American Dante Bibliography for 1996

Christopher Kleinhenz

This bibliography is intended to include all the Dante translations published in this country in 1996 and all Dante studies and reviews published in 1996 that are in any sense American. To assist with this and future issues of Dante Studies the Council of the Dante Society has commissioned a special team of associate bibliographers to assume responsibility for the annotation of the items listed herein. The Society is very grateful to the following scholars for their invaluable expertise and for their continuing contributions to the journal: Fabian Alfie (The University of Arizona), Stanley Benfell (Brigham Young University), Jessica Levenstein (Princeton University), Otfried Lieberknecht (Berlin, Germany), Christian Moevs (The University of Notre Dame), Guy P. Raffa (The University of Texas at Austin), and Lawrence Warner (The University of Pennsylvania). (Their initials will follow their abstracts.)

• Translations
• Studies
• Reviews

 

Translations

Alighieri, Dante. De Vulgari Eloquentia. Edited and translated by Steven Botterill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xxix, 105 p. (Cambridge Medieval Classics, 5)

This new English translation (with the Latin text on facing pages) follows Mengaldo’s 1968 edition and provides a very useful Introduction to the work. Contents: Introduction (ix-xxvi); Select bibliography (xxvii-xxviii); A note on the text (xxix); De vulgari eloquentia. Book I (2-45); Book II (46-89); Explanatory notes (90-101); Index (102-105).

Alighieri, Dante. Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy: Verse Translation and Commentary. 2 vols. Volume 1: Inferno. Italian Text and Verse Translation; Volume 2: Inferno. Commentary. Translated by Mark Musa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. vii, 335 + 472 p. (Italian Masterpiece Editions.)

This English translation contains more than 500 revisions from previous editions (e.g., see Dante Studies CIII, 140; CIV, 164; CV, 138). The second volume presents a much fuller and greatly expanded commentary than that appearing in previous editions of Musa’s translation and concludes with a bibliography of “Works Cited” (459-463) and an “Index” (465-472).

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Hell - Purgatory - Heaven. A Terza Rima Version by Peter Dale. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1996. xxiii, 422 p. (Distributed in the United States by Dufour Editions, Chester Springs, Pennsylvania.)

Contents: Dante: A Brief Life (vii-viii); Introduction (ix-xxiii); A Short Bibliography (xxiii); Hell (1-138); Purgatory (139-278); Heaven (279-414); The Illustrations (416); Index of Proper Names (417-422).

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Inferno. Translated by John Ciardi. New York: Modern Library, 1996. vi, 295 p.

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Purgatorio. Translated by John Ciardi. New York: Modern Library, 1996. vi, 364 p.

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Paradiso. Translated by John Ciardi. New York: Modern Library, 1996. vi, 363 p.

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Volume 1. Inferno. Edited and Translated by Robert M. Durling. Introduction and Notes by Ronald L. Martinez and Robert M. Durling. Illustrations by Robert Turner. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. xviii, 654 p.

This new prose translation features the Italian text on the facing page and copious notes and excursuses in the section on “Additional Notes.” Contents: Preface (v-vii); Maps (xiii-xvi); Abbreviations (xvii-xviii); Introduction (3-24); Inferno (25-549); Additional Notes: 1. Autobiography in the Divine Comedy (After Canto 2) (551-552); 2. The Body Analogy, 1 (After Canto 11) (552-555); 3. The Old Man of Crete (Canto 14) (555-557); 4. Dante and Brunetto Latini (Canto 15) (557-559); 5. Dante and Homosexuality (Canto 16) (559-560); 6. Geryon’s Spiral Flight (Canto 17) (560-563); 7. Boniface’s Church (Canto 19) (563-564); 8. Dante and the Classical Soothsayers (After Canto 20) (564-567); 9. Autobiography in Cantos 21-23 (567-568); 10. Time and the Thief (Cantos 24-25) (568-571); 11. Ulysses’ Last Voyage (Canto 26) (571-573); 12. The Poetry of Schism (Canto 28) (573-576); 13. The Body Analogy, 2: The Metaphorics of Fraud (After Canto 30) (576-577); 14. Dante’s Political Giants (Canto 31 (577-578); 15. Ugolino (Cantos 32-33) (578-580); 16. Christ in Hell (After Canto 34) (580-583); Textual Variants (585-586); Bibliography (587-609); Index of Italian, Latin, and Other Words Discussed in the Notes (611-613); Index of Passages Cited in the Notes (614-624); Index of Proper Names in the Notes (625-646); Index of Proper Names in the Text and Translation (647-654).

Studies

Antonello, Pierpaolo. “Dante e Montale: la voce, l’allegoria, la trascendenza.” In Quaderni d’italianistica, XVII, No. 1 (primavera, 1996), 109-120.

Against the background of numerous critical works on the relationship between Dante and Montale, the author examines the influence of the former on the latter as seen primarily in Montale’s lexical borrowings.

Astell, Ann W. Chaucer and the Universe of Learning. Ithaca, New York, and London: Cornell University Press, 1996. xvi, 254 p.

The author “examines the conventions of medieval learning familiar to Chaucer and discovers in two related topical outlines, those of the seven planets and of the divisions of philosophy, an important key. Assimilated to each other in a kind of transparent overlay, these two outlines, which were frequently joined in the literature with which Chaucer was familiar, accommodate the actual structural divisions of the Tales (in the order in which they appear in the Ellesmere manuscript), define the story blocks as topical units, and show the pilgrim’s progress from London to Canterbury to be simultaneously a planetary pilgrimage and a philosophical journey of the soul. The two patterns, Astell maintains, locate Chaucer’s work in relation to that of both Gower and Dante, philosophical poets who shared Chaucer’s relatively novel status as lay clerk, and who were, like him, members of the educated, secular bourgeoisie. The whole of the Canterbury Tales is thus revealed to be in dialogue with Gower’s Confessio and Dante’s Paradiso. Indeed, it represents an elaborately detailed response to the images used, and the stories related, in Dante’s successive heavens.” Contents: Preface (ix-xiii); Abbreviations (xv-xvi); Introduction (1-31); 1. Chaucer and the Division of Clerks (32-60); 2. The Divisions of Knowledge (61-91); 3. From Saturn to the Sun: Planetary Pilgrimage in Fragments I and IX (92-118); 4. Solar Alchemy in Fragments II and VIII (119-144); 5. Mercurial Marriage in Fragments III-IV-V: Philosophic Misogamy and the Trivium of Woman’s Knowledge (145-178); 6. Chaucer’s Mercurial Muse: Fragment VII and the Causes of Books (179-199); 7. Lunar “Practique”: Law, Medicine, and Theology in Fragments VI and X (200-220); Conclusion (221-229); Bibliography (231-248); Index (249-254).

Barolini, Teodolinda. “Minos’s Tail: The Labor of Devising Hell (Inferno 5.1-24).” In Romanic Review, LXXXVII, No. 4 (November, 1996), 437-454.

Employing the “detheologized,” or narrative approach to the Comedy that she advances in The Undivine Comedy, Barolini closely examines Dante’s depiction of the pilgrim’s encounter with Minos at the beginning of Inferno V, reflecting on the ways that Dante deploys the “poetics of the new” in his construction of the Minos episode, and considering the Comedy’s transformation of the restrained Minos found in the sixth book of Vergil’s Aeneid. Dante’s infernal judge is characterized by two main features: his bestiality and the juridical language used to describe his function. His composite nature—his judgment is as infallible as his aspect is brutish—connotes the radical difference between Vergil’s afterworld and Dante’s hell. “Minos’s tail is an apt emblem for the transition from the homogenous decorum of Vergilian alta tragedìa to the unfettered transgressiveness of comedìa and the vision it entails, a vision that plumbs the depths of degradation and scales heights of sublimity equally unknown to the Aeneid.” Minos’s hybridity, moreover, denotes the deliberate stylistic disjunctiveness of Dante’s mixed style: “the figuration of Minos, then, reflects and embodies the radical stylistic choices inherent in the genre comedìa.” [JL]

Barolsky, Paul. “The Visionary Art of Michelangelo in the Light of Dante.” In Dante Studies, CXIV (1996), 1-14.

Although Michelangelo’s profound indebtedness as painter and sculptor to Dante is well known, inadequate attention has been paid to the fact that the principal Dantesque episodes in Michelangelo’s art were all inspired by visions in the Comedy. In this essay, it is suggested that an understanding of Michelangelo’s allusions to Dante enriches our understanding of his own visionariness. [PB]

Barricelli, Jean-Pierre. “Dante: Inferno I in the Visual Arts.” In Dante Studies, CXIV (1996), 15-39.

Organizes the modes of visual interpretation of the Comedy into four categories—the narrative, the affective, the personal, and the ideological—and proceeds to discuss a number of artistic representations of Inferno I (with illustrations) by artists, from the Middle Ages (manuscript illuminations) and Renaissance (Botticelli) to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: e.g., Anton Koch, Gustave Doré, Alberto Mazzetti, Barry Moser, Romano Lucacchini, Renzo Zacchetti, Renato Guttuso, Enzo Babini, Amos Nattini, Peter Cornelius, Francis Phillipps, William Blake, Jerzy Nowakowsky, Salvador Dalí, Tom Phillips, Luigi Strazzabosco, Slauca Petrovich-Sredovic, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Barricelli, Jean-Pierre. “Dante in the Arts: A Survey.” In Dante Studies, CXIV (1996), 79-93.

Provides an extensive overview of the influence that Dante’s Comedy had on the visual arts (painting, woodcuts, sculpture, manuscript illumination, book illustration) and music (symphonies, tone-poems, musical settings of verse, opera).

Beal, Rebecca S. “Bonaventure, Dante and the Apocalyptic Woman Clothed with the Sun.” In Dante Studies, CXIV (1996), 209-228.

Cantos XII-XIV of Paradiso complicate an iconography established in Canto X, where Beatrice figures the woman from Apocalypse 12, clothed with the sun and crowned with twelve stars. The second and third crowns of teachers invoke interpretations of the Apocalyptic Woman in the Marian and contemplative traditions, particularly as these are illustrated in St. Bonaventure’s sermons and in his Hexaëmeron. [RSB]

Biow, Douglas. Mirabile Dictu: Representations of the Marvelous in Medieval and Renaissance Epic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. viii, 199 p. (Stylus: Studies in Medieval Culture.)

“Mirabile Dictu covers in six separate chapters the works of Virgil, Dante, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser. Its broad aim is to provide a select cross-section of works in the Middle Ages and Renaissance in order systematically to examine and compare for the first time the marvelous in the light of genre (epic), of literary and critical theory (both past and present), and of historically and culturally determined representational practices. [The author] organizes this volume around the literary topos of the bleeding branch through which a metamorphosed person speaks. In each chapter the author takes this ‘marvelous event’ as his starting point for a broad-ranging comparison of the several poets who employed the image. Mirabile Dictu offers not only an insightful survey of the literary connections among this group of important poets, but also a useful point of departure for scholars and students intrigued by the re-use of epic conventions, by the peculiar role of ‘marvelous’ events in dramatic poetry, and by the later history of classical literature.” Contents: Preface (vii-viii); Introduction (1-11); 1. Virgil’s Aeneid: Marvels, Violence, and Narrative Self-Consciousness (13-35); 2. Dante: From Ignorance to Knowledge (37-64); 3. The Value of Marvels (65-93); 4. Ariosto, Power, and the Desire for Totality (95-121); 5. Individuals, Communities, and the Kinds of Marvels Told (123-154); 6. A Spenserian Conclusion: Purity and Danger (155-171); Epilogue (173-175); Bibliography (177-191); Index (193-199).

Bolles, Nancy Louise. “The Satanic Vision of the Marquis De Sade.” In Dissertation Abstracts International, LVI, No. 7 (January, 1996), 2674. Doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1995, 267 p.

“In his revolt against society and, in particular, against Christianity, Sade’s Justine cycle appears to be a negative interpretation of the Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. ... Dante’s system of punishing vice in the Inferno is inverted in Sade’s works: virtuous characters are punished by being symbolically dragged to hell by the satanic libertines. The physical descent in the Inferno parallels the libertines’ descent into utter depravity in Sade’s novels.”

Botterill, Steven. “Dante’s Poetics of the Sacred Word.” In Philosophy and Literature, XX, No. 1 (April, 1996), 154-162.

Investigates the value placed on eloquence in the Comedy. While the infernal use of the “parola ornata”—the verbal dexterity of a Pier della Vigna, Jason, or Ulysses—plainly points to the moral and intellectual failings of the sinning speaker, Dante does not, in fact, distrust eloquence altogether. Rather, Dante demonstrates, particularly in Paradiso, that he credits the authority of poetic language when it is placed on a foundation of divinely sanctioned meaning. The discourse of Bernard of Clairvaux in Paradiso XXXI-XXXIII exemplifies such holy speech; its sacredness derives from its accordance with divine truth. Botterill repudiates recent arguments which maintain Dante’s skeptical stance toward the efficacy of poetic language. Dante may recognize the limits of human language—he and his contemporaries are fully aware of the fallen status of humanity and humanity’s efforts—, yet the third cantica, with its numerous neologisms, pushes these limits as far as possible and ultimately redraws the boundaries of poetic speech. Paradiso confidently demonstrates its “sacred eloquence;” the cantica derives its authority directly from the poet’s literary practice and theological beliefs. [JL]

Bryden, Mary. “No Stars without Stripes: Beckett and Dante.” In Romanic Review, LXXXVII, No. 4 (November, 1996), 541-556.

Samuel Beckett first encountered Dante as a student at Trinity College, and he remained a student of the Comedy throughout his life. Beckett seems to have been particularly drawn to the Purgatorio, and the notion of the Purgatorial journey “provides many points of comparison between Dante and Beckett” (543). Ultimately, it was Dante’s ante-Purgatory that most appealed to Beckett: a realm of waiting and of unstructured movement. Like the characters met by Dante the Pilgrim in his journey through Purgatory, many of Beckett’s characters find themselves on a journey whose consummation is in the future, as they are forced to wait, to suffer, and to hope for something to come. Unlike Dante’s Purgatory, however, the sufferings and delays of Beckett’s world seem capricious and inexplicable. Even though Beckett’s characters, like Dante’s, hope for the future, they are skeptical of any traditional visions of celestial bliss, which threaten to enforce a “God-driven” stasis. [SB]

Caferro, William. “Dante and the Problem of Byzantium.” In The Unbounded Community: Papers in Christian Ecumenism in Honor of Jaroslav Pelikan, edited by William Caferro and Duncan G. Fisher (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 93-111.

Discusses Dante’s views toward Byzantium as found in the Comedy, with particular reference to the Sicilian Vespers (instigated in part by Emperor Michael VIII Palealogus), to the Second Crusade (and the treacherous behavior of the Byzantines) and to the Emperor Justinian, and comments on Dante’s awareness of Byzantium through the Italian chroniclers (Villani, Malispini), and of various theological debates.

Cahill, Courtney. “The Limitations of Difference in Paradiso XIII’s Two Arts: Reason and Poetry.” In Dante Studies, CXIV (1996), 245-269.

Closely examines the role of difference—or, in the language of the Commedia, the “art” of distinguishing—as it appears in both an aesthetic/artistic and a philosophical context in Paradiso xiii. More specifically, it discusses how particular sections of St. Thomas Aquinas’s speech in Paradiso xiii reflect Dante’s own concerns regarding two issues that pervade the entire cantica: first, the ability of man’s intellect and reason to understand divinity; and second, Dante’s ability as a poet or artista to render Paradise through a language of difference. In this much under-examined canto, Dante elucidates both the necessity for, and the limitations of, a human reason and a human art that are based on difference through subtle allusions to Ovid’s Metamorphoses (in particular, the Daedalus and Icarus episode as it appears in Book 8), as well as to his own portrait of Ulysses in Inferno xxvi and to his representation of nature (“Natura”) in Paradiso viii and xxx. By rendering simultaneously the positive and negative aspects of an artistic and philosophical “art” of difference, Dante revisits the fundamental paradox that he confronts throughout the Paradiso: the difference that allows him to understand and describe Paradise (and thus to be a consummate artista), is the same difference that renders him imperfect. [CC]

The Cambridge History of Italian Literature. Edited by Peter Brand and Lino Pertile. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xxxiv, 701 p.

In Chapter 4 of this one-volume history Lino Pertile presents a general overview of the life and works of Dante (pp. 39-69). In Chapter 7—”Minor Writers”—Steven Botterill discusses the fourteenth-century commentators on Dante’s poem (pp. 125-127).

Cantor, Paul A. “The Uncanonical Dante: The Divine Comedy and Islamic Philosophy.” In Philosophy and Literature, XX, No. 1 (April, 1996), 138-153.

Argues for understanding Dante as an author “canonical in his importance” yet “uncanonical in his thinking,” whose indebtedness to Islamic thought is emblematic for the “tensions, contradictions, and conflicts” characterizing Western culture, and thus partly invalidates the views of modern critics of the Western Canon who brandish the alleged Eurocentricity of this Canon, but also contradicts modern defenders who try to read Dante’s work orthodoxically by ignoring its non-Western components. The argument is based on the account of Limbo in Inferno IV, where the initial description of its inhabitants as suffering “duol sanza martìri” (v. 28) is dismissed as a “deliberate rhetorical strategy on Dante’s part,” meant only to appease the orthodox among his readers, whereas his further presentation of the great poets of antiquity as “neither sad nor joyous” (cf. v. 84) reveals that they “are not suffering at all in Limbo, but have achieved a state of emotional equanimity” which, especially in the case of the philosophers, is reminiscent of a passage in Plato’s Apology (41a-41c) where the idea of an afterlife spent in the company of earlier great philosophers is hailed as “inconceivable happiness.” The presence of Muslims in Dante’s Limbo, who were neither born before the Christian era nor had a geographic excuse for not converting to Christianity, is assessed as another, even more daringly unorthodox element of Dante’s account—particularly in the case of Averroës, “the most feared and hated thinker in the Christian Middle Ages.” His presence is interpreted on the background of his doctrine of the unity of the intellectus possibilis, that is, his “paradoxical claim” that all human individuals by apprehending rational and eternal truths share a single and eternal intellect from which the immortality of the soul can be derived, as a sort of supra-individual “species immortality” independent from individual actions and beliefs and comprising also, in the case of philosophers, the afterlife of their thought which in written form transgresses the boundaries of time. Placing Averroës regardless of his religion in Limbo, and presenting him there in eternal conversation with other philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, Dante thus conceives his Limbo as “an allegorical representation of Averroës’s idea of the Possible Intellect,” a metaphor for what Averroës meant by the immortality of human thought.” [OL]

Chiampi, James T. “Visible Speech, Living Stone, and the Names of the Word.” In Rivista di Studi Italiani, XIV, No. 1 (giugno, 1996), 1-12.

In Purgatorio X-XII Dante invokes the imagery of dead and living stones from 1 Peter 2:2-8, posing the issue, “how do mute stones become visible speech?” Dante’s perception of the penitents of the Terrace of Pride “performs a typological and literary past”: the Ovidian myth of Deucalion throwing behind his back stones which took on human form, understood as an allegory of “hardened sinners” whose contrition softened them into men. The “visibile parlare” edifies these penitents, teaching them “distractive reading, one which may lead the attention upward to Heaven, but does so with and through its narrative.” In Paradise rock infuses the being of the blessed in a much different way: “Once the corbel, the hard-hearted penitent, has completely yielded up the ‘hardness’ of pride and become pliant, it will receive its reward of becoming one with the Word, as have the souls that form the redeemed millstone” of Paradiso XII, 3. When Beatrice calls the Pilgrim “impetrato” (Purg. XXIII, 74), “we realize that the speaking reliefs are analogies for testimony and its effects: the Pilgrim must be as humble as the tablet which bears the writing, humble as the sign which points beyond itself.” [LW]

Ciccarelli, Andrea. “Dante and Italian Futurism.” In Lectura Dantis, XVIII-XIX (Spring-Fall, 1996), 30-40.

Examines the cultural context for the many anti-Dante statements published by Futurist writers. Futurism glorified modernity, rejected the cult of the past and strove for originality in art. In general, these anti-traditionalist and anti-historicist beliefs motivated the attacks on Dante. Nor were these polemics limited to the Futurists themselves, since other authors, such as Prezzolini and De Robertis, similarly targeted Dante for much the same reasons. At the same time, however, Ciccarelli poses the question: could a movement promoting artistic creativity, ideological independence, novelty and autonomy completely oppose Dante’s example? Examines the language of Marinetti and Papini to see to what extent their anti-traditional drive relies on Dante’s poetics. Argues that although the Futurists’ Dantism proves to be little more than sporadic and superficial, it reveals a basic truth provided by Dante: without audacity or hope, poetry remains confined to the limits of a self-contained exploration. [FA]

Coassin, Flavia. “‘A te convien tenere altro viaggio’: il problema della auctoritas e il genere della Commedia.” In Quaderni d’italianistica, XVII, No. 1 (primavera, 1996), 5-31.

Wide-ranging investigation of the nature of allegory in the Divine Comedy and of the proper generic designation for the poem.

Colish, Marcia L. “The Virtuous Pagan: Dante and the Christian Tradition.” In The Unbounded Community: Papers in Christian Ecumenism in Honor of Jaroslav Pelikan, edited by William Caferro and Duncan G. Fisher (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 43-91.

Considers two aspects of the medieval Christian tradition regarding the salvation of pagans that provide the context for Dante’s poem: 1) the popular legends of Trajan and 2) the views of professional theologians on universal salvation. Examines Dante’s conception of Limbo and discusses the possible reasons for the salvation of four particular pagans: Trajan, Ripheus, Rahab, and Cato.

Cornish, Alison. “Beatrice and the Astronomical Heavens.” In Lectura Dantis, XVIII-XIX (Spring-Fall, 1996), 20-29.

Succinct and dense account of how in Dante’s three major vernacular works astronomy and its object, the movements of the celestial bodies, are set into relation to erotic love and to the philosophical desire of knowledge. Recurring to the Aristotelian notions of love as the principle of movement and of God as the first and unmoved mover, whose being known and loved by the celestial intelligences causes the various movements of the planetary spheres and by their sensible motion is transmitted to the sublunar world, Cornish unfolds the inherent logic of Dante’s astronomical imagery, from Beatrice’s association with the number nine of the celestial spheres in the Vita nuova, to the extended comparison between the celestial spheres and the sciences of Lady Philosophy in the Convivio, to the eyes of Beatrice reflecting the stars and operating Dante-pilgrim’s ascent through the heavens of Paradiso. [OL]

Cornish, Alison. “Interpretazioni fiorentine della ‘concubina di Titone antico’.” In Studi danteschi, LXII (1990, but 1996), 85-95.

Attempts to demonstrate through use of two fifteenth-century drawings for the poem (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Carte Rinuccini, filza 21; and G. Berti, Regola per ritrovare i tempi nel Purgatorio, in his copy of Le Terze rime di Dante [Venice, 1502], in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, 22.A.7.7) how the temporal reference in the opening verses of Purgatorio IX should be understood: i.e., that here Dante refers to dawn in Italy and to night in Purgatory.

Costa, Gustavo. “Il canto XXXI del Paradiso.” In L’Alighieri, XXXVII, No. 8 n.s. (luglio-dicembre, 1996), 57-85.

Wide-ranging, erudite and well-documented reading of Canto XXXI of the Paradiso with special attention given to the classical and medieval tradition of the “candida rosa,” to the nature and activity of the angels, to the complementary notions of the metaphysical light and the “stupore” of the Pilgrim, and to the figures of St. Bernard and the Virgin Mary and their roles in the poem.

D’Alessandro, Mario. “Dante, Ulisse e la scrittura della nuova epica: una lettura del Canto XXVI dell’Inferno.” In Quaderni d’italianistica, XVII, No. 2 (autunno, 1996), 93-106.

Argues that the encounter between Ulysses and the pilgrim Dante represents a linguistic or poetic drama or divide. Traces Dante’s understanding of poetic language, in both the De vulgari eloquentia and the Comedy, as a primordial and natural fusion of sensory sound and rational sign, a language of mother and wet-nurse rooted in concrete human life and in the innate response to divine creation: the vernacular Ulysses despises. Ulysses’s language is instead the fixed “grammatical” language of rational abstractions, signa without sound, and hence without poetry. Ulysses thus abandons not only the human community itself, but also the root of all human knowledge and truth, in which sound or poetry precedes reason, and in which the poetic and interpretative act co-exist in harmony. [CM]

Daniel, Dane Thor. “The Empyrean: The Pinnacle of the Medieval World View.” In Masters Abstracts International, XXXIV, No. 1 (February, 1996), 122. Masters thesis, University of North Texas, 1995, 132 p.

“The empyrean, Christian paradise and the outermost sphere of the geocentric cosmos, stood at the apex of scholastic thought. It was nurtured within the Platonic/Neoplatonic/ Augustinian heritage that looked upon the spiritual realm of ideas as primary reality. Arising during the twelfth century, the empyrean became associated with the Neoplatonic view of the emanative source of being. Theologically derived, the scholastics called it the home of God, angels, and the blessed—the spiritual heaven of Genesis 1:1. Acquiring Aristotelian characteristics, the empyrean served a vital role within the geocentric cosmos. It received its consummate synthetic description in the writings of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). Nominalism and the rise of modern science helped precipitate the empyrean’s eventual dissolution.”

Dumol, Paul Arvisu. “The Metaphysics of Reading Underlying Dante’s Commedia: The Ingegno.” In Dissertation Abstracts International, LVI, No. 7 (January, 1996), 2671. Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1994, 300 p.

Folkins, William Talivaldis. “The Aristotelian Psychology of Dante’s Vita Nuova.” In Master Abstracts International, XXXIV, No. 1 (February, 1996), 81. Masters thesis, Dalhousie University, 1995, 66 p.

Forni, Pier Massimo. Adventures in Speech: Rhetoric and Narration in Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. xiv, 155 p. (Middle Ages Series.)

Makes a number of allusions to Dante in the course of the work, in particular to the influence of Dante’s “rhetorical imagination” on Boccaccio and of the Vita nuova on the novella of Zima (Decameron III, 5).

Franke, William. Dante’s Interpretive Journey. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. xi, 250 p.

The author “establishes a dialogue . . . between Dante’s poetic practice in the Divine Comedy and recent philosophical and theological approaches to hermeneutics. . . . [A]rgues that interpretive work by philosophers such as Heidegger and Gadamer both sheds light on Dante’s poetry and is illuminated by it. Centering on Dante’s direct address to the reader, Franke reads the Divine Comedy through the insights into interpretation developed by hermeneutics, and at the same time uses Dante’s poem, with its interpretive praxis based on a theological vision, to challenge certain prevailing assumptions about interpretation today. While contemporary criticism has concentrated on the historical character of Dante’s poem, often insisting that it undermines the poem’s claims to transcendence, Franke argues that precisely the historicity of the poem forms the ground for a poetic mediation of religious revelation. The Divine Comedy’s dramatization, on an epic scale, of the act of interpretation itself emerges as a disclosure of truth and the locus of a possible event of divinity.” Contents: Preface (ix-xi); Introduction: Truth and Interpretation in the Divine Comedy (1-35); 1. The Address to the Reader (37-81); 2. Dante’s Hermeneutic Rite of Passage: Inferno IX (82-118); 3. The Temporality of Conversion (119-151); 4. The Making of History (152-190); 5. Resurrected Tradition and Revealed Truth (191-232); Recapitulatory Prospectus: A New Hermeneutic Horizon for Religious Revelation in Poetic Literature (233-237); Core Bibliography of Recurrently Cited Sources (239-242); Index (243-250).

Gallagher, Joseph. To Hell and Back with Dante: A Modern Reader’s Guide to “The Divine Comedy”. Foreword by John Freccero. Liguori, Miss.: Triumph Books, 1996. xxv, 226 p.

Provides a detailed summary of the Divine Comedy, canto by canto, with notes and an Appendix, in which Dante’s other works are described briefly. Contents: Foreword (ix-x); Preface (xi-xiv); A Catechism of The Comedy (xv-xxv); Part 1: Inferno (1-65); Part 2: Purgatorio (67-127)’ Part 3: Paradiso (129-202); Appendix (203-214); Bibliography (215-216); Index (217-226).

Gregory, E. R. “Milton’s Protestant Sonnet Lady: Revisions in the Donna Angelicata Tradition.” In Comparative Literature Studies, XXXIII, No. 3 (1996), 258-279.

Milton’s famous sonnet 23 (“I thought I saw my late espoused Saint”) draws heavily on the donna angelicata tradition of Dante and Petrarch. Milton’s “late espoused Saint” both is and is not like the ladies of his poetic predecessors. Like Beatrice and Laura, she is a virtuous and real woman, who continues to inspire her poet after death. Unlike Beatrice, however, Milton’s saint (identified by the author as Katherine Woodcock, a matter of some debate) sexually consummated her love with her poet in marriage. Milton thus creates a Protestant donna angelicata; the highest ideal for both the poet and his lady is the chaste sexual union of marriage, which Milton celebrates in his sonnet, even though he also realizes that, like any earthly institution, it is temporary and stained by human sin. [SB]

Guidotti, Richard Williams. “Deceivers, Credulous Skeptics, and Believers: Historical, Fictional and Hermetic Identity Development of Authors and Characters in Boncompagno da Signa, Salimbene da Parma, Dante, and Boccaccio.” In Dissertation Abstracts International, LVI, No. 9 (March, 1996), 3574. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1995, 213 p.

Hagedorn, Suzanne Christine. “Abandoned Women: Studies of an Ovidian Theme in the Works of Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer.” In Dissertation Abstracts International, LVI, No. 7 (January, 1996), 2671. Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, 1995, 239 p.

Havely, Nicholas R. “Poverty in Purgatory: from Commercium to Commedia.” In Dante Studies, CXIV (1996), 229-243.

As part of a larger project on ‘Dante and Franciscanism,’ this article emphasizes the importance of the allegorical prose text Sacrum Commercium Beati Francisci cum Domina Paupertate within thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Franciscan culture. It reviews the current scholarship on the text and the arguments for its influence upon Dante’s Comedy. It sees the Franciscan tradition of seeking and imagining mountains as a context for the Dantean landscape in Purgatorio and in Paradiso XI; and it notes some further specific parallels between the Sacrum Commercium and the Comedy, especially in their representations of avarice and poverty. [NRH]

Hodd, Thomas Patrick. “The Unread Vision: Dante and the Occult in The Waste Land Manuscript.” In Masters Abstracts International, XXXIV, No.6 (December, 1996), 2173. Masters thesis, The University of New Brunswick, 1996, 146 p.

Hollander, Robert. “Dante’s Deployment of Convivio in the Comedy.” In the Electronic Bulletin of the Dante Society of America: posted October 7, 1996 (www.princeton.edu/~dante/ebdsa), with a “Lettera aperta di Lino Pertile a Robert Hollander sui rapporti tra Commedia e Convivio.” Posted October 8, 1996.

Hollander, Robert. “Dante’s Harmonious Homosexuals (Inferno 16.7-90).” In the Electronic Bulletin of the Dante Society of America: posted June 27, 1996 (www.princeton.edu/~dante/ebdsa).

Holmes, Olivia. “The Vita Nuova in the Context of Vatican MS Chigiano L.VIII.305 and Dante’s ‘Johannian’ Strategy of Authorship.” In Exemplaria, VIII, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), 193-229.

Argues that Dante “modeled not only the text” of the Vita nuova, but also “his strategy of authorship” on those of the gospel of John. “Dante’s little book ... is a re-enactment, in microcosm, of the entire New Testament, from the life and death of Christ, to (a vision of) the end of time.” The author analyzes the structure of the lyric anthology Vatican Chigiano L. VIII.305, and the text of the Vita nuova which it contains, to argue that preceding “vernacular poetry is only ‘redeemed’ by the coming of Beatrice”; “the narrator’s self-dramatization as poet in the Vita nuova is ... a dramatization of the historical itinerary of the entire vernacular poetic tradition.” Examines the relation of orality and written composition in the Vita nuova, the parallel construction of authority in the Vita nuova and the gospel of John, the screen-personages as figures of Beatrice figuring Christ or Love, the relation between prose passages and poems, the “poetry of praise,” the “performative” nature of the text, its relation to Guittone, Guinizzelli and Cavalcanti, and the role of the “donna gentile.” [CM]

Holsinger, Bruce W. “Sodomy and Resurrection: The Homoerotic Subject of the Divine Comedy.” In Premodern Sexualities, edited by Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 243-274.

This essay situates Dante, the pilgrim and the poet, as a subject of homoerotic desire, an insistently “queer subject.” In the Brunetto episode of Inferno XV, Dante images textual production as a male homosocial practice founded on paternity; the next canto features Dante’s own vocal pronouncement of desire, instituting a program that insistently subjects Dante to forbidden pleasures. Purgatorio IX aligns Dante with the sexually vanquished Ganymede and transvested Achilles in a passage that suggests an intimacy of sodomy and Christian “raptus.” The relationship between Guido Guinizzelli and Dante in Purgatorio XXVI is informed by the homoeroticism of both the “sodomites” and the “hermaphrodites.” The passage from Purgatory proper to the Earthly Paradise allows the pilgrim to experience the homoerotic burning he has dreamed and desired up to this point. The “transhumanized” subject of the Paradiso may be a paradisiac refraction of the same homoerotic subject delineated in early canticles: the pilgrim’s final approach to God entails an eroticized triangulation of desire, in which the homoerotic interpenetration of his own body and desires with those of Christ are at least as crucial as his love and desire for Beatrice. [LW]

Jewiss, Virginia Carol. “Of Men and of Angels: The Poetics of Angelology in the Works of Dante Alighieri.” In Dissertation Abstracts International, LVI, No. 7 (January, 1996), 2672. Doctoral dissertation, Yale University, 1995, 234 p.

Kennedy, T. C. “Rhetoric and Meaning in The House of Fame.” In Studia Neophilologica, LXVIII, No. 1 (1996), 9-23.

Contains references to the influence of Dante’s invocation to the Muses and to Apollo on Chaucer’s House of Fame.

Kimmelman, Burt. The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. 288 p. (Studies in the Humanities, 21.)

Literary individualism first manifests itself in the twelfth century in word puzzles and overt self-naming, as well as in discussions about the nature of writing and the role of the poet in the world. Guillem IX, Marcabru, Dante, Chaucer, and Langland were poets and intellectuals. Kimmelman’s study traces their claims of authorship, not to a need for what modernity views as self-promotion, but rather to their interests in contemporary philosophical debates. Yet in their creations of both history and fiction, these poets anticipated modern narrative and its literary persona.

Kleinhenz, Christopher. “American Dante Bibliography for 1995.” In Dante Studies, CXIV (1996), 311-358.

With brief analyses.

Kleinhenz, Christopher. “Italy.” In Medieval Arthurian Literature: A Guide to Recent Research, edited by Norris J. Lacy (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996), pp. 323-347.

Contains a brief treatment of references to Arthurian literature in Dante (De vulgari eloquentia, Divine Comedy).

Levenstein, Jessica. “The Pilgrim, the Poet, and the Cowgirl: Dante’s Alter-Io in Purgatorio XXX-XXXI.” In Dante Studies, CXIV (1996), 189-208.

Examines the hitherto unexplored relationship between the final cantos of Purgatorio and Ovid’s narration of the Io episode in the first book of the Metamorphoses. The story of Io’s double transformations seems to provide Dante with a means of structuring his depiction of contrition, confession, and absolution; the sequence of events in Io’s story inform Dante’s narration of the pilgrim’s encounter with Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise. Io’s story stands as a prototype on which Dante can model his own journey: her tale, read allegorically, represents a successful transformation from a wandering, erring state to a happy reassumption of her original form and a successful entry into heaven. Her story thus functions as an effective blueprint for the pilgrim’s own struggle with his sinfulness on the top of Mount Purgatory. Moreover, the latent figure of Io in the Commedia stands as an emblem of selfhood—Ovid’s various accounts of Io’s journey are subtended by a profound consideration of identity—which supplies both the pilgrim and the poet with an evocative model of self-examination. [JL]

Lieberknecht, Otfried. “‘L’avvocato de’ tempi cristiani’ (Par. 10.118-120): Ambrose of Milan Reconsidered.” In the Electronic Bulletin of the Dante Society of America: posted September 17, 1996 (www.princeton.edu/~dante/ebdsa).

Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach. Edited by Seth Lerer. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. xii, 301 p.

Contains numerous references to Auerbach’s studies of Dante, especially Dante, Poet of the Secular World and Mimesis.

Lopez Cortezo, Carlos. “Las Tres ‘Orribili Infermitadi’ del Canto X del Inferno.” In Lectura Dantis, XVIII-XIX (Spring-Fall, 1996), 41-48.

Examines the unusual poetics of Canto X of Inferno—in the place of similes, the author notes, the poet instead emphasizes physical gestures—and studies the ways that Dante uses physical behaviors to convey the notion of heresy in this canto. Aquinas describes the aim of heresy as unhappiness or spiritual blindness, but its cause as passion or pride. Because it originates in this manner, it is classified as a carnal sin. Therefore, Dante stresses its corporeal attributes by depicting it in a bodily manner. In Convivio IV.xv.11-17, Dante describes the three causes of error: self-inflation (the proud), self-diminution (the cowardly), and lack of intelligence. With these two theories in mind, Cortezo then examines the behaviors of the two main characters of this episode: Farinata and Cavalcante. Farinata, who pridefully looks over the scene, embodies those who aggrandize themselves. Cavalcante, in contrast, barely on his knees, represents the cowardly. Indeed, Cavalcante’s extreme concern for his son scarcely veils his self-effacement. However, the Convivio passage establishes the expectation for there to be a third character representing this sin. In order to determine who might personify those lacking intelligence, the scholar reinterprets the statement: “forse cui Guido vostro ebbe a disdegno” (v. 63). He reads “cui” as the subject, meaning Virgil, and “Guido vostro” as the direct object. Virgil holds Guido in disdain, he asserts, because of his lack of intellectual vigor. In other words, Dante implicates Guido as allegorizing those without enough intelligence and implies that soon he, too, shall reside here. [FA]

MacFarland, Joseph C. “World Government and the Tension between Reason and Faith in Dante Alighieri’s Monarchia.” In Dissertation Abstracts International, LVII, No.5 (November, 1996), 2193. Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 1996, 329 p.

Maddox, Donald. “The Arthurian Intertexts of Inferno V.” In Dante Studies, CXIV (1996), 113-127.

The question of Inferno V in relation to the thirteenth-century Prose Lancelot is reopened in order to suggest that the relationship may be greater than previously assumed. Dante’s use of analepsis recalls similar accounts in the Lancelot. One in particular, featuring Galehot as narratee, marks the first explicit disclosure of the negative consequences of the love affair between Lancelot and Guinevere and is thus the moral “peripeteia,” as it were, of the cyclic version of the romance. Comparison of this passage and the end of Canto V shows how the latter resonates profoundly with the most significant turning point in the entire Prose Lancelot, while the latter’s numerous affinities with Inferno V are seen to hold important implications for our understanding of the comprehensive design of the Comedy. [DM]

Marafioti, Martin. “A New Edition of Dante’s Commedia: Peter Greenaway and Tom Phillips’ A T. V. Dante.” In Cincinnati Romance Review, XV (1996), 199-205.

Within the general context of the cinematographic versions of the Comedy over the years Marafioti discusses the value of the series of videos—eight episodes/cantos—produced by Peter Greenaway and Tom Phillips for the BBC in 1988. Argues that A T. V. Dante “is not merely a new interpretation of the Commedia but a vivification of Dante’s masterpiece filled with images, recited poetry, and commentary. The screen becomes the text of the Commedia, offering a new edition of Dante’s verses rather than simply a new interpretation.”

Mazzaro, Jerome. “Dante and the Image of the ‘Madonna Allattante’.” In Dante Studies, CXIV (1996), 95-111.

Examines the image of the nursing Virgin within other mother and child images in the Divine Comedy and the links of the image to earlier art and legend, especially legends surrounding Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. As opposed to mother and child metaphors involving Virgil and Beatrice, the image emphasizes sustenance for experience and recall. This sustenance finds definition and support in medieval commentaries on the Book of Psalms, Bernard’s Sermones supra cantica canticorum, and Saint Augustine’s Confessions. The image and especially who it is that nurses appear in the Comedy and De Vulgari Eloquentia to explain the differing qualities of poets’ abilities to register, store, and recall matter. [JM]

Menocal, María Rosa. “An Andalusianist’s Last Sigh.” In La corónica, XXIV, No. 2 (Spring, 1996), 179-189.

Brings to attention the recent republication of five volumes of Miguel Asín Palacios’ writings in Madrid (La escatología musulmana en la Divina Comedia [1919], seguida de Historia y crítica de una polémica, 2nd ed. [1943] (Madrid: Libros Hiperión, 1984); El Islam cristianizado. Estudios del sufismo a través de las obras de Abenarabi de Murcia [1931] (Madrid: Libros Hiperión, 1981); Sadilies y alumbrados, con estudio introductorio de Luce López Baralt (Madrid: Libros Hiperión, 1990); Tres estudios sobre pensamiento y mística hispanomusulmanes (Madrid: Libros Hiperión, 1992); Vidas de santones andaluces [1935] (Madrid: Libros Hiperión, 1981) and of the first Italian translation of his famous book on Dante and Islamic eschatology (Dante e l’Islam. 1: L’ escatología islamica nella Divina Commedia, con introduzione di Carlo Ossola; 2: Storia e crítica di una polémica; Parma: Pratiche, 1994). Discusses Asín’s role in the intellectual and political context of Hispano-Arabic Studies both in his own and in our times, analyzing the reasons why his work and its provocative vision of a medieval culture informed by mutually indebted Christian and Islamic traditions, after a first period of worldwide attention and controversy, “not only eventually fell into considerable obscurity but had minimal or no long term impact on the areas of thought they addressed.” [OL]

Miller, Edward G. Sense Perception in Dante’s “Commedia.” Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996. vi, 365 p.

The author notes in the Introduction that “This book will develop and support existing argument that Dante Alighieri, in writing his Comedy, was influenced by Platonic and Neoplatonic thought in addition to the well-attested connections between him and the Aristotelian teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. ... Influence would have come from many sources but [the book] will concentrate on links between the poem and Plato’s Timaeus, the widely-acknowledged sources from Aristotle, the academic works of Cicero and St. Augustine, and additionally the thought of Boethius, Albert Magnus, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas Aquinas himself. ... One chapter will concentrate in attempting to differentiate when it is the poet’s voice speaking, when it is the Dante-persona, or when the voice falsely represents the poet. This becomes necessary in order to confine the fictional examination of sense perceptions, the fictional exercise of Free Will, and the fictional intellective and character growth to the persona and not to the poet Dante Alighieri. ... [T]he first chapter explores some possible influences for the poet with its main focus directed on the Inferno; this narrow focus is maintained for the next chapter which offers examples of the different ‘voices’ used by the poet. Chapter 4 examines the poem’s technical components of linear structure and of discourse in an attempt to link these ‘building blocks’ with Platonic precedents. The Platonic ideas on Freewill, as they are reflected in the text of the poem, are dealt with in Chapter 7. The remaining chapters consist of detailed studies of how each of the three cantiche employs ‘sense perceptions’ as instruments in different ways for the development of knowledge in the protagonist. As epilogue studies Dante’s influence on the later epics by Ariosto, Tasso and Milton.” Contents: Introduction (iv-vi); Chapter 1: Polygenesis and myth (1-36); 2: Three Dantes (37-60); 3: Sense perceptions, Inferno (61-94); 4: Binary Structure (95-125); 5: Sense perceptions, Purgatorio (127-161); 6: Interiority—Purgatorio (163-187); 7: Freewill (189-230); 8: Divine Light, Paradiso (231-271); 9: Noesis, Paradiso (273-299); 10: Conclusion (301-307); Epilogue (309-342); Appendix I: Discourse Analysis (343); Bibliography (345-355); Index (357-365).

Moevs, Christian. “Is Dante Telling the Truth?” In Lectura Dantis, XVIII-XIX (Spring-Fall, 1996), 3-11.

Argues that “the conditions that could satisfy the Comedy’s truth-claims are by no means obvious,” and that “that fact is itself the subject of the poem.” For Dante, to say that the literal sense of a text is true or real does not mean that it is “objectively reporting prior spatio-temporal events”: in medieval thought those events are at the farthest extreme from being or truth. The failure of modern readers to grasp this point limits our understanding of the Comedy and its poetics. “By medieval metaphysics all determinate form is fiction, relatively unreal. What is real is pure intellect/awareness, the power of identification (love) which is the actuality or substance of all form.... Like the cosmos, ‘divinely-inspired’ texts embody truth; they give forms to being which afford glimpses (‘revelations’) of being itself.” This principle is linked to the De vulgari eloquentia’s definition of poetry, which is asserted to be the ground of the Comedy’s poetics. “By forcing us to accept the Comedy’s world as real ... Dante is in fact pointing to the sense in which all determinate form, including the physical world, is unreal.” [CM]

Moore, Richard. “Translating Dante.” In Hellas, VII, No. 1 (Spring-Summer, 1996), 124-130.

With references to the generally unsatisfactory nature of English translations of the Comedy (he favors Ciardi, while disparaging Pinsky), Moore proposes that the best English meter to use for Dante’s line is the octosyllable—and provides a sample translation (Inf. I, 1-30) to illustrate his point.

Morrison, Molly Georgette. “Hierarchies at a Crossroads: Dante’s Angels, Popes and the Cosmic Nexus of Divine and Earthly Truth in Canto 28 of the Paradiso.” In Dissertation Abstracts International, LVII, No. 4 (October, 1996), 1610. Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, 1996, 183 p.

Nichols, Stephen G. “‘Supple Like Water’: Lyric and Diaspora.” In Modern Language Notes, CXI, No. 5 (December, 1996), 990-1009.

In this review article of María Rosa Menocal’s Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of Lyric (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1994; see Dante Studies CXIII, 324), the author discusses how the book “permits readers to discover once more the love lyric as a vital cultural force, as both a product of and window on multicultural and multiethnic discourse.” Nichols discusses Shards of Love in terms of “cross-over,” the creative mixing of diverse cultural registers and references characteristic of both medieval Spain (i.e., al-Andalus, Sefarad) and lyrics by rock stars Jim Morrison and Eric Clapton. The Dante of De Vulgari Eloquentia is credited with recognizing the “cultural exile” of “not knowing how to hear, how to appreciate the love song.” [GPR]

Nohrnberg, James C. “The Descent of Geryon: The Moral System of Inferno XVI-XXXI.” In Dante Studies, CXIV (1996), 129-187.

A synthetic and synoptic study of Malebolge and environs: with an emphasis first on the figure of Geryon and then on Malebolge’s overall scaffolding. Beginning from the Comedy’s thresholds of assent and phenomenology of choice, especially in the Inferno, topics include Geryon’s centrally positioned personification of liminality, his hybrid mythography and parodic cosmic motions, his epistemological uncleanness and hypocrisy, his comprehensive and stratified anatomy (an image of hell itself), his “lie” in relation to figuratively veiled truths, and his underlying identity as Leviathanic-Satanic. From here the essay is enabled to broach Geryon’s and usury’s theological significance in terms of pre-Anselmian theories of the Incarnation and Atonement. The study then turns to a survey of the recurrent exchange that analogizes the fraudulent Malebolgians’ verbal sins to their venal crimes: corruptions of the discourse of reason and the truth of representations alternate with transgressions against the integrity of covenants, bonds, and corporations. The analysis develops an espalier-like organizational pattern combining double helix and terza rima. Malebolge is also viewed homiletically, through a catalogue of the major characters’ crafty and self-divisive use of language and signs: mainly in the even-numbered ditches, but extending from Jason’s ornate words in the first ditch to Virgil’s suasion and Nimrod’s idiolect beyond the tenth. For sources, echoes, analogues, and authority, the author cites variously from biblical, classical, patristic, and scholastic texts. [JCN]

Papadopoulou, Andriani. “The Place of Comedy in Social Life.” In Dissertation Abstracts International, LVI, No. 7 (January, 1996), 2877. Doctoral dissertation, York University, 1994, 311 p.

“The relationship of theory and art is explored through an analysis of the work of comedy, as it is manifested in a play (Aristophanes, The Clouds), in a novel (Cervantes, Don Quixote), in a poem (Dante, Divine Comedy), and caricatures. The work of philosophy is addressed through an analysis of Plato’s and Nietzsche’s approach to life. The relation between comedy and philosophy is found to be characterized by both collaboration and resistance.”

Papio, Michael. “Dante’s Re-Education of Conscience (Paradiso XVII).” In Lectura Dantis, XVIII-XIX (Spring-Fall, 1996), 91-110.

Examines the links between the concepts of fame and exile in the Comedy. Already in the Convivio Dante justifies his misgivings about writing to foster his own reputation and fame by the fact that these are damaged by exile. In the Comedy both Virgil and Oderisi inveigh against the desire for fame: how exactly is Dante’s desire for fame (and his Pride and Envy and Wrath to boot) righteous and not vainglorious? This is the crux of the poet’s conversation with himself as Cacciaguida. From the Brunetto Latini episode we learn that literary fame keeps one’s “name alive,” but only through the “generous disposition of those who outlive him.” The divine mandate the poet gives the Pilgrim through Cacciaguida resolves the conflict of conscience “on the fictional level” by fusing poet and Pilgrim in the reader’s mind. Distinguishing between infallible synderesis and fallible conscientia in human conscience, the essay argues that Cacciaguida is “re-educating” the Pilgrim’s conscientia to authorize his intentio famae, while in effect the poet implicitly leads readers to grant himself what they grant the Pilgrim. The poet’s self-validation requires our complicity. [CM]

Pertile, Lino. “‘Ancor non m’abbandona’ (Inferno 5.105).” In the Electronic Bulletin of the Dante Society of America: posted August 24, 1996 (www.princeton.edu/~dante/ebdsa).

Pertile, Lino. “‘E ’l ciel di sopra fece intento’ (Purg. 5.117).” In the Electronic Bulletin of the Dante Society of America: posted June 27, 1996 (www.princeton.edu/~dante/ebdsa).

Psaki, Regina. “Dante’s Redeemed Eroticism.” In Lectura Dantis, XVIII-XIX (Spring-Fall, 1996), 12-19.

Reviews “recent and somatically-inflected Dante scholarship” in which “erotic attraction is what has been seen to be devalued in the episode of the Siren, among others; and what had been the pilgrim’s erotic desire for Beatrice is transmuted into a non-physical, or post-physical, desire for beatitude. The distracting desire for the lesser good, in this scenario, is swept away by the proper desire for the greater good.” Psaki argues instead that “The erotic language of the Paradiso ... is meant to have its full shock value as we read it, even though a long and careful lesson may be seen to have divested it, in advance, of its sinful connotations.... Rather than concluding that for Dante erotic love is desexualized, purged of the corporeal, superseded by the unimaginable experience of a purely mental communion, [Psaki] believe[s] that Dante’s paradigm of bliss includes the specific, corporeal bliss of love in all the dimension we now know, and others of which we can only dream. Dante’s innovation is not, in other words, that divine love has replaced erotic desire; it is that finally, in that world beyond earth and beyond time, the two no longer conflict.” [LW]

Raffa, Guy P. “Dante’s Mocking Pastoral Muse.” In Dante Studies CXIV (1996), 271-291.

Argues that the primary goal of Dante’s use of mythic and literary material from Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses in his second Eclogue is to refuse Giovanni del Virgilio’s offer of the laurel crown while at the same time showing himself perfectly capable of composing Latin verse in the lofty style of epic that Del Virgilio admires. Dante therefore fashions a bucolic poem around an interrelated series of allusions drawn from Virgil’s epic and Ovid’s great poem of change. Dante first refers to Ovid’s tales of Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece and Midas’ “gift” of the Golden Touch, calling as well on Virgil’s humorous account of the boat race during the Sicilian games, before finally revisiting both Virgil and Ovid through a dramatic reworking of the figure of Polyphemus, the Cyclops who devoured several of Ulysses’ men and brutally murdered Galatea’s lover, Acis. Polyphemus’ reputation as both a sweet-tongued shepherd and pitiless killer allows Dante to present a pastoral world contaminated with violence. Thus Dante revives Virgil’s pastoral muse not only to mock Del Virgilio’s scorn for the vernacular comedía but also to show the inadequacy of competition and prizes (staples of the eclogue tradition) for a poetic vision forged from the experience of exile and a theological imagination grounded in history. [GPR]

Raffa, Guy P. “Eco and Calvino Reading Dante.” In Italica, LXXIII, No. 3 (Autumn, 1996), 388-409.

Identifies the “unity of knowledge” as an issue central to both Dante’s Commedia and the “cosmic” postmodernism of Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco. Like the Dante of Paradiso, and unlike some of the poet’s modern commentators, Calvino and Eco debunk rather than reinforce the myth of the Two Cultures, humanistic and scientific. However, while Eco, like Thomas Aquinas, seeks to mark the “boundaries and limits” of various forms of knowledge, Calvino and Dante share the “belief that new epistemological configurations are possible only by allowing for the interplay—and even contamination—of different lines of inquiry.” [GPR]

Scott, John A. “Dante’s Miraculous Mountainquake (Purg. 20.128).” In the Electronic Bulletin of the Dante Society of America: posted October 23, 1996 (www.princeton.edu/~dante/ebdsa.

Scott, John A. Dante’s Political Purgatory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. xi, 295 p. (Middle Ages Series)

This book “was conceived as a whole in two parts: a political biography of Dante Alighieri followed by a detailed analysis of the political thread that runs throughout his Purgatorio. The first part offers . . . a sketch of the poet’s experience of politics from his birth in a Guelf commune to his death after twenty years of exile and the way this experience is inextricable bound up with his writings. . . . The second, major section leads to the inescapable conclusion that the Purgatorio was inspired in large measure by the lesson drawn by the poet from Henry VII’s attempts (1310-1313) to restore imperial power and authority in Italy. The lesson of those four years does not imply merely a denunciation of the causes for the failure of Henry’s enterprise: it includes the immense hopes aroused in the poet’s breast by that same enterprise, which appeared to him as proof that his political ideal was no utopian vision but a para-edenic state that could be realized on earth. ... Our understanding of the second cantica of Dante’s masterpiece is partial and fragmentary without this historical-political approach.” Contents: Preface (ix-xi); Part One: Dante’s Politics. 1. Dante’s Political Experience (1265-1302) (1-20); 2. Dante’s Political Experience: Exile and Conversion (1302-1305) (21-35); 3. Exul Immeritus (1305-1321) (36-59); Part Two: Dante’s Purgatorio. Introduction to Part Two (61-67); 4. Cato: A Pagan Suicide in Purgatory (69-84); 5. Manfred and Bonconte (85-95); 6. The Sordello Episode (Purgatorio VI-VIII) (96-127); 7. The Dream and the Entrance to Purgatory (Purgatorio IX-X) (128-143); 8. The Poem’s Center (Purgatorio XII-XVIII) (144-157); 9. The She-Wolf and the Shepherds (Purgatorio XIX-XX( (158-178); 10. The Apocalypse (Purgatorio XXIX-XXXIII) (179-211); Conclusion (212-213); Notes (215-267); Bibliography (269-283); Index (285-295).

Senior, Diane Hichwa. “Pilgrimage of Love and Writing: A Study of Dante’s Vita Nuova.” In Dissertation Abstracts International, LVI, No. 7 (January, 1996), 2673. Doctoral dissertation, Yale University, 1995, 284 p.

Shapiro, Marianne. “Dante’s Twofold Representation of the Soul.” In Lectura Dantis, XVIII-XIX (Spring-Fall, 1996), 49-90.

Stresses that Dante’s representation of the “shade-bodies” of the dead, which “has no precedent in Christian theology,” has its origin in classical poetry, especially Virgil, Ovid, and Lucan; these lie behind Dante’s dual depiction of shades as both “soul-bodies” and “free souls,” both “autonomous beings” and “psychologized figments.” This duality is reflected in the tension between Dante’s Neoplatonic and Aristotelian accounts of imagination and between his Aristotelian and Biblical accounts of the creation of human life. The essay discusses the varying materiality in Dante’s representation of soul-bodies; their relation to phantasms; the tension between spiritual and corporeal being in the dreams of Purgatory; the “pneuma” as nexus between body and soul; Epicurean and Virgilian conceptions of soul; the “facies” of the soul; the difference between “ombra” and “anima” in the Comedy; the influence of the Timaeus on Dante’s representation of “the state of souls after death”; Frate Alberigo and Branca d’Oria as “infernal simulacra”; the influence of Virgilian and Ovidian apparitions on Dante; Lucan’s Erichtho, and her relation both to Virgil and to Beatrice as an intermediary. The author concludes that “speaking of a duality affecting the representation of the human soul ... means nothing less than giving its due to the poetic language of the Commedia.” [CM]

Sisson, Larry Wayman. “Spiritual Autobiography: Origins to Apocalypse.” In Dissertation Abstracts International, LVI, No. 12 (June, 1996), 4762. Doctoral dissertation, University of Washington, 1995, 262 p.

“Central subjects of this study are life-writing reference and recollection; biblical and autobiographical hermeneutics; linguistic psychology and narrative identity; and the roles played by apocalypse and conversion in all first-person efforts at comprehension and identity. Central figures include Augustine, Dante, Bunyan, Richard Norwood, James Hogg, Therese of Lisieux, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Paul Ricoeur. Together, these writers reveal the nature and main functions of spiritual autobiography, and help restore this form to its rightful and still relevant place in the long history of Western life-writing.”

Stapleton, M. L. Harmful Eloquence: Ovid’s “Amores” from Antiquity to Shakespeare. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. xiii, 175 p.

Stapleton explores the impact of Ovid’s Amores on Western European literature and devotes Chapter 4, “‘Io non lo ‘nvidio’: Dante’s Vita nuova and the desultor Amoris” (91-113), to Dante. There he examines the Vita nuova “as a sequence that contradicts itself as a critique of Ovidian troubadour erotics, since Dante appropriates and updates the Protean persona for his epoch, in the manner of his thirteenth-century contemporaries Jean de Meun and the author of de Vetula, as well as the stilnovisti” (ix). “[I]n the Vita nuova, Dante confronts, saves, and recasts Ovid’s erotic poetry. He rewrites the Amores for the thirteenth century in the ‘dolce stil novo’ ... of the stilnovisti, whose troubadour-derived poetics owe much to the magister and desultor Amoris. Both the Vita and the Amores are devoted to the progress of poet-lover personae who are fashioned after Dante and Ovid, respectively. ... At the end of the thirteenth century, Dante confronts at least two forms of medieval Ovidianism: the refined vernacular, nonreligious eroticism of the troubadours, and the Christianized Latin Ovid exemplified by such works as de Vetula. The Vita nuova reflects this tension. It is the first sustained work of the Middle Ages to attempt the exorcism of the desultor Amoris and to revise troubadour erotics, and it is fueled by the tenets of medieval Christianity” (92-93).

Stefanini, Ruggero. “Tenzone sì e tenzone no.” In Lectura Dantis, XVIII-XIX (Spring-Fall, 1996), 111-128.

In his recently published book, La falsa tenzone di Dante con Forese Donati (1995), Mauro Cursietti challenges Dante’s authorship of the comic poetic exchange with Forese, arguing that those six scabrous sonnets were composed much later, perhaps by Stefano Finiguerri, known as il Za, in the 1390s. By making reference to the poetry of il Za, Burchiello, and other poets of the early Quattrocento, Cursietti provides a reading of these sonnets. To wit, he interprets them as having been composed by one author who utilized a codified language which obfuscates its homoerotic nature. In this article, Stefanini assesses the merits of this work, summarizing Cursietti’s points. He claims that the relationship of the tenzone to Purgatorio XXIII has been misunderstood by critics. When Dante meets Forese in Purgatory, Stefanini argues, he does not regret this correspondence, but only their friendship spent in vain exploits. The tenzone, rather, was written with this passage in mind, and not vice versa. Moreover, Stefanini agrees that Cursietti has provided the only accurate exegesis of these difficult sonnets through reference to the poets of the early Renaissance. Stefanini’s article, therefore, provides a good general overview of Cursietti’s objections to the inclusion of the tenzone to Dante’s opus. [FA]

Taylor, Paul Beekman. Chaucer’s Chains of Love. Madison-Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associate University Presses, 1996. 215 p.

Contains numerous references to Dante.

Teskey, Gordon. Allegory and Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. xiv, 195 p.

In addition to several allusions to the Divina Commedia in the course of the work, Teskey discusses in greater detail the events of Inferno 5 in Chapter One (“Personification and Capture: Francesca da Rimini,” esp. pp. 25-29).

Trovato, Mario. “Dante’s Poetics of ‘Honestum’: The Difference: ‘Parlare Onesto’ and ‘Parola Ornata’.” In Quaderni d’italianistica, XVII, No. 2 (autunno, 1996), 5-35.

Analyzes “Dante’s self-definition of poeta rectitudinis and honestatis within the context of medieval philosophical writings regarding the Stoic theory of honestum.” Dante’s “poetics of honestum,” grounded in the triads scientia, ars, ingenium and unum, verum, bonum, constitutes a union of intellectual-moral values with aesthetic worth, in order to direct the human will to its proper end. The Comedy does not aim to present a new dogmatic truth, but to communicate an honest love or good, through appropriate rhetorical means, “to bring about a sociopolitical redemption.” Discusses the Christianized concept of honestum in Augustine, Albert the Great, and Philip the Chancellor. [CM]

Usher, Jonathan. “Who Was Boccaccio’s ‘Yschiros’ (Buccolicum Carmen 14.129)?” In the Electronic Bulletin of the Dante Society of America: posted October 30, 1996 (www.princeton.edu/~dante/ebdsa).

Verdicchio, Massimo. “Overreading and Underreading Dante in North America.” In Italian Quarterly, XXXIII, Nos. 127-128 (Winter-Spring, 1996), 77-86.

This review article discusses the following works: John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); Antonio C. Mastrobuono, Dante’s Journey of Sanctification (Washington, DC: Gateway, 1990); Peter Dronke, Dante and Medieval Latin Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); J. F. Took, Dante: Lyric Poet and Philosopher. An Introduction to the Minor Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Jeremy Tambling, Dante and Difference: Writing in the “Commedia” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Robert Pogue Harrison, The Body of Beatrice (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Sergio Corsi, Il “modus digressivus” nella Divina Commedia (Potomac, Maryland: Scripta Humanistica, 1987); Anthony K. Cassell, Inferno I (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Rachel Jacoff and William A. Stephany, Inferno II (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Tibor Wlassics, ed., Lectura Dantis (Fall, 1987; Fall, 1990; Spring, 1990); Anthony Oldcorn, ed., Letture Classensi, 18 (Ravenna: Longo, 1989); Paolo Cherchi and Antonio C. Mastrobuono, eds., Lectura Dantis Newberryana, 2 (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1990); Eric Haywood, ed., Dante Readings (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1987); John Saly, Dante’s Paradiso: The Flowering of the Self. An Interpretation of the Anagogical Meaning (New York: Pace University Press, 1989); Jeffrey T. Schnapp, The Transfiguration of History at the Center of Dante’s Paradise (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986).

Verduin, Kathleen. “Dante in America: The First Hundred Years.” In Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America, edited by Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), pp. 16-51.

Traces Dante’s promotion to cultural prominence in America by surveying the American publication history of Dante’s works from the 1820s to the 1920s. Volumes discussed include the Works of the British [sic] Poets series (Philadelphia, 1822), the Appleton edition of Cary’s translation (1845), the Harper edition of J. A. Carlyle’s Inferno (1849), the Longfellow translation (Ticknor and Fields, 1867), and the Norton translation (Houghton Mifflin, 1891-1892). Stressing that both as a literary and commercial commodity, “the American Dante was ... a product of the New England establishment,” the essay also cites a “cultural bifurcation” of Dante into elite and popular forms by the turn of the century. [KV]

Verduin, Kathleen. “‘The Inward Life of Love’: Margaret Fuller and the Vita Nuova.” In Dante Studies, CXIV (1996), 293-309.

Traces Fuller’s engagement with the Vita Nuova—in Fuller’s words, “the noblest expression extant of the inward life of love”—from the late 1830s to her death in 1850. Resisting the contemporary sentimentalization of Beatrice, Fuller nevertheless invoked the text as a touchstone in her attempts to establish personal intimacy; as these successively failed, she was confronted instead with a textual paradigm of her own frustrations. Covers Fuller’s relations with Samuel Gray Ward, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Nathan, and Adam Mickiewicz and her remarks on Dante in the Dial (observations on Washington Allston’s 1819 painting “Beatrice”), Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), and correspondence. [KV]

Watts, Barbara J. “Artistic Competition, Hubris, and Humility: Sandro Botticelli’s Response to Visibile parlare.” In Dante Studies, CXIV (1996), 41-78.

Discusses Botticelli’s pictorial adaptation of Purgatorio X in Cod. Hamilton 201 (Cim. 33) in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin. The essay argues that in rendering the incised examples of humility, Botticelli used perspective metaphorically to indicate the virtue that these storie represent. It is also argued that in using perspectival illusionism to render the reliefs, Botticelli likened the achievements of fifteenth-century artists to God’s artistic achievement on Purgatory’s first terrace, and that his reliefs chart the storia of arts progression in his own century. Botticelli’s reliefs, therefore, demonstrate that though illusionistic verisimilitude, “visible speech,” may not have been seen in Dante’s world, it could be seen in fifteenth-century Florence. [BJW]

 

Reviews

Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation. Translated by Robert Pinsky. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1994. (See Dante Studies, CXIII, 210.) Reviewed by:

            Theodore J. Cachey Jr., in Lectura Dantis, XVIII-XIX (Spring-Fall, 1996), 134-38.

Alighieri, Dante. Vita nuova. Italian Text with Facing English Translation by Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. (See Dante Studies, CXIV, 312-313.) Reviewed by:

            Mario Marti, in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, CLXXIII, (1996), 610-14.

Annotationi nel Dante fatte con M. Trifon Gabriele in Bassano. Edited by Lino Pertile. Bologna: Commissione per i Testi di Lingua, 1993. Reviewed by:

            Peter Armour, in Lectura Dantis, XVIII-XIX (Spring-Fall, 1996), 129-11.

Astell, Ann W. Job, Boethius, and Epic Truth. Ithaca, New York, and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. (See Dante Studies, CXIII, 210.) Reviewed by:

Marcia A. Dalbey, in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XCV, No. 1 (January, 1996), 104-07;

            Brian J. McFadden, in Religion and Literature, XXVIII, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), 141-42.

Baranski, Zygmunt G., John Took, Peter Armour, Peter Hainsworth, John C. Barnes, Mark Davie, Lino Pertile, and Patrick Boyde. Letture Classensi: lettura del “Fiore.” Ravenna: Longo, 1993. Reviewed by:

            Santa Casciani, in Italica, LXXIII, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), 104-05.

Baranski, Zygmunt G. ed., ‘Libri poetarum in quattuor species dividuntur’: Essays on Dante and ‘Genre’. The Italianist. Supplement 15 (1995), 170 p. Reviewed by:

            A[ntonio] F[ranceschetti], in Quaderni d’italianistica, XVII, No. 2 (autunno, 1996), 154.

Barolini, Teodolinda. The Undivine “Comedy”: Detheologizing Dante. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. (See Dante Studies, CXI, 269-270.) Reviewed by:

R[oberta] C[olombi], in L’Alighieri, XXXVII, No. 7 n.s. (gennaio-giugno, 1996), 108-09;

Ernesto Livorni, in Rivista di Studi Italiani, XIV, No. 1 (giugno, 1996), 257-60.

Barolsky, Paul. Giotto’s Father and the Family of Vasari’s “Lives.” University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Reviewed by:

            Sara Blake McHam, in Italian Quarterly, XXXIII, Nos. 129-130 (1996), 117-20.

Barolsky, Paul. Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (See Dante Studies, CX, 281.) Reviewed by:

            Sara Blake McHam, in Italian Quarterly, XXXIII, Nos. 129-130 (1996), 117-20.

Biow, Douglas. Mirabile Dictu: Representations of the Marvelous in Medieval and Renaissance Epic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. (See Dante Studies, CXV, 278.) Reviewed by:

            A[ntonio] F[ranceschetti], in Quaderni d’italianistica, XVII, No. 2 (1996), 154-155.

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. (See Dante Studies, CXIII, 211-212.) Reviewed by:

            Charles T. Wood, in Speculum, LXXI, No. 3 (July, 1996), 686-89.

Boccaccio, Giovanni. “Diana’s Hunt: Caccia di Diana”. Boccaccio’s First Fiction. Edited and translated by Anthony K. Cassell and Victoria Kirkham. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. (See Dante Studies, CXI, 304.) Reviewed by:

            Louis Chalon, Le Moyen Age, CII, 2 (1996), 367-69.

Boitani, Piero. L’ombra di Ulisse: figure di un mito. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992. Reviewed by:

            Lino Pertile, in Lectura Dantis, XVIII-XIX (Spring-Fall, 1996), 142-44.

Botterill, Steven. Dante and the Mystical Tradition: Bernard of Clairvaux in the “Commedia.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. (See Dante Studies, CXIII, 212-13.) Reviewed by:

            John C. Barnes, in Italian Studies, LI (1996), 211-12;

            Peter S. Hawkins, in Speculum, LXXI, No. 1 (January, 1996), 127-29;

            Lino Pertile, in Medium Aevum, LXV, No. 1 (1996), 153-54;

            Paul Spillenger, in Lectura Dantis, XVIII-XIX (Spring-Fall, 1996), 131-34.

Boyde, Patrick. Perception and Passion in Dante’s “Comedy.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Reviewed by:

            John Kleiner, in Medievalia et Humanistica, XXII (1996), 204-09.

The Cambridge Companion to Dante. Edited by Rachel Jacoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. (See Dante Studies, CXII, 306-07.) Reviewed by:

            Theodore J. Cachey Jr., in Speculum, LXXI, No. 2 (April, 1996), 439-42;

            Barbara Bargagli Stoffi-Mühlethaler, in Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch, LXXI (1996), 181-200.

Carugati, Giuliana. Dalla menzogna al silenzio: La scrittura mistica della “Commedia” di Dante. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. (See Dante Studies, CX, 284.) Reviewed by:

            Giuseppe Mazzotta, in Italian Quarterly, XXXIII, Nos. 127-128 (1996), 111-14.

Chiarenza, Marguerite Mills. The Divine Comedy: Tracing God’s Art. Boston: Twayne, 1989. (See Dante Studies, CVIII, 123.) Reviewed by:

            Giuliana Carugati, in Italian Quarterly, XXXIII, Nos. 127-128 (1996), 114-18.

Dante e la “bella scola” della poesia: Autorità e sfida poetica. Edited by Amilcare A. Iannucci. Ravenna: Longo, 1993. (See Dante Studies, CXII, 309-310.) Reviewed by:

            Madison U. Sowell, in Speculum, LXXI, No. 4 (October, 1996), 962-64.

Dante nei commenti del Novecento. Edited by Tommaso Di Salvo. Ravenna: Longo, 1994. Reviewed by:

            Angelo Mazzocco, in Rivista di studi italiani, XIV, No. 2 (Dicembre, 1996), 255-58.

Dante Now: Current Trends in Dante Studies. Edited by Theodore J. Cachey Jr. Notre Dame, Indiana, and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. (See Dante Studies, CXIV, 320.) Reviewed by:

            James Chiampi, in Quaderni d’italianistica, XVII, No. 2 (autunno, 1996), 133-35;

            M[ario] M[arti], in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, CLXXIII, (1996), 470.

Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Introductory Readings. II: Purgatorio. Special Issue: Lectura Dantis Virginiana, vol. II. Edited by Tibor Wlassics. Lectura Dantis, XII: Supplement (1993). (See Dante Studies, CXII, 310.) Reviewed by:

            M[auro] C[ursietti], in L’Alighieri, XXXVII, No. 7 n.s. (gennaio-giugno, 1996), 113-20.

Dronke, Peter. Verse with Prose from Petronius to Dante: The Art and Scope of the Mixed Form. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. (See Dante Studies, CXIII, 215.) Reviewed by:

            Pascale Bourgain, in Romance Philology, XLIX, No. 4 (May, 1996), 470-74.

EBDSA. Electronic Bulletin of the Dante Society of America. Reviewed by:

            Francesco-Saverio Caccavella, in Rassegna della letteratura italiana, C, (1996), 251-52.

Eliot, T. S. The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry. The Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926 and The Turnbull Lectures at The Johns Hopkins University, 1933. Edited by Ronald Schuchard. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Reviewed by:

            Steven Helmling, in Sewanee Review, CIV, No. 2 (Spring, 1996), xxiv-xxvi.

Fleming, John V. Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s “Troilus.” Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. (See Dante Studies, CIX, 182.) Reviewed by:

            Marilynn Desmond, in Comparative Literature, XLVIII, No. 4 (Fall, 1996), 377-81.

Franke, William. Dante’s Interpretive Journey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. (See above under Studies.) Reviewed by:

            James Torrens, S.J., in Christianity and Literature, XLV, Nos. 3-4 (1996), 416-18.

Godorecci, Barbara J. After Machiavelli: “Rewriting” and the “Hermeneutic Attitude.” West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1993. (See Dante Studies, CXII, 314.) Reviewed by:

            Salvatore Di Maria, in Renaissance Quarterly, XLIX, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), 393-95.

Holloway, Julia Bolton. Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. (See Dante Studies, CXII, 315-16.) Reviewed by:

            Mark Balfour, in Modern Language Review, XCI, No. 1 (January, 1996), 240-41;

            John M. Najemy, in Speculum, LXXI, No. 2 (April, 1996), 435-37.

Kay, Richard. Dante’s Christian Astrology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. (See Dante Studies, CXIII, 220-21.) Reviewed by:

            Zygmunt Baranski, in Medium Aevum, LXV, No. 1 (1996), 149-51;

            Susanne Sara Thomas, in Romance Quarterly, XLIII, No. 3 (Summer, 1996), 189-90.

Kleiner, John. Mismapping the Underworld: Daring and Error in Dante’s “Comedy.” Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1994. (See Dante Studies, CXIII, 222.) Reviewed by:

            Jeremy Tambling, in Modern Language Review, XCI, No. 4 (October, 1996), 1008-09.

Kelly, Henry Ansgar. Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Reviewed by:

            Richard J. Utz, in Philosophy and Literature, XX, No. 1 (April, 1996), 253-56.

Kiser, Lisa J. Truth and Textuality in Chaucer’s Poetry. Hanover, New Hampshire, and London: University Press of New England, 1991. (See Dante Studies, CX, 295.) Reviewed by:

            Marilynn Desmond, in Comparative Literature, XLVIII, No. 4 (Fall, 1996), 377-81.

Kleiner, John. Mismapping the Underworld: Daring and Error in Dante’s Comedy. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. (See Dante Studies, CXIII, 222.) Reviewed by:

            James T. Chiampi, in Italica, LXXIII, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), 265-67;

            Elizabeth H. D. Mazzocco, in Rivista di studi italiani, XIV, No. 2 (1996), 252-54.

Kleinhenz, Christopher. The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220-1321). Lecce: Milella, 1986. (See Dante Studies, CV, 152.) Reviewed by:

            Vincent Moleta, in Italian Quarterly, XXXIII, Nos. 127-128 (Winter-Spring, 1996), 118.

Land, Norman E. The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. (See Dante Studies, CXIII, 223.) Reviewed by:

            James S. Baumlin, in Sixteenth Century Journal, XXVII, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), 249-50.

Lectura Dantis, X (1992). Reviewed by:

            Roberta Gentile, in Rassegna della letteratura italiana, C, Nos. 2-3 (1996), 244.

Lectura Dantis, XI (1992). Reviewed by:

            Roberta Gentile, in Rassegna della letteratura italiana, C, Nos. 2-3 (1996), 244-45.

Lectura Dantis, XII (1993): Supplement. Special Issue: Lectura Dantis Virginiana, II. Dante’s Purgatorio: Introductory Readings. Reviewed by:

            Marcellina Troncarelli, in Rassegna della letteratura italiana, C, Nos. 2-3 (1996), 245-49.

Lectura Dantis, XIII (1993). Reviewed by:

            Italo Pantani, in Rassegna della letteratura italiana, C, Nos. 2-3 (1996), 249-50.

Mazzocco, Angelo. Linguistic Theories in Dante and the Humanists: Studies of Language and Intellectual History in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993. (See Dante Studies, CXII, 317-318.) Reviewed by:

            Italo Pantani, in Rassegna della letteratura italiana, C, Nos. 2-3 (1996), 252-54.

Mazzotta, Giuseppe. Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the “Divine Comedy.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979. (See Dante Studies, XCVIII, 168-69.) Reviewed by:

Craig Frisch, Gloria Lauri, Gregory L. Lucente, in Italian Criticism: Literature and Culture, ed. Gregory L. Lucente (= Michigan Romance Studies, XVI, 1996), 214-31.

Mazzotta, Giuseppe. Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. (See Dante Studies, CXII, 318.) Reviewed by:

            Mark Balfour, in Modern Language Review, XCI, No. 2 (April, 1996), 496-97;

            R[oberta] C[olombi], in L’Alighieri, XXXVII, No. 7 n.s. (1996), 127-28;

Craig Frisch, Gloria Lauri, Gregory L. Lucente, in Italian Criticism: Literature and Culture, ed. Gregory L. Lucente (= Michigan Romance Studies, XVI, 1996), 214-31;

            Roberta Gentile, in Rassegna della letteratura italiana, C, Nos. 2-3 (1996), 217-18.

Menocal, María Rosa. Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1994. (See Dante Studies, CXIII, 224.) Reviewed by:

            Diana De Armas Wilson, in Speculum, LXXI, No. 4 (October, 1996), 980-83.

Menocal, María Rosa. Writing in Dante’s Cult of Truth: From Borges to Boccaccio. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1991. (See Dante Studies, CX, 300.) Reviewed by:

            A. M. Jeannet, in Comparative Literature Studies, XXXIII, No. 3 (1996), 307-11.

Nassar, Eugene Paul. Illustrations to Dante’s “Inferno.” Rutherford-Madison-Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associate University Presses, 1994. (See Dante Studies, CXIII, 226.) Reviewed by:

            Charles Franco, in Forum Italicum, XXX, No. 1 (Spring 1996), 206-08.

            Lora Palladino, in Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch, LXXI (1996), 228-36.

Palma di Cesnola, Maurizio. Semiotica dantesca. Profetismo e diacronia. Ravenna: Longo, 1995. Reviewed by:

            A[ntonio] F[ranceschetti], in Quaderni d’italianistica, XVII, No. 2 (autunno, 1996), 153.

Parker, Deborah. Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1993. (See Dante Studies, CXII, 320-21.) Reviewed by:

            Nadia Cannata Salamone, in Medium Aevum, LXV, No. 1 (1996), 151-53;

            Brian Richardson, in Comparative Literature, XLVIII, No. 1 (Winter, 1996), 86-88;

            Janet L. Smarr, in Comparative Literature Studies, XXXIII, No. 2 (1996), 205-08.

Picchio Simonelli, Maria. Inferno III. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. (See Dante Studies, CXII, 321-22.) Reviewed by:

            John Kleiner, in Medievalia et Humanistica, XXII (1996), 204-09;

            Angelo Mazzocco, in Speculum, LXXI, No. 3 (July, 1996), 762-64.

Pite, Ralph. The Circle of Our Vision: Dante’s Presence in English Romantic Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Reviewed by:

            Carmine Di Biase, in Italica, LXXIII, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), 105-07;

            Tim Fulford, in Modern Language Quarterly, LVII, No. 1 (March, 1996), 112-14;

            Paola Marconi, in Lectura Dantis, 18-19 (Spring-Fall, 1996), 140-41.

Quinones, Ricardo J. Foundation Sacrifice in Dante’s “Commedia.” University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. (See Dante Studies, CXIII, 227.) Reviewed by:

            Guy P. Raffa, in Italica, LXXIII, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), 267-69.

Saly, John. Dante’s Paradiso: The Flowering of the Self. An Interpretation of the Anagogical Meaning. New York: Pace University Press, 1989. (See Dante Studies, CVIII, 146-47.) Reviewed by:

            Roberta Gentile, in Rassegna della letteratura italiana, C, Nos. 2-3 (1996), 236.

Scaglione, Aldo. Knights at Court: Courtliness, Chivalry and Courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. (See Dante Studies, CX, 305.) Reviewed by:

            John A. Scott, in Modern Language Review, XCI, No. 1 (January, 1996), 238-20.

            Alberto Varvaro, in Romance Philology, L, No. 2 (November, 1996), 217-20.

Scanlon, Larry. Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Reviewed by:

            Elizabeth Scala, in Medievalia et Humanistica, XXII (1996), 174-78;

            A. C. Spearing, in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, XVIII (1996), 289-94.

Staten, Henry. Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan. Baltimore, Md., and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. (See Dante Studies, CXIV, 337.) Reviewed by:

            Richard Macksey, in Modern Language Notes, CXI, No. 5 (December, 1996), 1060-62.

Storey, H. Wayne. Transcription and Visual Poetics in the Early Italian Lyric. New York and London: Garland, 1993. (See Dante Studies, CXIII, 241-242.) Reviewed by:

            Steven Botterill, in Renaissance Quarterly, XLIX, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), 391-92;

            Paolo Cherchi, in Speculum, LXXI, No. 1 (January, 1996), 216-17.

Treip, Mindele Anne. Allegorical Poetics and the Epic: The Renaissance Tradition to “Paradise Lost.” Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1994. (See Dante Studies, CXIII, 229.) Reviewed by:

            Diane Kelsey McColley, in Modern Language Review, XCI, No. 2 (April, 1996), 451-53.

            John M. Steadman, in Comparative Literature Studies, XXXIII, No. 2 (1996), 198-201.

Tripodi, Vincenzo. L’umile Italia in Dante Alighieri. Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 1995. (See Dante Studies, CXIV, 338-339.) Reviewed by:

            A[ntonio] F[ranceschetti], in Quaderni d’italianistica, XVII, No. 1 (1996), 161.

Watkins, John. The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. Reviewed by:

            David Mikics, in Modern Language Quarterly, LVII, No. 4 (December, 1996), 645-48;

            Lauren Silberman, in Sixteenth Century Journal, XXVII, No. 3 (Fall, 1996), 969-70.

Williams, Charles. The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante. Cambridge, Eng.: D. S. Brewer, 1994 (1943). Reviewed by:

            Claire Honess, in Lectura Dantis, XVIII-XIX (Spring-Fall, 1996), 138-40.