Poetik des Dialogs: Aktuelle Theorie und rinascimentales Selbstverständnis by Klaus W. Hempfer

Abstract

8I2 Reviews threat to the human soul and to human salvation. This book sets out to redress the balance, and to explore this 'other Renaissance': that of night-lovers, night-students, and night-contemplators, the astronomers, poets, artists, mystics, theologians, and cosmographers who variously celebrated, illustrated, and mapped the complexities of the night. Menager's texts are drawn from an impressively large sample of elite literature: Galileo, Cervantes, Jean de la Croix, Belleau, Ronsard, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Duirer are only the more canonical figures in this wide-ranging survey. The choice of the term 'Renaissance' over 'sixteenth-century' is a deliberate one: it allows Menager to explore a cultural movement, and to draw on two centuries of Italian, English, French, and Spanish writers. The book charts awide range of influences and echoes: the influence of astronomy on poets and painters, but equally, that of poetry and philosophy on astronomers. Menager is keen to point out that his book does not aim simply to reverse the binary opposition that keeps night obscured and frightening; this, he argues, is a product of the privileging of day and one that is not necessarily reproduced in the texts under consideration. Chapter I describes how, for medieval and Renaissance theologians, night and day were not radically opposed like light and darkness; the night that was created on the first day gave order and form to the darkness, but was distinguished from the primordial obscurity that existed before the creation, and that returned for an instant when Christ was crucified. Menager describes the various representations of night as unsystematic, sometimes contradictory. And yet, the picture that emerges does have coherence, of slightly illegitimate pleasure: stripped bare of the simplicities and glaring evidences of the day, the night was dedicated towhat was essential. For pastoral poets, itwas a time of escape and love. For astronomers, the night represented fervent study and the possibility of the progress of knowledge. Don Quixote spurned sleep in order to read and invent his histories of chivalry. Commentators on the Psalms insisted that the night was a privileged time inwhich to experience the divine presence; and for Renaissance mystics, night provided an opportunity to contemplate and participate in the Passion. The book is divided into five chapters, which consider, broadly, cosmologies and mythologies; images and the imaginary; proper 'use' of the night, inwhich the adage 'the night brings counsel' is discussed; mystical and theological versions of night, with particular attention given to Christmas and the night inGethsemane, perhaps the most successful and stimulating chapter; and a final chapter on nocturnes, con centrating on representations of night in painting. These varied and wide-ranging contexts are both rich and stimulating. They also represent a potential weakness in the project, as the focus on representations of night may get lost sometimes in the summarizing and elaboration of existing criticism and other concerns. But this does not ultimately detract from the success of this book in illuminating a dark space of Renaissance culture in such thought-provoking ways. UNIVERSITYOF SHEFFIELD EMILYBUTTERWORTH Poetik des Dialogs: Aktuelle Theorie und rinascimentales Selbstverstdndnis. Ed. by KLAUSW. HEMPFER. (Text und Kontext, 2I) Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. 2004. I91 PP. ?34. ISBN 3-5I5-o8576-9. The last decade has seen a very welcome increase in studies on the use of the dia logue genre in the Renaissance. In this context, Poetik des Dialogs stands out strongly because its contributors make an exceptional effort to discuss specific possibilities of the genre from the point of view of modern theories on the dialogue, which are then linked in turn to sixteenth-century theoretical discourse on dialogue poetics. The first MLR, IOI.3, 2oo6 8I3 of the five studies in the collection is a lengthy essay by Bernd Hasner. In line with thewidely underestimated work of Leonid Batkin on humanistic dialogue in Italy, he approaches the genre as a new episteme for the transmission of knowledge, which, as such, needs to be distinguished theoretically from competing genres between Middle Ages and Enlightenment, such as essays and treatises. This is a very dense essay that, through constant reference to the dialogues of Bruni and Tasso, but also to Plato, Shaftesbury, and Diderot, painstakingly unravels themany...