Cloves in Dante’s Inferno
Indonesian commodities are rarely mentioned in the literature of early ‘Renaissance’ (i.e. fourteenth- and fifteenth-century) Italy. (1) When Asia and Africa do appear it’s usually in the form of toponyms known in Europe since antiquity: Ethiopia and the Indian Ocean both occur in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, for instance, but Cathay, Java, and so on do not. I haven’t come across any cloves, nutmeg, galangal, or camphor in Petrarch either (although do let me know if you have). In Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (written c.1308–1320), however, an Indonesian spice — a clove (gharofano) — is mentioned by name. In this post I’m going to take a quick look at this clove and the ‘luxurious use’ to which it was put.
The clove appears on line 128 of canto XXIX of Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy, in reference to one Niccolò, perhaps Niccolò Bonsignori (a brother of Stricca, mentioned three lines earlier) or possibly Niccolò dei Salimbeni, a well-known alchemist. Both were Siennese. Canto XXIX is about alchemists and falsifiers condemned to Hell, and modern scholarship seems to prefer Salimbeni for this reason (but see below). This Niccolò, whatever his family name, is said to have invented a luxurious use for the clove, as you can see from the text below (Figure 1):
TEXT
Transcription:
<E niccholo chella chostuma riccha
del gharofano prima dischoperse
nellorto doue tal seme sappiccha .>
Normalised:
[…]
e Niccolò che la costuma ricca (127)
del garofano prima discoverse
ne l’orto dove tal seme s’appicca;
[…]
MY OVERLY LITERAL TRANSLATION
‘…and Niccolò, who the rich use
of the clove first discovered,
in the garden where such seed takes root.’
The Divine Comedy is the premier work of Italian literature — not just from the Middle Ages but of all time — so there are of course plenty of available English translations if you want to see these lines in their proper context. You can find Allen Mandelbaum’s 1980 translation of the entire Divine Comedy online complete with notes and an introduction, and several out-of-copyright versions are available on Wikisource. Here’s Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1867 translation of these lines, for instance:
And Niccolò, who the luxurious use
Of cloves discovered earliest of all
Within that garden where such seed takes root
And here’s Mandelbaum’s more lyrical and possibly less accurate version:
and Niccolò, the first to make men see
that cloves can serve as luxury (such seed,
in gardens where it suits, can take fast root); […]
The question that naturally arises: What chostuma riccha did this Niccolò discover? Modern scholarship doesn’t seem to have an answer to this, at least as far as I have been able to discover. (2)
Fortunately, medieval scholarship may be able to fill the gap. While searching for a Dante manuscript to illustrate this article, I came across London, British Library, Egerton MS 943, an early fourteenth-century northern Italian copy of the complete Divine Comedy that dates to within a couple of decades of Dante’s death in 1321. The text has plenty of charming illustrations of Virgil and Dante’s journey through Hell, but it is also replete with Latin annotations, as you may be able to see in Figures 2 and 3. These annotations are found with some variations in a number of other early manuscripts of the text, and they have even been the subject of an edition in their own right by Vincenzio Cioffari (Anonymous Latin Commentary on Dante’s Commedia: Reconstructed Text, Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 1989). Cioffari’s (apparently controversial) position is that the commentaries were all written by the same writer, probably a Dominican, shortly after the initial release of the Commedia.
A note labelled <g> on f.53r (see Figure 3 for a close-up) attempts to explain who this Niccolò was and what he did with cloves. The annotator says that he was in fact Nicolaus Bonsegnoris de scena — that is to say, Niccolò Bonsignori of Siena — rather than Niccolò dei Salimbeni, as modern scholarship seems to have it. The note goes on to say that et fuit ille ꝗ p’mo inuẽit gariofilos poni in assatis ‘and it was he who first came up with [the idea of] putting cloves in roasted meats’. (3)
This is a less arcane alchemical use than one might expect from the context, but it seems reasonably authoritative to me (a non-Dante-scholar). The Latin annotations were made at the same time as the Italian text of this manuscript and both were roughly contemporary with the life of Dante Alighieri. And, of course, the idea of roasting, braising, and stewing meats with (powdered?) clove is mentioned in other texts.
In any case, the word Dante uses for ‘clove’ is g(h)arofano, which comes from the same Greek word, καρυόφυλλον, as most other medieval European names, in this case by way of Latin gariofilus. All the cloves in the medieval world came from Maluku in what is now eastern Indonesia.
NOTES
(1) I put ‘Renaissance’ in speech marks because it, uh, wasn’t real. Not in the way people usually assume, at least.
(2) I’m not a Dante specialist — and given the nature of Dante studies there could well be a monograph or something out there dedicated to this very topic. You certainly shouldn’t consider my comments here to be the final word. I couldn’t find anything on this, though, and if there is such a monograph it doesn’t seem to have had an impact on modern editions of the text.
(3) As ever, let me know if you think this translation can be improved.
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A. J. West, December 2019
