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From the Golden Bough to the Grace of God: Heroic Journey & Personal Vocation in Virgil & Dante
The intertextual influence between Virgil and Dante is an endlessly rewarding subject for scholars and readers of the Aeneid and The Divine Comedy. Decades of reading and teaching these texts have given me much opportunity to reflect upon what connects them. Dante appropriates and extends many dimensions of the Aeneid in his Commedia; in this essay I explore just one—the famous Golden Bough.
In 1890, James G. Frazer published his famous work entitled The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion. Frazer’s massive study of world religions adopts the Golden Bough from Virgil’s Aeneid as the symbol for his project—exploring history’s great mythic narratives through which man seeks unity with the divine. Frazer’s text ranks among modernity’s most important studies of religion; it also points to the enormous significance of the Golden Bough in Aeneas’ own journey. The importance of this seemingly minor object in the Aeneid cannot be understated; it raises the broader question of whether, and in what way, Dante adopts it in his own epic.
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