Description
Benvenuto Rambaldi da Imola (c.1320–1388), an Italian scholar and lecturer based in Bologna, is chiefly remembered for his influential Latin Comentum super Dantis Aligherii comoediam [Commentary on Dante’s Alighieri’s Comedy] (1373–88). In his gloss on Dante’s placement of Mordred in Hell, Benvenuto borrows extensively from Boccaccio’s chapter on King Arthur (VIII.19) in De casibus virorum illustrium [On the Downfalls of Famous Men] (1360; 1373). Benvenuto adds additional content from the chronicle story of King Arthur that derives from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae [History of the Kings of Britain] (c.1136). Benvenuto’s Arthurian gloss invites us to consider two questions. First, what meaningful modifications does Benvenuto make to Boccaccio’s account of Arthur and how, if at all, do these alterations impact the narrative and its moral meaning? Second, Dante tells us where King Arthur’s treacherous kinsman Mordred is in the afterlife—Caina, the ice-lake of Hell, home to betrayers of kin—but not where King Arthur is located. Based on Dante’s Commedia and Benvenuto’s Comentum, what would be the most fitting placement for Arthur in Dante’s poetic vision of the afterlife? Our translation is based on Benvenuto Rambaldi da Imola, Comentum super Dantis Aldigherij Comoediam, ed. Giacomo Filippo Lacaita, 5 vols. (Florence: G. Barbèra 1887), 2: 497–501. All translations supplied for Dante’s Inferno are from Dante Alighieri, Inferno, ed. and trans Anthony Esolen (New York: Modern Library, 2005), pp. 332–33.
Publication Date
1380
Type
Article
