Piero Boitani Research Articles

Geoffrey Chaucer in Context. The Oxford Handbook of ChaucerThe Oxford Handbook of Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer in Context. The Oxford Handbook of ChaucerThe Oxford Handbook of Chaucer

Vertical Readings in Dante’s ‘Comedy’, vol. iii. ed. by George Corbett, Heather Webb

 Reviews English which demand a deeper investigation than this short book is able to offer. ere is the intriguing matter of why some elements (baby and calcio are mentioned ) seem more prone to compounding than others, suggesting the operation of an internal dynamic that is susceptible of diachronic description. Comparison with other Romance languages would be instructive in order to judge the commonality or distinctiveness of some supposed Anglicisms (in Spanish, for example, it is considered that increased use of the be passive, not mentioned here for Italian, is attributable to English). Such comparison might also illuminate the history of pseudo-Anglicisms such as recordman and the apparently independent development of Anglicisms such as andare in tilt. But this book will be instrumental in stimulating interest in these and other lines of future enquiry. Q M U  L C J. P Vertical Readings in Dante’s ‘Comedy’, vol. . Ed. by G C and H W. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. .  pp.£. (/ free). ISBN –––– ( ––––;  ––––). Vertical Readings in Dante’s ‘Comedy’ is the first series of readings of Dante Alighieri ’s Comedy which systematically follow a structure different from the traditional Lecturae Dantis: not a linear (‘horizontal’) reading of the poem, canto by canto, but a reading which runs perpendicular to the narration (‘vertical’), which passes through the three canticles of the poem at one time, grouping the samenumbered cantos of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. e third and final volume of this series includes eleven readings, from Cantos  to  (the last essay is the only one which analyses four cantos: the s, with Canto  of Inferno). is project, published between two important anniversaries of Dante’s birth and death, is ground-breaking in setting a new way of looking at the Comedy and in providing a fruitful model for new series of the same or a similar kind. ‘Further vertical, but also [. . .] “diagonal” and “horizontal”’ readings, as wished for by the editors (p. ), have in fact already been suggested within this series. Although such a reading scheme could run the risk of forcing connections and interpretations (and indeed some threads appear stronger than others), it actually fosters original insights into single cantos and the poem as a whole. e variety of this third volume (which brings specific attention to the theological perspective), together with its internal interconnections, fully proves this potentiality. Some interesting key themes emerge among these diverse readings: imagery, numerology, corporeality, all-inclusiveness, movement and change, language and truth. Inspired by Mandelstam’s idea of the Comedy as an organic growing body, Peter Hawkins reads Cantos  following a thread of corporeality: from the hypocrites’ attention to the pilgrim’s living body, to the hollow aerial bodies of the penitent gluttons, to one of the most abstract cantos of Paradiso, which nonetheless shows for the first time the central materiality of Christ’s ‘bright Substance’ and the concrete maternal character of the Virgin Mary. We move from body to desire, as MLR, .,   related to identity and poetry, with Janet Soskice’s reading of Cantos : the is a wrong desire, the gluttons’ hunger is a form of desire, and the poets among them represent a form of ‘gluttonous’ poetry, which Dante’s sacred poem overcomes, in focusing on the only happily unending desire: faith. ‘Ardour’ is the thread in one of the strongest verticals, traced by Elena Lombardi: Cantos  feature Dante’s ‘trespassing’ alter egos, Ulysses and Adam, and his poetic father Guido Guinizzelli, cornerstones linked by particular images (flames and sea), lexical correspondences, and the interwoven themes of desire and language: wrong desire and deceitful language , good desire and true language. at ‘ardour’ is again highlighted by Piero Boitani in the pivotal Purgatorio , where Dante recognizes the ‘ancient flame’ of his love for Beatrice, who represents divine wisdom as opposed to Ulysses’ ‘flame’; fire is at the centre of a thread of water images in Cantos : from falsifiers’ thirst, through Dante’s flowing tears, to the Empyrean river. A vertical progression of concentric ‘containers’ is followed by Ronald Martinez reading Cantos : from the infernal inflamed containers of fraud and sin (among which we find again language), to the wall of fire between Purgatory and Earthly Paradise, to...

The Gospel According to Shakespeare by Piero Boitani

The Gospel According to Shakespeare by Piero Boitani

The Gospel According to Shakespeare by Piero Boitani, and: Faith in Shakespeare by Richard C. McCoy

The Gospel According to Shakespeare by Piero Boitani, and: Faith in Shakespeare by Richard C. McCoy

Book Review: The Gospel According to Shakespeare

The Gospel According to Shakespeare. By Piero Boitani. Trans. Vittorio Montemaggi and Rachel Jacoff. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-268-02235-8. Pp. xiii + 156. $27.00. Piero Boitani's study of Hamlet, King Lear, and four late romances is a beautiful work of literary criticism. The learning is prodigious, prose elegant, and insights thought-provoking and memorable. Boitani focuses on Shakespeare's Christian themes as developed in these plays; on characters who seem to modeled on biblical figures, including Job, Christ, and God; and on biblical echoes in wording and in idea. The study leaves reader with new insights regarding Shakespeare's works, and, with its focus on Gospel, or Good News that incarnation brought, should of major interest not only to readers of Christianity and Literature but also to readers in general. Boitani, an eminent Italian scholar and literary critic specializing in medieval literature, is Professor of Comparative Literature at Sapienza University of Rome. Among his numerous books on Medieval literature and classics are Cambridge Chaucer Companion (1986), original essays by European and American scholars intended to introduce reader to Chaucer's work, a collection which he edited with Jill Mann; and Medieval and Pseudo-Medieval Literature (1984), another series of essays by medieval scholars, though subject matter is broader in including medieval European culture--this series edited with Anna Torti. In The Bible and its Rewritings (in Italian, 1997; trans. Anita Weston, 1999), Boitani anticipates The Gospel According to Shakespeare as he finds in Pericles' recognition of his daughter Marina a retelling of Mary Magdalene's recognition of resurrected Jesus near tomb in Gospel of John. The Genius to Improve an Invention: Literary Transitions (1999 in Italian; 2002 in English) complements previous Rewritings, continuing theme of recognition in Shakespeare as it discusses Hamlet and King Lear. In 2002, Boitani was awarded Feltrinelli Prize for Literary Criticism. Published in Italian in 2009, Il Vangelo Secondo Shakespeare was awarded 2010 De Sanctis Prize for literature. In this study, Boitani shows an incredible grasp of classical literature, medieval literature, Renaissance literature, and Bible as well as literary criticism, both major works of past and contemporary theory. He argues that in Hamlet and King Lear Christian message of faith, salvation, and peace is presented as if from a distance but that in romances the themes of transcendence, immanence, role of deity, resurrection, and epiphany are openly, if often obliquely, staged (xi). He relates plays to Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Parmenides, Gorgias, Virgil, Lucian, Marcus Aurelius, Dante, Appollonius, John Gower, and Christopher Marlowe (especially Doctor Faustus). The chapter on Hamlet focuses on change in Hamlet after his return from aborted voyage to England with pirates. Before that voyage, he was melancholy and indecisive, pretended to mad, and failed to act; after Hamlet's return, reader finds Shakespeare meditating on providence, on forgiveness, and on goodness and happiness, and ... doing so in Christian terms (2). Boitani points out that Hamlets pivotal speech in Act 5, Scene 2, when he tells Horatio that God is concerned with fall of a sparrow, is an allusion to Jesus' statement, Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to ground unperceived by your Father. When Hamlet continues that the is all, he is referring to Christian's trusting Providence as there's a divinity that shapes our ends. Boitani also notes that Let be with which Hamlet ends readiness speech means amen (20-21). The chapter on King Lear focuses on sacrifice, suffering, and purification--themes developed further in romances. …

Michael Lieb The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the BibleThe Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible. Edited by Michael Lieb, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts, and Christopher Rowlands. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xi+725 pp.

<i>Michael Lieb</i> The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible<i>The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible</i>. Edited by Michael Lieb, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts, and Christopher Rowlands. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xi+725 pp.

The Gospel According to Shakespeare by Piero Boitani (review)

Reviewed by: The Gospel According to Shakespeare by Piero Boitani Robin S. Stewart Piero Boitani, The Gospel According to Shakespeare, trans. Vittorio Montemaggi and Rachel Jacoff (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2013) xiii + 156 pp. Originally published in Italian in 2009 and awarded the prestigious De Sanctis prize the following year, Piero Boitani’s The Gospel According to Shakespeare is consciously tailored to appeal to a general audience. Much of its slim 145-page length consists of comprehensive plot summaries, a useful feature for the average reader unlikely to be familiar with Shakespeare’s late romances. In addition, as the author himself notes in his Preface to this English translation, the book “has little in common with contemporary Shakespeare criticism” and foregoes engagement with recent literary scholarship in favor of an intuitive essayistic style reminiscent of Eric Auerbach and Frank Kermode, an approach Boitani likens to “a classroom step-by-step lectura” (xiii). However, the modest size of Boitani’s book should not belie the ambition of his argument, which is that Shakespeare’s late romances are not just “old fashioned tales” casually engrafted with sacred themes and tropes, but in toto they constitute Shakespeare’s own Gospel, which, like those of the New Testament, activate a sense of wonder and affirm the miraculous in a way that cultivates something like Paul’s definition of faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11.1). Throughout his readings of Hamlet, King Lear, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, Boitani equates this Pauline faith (and state of grace that accompanies it) with attaining a providential view of human affairs. As he insists in his chapter on Hamlet, “to abandon oneself to Providence, being ready for death, which can come at any moment: this is the evangelical message” (21). Thus, in his overall argument Hamlet and King Lear function prophetically, “where Shakespeare’s New Testament is only announced and where faith, salvation, and peace are only glimpsed at from far away” (xi), as in Hamlet’s brief reflections on “the fall of a sparrow” and Lear’s fleeting joy at the prospect of reuniting with Cordelia to become “God’s spies.” In the final scenes of the romances, however, he finds “a plenitude—a grace—that is found only in the Gospels (and particularly in those of John and Luke) within the post-Resurrection scenes” (5). In Shakespeare it is this-worldly grace, marked by “repentance and forgiveness … [and] the hope of immanent transcendence” (73), made manifest through the plays’ scenes of familial restoration—in Pericles’s rediscovery of Marina and Thaisa, in Imogen’s return to Cymbeline and Posthumus, in Hermione’s resurrection, and in the realignment of affairs at the [End Page 210] conclusion of The Tempest. “The Good News that Shakespeare’s last plays bring us,” Boitani claims, “is that we can reach happiness on earth,” by which he means “to be reunited with one’s loved ones, to rediscover them and recognize them, constitutes true happiness” (8). Walking this tightrope between the sacred and secular, between the theological and dramatic elements of Shakespeare’s theater, generates Boitani’s most compelling readings and inspires useful insights on the interplay between art and faith. In his discussions of Hermione’s resurrection, he observes, “if we can believe, through the ‘suspension of disbelief’ that Coleridge says is necessary for the fruition of art … then Shakespeare would seem to suggest that we can also believe in the resurrection of the dead, the mystery and miracle preached by Christianity” (85–86). Throughout the book, Boitani pursues this interaction between dramatic art and faith by focusing on the concept of recognition, which can encompass both Aristotle’s notion of anagnorisis and the recognition of divinity in scriptural narratives—a subject that Boitani’s previous works, such as The Bible and its Rewritings, have dealt with extensively. His readings of Shakespeare’s recognition scenes—particularly between Pericles and Marina, and between the complex network of characters in the final scene of Cymbeline—are far and away the most breathtaking sections of the book, and through the act of recognition, Botani most convincingly connects...

The Walking Dead in Chaucer's Knight's Tale

The Walking Dead in Chaucer's <i>Knight's Tale</i>

Dante's 'Commedia': Theology as Poetry ed. by Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne (review)

Reviewed by: Dante's 'Commedia': Theology as Poetry ed. by Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne Julie Robarts Montemaggi, Vittorio and Matthew Treherne, eds, Dante's 'Commedia': Theology as Poetry (The William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante Studies), Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 2010; paperback; pp. 400; R.R.P. US$40.00; ISBN 9780268035198. Dante's 'Commedia': Theology as Poetry, edited by Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Traherne, contains eleven essays, an Introduction, and two Afterwords. It is the result of a 2003 conference held in Cambridge at which theologians and Dante scholars discussed 'the theological implications of Dante's poetic narrative' (p. 1) and the ways in which theological considerations could illuminate the Commedia as a literary text. It is a collection for a specialist audience, which would include scholars and graduate students of Dante, medieval literature, and theology. Robin Kirkpatrick's conversational opening essay 'Polemics of Praise: Theology as Text, Narrative and Rhetoric in Dante's Commedia', which frames the collection, seems to suggest that literary critics who find a place for first-order discourse in their engagement with texts (and the audience they write for) need not do so at the cost of critical or historical rigor, and that love must be the ethical basis of any critical tradition which has a claim on the future, as a response to the problem of what is the tenable posture of those of us who live off words. My short review of the essays places them in four thematic groups: Images, language, philosophy, and liturgy. Peter Hawkings sees the image of the smile as an important contribution made by the Commedia to subsequent religious iconography, while Paula Nasti considers Dante's intertwining of strands of medieval ecclesiology centred on caritas, and the bride of the Song of Songs as he creates his image of the true church in Paradise. Christian Moevs explores the recurring image of 'il punto che me vinse', the point of creation, and dilation or expansion of self-knowledge and knowledge of God. In addition to the focus on language in Kirkpatrick's essay, Vittorio Montemaggi explores Dante's conception of language as our means of both engaging in and expressing what is knowable and unknowable about God, while Theresa Federici presents Dante's self-fashioning as a scribe of God in the image of King David. Oliver Davies presents a reading of the Commedia from the perspective of systematic theology. Douglas Hedley explores Dante's neo-Platonism, and includes a reassessment of Romantic reception of the Commedia, while Piero Boitani considers Dante's notion of creation, of people and the world, and the ways in which the poetics of the Commedia encompass and surpass the work's classical philosophical and scriptural sources. [End Page 331] Matthew Treherne argues that Dante's innovation in the configuration of Purgatory and Heaven can be understood through the liturgical performance of the characters in those realms, respectively penitence and praise. Denys Turner proposes to read the poetry of the Commedia, in dialogue with the theological methods of Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart, as sacrament, seeking to 'effect what it signifies', especially in its apophatic mode. Dante scholarship for the non-dantista is often awe-inspiring in the way its critical discourses wrestle with the depth, breadth, and complexity of the Commedia. This collection is no exception. Julie Robarts Italian Studies, School of Languages and Linguistics The University of Melbourne Copyright © 2012 by the Author

Piero Boitani, Dante’s Poetry of the Donati, Maney Publishing for the Society for Italian Studies 2007 (The Barlow Lectures on Dante delivered at University College London, 17-18 March 2005. Occasional Papers, 7. Edited by John Lindon), V, 55 S

Piero Boitani, Dante’s Poetry of the Donati, Maney Publishing for the Society for Italian Studies 2007 (The Barlow Lectures on Dante delivered at University College London, 17-18 March 2005. Occasional Papers, 7. Edited by John Lindon), V, 55 S

Chaucer: An Oxford Guide. ed. Steve Ellis.

ANYONE who needs a guide to the Chaucerian terrain need not look very far these days. Of the three volumes of Oxford University Press's superb Guides to Chaucer series, Barry Windeatt's 1995 Troilus and Criseyde and A. J. Minnis's 1995 Shorter Poems can be printed on demand; Helen Cooper's Canterbury Tales (second edition 1996) is still in print. In 2005, Blackwell added A Concise Companion to Chaucer, ed. Corinne Saunders, to its list, where it keeps company Saunders’ Blackwell Guides to Criticism: Chaucer (2001) and a monumental Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown (2000). Gillian Rudd's Complete Critical Guide to Chaucer was published in 2001 by Routledge. Cambridge University Press produced a second edition of Piero Boitani and Jill Mann's Cambridge Companion to Chaucer in 2004; Withrop Wetherbee's guide to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales is also in its second edition from the press (2004). In 2005, Yale University Press produced a Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer.

:Discussion, Dialogue, and Development

Chapter 1 Gregorian Chant in Spain Chapter 2 The Shaping of Dante's Cosmos Chapter 3 Truthtelling and Satire in the Trial of Renard Chapter 4 Wayward Wives: Fauvel Bibliotheque Nationale de France MS. fr. 146 Chapter 5 Heinrich der Teichner: The Didactic Poet as a Troublemaker, Whistle-Blower, and Social Rebel Chapter 6 Squire Janklyn's Legs and Feet: Physiognomy, Social Class and Fantasy in The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale Chapter 7 Poes-ing in the Dark: An Irish Presence in Early Modern British Literature Chapter 8 Father's Perfection Shall be Your Blemish: The 3rd Earl of Essex and the Development of a Legend Part 9 Review Notices Chapter 10 Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, 2nd ed. Chapter 11 Joyce Tally Lionarons, ed., Old English Literature in its Manuscript Context Chapter 12 Hillberti Cenomanensis Episcopi, Vita Marie Egiptiace Chapter 13 Sorensen Kaspersen, ed. Images of Cult and Devotion: Function and Reception of Christian Images in Medieval and Post-Medieval Europe Chapter 14 Richard Marsden, ed., The Cambridge Old English Reader Chapter 15 Darren Oldridge, Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead and other Matters of Fact Chapter 16 Deanne Williams, The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare Chapter 17 Lynn Staley, Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II Part 18 Books Received

Winged words: flight in poetry and history

Flight has always fascinated human minds, but until a century ago it remained a dream - the exclusive domain of birds, gods, and mythological heroes. From the myths of the ancients to the poetry of Pindar and Yeats, Winged Words traces the imprint of the human impulse to fly from premodern times up to the age of terrorism in both literature and history. Piero Boitani begins his analysis with an account of how the myths of Pegasus and Icarus have persisted from classical to twentieth-century politics and literature. He then takes up the figure of Hermes; the roles of halcyons and eagles in classical, biblical, and later literatures; and literary responses to Pieter Brueghel's The Fall of Icarus. Homing in on modern figures and concerns, Boitani also offers a fascinating discussion of author - pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery and concludes with a meditation on the flight of the hijacked airliners on 9/11. Throughout, Winged Words brings a remarkable range of men of action, politicians, theologians, writers, and artists into dialogue with each other: Shakespeare with T. S. Eliot, Horace with Ovid, Leonardo with Milton, Leopardi with Mallarme, Saint-Exupery with Faulkner and Rilke, and the Ulysses of Homer with the Ulysses of Dante. Ultimately, by showing how writers and fliers have looked to the ancients for inspiration, Boitani testifies to the modern relevance of poetry and the classics.

The Genius to Improve an Invention: Literary Transitions (review)

Piero Boitani. The Genius to Improve an Invention: Literary Transitions. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. xiv + 151 pp. Cloth, $35; paper, $18.

"Little Troilus ": Heroides 5 and Its Ovidian Contexts in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

"Little Troilus":Heroides 5 and Its Ovidian Contexts in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde Jamie C. Fumo When considering Chaucer's debt to Ovid's Heroides, it is common for our minds to fix upon that work promised by a sheepish Chaucer in the first lines of the narrative implosion that is the epilogue of Troilus and Criseyde: "And gladlier I wol write, yif yow leste, / Penolope&eumls trouthe and good Alceste" (5.1777-78).1 Chaucer appears to have relished the tension availed by the Heroides as intertext within his work—its capacity to subvert, as it does the Virgilian veneer of the Dido story in the House of Fame, or be subverted, as it is by Chaucer's flattened and de-individualized reworking of the collection of complaints in the Legend of Good Women. It is doubtful, had Chaucer agreed with the many modern readers who find the Heroides to be thin, repetitive, even boring exercises, that he would have rechannelled them into his own poetic world as strikingly as he did, and in such writerly environs as Venus's temple and Alcestis's garden. Rather, I am inclined to think that Chaucer found many of his own interests reflected in what one of the most important modern defenders of the Heroides has called "a mirror of the relative nature of reality," wherein "[t]he world of myth is no longer reality or a symbolic reflection of reality, but to a large degree projections or extensions of individual minds" and each event "becomes a multi-faceted thing depending on who sees, experiences, and recounts it."2 Since Edgar Finley Shannon brought to light more than seventy years ago Chaucer's infusion of Criseyde's psychological process of falling in [End Page 278] love with motifs from Helen's Ovidian heroid to Paris,3 much of Chaucer's intertextual treatment of individual heroides within Troilus and Criseyde —a notably epistolary poem itself—has gone unexplored. However, in the intervening decades, our appreciation of the special affinity between Chaucer and Ovid has been greatly advanced by Richard L. Hoffman, John M. Fyler, and Michael A. Calabrese, among others, and our recognition of the "deep classicism" and complex intertextuality that permeates the Troilus preeminently among Chaucer's writings has been enhanced by the important studies of Winthrop Wetherbee and John V. Fleming.4 The present essay re-approaches the question of Chaucer's relationship to Ovid, as well as that of Chaucer's allusive style, by investigating the function of Heroides 5, Oenone's letter to Paris, in the design and structure of the Troilus. Though numerous critics have made passing note of Chaucer's curious use of Heroides 5 in two isolated moments in books 1 and 4 of the Troilus, and several have commented upon the irony embedded in these outof-context allusions to an Ovidian text that describes sexual betrayal and forecasts the fall of Troy,5 no one has recognized Chaucer's sustained and allusive use of Heroides 5 and its function as a metanarrative structural device in the design of the poem. The intratextual energy of Heroides 5 within Ovid's own body of writings has likewise been overlooked, and regrettably so, for it is largely this aspect of the Oenone story that attracts Chaucer's creative interest and structures his own rewriting of it. In the hope of better illuminating the often shadowy contours of the Ovidian contexts of the Troilus, my approach is twopronged: (1) to assess the details of Chaucer's reworking of Oenone's letter where it is explicitly cited and (2) to gauge the rich multivalence of the Ovidian text, its more implicit and deeply situated relevance to the design of Chaucer's poem, as an intertextual backdrop to many of the special formal and narrative qualities of the Troilus. Heroides 5 as intertext, I would like to suggest, is a microcosm, an epitome, of the action of Chaucer's poem. The Ovidian text acts in Chaucer's poem as does the symbol of "Troilus" in early tradition as Piero Boitani describes it: like Troilus—"little Troy," in his youth the image of Troy's vitality and in his death the...

The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature: The J. A. W. Bennett Memorial Lectures ed. by Piero Boitani and Anna Torti

The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature: The J. A. W. Bennett Memorial Lectures ed. by Piero Boitani and Anna Torti

That Dangerous Figure: Charles Lamb and the Critics by Joseph E. Riehl Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide by Michael O'Neill (review)

TES,31, 200 TES,31, 200 The tension slackens slightly in the next section, on 'Victorian Evaluations'. Alison Milbank, author of a promising DanteandtheVictorians, chooses as her topic the poetical and critical fortune of the Paolo and Francescaepisode: after a very good opening comparison with AnnaKarenina and the outline of an interestingplot to come, however, her article (on 'Dante and the Victorian Fate of Tragedy') becomes fragmentary. From Ralph Pite, who published a stimulating book, The Circleof OurVision: Dante'sPresence in EnglishRomantic Poetry, one might expect an incisive essay on, say, Tennyson. Instead, we get a well-constructed and argued piece on a less fascinatingtopic, E. H. Plumptre'stranslationof Dante as a mirror of Victorian 'Faith', i.e., of nineteenth-century attitudes to religious and cultural doubt. In Part iv, 'Modern Revisions', the stage is taken by Pound, MacNeice, and Beckett. Matthew Reynolds's contribution on the first of these is elegant; Steve Ellis's on MacNeice's Autumn Sequeloriginal; Hugh Haughton's on (late) Beckett pleasantly surprising.The picture the three together offer of Dante's afterlife in Modernism, oscillating as it does between quotation, form, and existential perspective,suggeststhereis stilla lot of workto be done on the subject. Part vi opens with Nick Havely's agile and perceptive study of Gloria Naylor's novel, Linden Hills, which is examined in the context of other Dante-inspiredAfroAmerican works such as Ellison's Invisible Man and LeRoi Jones's TheSystemof Dante'sHell(aswell as the Nigerian Wole Soyinka'spoem, 'Purgatory').In a sense, Havely's essay gives a poignant direction to the entire collection, but the two concluding articles on Walcott and Heaney, by Mark Balfour and Bernard O'Donoghue, open up truly new vistas. The former'sreading of Dante's lesson in Walcott'snarrativepoetrywould get my prize. 'In the middle of thejourney through my life', proclaims 'Prelude' ( 948), the firstpiece in Walcott's Collected Poems.His latestcollection, TheBounty (1997), opens with an allusionto Paradiso, xxxiiI. UNIVERSITY OF ROME, 'LA SAPIENZA' PIERO BOITANI ThatDangerous Figure.Charles LambandtheCritics. ByJOSEPH E. RIEHL. (Literary Criticismin Perspective)Columbia, SC: Camden House. 1998. xi + 208 pp. ?45;$55 Literature of theRomantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide. Ed. by MICHAEL O'NEILL. Oxford:Clarendon Press. I998. viii + 4 Opp. 1I6.99. Not so long ago Jacques Derrida was asked why he had not written on Samuel Beckett.Derrida'sanswerwas characteristicallysuggestive(somemight sayevasive): whilst the idea of working on Beckett was attractive- here after all was a writer who seemed to share so many of the critic'spreoccupations - one would have to admit that the texts themselves were so elegantly deconstructive that additional deconstructiveworkwould seem unnecessary,not to say banal.Joseph E. Riehl, in his timely survey of critical readings of Charles Lamb runs the risk of drawing a similar conclusion. Dismissed for many years as 'trivial', 'sentimental', and 'regressive', everything that academic criticism with its dedication to the high modernistvalues of seriousness,austerityand moral rigouropposed, Lamb and his enthusiastswere all but silenced. It took a new generation of critics, interested in probing beneath the surface,to discoverthat Lamb was, afterall, a 'deeply serious' writerand thereforeworthyof consideration.Now of course,we have 'Post-Modern Lamb' and attention has turned towards what Lamb once called 'that dangerous figure -irony'. Yet with the exception of Seamus Perry in his excellent article The tension slackens slightly in the next section, on 'Victorian Evaluations'. Alison Milbank, author of a promising DanteandtheVictorians, chooses as her topic the poetical and critical fortune of the Paolo and Francescaepisode: after a very good opening comparison with AnnaKarenina and the outline of an interestingplot to come, however, her article (on 'Dante and the Victorian Fate of Tragedy') becomes fragmentary. From Ralph Pite, who published a stimulating book, The Circleof OurVision: Dante'sPresence in EnglishRomantic Poetry, one might expect an incisive essay on, say, Tennyson. Instead, we get a well-constructed and argued piece on a less fascinatingtopic, E. H. Plumptre'stranslationof Dante as a mirror of Victorian 'Faith', i.e., of nineteenth-century attitudes to religious and cultural doubt. In Part iv, 'Modern Revisions', the stage is taken by Pound, MacNeice, and Beckett. Matthew Reynolds's contribution on the first of these is elegant; Steve Ellis's...

Mediaevalitas: Reading the Middle Ages ed. by Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (review)

PiERO BOITANi and anna TORTi, eds., Mediaevalitas: Reading the Middle Ages. The J.A.W. Bennett Memorial Lectures, Ninth Series, Perugia 1995. Cambridge, Brewer, 1996. Pp. x, 183. isbn: 0-85991-488-7. $71. In recent years the term 'reading' in medieval studies has been redefined and expanded to act as a kind ofshorthand for the processes oftextual transmission and reception, as well as intertextuality and literary influence. Employing this shorthand, Piero Boitani and Anna Torti present Mediaevalitas: Reading the MiddleAges, a collection ofpapers from the J.A.W. Bennett Memorial Symposium in 1995. In this anthology they broach the rather broad subject of how medieval texts and culture have been 'read' and represented on an international scale, from the Middle Ages to the present. The title, perhaps, is a shade misleading. Although the collection does, as the title suggests, involve material from avariety ofliterary traditions, the anthology isweighed very heavily towards medieval and modern English texts, particularly Chaucer; it is scholars ofEnglish who will find the collection most useful. The first half of the book supplies four interesting readings of Chaucer and his contemporaries. Lisa J. Kiser demonstrates how Chaucer, Alain de Lille and Jean de Meun present three significantly different views ofa single medieval trope, Nature as a female figure. Adding another layer of reading, she brings to the discussion the philosophy ofecofeminism and examines its (somewhat dangerous) association with the Dame Nature tradition. In the second discussion of Chaucer as a reader, Robert R. Edwards discusses how Chaucer's hermeneutics respond to Boccaccio and Petrarch in the Clerk's Tale. The collection then switches from Chaucer reading to reading Chaucer as Julia Boffey deftly negotiates the tricky business oftrying to ascertain his impact on Charles ofOrleans, while exploring the issue ofinfluence and intertextuality amongst French and English medieval authors generally. Sheila Delany presents a somewhat more restricted example ofreading Chaucer in theAugustinian friar Osbern Bokenham's pious re-appropriation of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, his reclamation ofthe hagiographie genre in his genuine collection offemale saints lives, Legends ofHoly Women, from Chaucer's courtly parody. The fifth essay in the collection makes the transition from medieval to modern readings ofmedieval texts. In it, Carol Meale considers how books and texts moved through the life of one woman, Alice Chaucer, and how her reading habits can be interpreted as a part of female participation in medieval literate culture. The latter halfofthe anthologyshifts to the subjects ofpost-medieval authors and critics reading medieval texts and, more broadly, medievalism in general. Leading this section is Thomas P. Roches effort to correct what he considers to be critical misreadings of Spenser's allegorical use ofthe Four Daughters of God to refashion political history in theFairie Queene. Next, Stefania D'Agata D'Ottavi provides arefreshingexpansion beyond the literaryfocus ofthe anthologyin her discussion ofBlake's artisticrendering ofChaucer's pilgrims in the image ofhis own (perhaps regressive) 'scholastic' world view. Angelo Righetti provides a more general discussion ofBrownings medievalism, in particular his readings of Dante in Sordello. Reading medieval culture is brought into the twentieth century in the last two contributions to Mediaevalitas, where ARTHURIANA 8.1 (1998) ARTHURIANA Toshiyuki Takamiya and Joerg O. Fichte examine Japanese and German reworkings of the Arthurian tradition. Aside from the aforementioned bias towards English literature, Boitani andTorti's collection does an adequate job of fulfilling its mission statement of 'reading the middle ages.' Still, given the broadness of the subject matter, not to mention the vagueness of the title, the book might have benefited from a more detailed introduction, including an elaboration of their understanding of the concept of 'reading' (it contains only avery briefpreface). Similarly, some selections in the volume use the term 'reading' simply as a hook for basic textual criticism without considering the concept carefully—although some ofthis criticism is interesting as such. Only a few contributors (Edwards, Boffey and Meale especially) demonstrate true sensitivity to the way 'reading' as a concept folds in on itself—enveloping the reception, interpretation and representation of texts or ideas. Nevertheless, whether by good fortune or good design, this anthology does a decentjob oflinkingvarieties ofreading regarding the Middle Ages, however loosely. JANINE ROGERS McGiIl University ...

The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (review)

Reviews173 The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature, by Piero Boitani; xii and 330 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, $69.95. Piero Boitani, author of Engluh Medieval Narrative in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries and editor of the essay collection Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, has long provided readers with literary and generic contexts in which to discuss and appreciate medieval literature. In The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature, Boitani puts together ten essays, some of which were previously published but are revised for the present volume, on works, passages, and episodes diat confront tragedy and sublimity. The collection focuses mainly on Dante, and all the essays seem to be building, like the Comedia itself, toward a study of Dante's sublime language during the final episodes with Beatrice, St. Bernard, die Virgin, and God at the end of the Paradiso. Chapter one focuses on Chaucer and the complexity of the old man in the Pardoner's Tale, a depiction Boitani argues is "supremely and 'sublimely' tragic." The second chapter, one of the most instructive in the book, contrasts the "meta-history" of Dante's story of Ugolino to Chaucer's starker, more universally tragic depiction of the same story in the Monk's Tale. Chaucer's version, says Boitani, recalls "black and white film ofscenes from a concentration camp" (p. 51). Chapter three turns to the oxymoronic language of Petrarchan love and its manifestation in Chaucer's Troilus. Boitani then focuses on the natural imagery of sunsets, flowers, and leaves in, mainly, Inferno II and the Troilus. Chapters five and six trace Biblical, Classical, and Medieval recognition scenes as contexts for the many dramatic recognition episodes in the Comedia. Chapter seven traces Marian lyrics in various authors including Chaucer, while the last two chapters provide the book's main focus, a study of the Dantesque sublime in the final cantos of the Paradiso, as Dante traces his steps toward recognition of God. Boitani makes very specific distinctions about the goals and audience of this book, and the reader or scholar would do well to keep them in mind while reading or deciding to read this collection. The book is "meant to be read by students" (p. ix) , and Boitani provides much plot summary and many quotations . Chaucerians probably do not need a close comparison of the Pardoner's old man and Hemingway's Santiago to see the distinct medievalness of Chaucer's depiction. But the comparison might help teachers provide a context for students new to the Middle Ages, and all readers will be impressed by Boitani's broad range, from Vergil to Eliot, Goethe, and Seamus Heaney. The chapters read like a set of lectures. Sometimes it is wearying to be dragged through the poetry word by word, and students will most likely want to put down the glosses and go read the primary texts for themselves. But like any good gloss or lecture, the book seems content to make us do just that. 1 74Philosophy and Literature But the critic and die researcher wanting, and needing, to engage with die critical issues of our time will find much less here. We find no gender studies, no sexual-textual politics, no new-historical contexts. Indeed, the book has no argument or diesis at all. Rather, it seeks to locate the tragic and sublime and make the reader sensitive to it and, no doubt, to the beauty of the poetry. Some critics will find this dangerously outdated and even politically irresponsible, beauty and the "quality" implied by sublimity being oppressive constructs of one kind or anodier. Odiers may find the absence ofpolitics a refreshing boon. In short, the book is quite frankly about an Italian professor's love for Dante, and Boitani clearly explains his authorial status: "any Italian critic must sooner or later confront his greatest poet . . . and that moment has now come for me" (p. xi). Readers are forewarned in the preface, and diey will have to decide whedier to witness this important moment, or these several moments, of confrontation that Professor Boitani has bound together. Whitman CollegeMichael Calabrese Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania, by Avital Ronell; 175 pp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska...

Religion in the Poetry and Drama of the Late Middle Ages in England ed. by Piero Boitani, Anna Torti

Religion in the Poetry and Drama of the Late Middle Ages in England ed. by Piero Boitani, Anna Torti