Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Order in Dante Inferno
Since we were talking about the Great Chain of Being in class and how fixated Elizabethan era was on order, I was thinking about how Dante's Inferno also contains a strict order. So, even though there is a time gap between Dante's Inferno and Queen Elizabeth's reign, the value of order is still present. Dante's Hell contains nine circle, with each circle containing a certain type of sinner. Even Dante's writing style (terza rima) is extremely ordered with a specific rhyme scheme and a specific meter. As Ms. Quinet said in class, there was no sudden change from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The Elizabethan era still contained strong medieval influences.
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Well, I am posting from my phone and my last post didn't save...sweet. Basically the gist (spelling?) of it is that there have been gradual changes in historical writings. There are many instances in which writing styles change, and they are hardly ever extremely sudden. It takes years of trial and error mixed with changes of preferences for writing to change. I guess you can say its sort of like evolution. There is no reason that order should be any different. Even after considering the gap between the time/periods, I'm still not surprised that order has been a prevalent theme throughout history because it is a very popular and easy concept to follow.
As you stated before, there was no sudden shift between the Medieval Period, and the Renaissance period in terms of writing sytle becasue the Renaissance period carried many of the same soical/political influences that the mideval era. Some of the styles such as a stict order, were created to reflect, adress, and answer some of the current issues at hand. Also I think that Dante's strict order had more to do with the religious the number 3 had, as Dante uses 9 cirlces (a mutliple of 3), has three parts to his series, has 33 cantos in each part of his series - all to invoke the trinity.
I agree that the Elizabethans seemed to have strong medieval influences and that there seemed to be a lot of order in the Medieval times before the Elizabethan Era. The Elizabethan's simply added to what the Medieval ages already started. They created the Chain of Being to advance culture that was already started in an earlier period. This is nothing new. We see this in many of the different cultures and time periods we have studied so far. For example, The Romans created the Aeneid simply based off of the Greek epic, the Odyssey. The Roman's wanted to make their society as good if not better than the Greeks so they simply created the Aeneid to make a better version of the Odyssey.
I would venture to say that the order prevalent in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance still somewhat exists today. Although it seems to me like prose is the most common form of Western writing today (correct me if I'm wrong), poetry and verse is still prevalent and feeds off of the systematic forms and specific order from the Middle Ages. I can't think of a modern example of terza rima, but several other specific meters and orderly rhyme schemes that we've learned about are still used in poetry today.
I completely agree. As both Lindsay and Mrs. Quinet said, lots of ideas continued on from the middle ages into the renaissance, and the idea of order is one such idea. During the middle ages, everything had to be perfect and had to have its place, i.e. the importance of the Great Chain of Being in the middle ages. Everything had its rank and place, and if something wasnt out of order, then everything got messed up because of it.
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