Libraries

Dante in the British Library: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven

April 11, 2022 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

On September 14, 2021, the British Library in London hosted an online event titled “Dante in the British Library: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven”. The event featured two lectures on Dante about the following:

“Alessandro Scafi – Mapping Paradise in the Middle Ages: Dante and the Garden of Eden

“Christian scholars and map-makers of the late Middle Ages were dedicated to the search for the Garden of Eden, as described in Genesis. Could paradise be found on a map? Dante’s knowledge of geographical lore was deep, rich, and varied, and his Divine Comedy echoes contemporary debates about the location and the mapping of paradise.

“Elisabeth Trischler – Architecture and the Afterlife: How the Urban Spaces of Medieval Florence inspired Dante’s Divine Comedy

“The city of Florence underwent a significant building boom in the 13th and 14th centuries, and this expansion offers a way to explore Dante’s world. This lecture uses illustrations of the Divine Comedy from the British Library’s collection to show how Dante’s masterpiece was shaped by Florence’s urban spaces.” [. . .] —The British Library (retrieved April 11, 2022)

View the event’s listing on the British Library’s website here.

A.J. Hackwith, The Library of the Unwritten (2019)

January 2, 2021 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

“A Library of the Unwritten by A. J. Hackwith tells the story of a librarian and her assistant from the ‘Unfinished Book’ wing of the library of Hell tracking down escaped characters from the books, attempting to meet their authors or change their stories. Towards the beginning of the story, as they are about to depart the library of hell for Earth so they can track down an escaped character, a figure appears and quotes most of the inscription which is written on the gate of Hell in Dante’s Inferno.” –Contributor Robert Alex Lee

Here is the synopsis of the 2019 novel, from Penguin Random House: “In the first book in a brilliant new fantasy series, books that aren’t finished by their authors reside in the Library of the Unwritten in Hell, and it is up to the Librarian to track down any restless characters who emerge from those unfinished stories.

“Many years ago, Claire was named Head Librarian of the Unwritten Wing—a neutral space in Hell where all the stories unfinished by their authors reside. Her job consists mainly of repairing and organizing books, but also of keeping an eye on restless stories that risk materializing as characters and escaping the library. When a Hero escapes from his book and goes in search of his author, Claire must track and capture him with the help of former muse and current assistant Brevity and nervous demon courier Leto.

“But what should have been a simple retrieval goes horrifyingly wrong when the terrifyingly angelic Ramiel attacks them, convinced that they hold the Devil’s Bible. The text of the Devil’s Bible is a powerful weapon in the power struggle between Heaven and Hell, so it falls to the librarians to find a book with the power to reshape the boundaries between Heaven, Hell….and Earth.” —Penguin Random House

Contributed by Robert Alex Lee (Florida State University ’21)

“What Happens When a Writer Hates the Heroine of Her New Book?” Excerpt from Nisha Susan’s The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories

October 4, 2020 By lsanchez

“In her second week at the library, she was choked. Somewhere in this building, she had been told, is an actual manuscript of the Divine Comedy. Dante Alighieri had not sat around in the 1300s writing coy shit. Somewhere near here, Arun Kolatkar had written Jejuri and the Kala Ghoda poems. Somewhere near here, Kolatkar had died. Where in her writing was the blood, the grime, the puking on the streets and the deep stuff?” –Nisha Susan, excerpt from The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories, Huffington Post, August 10, 2020

“7 Circles of Library Hell” at Northwestern University

September 15, 2020 By lsanchez

“Periodicals: The most frigid and judgmental part of the library. If you even think of talking or breathing above a whisper, you will be violently shushed (and maybe shanked).” –Caroline Brown, North by Northwestern, February 22, 2016

“A White Canon in a World of Color,” by Sierra Lomuto

June 30, 2020 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

“I was recently in my hometown of San Francisco, walking through the Mission district on Christmas Eve looking for a place to pop into and get some work done. I had some grading to finish for my Chaucer class. I worked for a bit in a café at Valencia and 24th St. But when it closed early at 4pm, because of the holiday, I made my way toward the local library a couple blocks away.

[. . .]

“Wrapped around the face of the building were etchings of names, six per column, and the first read: Homer, Virgil, Rabelais, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante. My eyes followed the carved words around to the side where they ended, each name digging a pit deeper into my stomach. Here I was, in the heart of the Mission, a Latinx neighborhood for as long as most San Franciscans’ memories can reach back to, and a building that is meant to represent knowledge, learning, community, safety. . . is encased with the names of white men. I wanted this old stone building, this old library in the Mission, to offer me some solace amidst a devastating present, to remind me that knowledge, education, and learning are paths out of socio-economic oppression.

“Instead, it reminded me that those paths too often lead us toward our own epistemological oppression—and do too little for the places and people we came from. The façade of the Mission library reminded me that those paths belong to white men; the rest of us merely walk them. [. . .]” –Sierra Lomuto, “A White Canon in a World of Color,” Medievalists of Color (March 26, 2019)

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