Holloway and Hoelun.

Comments

1. Bathrobe says

   August 2, 2021 at 9:34 am

   Hoelun: I’m not sure. In Mongolian script it’s ᠥᠭᠡᠯᠦᠨ (öhelün, I think). In Chinese it’s 訶額侖 hē’élún. I believe that an initial aspirate, derived from an earlier /p/, is posited in earlier stages of the language for what are now vowel-initial words.
2. Stephen Goranson says

   August 2, 2021 at 10:49 am

   Here’s the end of the Times July 7/8 report:

   The handwriting is schoolboy-like in the early manuscripts but the writing is in excellent Tuscan, which later provided the blueprint for Italian,” said Julia Bolton Holloway, 84, a British expert who has studied Latino — also known as Latini — for 50 years. “It covers the ideas of ethical government, which later showed up in the Comedy,” she said. The scripts are believed to date from the 1280s and 1290s.

   Studied by all Italian schoolchildren to this day, the Divine Comedy describes Dante’s journey through Hell, purgatory, and paradise.

   Less attention has been paid to Latino, who appears in the Divine Comedy in Hell in a section reserved for sodomites. “Dante reports that Latino was his former teacher, but he really tarred and feathered him in his work, and as a result he has been overlooked. Perhaps it took a woman to pay attention to him,” Bolton Holloway said.

   She said one set of manuscripts was very likely to be Dante’s work. “They are the only ones written in the socalled ‘Cancelleresca’ script, which Dante was likely taught by his father,” she said. “No copies of Dante’s own, handwritten version of the Comedy have been found, but Leonardo Bruni, a later Renaissance scholar who saw Dante’s handwriting described it as being similar to the manuscripts I have found,” she said.

   Bolton Holloway, whose findings appear in a book published by the regional authority of Tuscany, taught at Princeton University then became a nun and lived as a hermit in Tuscany before taking over Florence’s so-called English cemetery.

   I don’t yet find the mentioned book on WorldCat. The Times does not quote a second supporting scholar; perhaps the book will.
3. languagehat says

   August 2, 2021 at 10:53 am

   Thanks to both of you! I guess the Dante will remain a mystery unless and until the book appears.
4. David L says

   August 2, 2021 at 11:08 am

   The handwriting is schoolboy-like…

   “Mommy took me to an old house to look at some pictures hanging on the walls, they were all pictures of ladies with babies, totally boring. She wouldn’t let me swim in the river because it was smelly. Then we went home and had spaghetti for dinner (again).”

   Extract from “What I did on my summer vacation” by Dante Alighieri (age 8).
5. Y says

   August 2, 2021 at 1:43 pm

   Here’s a reference to the book, Il Tesoro di Brunetto Latino, maestro di Dante Alighieri, and here (about a third of the way down) is a fuzzy picture of the cover. From her academia.edu page it looks like Holloway has worked on Latino for quite a bit of her career. This is a summary of Latino’s biography.
6. languagehat says

   August 2, 2021 at 1:53 pm

   From her vita: “Languages (in descending order of competence): Italian, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, German.” Interesting.
7. John Cowan says

   August 2, 2021 at 4:47 pm

   Of course. But what the Supreme Poet fails to point out is whether it was “ai funghi or aglio olio that his family ate that day. His (half)-sister was named Tana < Gaetana.
8. languagehat says

   August 2, 2021 at 5:25 pm

   Missing link.
9. John Cowan says

   August 2, 2021 at 6:15 pm

   Arrgh, trying again: … ai funghi or aglio olio …
10. Xerîb says

    August 3, 2021 at 6:03 am

    I hope LH readers can see this. There is more information on the Middle Mongol sound here in Juha Janhunen (2006) The Mongolic Languages, under (1) in the middle of the page 61. (SH is the Secret History of the Mongols, C is other Chinese sources, and A is sources in Arabic script, and K is the Mongolian vocabulary list in the Armenian history of Kirakos Gandzaketsi completed in 1265.)

    Note also this on Khitan under (1) at the bottom of page 396.
11. languagehat says

    August 3, 2021 at 7:22 am

    Ah, so the written h represents /x/. Thanks!
12. Xerîb says

    August 3, 2021 at 7:52 am

    Some notes on how Hülegü was rendered in different languages, from Paul Pelliot (1959-63) Notes on Marco Polo, II, p. 866f, no. 373 “Ulau”:

    http://dsr.nii.ac.jp/toyobunko/III-2-F-c-104/V-2/page-hr/0270.html.en

    Interestingly, it was ه /h/ that was used in Persian and not خ /x/ in this instance.
13. Vanya says

    August 3, 2021 at 6:20 pm

    Then we went home and had spaghetti for dinner (again)

    Not bloody likely in 1273 in Florence. Maybe if they had taken a trip to Palermo…

    (According to Wikipedia the first reference to „Spaghetti“ as a type of pasta appears in 1824 in a book called li maccheroni di Napoli)
14. Y says

    August 4, 2021 at 3:55 pm

    One niggling thing about Brunetto Latino: he was a famous teacher, of Dante, Cavalcanti, and others. Presumably his homosexuality was well-known, or at least an open secret. Why did Dante choose him as the object of the hellish torment reserved for “sodomites”? Did Dante turn rigidly intolerant in his later years? WP summarizes some thought about the subject, but it seems there is no satifsfactory conclusion. I imagine Holloway has some ideas about it.
15. languagehat says

    August 4, 2021 at 4:04 pm

    Presumably his homosexuality was well-known, or at least an open secret. Why did Dante choose him as the object of the hellish torment reserved for “sodomites”?

    Because his homosexuality was well-known? Seems an odd question. The fact that Dante liked and respected him (assuming he did) did not change Divine Law.
16. Y says

    August 4, 2021 at 5:05 pm

    Why didn’t he choose a less sympathetic homosexual as representative? I am speaking as one ignorant both of Dante’s representation of complex personalities, and of how medieval morality judgments were dispensed.

    From what I have read, it sounds like Dante did like and respect Latinus; and that homosexuality, like a number of other sexual behaviors, was commonplace, condemned, but readily forgiven.
17. languagehat says

    August 4, 2021 at 6:08 pm

    homosexuality, like a number of other sexual behaviors, was commonplace, condemned, but readily forgiven.

    Readily forgiven by whom? Not by God, and that’s Dante’s point. He wasn’t some modern loosey-goosey relativist; he was saying “You may be a great guy everybody thinks well of, but if you violate God’s law, you’re going to hell and will suffer forever and bitterly repent your sins.” They took religion seriously in the Middle Ages.
18. languagehat says

    August 4, 2021 at 6:10 pm

    To have chosen “a less sympathetic homosexual” would be to implicitly say “God only punishes the nasty gay people, not the nice socially acceptable ones.” Which was not what he wanted to say. Compare the reactions of progressives today who are told that some racist uncle is “a really great guy.”
19. Y says

    August 4, 2021 at 7:02 pm

    My impression was (and it’s based on a vague memory of reading something) that because some sins were considered heinous but were commonplace, they could be easily repented of, through the mechanisms set by the Faith. In other words, the Church had given up on eradicating such behavior; you had to repent, however often, and you were taking the risk of dying unexpectedly in your sins. So if Latino had made arrangements between his last sin and his passing, he would be safe from eternal damnation, despite all he had done before.

    As to the “less sympathetic” angle, of course, that is clear to us moderns with our ambiguous characters, flawed heroes and sympathetic villains. What I don’t know is whether Dante and his readership were comfortable with that idea, and how they read such characters and their place in the world.
20. D.O. says

    August 4, 2021 at 8:06 pm

    Obviously Dante might have planned his circles of Inferno with some sins in mind and then found most suitable characters for each sin, but he also could have wanted to write about certain people whether they were or not “representative” of some sin and put them wherever they in his opinion belonged.
21. David Eddyshaw says

    August 4, 2021 at 8:24 pm

    Dante has some pretty sympathetic characters in Hell. The Christian doctrine of salvation is really not about whether you’ve been naughty or nice, and Dante did not believe that his friends would all go to heaven and his enemies all to Hell. Nor did he expect his readers to think any such thing.

    Maestro, il senso lor m’è duro, says Dante to Virgil in the poem itself of the inscription over the gate of Hell. Never a truer word …
22. Y says

    August 4, 2021 at 8:38 pm

    Fair enough.
    I read Dante when I was a teenager, and there was a lot I didn’t understand then, even if now I might.
23. Giacomo Ponzetto says

    August 4, 2021 at 11:01 pm

    @Y: the traditional puzzle about Brunetto Latini is that there’s little outside evidence of his homosexuality, something that has led to pretty fanciful interpretations of the sin Dante may be attributing to him. However, as our gracious host and David Eddyshaw have both noted, there hardly seems to be a puzzle if you grant his sodomy.

    In particular, if I understand correctly your suggestion that homosexuality would be no big deal because you could simply repent early and often, that’s a line of reasoning whose pretty obvious flaws Dante himself skewers very memorably through Guido da Montefeltro in Inferno XXVII.
24. Stu Clayton says

    August 5, 2021 at 12:04 pm

    Maestro, il senso lor m’è duro … Never a truer word …

    The reply is not what I would call soothing:

    # Und er zu mir, [wie man erlebt hat]:
    “Hier muss jeder Verdacht aufgegeben werden,
    alle Feigheit muss hier ausgestorben sein. #

    I’ve bracketed a few words that make no sense here. It would be nice if translators simply skipped what they don’t understand, instead of “making a stab” at it. I would rather pay for honesty than subsidize waffle. This is my extrapolation of the widow’s mite story.
25. John Cowan says

    August 22, 2025 at 2:10 pm

    It occurs to me that Dante might have meant Latino to be a type of the heterosexual sodomite, which is the sort of thing that could be a matter of gossip in Dante’s day but leave no trace in the historical record.
26. PlasticPaddy says

    August 22, 2025 at 3:50 pm

    @stu
    Here is a prose paraphrase in modern Italian I have found:
    Ed egli mi rispose, da persona saggia qual era: «Qui è necessario abbandonare ogni paura;
    ogni forma di viltà dev’essere lasciata.

    So the words you have bracketed should maybe be “als weiser Mensch”
    https://www.studenti.it/canto-3-inferno-dante-parafrasi-commento-figure-retoriche.html
    However I don’t know if you like this better.
27. languagehat says

    August 22, 2025 at 4:37 pm

    One niggling thing about Brunetto Latino: he was a famous teacher, of Dante, Cavalcanti, and others. Presumably his homosexuality was well-known, or at least an open secret. Why did Dante choose him as the object of the hellish torment reserved for “sodomites”?

    I can’t believe I didn’t mention this back in 2021, but Richard Kay wrote a whole book about this, Dante’s Swift and Strong: Essays on Inferno XV. His conclusions have not been generally accepted, but they strike me as worth considering; at any rate, it will keep the attentive reader from lazily accepting the “obvious.” Some excerpts will give the basic idea:

    What was the sin of these runners? That, I think, is a good question. Most critics find the answer self-evident and the subject embarrassing. After all, did not Virgil specify three sins that are punished in this ring—blasphemy, usury, and sodomy? Since the blasphemers are lying in one place and the usurers are sitting in another, must not all the runners be sodomites? This conclusion, however, soon places the commentator in an awkward position. The inference is logically valid only if Virgil’s enumeration of the crimes punished on the plain was an exhaustive catalogue. It is possible, however, that he selected a characteristic sin from each of the three categories in order to illustrate his definition. If this were the case, the runners would include not only sodomites but also those who disdained nature and her bounty in other ways as well. From Virgil’s reference to Sodom, we may infer that some are sodomites, but not that they all are. His ambiguous words provide nothing more than a preliminary orientation. Like the pilgrim Dante, we must see for ourselves what was meant. […]

    Villani’s estimate has been substantiated recently by Charles T. Davis, who shows Brunetto to have been the fountainhead of Florentine civic humanism. […] “For Brunetto, education in general and rhetorical education in particular was a preparation for politics,” Davis says. This attitude constituted nothing less than a revival of the Hellenic concept of liberal education, which was appropriate to the free citizen who participated in the government of his city-state. […]

    Brunetto Latini was the first rhetorician in centuries to return to Cicero’s view of rhetoric as the basis of political action. The revival was eminently practical, inasmuch as the conditions of political life in Cicero’s Rome bore a strong resemblance to those in Brunetto’s Florence. Accordingly, treatises of Cicero on rhetoric spoke directly to the needs of Brunetto Latini, and he studied them well, translated some, and above all took Cicero as his own model of the rhetorician as statesman.

    Dante surely did not disapprove of this revival. On the contrary, it would appear that he was deeply influenced by it. Certainly he often honored Cicero much as Brunetto had done, though it was Virgil whom he took as his supreme classical model. Nonetheless, Dante may well have conceived himself to be, as Davis suggests, a virtuous rhetorician who, like Cicero, devoted his talents to public service. But I cannot agree with Davis that the poet of the Comedy considered the political career of Brunetto Latini no less worthy of emulation. Dante could readily accept Brunetto’s ideal of public service through rhetoric and yet maintain without contradiction that Brunetto’s efforts to put these principles into practice were misdirected, not to say perverted.

    For Brunetto differed from Cicero in one essential respect: he was not loyal to Rome. The crux of the matter for Dante was political, since the Rome that the poet felt commanded the political loyalty of all men was the Roman empire. Although Brunetto in his private writings did acknowledge that Rome was “the head of the world and the commune of everyone,” his loyalty to her would seem to have been cultural rather than political. Without question the commune that he served had flatly refused to recognize that the Roman emperor had any right to the political loyalty of Florence. In no uncertain terms, the Florentines had written in 1281 to the vicar of Rudolf of Habsburg: “Nunquam Comune Florentie fidelitatem fecit alicui imperatori… quia semper vixit et fuit liberum” (“The Commune of Florence has never given allegiance to any emperor: it has always been free”). To be more precise, I should have said that this treasonable assertion was written in the name of the Florentines by their government and, still more precisely, that the letter was composed by that official whom the commune retained to draw up its documents—the dittatore, chief notary and scribe of the council of the commune, who in effect was head of the secretariat of the Florentine republic and in all but title was its chancellor. And who was the man who held this position in 1281? Beyond doubt—Brunetto Latini. In all probability, a composition of such major importance would have been executed by the best Latinist available; certainly the final responsibility for the work would have rested on Brunetto as chief of the notarial staff. Either way, one cannot escape the implication that Brunetto was professionally responsible for the letter. One could not wish for a clearer example of the sin of Brunetto Latini: he had perverted his profession of rhetoric by turning it against the natural lord of the world, the Roman emperor.

    Obviously there’s a great deal more to his argument, which he supports with many references and the kind of penetrating vision I admire in a scholar; his conclusions may be wrong, but his discussion is exhilarating to read (I’d quote a lot of his chapter on Priscian if it weren’t so much trouble). I highly recommend the book to anyone whose interest is piqued!
28. ulr says

    August 22, 2025 at 5:17 pm

    a prose paraphrase in modern Italian I have found

    I have found the following gloss on accorta:

    che previene lo spavento del poeta e lo soccorre dinanzi alle violente sensazioni che egli prova, alle soglie die questo ingresso nella città infernale.
    (from the commentary on the Commedia in the paperback edition of Dante’s Complete Works published in 1993 by Newton Compton Editori, which prints the Petrocchi text of the Commedia)
29. Hans says

    August 23, 2025 at 3:28 am

    PP’s post reminds me – I haven’t seen Stu posting here at LH for quite a while… I hope all is well?