User:CardinalSims/Bonagiunta Orbicciani

Role in Dante's Purgatorio
Bonagiunta appears among the gluttons in Canto 24 of Purgatorio, the second canticle of Dante's Divine Comedy. He is first pointed out by Forese Donati, who names numerous poets for Dante because their faces are unrecognizable due to their contrapasso: fasting. Bonagiunta appears to recognize Dante, and Dante hears him mumbling what sounds like the word "Gentucca" repeatedly. After Dante encourages Bonagiunta to speak with him, Bonagiunta asks if he is the poet who wrote the poem that began "Ladies that have intelligence of love." After Dante confirms his identity, Bonagiunta remarks that he finally understands what separated his poetry and the poetries of the Notary and Guittone from Dante's dolce stil novo ("sweet new style"). Once he has finished praising Dante, he is silent.

Bonagiunta's presence within Purgatorio addresses the differences between Dante's poetic style and the style of his Italian predecessors. Both early and modern commentators have suggested that Bonagiunta was included in the Divine Comedy as the result of his tenzoni with Dante and Guido Guinizzelli, another practitioner of the dolce stil novo. Dante, who had previously argued in his De vulgari eloquentia that Bonagiunta's poetry over-utilizes abstract terminology and does not live up to poetry's fullest potential, has Bonagiunta praise Dante (the character) and remark that he has a newfound understanding and appreciation of his dolce stil novo in Canto 24. Robert Hollander, a Dante scholar, lists five possible hypotheses regarding Dante's use of the specific phrase "dolce stil novo" through the mouth of Bonagiunta: he is using the now-defined phrase for the first time in Italian; he intends to suggest a group of poets that includes himself and Cino da Pistoia that is separate from Bonagiunta and other poets; he is presenting himself as a uniquely theological poet, one whose abilities supersede those of traditional love poets; he believes that the word "style" denotes not just a way of writing, but also the content within a poem; and that the phrase may be used by Dante to specifically refer to his own poetry. In "Dante and Bonagiunta," Professor James Eustace Shaw determines that Bonagiunta's praise for Dante and the dolce stil novo stems from a heightened understanding of love that he attained while atoning for his sins on the 6th terrace of Mt. Purgatory.