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DANTE SEXCENTENARY
LECTURES

I

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF DANTE

THE object of this lecture is to make clear the main
movements and forces in the midst of which Dante’s
life unfolded itself. The lecture aims to recall to mind the
chief features of his career, with special reference to the
parallel events of his time.

In what age, then, and what places did Dante run his
course of life? Dante was born in Florence in 1265, and
died at Ravenna in 1321. His span of life was thus fifty-
six years, thirty-five of which fell in the thirteenth century
and twenty-one in the fourteenth. Dante’s most impres-
sionable years, the years in which his fundamental concep-
tions of life, his tastes and habits were acquired and formed,
were those of the late thirteenth century, the last, and the
greatest century of the Middle Ages, as it is often called by
enthusiastic admirers. Dante’s early manhood, his romantic
love for Beatrice, which so profoundly colored all his life,
his marriage with Gemma Donati, his earliest achievements,
poetical and political, the composition of the “Vita Nuova,”
and his service on the city council also fell in this last cen-
tury of the Middle Ages, more particularly in its last dec-
ade, from 1290 to 1300. In the first two decades of the
fourteenth century, 1300 to 1320, when the breath of a
new age began to make itself faintly felt, were spent the
years of his mature manhood, the years which saw his exile
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