Dante's Invention: The History Behind Dan Brown's Inferno

by James Burge

From the author of the acclaimed Heloise & Abelard comes a new biography of Dante, following his life through the turbulent world of late middle ages  Young Dante Alighieri was a teenage poet. His account of his early life and love, the Vita Nuova, is a model of it tells is about the state of Dante's soul and the pain that his love caused him but it does not mention any other living person by name, it tells us nothing about the battles in which young Dante took part as a cavalryman nor does it give us a single detail about Beatrice.Fate had to work very hard to turn Dante into a poet whom anyone would ever remember. It did so in stages. Firstly, a series of events made Dante aware of the world around him and even concerned about the violence and injustice that he saw there. But is was only after exile, sentence of death and the near collapse of his home city of Florence that Dante started writing fiction. That was the key. The narrative innovation of his great work, the Divine Comedy, enabled him to produce a picture of the Universe which not only said how things were but also how they ought to be. And Beatrice was a key part of it.Dante's invention of a new kind of fiction not only shows us his vision of life, death, right and wrong but, almost by accident, it introduced a new kind of humanity into the way human beings write about each other.

Genres: History

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 4, 2011

About the author

JAMES BURGE is an award-winning television director who also writes popular books about the Middle Ages. His interest in Dante dates from a dramatised version of the Divine Comedy which he directed for BBC Television in the nineties, filmed, as he puts it, on location in Hell and Heaven. His acclaimed biography of Heloise and Abelard was published in 2003. He also writes historical detective fiction, articles and reviews for the Literary Review, the Independent on Sunday and History Today and he still makes the odd television programme.

Reviews

[Angela Young · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never knew I could become so lost in a book that wasn't a novel (I read more fiction than any other kind of book). But then this is a book about the man who invented the novel and what a book it is. Subtly Burge shows how Dante's life informed his greatest work, the Divine Comedy; how little he really knew Beatrice and how little time he spent with his actual wife; how the former haunted him and the latter apparently did not. And there is gentle humour in this book, for instance, when Burge describes how there is only one passage in all the works of Dante 'Which bring us close to the woman whom he calls Beatrice. It does not supply details about her: we will never know the colour of her eyes or hair, let alone anything about the way she wore her hat or the way she sang off key ... .' Read on, I urge you.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was pretty good , except he misses so much of the theological texture of the Comedy. However, a good blend of bio and Vita Nuova plus the Comedy itself. You need Sayers in the end..,

[Paul Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rather drily academic at times it sets the Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy into a historic and personal context.

[Scott Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think a big part of the New Year is to start whittling down the number of books I have in the queue for reading. I took care of one of those today in Dante's Invention, which is a combination literary criticism/biography of Dante's work. Burge starts the work off right away with a critical moment in Dante's early life, his first encounter with Beatrice. From there, it is an interspersing of Dante's work with a discussion of Dante's personal and professional life. Dante emerges as a political figure, one who manages to be on the wrong side of several key political issues in Florence, thus leading to his eventual exile. Burge does attempt to bring some balance into the historical discussions on Dante, such as establishing that one of Dante's biggest villains. Boniface VIII, was not quite the corrupt, evil pope that Dante thought him, and who went to great lengths to disparage him in his Divine Comedy. Dante is a poet that doesn't quite have all the facts/resources when writes his famous works. Overall, it was informative, but I found the writing a bit too much literary criticism and not as much straight bio. Granted, there is a lot about Dante we don't know, so that must be taken into account. The book read a bit more academic and dry than you might expect for bio. Given that many in the English-speaking world are not as versed on late medieval Italian political history, sometimes works on Dante are hard to follow. Still, it provides some insights into the man that became on of the world's most influential writers. Not for the casual fan, but one engaged in deep study of Dante, this might be worth the time.