Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante's 'Commedia' by Helena Phillips-Robins

Abstract

Reviewed by: Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante's 'Commedia' by Helena Phillips-Robins Alejandro Cuadrado Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante's 'Commedia'. By Helena Phillips-Robins. (The William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature, 19) Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2021. xvi+307 pp. $60. ISBN 978–0–268–20068–8. The impressive slate of Dante-related publications by Notre Dame's Devers Series has its most recent instalment in Helena Phillips-Robins's Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante's 'Commedia', a well-researched and interdisciplinary reading of the [End Page 249] role of liturgy in Dante's poem. In this book Phillips-Robins not only articulates the presence of liturgical song in Purgatorio and Paradiso, but argues that these songs invite readers of the Commedia to participate in the same performance as the souls depicted in the poem. The first chapter, 'Liturgy and Community', examines two liturgical moments that bookend a soul's time in Purgatory: the 'In exitu Israel de Aegypto' sung aboard the angelic ferry to Purgatory in Purgatorio ii and the Gloria sung in celebration of Statius's completed purgation in Purgatorio xx. Using evidence from liturgical practices attested in medieval Italian ordinals, Phillips-Robins hypothesizes a reader response in which Dante's reader would pause to complete the psalm or Gloria, and in doing so participate in a transformation similar to that experienced by the penitent souls in Purgatorio. The second chapter, 'Liturgy and Participation in Christ', continues the argument that Dante invites readers to participate in the psalms of the Commedia, first by examining the two psalms of Purgatorio xxiii ('Labïa mea, Domine' and 'Elì'). Leaning on patristic sources, Phillips-Robins argues that these psalms invite the reader to adopt the principle of imitatio Christi. The chapter then broadens its scope to include the liturgical songs in Paradiso x and Purgatorio xi as 'explicit invitations to the reader to engage in devotional activity' (p. 108). A section in the middle of the chapter catalogues at breakneck pace the passages in the Commedia in which Dante indicates that he is only partially citing a liturgical song. Given Phillips-Robins's convincing close reading of Purgatorio xxiii, one wishes she had given more attention to each passage listed. In 'The Shared Voice of Liturgical Prayer' (Chapter 3) Phillips-Robins turns her attention to the liturgical songs in the final cantos of Purgatorio: the 'In te, Domine, speravi' of Purgatorio xxx and the 'Asperges me' of Purgatorio xxxi. She also treats the Prayer to the Virgin of Paradiso xxxiii, arguing that intercessory prayer in Dante's Commedia involves both those praying and those being prayed for. The second half of this chapter turns to Giovanni di Paolo's celebrated manuscript illuminations in Yates Thompson 36, especially those that depict Marian devotion (three of these are reproduced in black and white). Phillips-Robins argues that 'Giovanni di Paolo shows himself to be particularly attuned to Dante's invitations to his readers to engage, in the first person, with the divine' (p. 163). The final chapter, 'Liturgy and Love', is at once the most successful and the one that strays furthest from the book's central theme. In this chapter Phillips-Robins traces a historical itinerary of the idea of 'believing in' from Augustine through to thirteenth-century theologians, including the prominent preacher Giordano da Pisa. Against this historical and theological context, Phillips-Robins offers a careful close reading of Dante's Credo in the Heaven of the Fixed Stars, arguing that his creed engages in a 'movement in love toward' God (p. 191). One limitation is the extent to which Phillips-Robins insists that certain materials such as the Florentine ordinals are 'all but unknown in Dante studies' (p. 13) or 'as yet all but untapped in Dante studies' (pp. 14 and 31). A visit to her extensive and well-documented footnotes (especially nn. 50 and 57 in the Introduction) shows [End Page 250] that Dante scholars have tapped some of these sources, most notably in Francesco Ciabattoni's Dante's Journey to Polyphony (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). Similarly, Alessandro Vettori's recent...