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Communal And Economic Implications Of Blood In Dante, Anne C. Leone

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

This article investigates two of the varied and diverse implications of blood in Dante’s works (Fiore, Rime, Vita nova, Convivio, Commedia, Monarchia, Epistole, and Egloghe) where the term and its derivations appear: the ‘communal’ and the ‘economic’. By ‘communal’, I mean that Dante emphasizes the generative, formative, nourishing and charitable implications of blood: as the parts of a body are joined together through the blood they share, members of various communities — the city, the Church, the Roman Empire, the family, humankind — are joined together through blood. By ‘economic’, I understand …