MEDIEVAL LITERATURE 411 office, and was first fined and banished for two years, then condemned by the angry commune to be burned at the stake with fourteen others of his party. He always protested I his innocence and was probably simply the victim of party I animosity, but he had to spend the rest of his life in bitter t exile and wandering, although he found some powerful patrons like the despot of Verona. Dante was well educated like the second author of the Romance of the Rose. He knew Aristotle and his philosophy, Aquinas and his theology, and was well ac- His varied ! quainted with the two leading medieval sciences talents
- of astronomy and astrology. He could write in Latin if he
! chose, and he knew a good deal about the great heroes and writers of antiquity. He also had had experience of con- temporary politics, and, by his wanderings from city to city and court to court, had acquired a wide fund of infor- mation concerning leading men of the present or the recent i past, and a deep insight into human nature. Yet he was j strongly inclined toward allegory and mystic forms of expression, and was at heart a stern moralist, lofty idealist, ! and devout Roman Catholic. Finally, he had poetic gifts of the very first order. Dante's earliest considerable work was the Vita Nuova, in which he tells and sings in such a mystic, dreamy, and j exalted way of his early love for Beatrice and Minor 1 of her untimely death, that many have doubted works f whether there ever really was any such lady. His Convivio,
- or Banquet, is a more elaborate and learned composition,
1 discussing in philosophical fashion such questions as, What is true nobility? and, What is true love? But this feast of reason is not set forth in Latin for the learned alone, but in Italian so that many may partake thereof. Dante also declares that Italian is as suitable for literary purposes as any other vernacular, even the Provencal. He also defended 'his mother tongue in a scholarly Latin treatise, entitled I De Vulgari Eloquentia, upholding it even against Latin and further giving us much information about Italian dialects and medieval verse-forms. In Latin prose from his pen we
