The Oxford Handbook of Dante ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of Dante ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden F. Regina Psaki The Oxford Handbook of Dante. Ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. xxxv+741 pp. £125. ISBN 978–0–19–882074–1. Centenary commemorations of a foundational figure such as Dante Alighieri spark a host of initiatives, from the public and performative, to the pedagogical and curricular, to the specialized and even recondite. New discoveries both prompt and emerge from the occasion, which is less a celebratory fermata than an explosion of activity. Dante Studies will be a long time processing all that the year 2021—the seventh centenary of Dante's death—will bring into being. It has long been impossible to read the entire bibliography on Dante in a single lifetime. One of the great gifts of centenary years, however, is the renewal of our stock of strumenti di lavoro, the major scholarly reference sources that remain the gold standard of credibility in an increasingly saturated information landscape. The Oxford Handbook of Dante is a capacious resource that will last until 2065—the next Dante year—and beyond. The volume's values and goals are announced in its editors' co-authored introduction, 'Dante Unbound: A Vulnerable Life and the Openness of Interpretation'. The introduction declares, and the volume performs, an intention not to freeze or systematize Dante's corpus and its meanings in a version that would aspire to be definitive (for a while). This Handbook aims to unbind the corpus: to make permeable the categories and constructs that have been baked into it after its making, over its long critical reception, and thus to kindle more of the innovation that the volume itself exemplifies. In this goal, the prominence of current epistemologies (sometimes attached to philosophers and theoreticians by name, sometimes not) is not only appropriate and unavoidable, it is productive. Chapter sequence offers one reading trajectory which the introduction invites us to set aside in order to read not 'from start to finish', but flitting among the chapters and gleaning at our pleasure (pp. xxxiv–xxxv). That is very nearly an imperative in such a copia of erudition, exhilaration, and intellectual energy. Still, I did begin [End Page 251] with Chapter 1, Justin Steinberg's 'The Author', which opens with his signature limpid dynamism: 'No one has ever dared to kill Dante the author' (p. 3). He chooses three major topics—Dante-poet cf. Dante-character; Dante and authority; Dante and autobiography—and illuminates them by examining various moments in the Commedia which break the fictional frame. Foregrounding the back story of the putatively definitive distinction between poet and pilgrim, Steinberg reminds us that this interpretative lens is as recent (the 1950s) as it is inflexible. The first and last chapters, among others, thematize the contingency of analytical paradigms that have gained the status of accepted wisdom but which, we must presume, will not be eternal. Each chapter features a different balance of critical background, specific aspects of medieval intellectual history, modern theory and practice, and close reading of hot spots in Dante's corpus. But the authors negotiate such competing foci with energy and confidence, embracing rather than effacing the ways in which they might clash or wobble. Nicolò Crisafi's 'The Master Narrative and its Paradoxes', for example, explores the passages in which Dante constructs a teleological narrative in the Commedia. So far so familiar. But Crisafi shows 'how in spite (and because) of their function of reinforcing Dante's linear path, such passages are invariably contaminated with open-endedness, centrifugal tendencies, and paradox [. . .] as much a part of Dante's text as the teleological master plot, encoded [. . .] as intentionally as the dominant narrative' (p. 514). In other words, instead of trying to resolve cruxes into clarity and unity to assure mastery (whether of author or critic), the Handbook looks at how cruxes, contradictions, collisions can be productive, and how they can signify. In consulting and sketching the contours of a collaborative work of scholarship on a massive scale, we inevitably consider how it presents what lies behind us, upstream from us...