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Suppose, for the sake of easy memory, that the Middle Ages begin in A. D. 313, finish in 1313. The first date is marked by Constantine's Edict of Milan, virtually establishing Christianity as the religion of the Roman world empire. The second date emphasises the sudden death of Emperor Henry VII at Buonconvento in Tuscany during his Italian campaign, as the irreparable failure of the last attempt that could be undertaken, with a reasonable chance of success, to enact the plan of Roman-Christian unity under whose spell the Latin West and the Germanic North had dreamed and laboured all through those thousand years. Of this phase of history Dante is the witness and an actor, a victim and the judge as well.
These pages are excerpted from a larger and more comprehensive essay on Dante and on the reading of the Divine Comedy. The essay in its entirety will be published, in the original English version, by Henry Regnery, as Introduction to a new edition of the Divine Comedy. In Italian translation the essay will be included in a forthcoming volume of essays by Borgese, to be published by Mondadori next spring.
1 ' On Dante Criticism', in Report of the Dante Society, Cambridge, Mass., 1936. Another essay by the same writer, 'The Wrath of Dante', in Speculum, April 1938, deals with the interre lations between Dante's mind and heart, particularly in regard to the emergence of his passions and to the effects, in poetic creation and style, of the ‘release of anger' when his destiny as a fugitive was sealed.
2 Erewhon: title of Butler's novel, anagram of ‘nowhere'.
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