature from an early age, he began to teach himself poetics and read the works of classic authors. This life gave him first-hand experience of the lives of citizens and merchants as well as the thoughts and feelings that he incorporated into the Decameron, which he would later write. While living in Naples, Boccaccio had access to the court of King Robert of Angerso. Here his suppressed personality and talents were given full play. He traveled extensively with many humanist poets, scholars, theologians, and jurists, and was exposed to the life of noble knights. This enriched his life experience, broadened his cultural and artistic horizons, and further renewed his interest in classical culture and literature. He met Robert's illegitimate daughter Maria at court and fell in love with her. This experience, rich in romance, also left a deep mark in his literary creation, and some of the female figures he later portrayed in his literary works can be seen in the shadow of Maria. In the winter of 1340, Boccaccio's father's business activities suffered a setback and his financial situation deteriorated. Unable to maintain his original life of leisure, Boccaccio returned to Florence. In the fierce political struggles in Florence, he always stood firmly on the side of the **** and the government against the power of the feudal aristocracy. He joined the guilds, served in the position of managing finances, and was repeatedly commissioned by the **** and the government as an envoy on diplomatic missions to other Italian city-states and the Holy See. In 1350, Boccaccio became acquainted with the poet Petrarch. In the following year, he was commissioned to invite the banished Petrarch back to Florence to preside over a scholarly discussion. From then on, the two outstanding humanists established a close friendship. Boccaccio studied the classics and became a learned humanist. He translated the works of Homer and made important contributions to the collection, translation and exegesis of ancient texts. In his later years, he devoted himself to the interpretation and exposition of the Divine Comedy, and once presided over a discussion of the Divine Comedy at the University of Florence. On October 23, 1373, Boccaccio gave his last lecture at the discussion of the Divine Comedy at the University of Florence. The following year, the death of his friend Petrarch gave him a great mental shock, and on December 21, 1375, Boccaccio died in Cittaldo.
Works
Boccaccio was a talented, diligent and prolific writer. He was famous for his short stories and sagas, as well as for his narrative poems, pastoral songs, sonnets, and his scholarly writings. The legendary novel Philokolos was Boccaccio's first work, written around 1336. Set in the Spanish court, it draws on medieval legends to recount the love story of a Christian young woman and a young pagan. They overcame all obstacles and the lovers were finally united. Two of the stories in The Decameron are taken from this work. Philokolos is an early European novel. The long narrative poems Philostrato (c. 1338) and Tessa?da (1340-1341), which take their subjects from the Trojan Legend and Virgil's Chronicle of Aeneas, respectively, glorify pure love, noble friendship, and display the beauty of life in the world and the joys of friendship, infusing classical subjects with modern emotions. These two works pioneered the 8-line poem. The pastoral saga The Goddesses of Ameto (also known as The Comedy of the Florentine Goddesses, c. 1341), modeled in form on Dante's The New Birth, uses prose to concatenate three rhyming lines of verse. Boccaccio borrowed mythological themes and wrote lyrically about Alecto's transformation from a rough shepherd youth to a man of noble character under the cultivation of love, interspersed with seven goddesses recounting their love experiences to Alecto. The long poem, The Vision of Love (1342-1343), influenced by Dante's Divine Comedy, is written in three rhyming stanzas and is characterized by metaphorical poetry. Boccaccio recounts one of his own allegorical journeys, combining the celebration of virtue with the praise of pure love. The Goddess of Fiesola (1343-1354) is another eight-line poem about a goddess and a shepherd who fall in love and are punished for offending the goddess Diana; the lovers are transformed into two rivers, but in the end, they both flow into the Arno River and are brought together again. The Lamentations of Philometra, is an important work next to the Decameron. It was written between 1343 and 1344 after Boccaccio returned to Florence from Naples. This legendary novel describes the encounter of Fiammetta, a woman who was abandoned by her lover, and expresses in detail her love and resentment, hope and pain, and looks forward to the return of her lover's psychology, which is the earliest psychological novel in Europe. These works are characterized by love as the theme, drawing on ancient Greek and Roman poetry, myths and legends, showing traces of medieval tradition and chivalric literature, but also free from the cliché, full of human life and the pursuit of happiness, and condemnation of asceticism. In his later years, Boccaccio devoted himself to the study of classical culture, and buried himself in his works The Genealogy of the Pagan Gods (1350-1375) and The Biography of Dante are two of the most important works. The former is a rich historical account of the origins of gods and heroes, demonstrating the foundations of mythology, while the latter is one of the earliest scholarly works on Dante in Italy. In his theoretical writings, Boccaccio criticized the Church's denigration of poetry and put forward the viewpoint that "poetry is theology"; he elaborated that poetry should imitate nature and reflect life, and emphasized the great role of literature in enlightenment and education; he demanded that poets should draw nourishment from the culture of ancient Greece and Rome, and emphasized on fictionalization and imagination. Though Boccaccio had not yet completely freed himself from the theological concepts of the Middle Ages, his literary theories laid the foundation for the development of Renaissance poetics.
The Decameron
In 1348, a terrible plague struck Florence, Italy. Every day, even every hour , large batches of corpses were brought outside the city. From March to July, more than 100,000 people died of the disease, and the formerly beautiful and prosperous city of Florence became full of cemeteries, corpses and bones, which was horrible to see. This incident gave a great Italian writer Boccaccio a deep impact. In order to write down this disaster of mankind, he took this plague as the background and wrote one of the most famous Italian short story collection "The Decameron" at that time. At that time, the Decameron was known as "The Human Comedy", a literary work on a par with Dante's Divine Comedy, and also known as the sister of the Divine Comedy. The Decameron tells the story of 10 young men and women who took refuge in the countryside in 1348 when the Black Death was raging in Florence, and spent their time by feasting, singing, dancing, and storytelling, each telling a story for 10 days, and ****ing up to 100 stories. Humanist thought is like a red thread running through this collection of stories. The author directs his attack on religious theology and the Church, exposing canon law as the evil cause of the monks' treachery and hypocrisy, unflinchingly removing the veil of the Church's sanctity, and pungently ridiculing the Papal Residence, Rome, as the "great furnace of all evils". Love stories occupy an important place in the Decameron. The author believes that asceticism is against the laws of nature and human nature, and that people have the right to enjoy love and present happiness. In many stories, he praises with great enthusiasm the struggle of young men and women to break through the feudal hierarchical concepts, defy money and power, and strive for happiness. The Decameron also criticizes feudal privileges and defends social equality and gender equality. Many stories recount the victory of the lowly over the noble with wisdom and perseverance. The author also preached the ideal of a well-rounded human being, emphasizing that a person should be healthy and handsome, as well as intelligent, courageous, versatile and all-round harmonious. With rich knowledge of life and great artistic power, Boccaccio portrayed hundreds of characters of different classes, three religions and nine classes with distinctive personalities and characters, showing a broad picture of social life in Italy and expressing the ideas of freedom in the early Renaissance. He adopted a box structure and skillfully linked the 100 stories together, making it an exceptionally complete work both ideologically and artistically. These stories draw on the characteristics of the spoken folk language, the language is refined, fluent, and playful, vivid, creating a unique art form of the European short story. The Decameron had a profound influence on European literature. Many writers in Britain, France, Spain and Germany imitated the Decameron, or drew creative materials from its stories. [3]