emotional life of the troubadour. His Commedia—later known as the Divine Comedy
—presents Dante (writing in the first person) as a traveler who passes through Hell,
Purgatory, and Paradise, and yet the poem is fixed on locations in this world. For
example, when Dante asks a soul in Hell to introduce herself, she begins with her
hometown: “The city where I was born lies on that shore where the Po descends.”^14
Dante himself was a child of the Arno, the river that flows through Florence. An
ardent Florentine patriot and member of the “Whites” party, the faction that opposed
papal intervention in Tuscany, he was condemned to death and expelled from the city
by the “Blacks” after their victory in 1301. The Commedia was written during
Dante’s bitter exile. It was peopled with his friends, lovers, enemies, and the living
and dead whom he admired and reviled.
At the same time, it was a parable about the soul seeking and finding God in the
blinding light of love. Just as Thomas Aquinas used Aristotle’s logic to lead him to
important truths, Dante used the pagan poet Virgil as his guide through Hell and
Purgatory. And just as Aquinas believed that faith went beyond reason to even higher
truths, Dante found a new guide, Beatrice, representing earthly love, to lead him
through most of Paradise. But only faith, in the form of the divine love of the Virgin
Mary, could bring Dante to the culmination of his journey, the inexpressible and
ravishing vision of God.
In other writers, the harmony of heaven and earth was equally sought, if
differently expressed. In the anonymous prose Quest of the Holy Grail (c.1225), the
adventures of the knights of King Arthur’s Table were turned into a fable to teach the
doctrine of transubstantiation and the wonder of the vision of God. In The Romance
of the Rose, begun by one author (Guillaume de Lorris, a poet in the romantic
tradition) and finished by another (Jean de Meun, a poet in the scholastic tradition), a
lover seeks the rose, his true love, but is continually thwarted by personifications of
love, shame, reason, abstinence, and so on. They present him with arguments for
and against love, but in the end, erotic love is embraced in the divine scheme—and
the lover plucks the rose.
THE MOTET
Already by the tenth century, the chant in unison had been joined by a chant of many
voices: polyphony. Initially voice met voice in improvised harmony, but in the twelfth
century polyphony was increasingly composed as well. In the thirteenth century its
most characteristic form was the motet. Created at Paris, probably in the milieus of
