Monstrous tyranny, men of blood: Dante and Inferno XII

This paper reads Dante's Inferno XII as a study of how Dante conceptualizes violence towards others. It concentrates on the Minotaur, the centaurs, and the violent bathed in blood, and discusses how the violent to others are characteristically seen as tyrants. It examines the implications of tyranny in Dante, and gives this some political and historical context, but it concentrates on the image of the river of blood and what it means that these tyrants are bathed in blood. Drawing on Shakespeare's Macbeth and Coriolanus for comparison, and on Julia Kristeva's sense of abjection, it puts into relationship the stress in the canto on biform natures, and the consequential doubling of identity and simultaneous confusion of identity.