Commentary Purg XXVI 67-70

For a later resonance of the image of the rustic mountainman struck dumb by the sights of the city, see Boccaccio's 'meta-novella' (Decameron IV.Intro.19-20), when the normally appetitive son of Filippo Balducci, Boccaccio's version of Dante's 'montanaro... rozzo e selvatico' (the mountaineer... rough and rustic), descends with his father from their monastic mountain and sees Florence for the first time, immediately falling under the spell of the lovely women in the beautiful city.  (For Boccaccio's redoing of Dante's text see Hollander [Holl.1997.2], p. 75.)  However, and as William Stephany pointed out in a lecture at Dartmouth College on 31 August 1983, Dante's mountainman is a revised version of his own earlier portrait of such rude folk.  In De vulgari eloquentia (V.E.II.i.6) he declaims that the illustrious vernacular is not fitting to 'mountaineers who treat of rustic matters' (montaninis rusticana tractantibus).  Here, in a sort of palinode, he chides his younger self for his stylistic and intellectual snobbery, making these saved souls amazed at the presence of this writer of low vernacular texts and thus canceling the prideful assertiveness of his younger self.