For the record: Rewriting Virgil in the Commedia

14 Although the negative-constructed wood (non ... non ... non) of Inferno 13 derives most obviously from a passage in Seneca's Hercules furens (vv. 689-703), it also recalls the antiqua silva (Aeneid 6.179), the silva inmema (6.186), entered by Aeneas, in whose shady depths Aeneas must pluck the golden bough if he is to gain access to the underworld. For the likely source for Dante's harpies, see Aeneid 3.209-12, 214-18, 225-35, and 242-57. The entire Pier delie Vigne encounter follows closely on Aeneas's meeting with Polydorus's shade in Aeneid 3.22-48. Dante also may have had in mind Ovid's Metamorphoses 2.358-366, which tells of the transformation of the Heliades into poplar trees.

15 The greatest example of desecrating greed in the Aeneid is Turnus's killing of Pallas and then taking booty from his corpse (10.479-89). This is an act that Aeneas recalls at the very end of the poem (12.94OfF) when sight of the plundered war belt incites him to reject Turnus's pleas for mercy.

16 See Spitzer.

17 The word scrittura appears ten times in the Commedia. With the exception of its first use in Purgatorio 6.34 ("la mia scrittura e piana" 'my writing is plain'), all other uses refer to the Bible. Likewise with volume, which appears nine times. In the first instance ("ehe m'hafatto cercar Io tuo volume" 'that have made me search your volume'; Inferno 1.84), in the speech of Dante pilgrim, volume refers to Virgil's poetry; all other appearances are in the Paradiso and pertain to the heavens, to monastic rules, and to the mind of God. The last of these is Paradiso 33.86, legato con amore in un volume, "bound by love in one volume."

18 Schnapp gives the fullest account of the Heaven of Mars and Dante's reworking of Virgil in and through the meeting with Cacciaguida. see also Hollander, esp. 145-51, and Allevi.

19 On Paradiso 17.31-33 and Dante's use of ambage, see Schnapp 140-41.

20 Ahern explores how book production informs this image of God's book (s'interna..., si squaderna).

WORKS CITED

Ahern, John. "Binding the Book: Hermeneutics and Manuscript Production in Paradiso 33." PMLA 97 (1982): 800-09.

Akenson, Donald Harman. Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.

Allevi, E Con Dante e Ia Sibilla ed altri d'agli anlichi al volgare. Milan: Edizioni ScientificoLetterario, 1965.

Augustine. Confessions. Trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin. Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1961.

Barolini, Teodolinda. Dante's Poets: Textuality and Truth in the "Comedy." Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

___. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1994.

Bosco, Umberto, and Giovanni Reggio. Dante Alighieri, "La Divina Commedia" con pagine critiche. 3 vols. Florence: Le Monnier, 1979.

Boyarin, Daniel. A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.

Charity, A. C. Evenis and Their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966.