A Companion to Dante

ead in Villani xi. 94 how people contrived, even in somewhat later days, to ascertain the number of children born in a year. The baptizing priest at St. John's Church, where all Florentine children were brought to the font, used to place in a vessel a black or white bean respectively for every boy or girl that he christened. At the end of the year the beans were counted, and in this way people at Florence knew how many boys and girls had been born in the city in the course of the year. It would be difficult to find the black bean which was put in for Dante's baptism, and even were it discovered it would hardly show the year or the day of birth or baptism, so that we are compelled to establish the required date as best we can from other sources. Let us first question the poet himself. At the very outset of his work, the Vita Nuova, he says that when he first saw Beatrice she was near the beginning of her ninth year, and he himself at the end of his. The calculation of the astronomical data which he gives indicates Beatrice's age atthat time as eight years and four months. In chapter xxx. of the same work we find the statement that Beatrice died June 9, 1290, and from Purg. xxx. 124, we may gather that at the time of her death she was in her twenty-fourth year. She was therefore born before July 9, 1266, and the poet, who was about a year older, must accordingly have been born in 126s.1 Whether the Vita Nuova is truth and fiction, or only the latter, need not her...