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Edited by Dino S. Cervigni and Anne Tordi with the collaboration of Paolo Cherchi, Gustavo Costa, Valeria Finucci, Albert N. Mancini, Massimo Maggiari, and John P. Welle. Carlo Paolazzi. La maniera mutata. Il 'dolce stil novo' tra Scrittura e Ars poetica. Milano: Edizioni Vita e Pensiero, 1998. Pp. x, 340. Il merito di questo volume consiste nell'aver puntato l'attenzione della critica verso fonti e modelli letterari tralasciati dagli studiosi che si sono impegnati nella polemica sulla legittimità o meno, in sede critica e storiografica, della formula ripresa dal De Sanctis di 'Dolce Stil Novo'. Paolazzi risponde, rettificandola e superandola, alla domanda di Gorni che si era chiesto se la 'inafferrabile sostanza' del Dolce Stil Novo consistesse in quell'ispirazione 'soprannaturale' a cui facevano appello gli 'ardimentosi' poeti per avallare le loro pretese di veridicità poetica. Gorni aveva incluso, tra gli 'antichi' segnati dal mancato miracolo di una lingua 'per sé stessa mossa', anche il bolognese Guinizzelli. È proprio su questo punto che Paolazzi, schierato apertamente sulla linea positivistica di Marti, sente il bisogno di rettificare le conclusioni di Gorni, attraverso una puntigliosa indagine intertestuale, volta a rivalutare il ruolo giocato dal 'maximus' Guido nella storia del Dolce Stil Novo. Accusato da Bonagiunta da Lucca di 'iscura parlatura' ma soprattutto di 'traer canson per forsa di scrittura', Guinizzelli ebbe il merito di aver dischiuso per primo i 'canali' biblici, rinnovando radicalmente il linguaggio della poesia cortese grazie alla ricchezza di analogie, similitudini e metafore naturalistiche che il poeta bolognese aveva prelevato dalle Sacre Scritture e 'trasportato' nella poesia amorosa . E basti pensare al sonetto 'Io voglio del vero la mia donna laudare' di cui Paolazzi mette in luce il fitto reticolo di agganci testuali al famoso passo dell'Ecclesiaste in cui si tesse la lode del sacerdote Onia: Guinizzelli ne attinge una lunga serie di paragoni naturalistici (la stella mattutina, la rosa e il giglio, per citarne solo alcuni). Ed ancora, ad una analisi attenta e metodicamente serrata, la canzone 'Tegno de folle 'mpresa' rivela al critico accorto una 'costellazione di figure metaforiche e di rispondenze lessicali largamente speculare nei confronti di una solenne apertura descrittiva sulla sposa del Canticum Canticorum'. E d'altra parte già in Guinizzelli faceva la sua comparsa quella poetica nata attorno all'idea tutta stilnovistica che il poeta dice 'd'Amor lo vero' su cui si incontreranno sia Dante che Cavalcanti ed infine Cino da Pistoia. Preludio allo scrivere 'ispirato', in cui Gorni ravvisa il nocciolo duro della poetica stilnovistica, è già quel verso guinizzelliano di ammonimento a Bonagiunta in 'Omo ch'è saggio non corre leggero': l'uomo veramente saggio 'riten su' pensero / infin a tanto che 'l ver l'asigura'. Paolazzi suggerisce che Guinizzelli voleva così sottolineare gli elementi fondamentali della propria poetica, ovvero quella 'dimensione interiore del pensare', a cui fa da corollario l'individuazione del 'vero'. L'autore procede poi con il constatare che Cavalcanti identificò il 'ver'/lo vero' di Guinizzelli (pur ridimensionandolo a puro livello di esperienza) con la 'verità' d'Amore', proprio nella sua canzone-manifesto 'Donna me prega, per ch'eo voglio dire' in cui l'aggettivo sostantivato ricorre tre volte e sempre in quella limitata ma precisa accezione ('l ver sentire'). Il 'veder lo vero' del Guido bolognese riapparirebbe, risemantizzato, anche nel sonetto cavalcantiano 'Io vidi gli occhi dove Amor si mise' in cui Cavalcanti riecheggia la discesa dello Spirito santo sugli Apostoli ('Dal ciel si mosse un spirito, in quel punto / che quella donna mi degnò guardare,/ e vennesi a posar nel mio pensero:/ elli mi conta sí d'Amor lo vero,/ che ogni sua virtù veder mi pare / sí com'io fosse nello suo cor giunto'). Si tratta di una sorta di investitura del poeta che, grazie allo spirito divino che gli conta il vero d'Amore, può legittimamente affermare la veridicità del suo dire dí Amore. Dall'insieme coerente di citazioni allusive che l'indagine di Paolazzi mette in luce emerge il nodo cruciale 'di una poetica [guinizzelliana] cresciuta in confronto serrato con il testo sacro ed il suo messaggio'. Fu dunque il poeta bolognese il primo a 'metabolizzare' le fonti bibliche da cui trassero poi ispirazione tematica, lessicale e strutturale sia Dante che Cavalcanti ed a rinnovare il linguaggio poetico attraverso il raffinato riuso dei testi sacri, posti ora al servizio della poesia amorosa. Paolazzi arriva cosí ad allargare sul terreno della cultura sacra gli spazi di poetica condivisi dal gruppo dei poeti Stilnovisti, allo stesso tempo accreditando questo 'rivoluzionario' processo di rinnovamento, che ebbe straordinari sviluppi nei fiorentini, a Guinizzelli, meritatamente considerato 'padre' e precursore del Dolce Stil Novo. La parte forse più originale, seppur vi si pervenga a conclusioni in sede critica a volte opinabili o poco convincenti, ha il merito di aver individuato una seconda voce, concomitante a quella biblica, 'metabolizzata' dai poeti stilnovisti, che ad essa fecero costante ricorso per lo sviluppo di una comune elaborazione di teoria e prassi poetica. Seppur già De Robertis aveva accertato in Cavalcanti e Dante un 'salto culturale' e Favati aveva sottolineato la grande creatività dei due poeti nel loro 'riuso e rilancio di generi e modelli' antichi, Paolazzi va oltre e crede di poter individuare con certezza nell'Ars poetica di Orazio l'altra 'voce' che ha contribuito in maniera determinante a far 'lievitare' l'autoconsapevolezza teorica del gruppo e ad elaborare il nucleo centrale del nuovo codice poetico. Al manuale oraziano si sarebbero rifatti Dante, Cavalcanti, Cino e Guinizzelli stesso non solo come fonte normativo-interpretativa ma anche come stimolo a tutta una 'catena di invenzioni' poetiche. L'ambizioso progetto di Paolazzi è quello di 'connettere saldamente il corpus poetico degli Stilnovisti con i pronunciamenti oraziani su origine, manifestazione, funzione dei detti poetici' (180) facendo leva su uno sparuto manipolo di versi oraziani (e qui sta una delle massime debolezze della sua indagine, peraltro stimolante) da cui crede di estrapolare un insieme coerente di indizi testuali di 'spessore alternante'. Un 'fitto reticolo di spunti orazianií è già individuabile, secondo l'analisi dell'autore, nel proemio di 'Donne ch'avete', di cui si sottolineano gli agganci con la tradizione stoico-epicurea sulla natura del linguaggio poetico come manifestazione adeguata delle passioni dell'animo ( Ars Poetica 108-113); la funzione psicagogica della poesia (Ars Poetica 99-100) circa la capacità della poesia 'dolce', cioè 'ricca di sentimento' di condurre a suo piacimento il cuore dell'ascoltatore; il principio della 'convenienza' tra materia trattata e stile prescelto dal poeta (Ars poetica 24-28). Quello che sottolinea il Paolazzi, e che costituisce veramente il suo contributo forse più originale (ed azzardato?) è che la teoria oraziana della natura che 'forma' dentro i sentimenti e della parola a cui spetta di 'portar fuori' detti sentimenti del poeta contiene tutti gli elementi costitutivi della poetica dell'interiorità di Cavalcanti ('Amor ha fabbricato ciò ch'io limo' nel sonetto polemico diretto a Guido Orlandi 'Di vil matera mi conven parlare') e di Cino ('d'Amor? Che dal suo spirito procede, / che parla in me, ciò ch'io dico rimando' nel sonetto 'Merzeí di quel signor ch'è dentro a meve'). Questo il teorema critico su cui si appunta l'indagine di Paolazzi: che il dolce Stil Novo si sia sviluppato in sinergia delle sacre scritture e dell'Ars Poetica di Orazio, e che la nuova poetica aveva alle spalle non soltanto il biblico 'ex abundantia cordis os loquitur' ma anche la teoria oraziana del poetare 'come manifestazione fedele [...] del 'dolce sentire' interiore attraverso il segno 'dolce' della parola, capace di trasmettere passioni e sentimenti ad ascoltatori e lettori' (118). Da questa fondamentale acquisizione critica Paolazzi arriva a ridefinire la questione del 'nodo' nel famoso passo purgatoriale: la distanza 'dall'uno all'altro stilo' consiste nella 'dolcezza' dei rimatori, ovvero nella 'piena corrispondenza fra la dolcezza (= 'ricchezza di sentimento' del dettato interiore di Amore) e la corrispondente dolcezza (= 'forza persuasiva') dello stile della poesia (120). Tralasciando in questa sede le riprove in sede intertestuale dei nessi ispirativi di Cavalcanti con il codice di poetica oraziano, preme far presenti i risultati della ricerca in merito all'influenza esercitata dal poeta latino sulla poetica guinizzelliana. Paolazzi, appoggiandosi per l'ennesima volta al passo oraziano (108-110), mette in luce il parallelismo tra teoria del 'cor gentil' e teoria oraziana della natura che 'forma dentro'. Come la natura oraziana sviluppa l'interiorità e la rende atta a reagire alle contingenze fortunose della vita ('Format enim natura prius nos intus ad omnem fortunarum habitum'), cosí la natura universale di Guido forma nel cuore 'gentilezza' intesa come 'capacità' potenziale di sprigionare il sentimento 'nobile' dell'amore all'apparire della donna ('cosí lo cor ch'è fatto di natura / asletto, pur, gentile, / donna a guisa di stella lo 'nnamora' in 'Al cor gentil rempaira sempre Amore', 209). Le concordanze tematiche si rispecchiano anche nelle ricadute lessicali ( fe' -anti- natura in Guido e format - natura-prius in Orazio) cosí come 'lo cor ch'è fatto da natura' ricalca il 'format enim natura prius nos'. Questi riscontri parzialmente decontestualizzati sono rinforzati da osservazioni di supporto di 'Madonna il fino amor ched eo vo porto' in cui la fusione di 'natura' e 'amor' dà origine alla 'natura amorosa' del poeta, e questa a sua volta dà il via a tutta una serie di 'azioni strettamente parallele' a quelle compiute dalla 'natura' di Orazio. Al dettato oraziano 'post effert animi motus interprete lingua' si rifa anche quel 'ch'ogni parola che a ciò fori porto' con cui Guinizzelli 'salda in un disegno amplificativo unitario il tema di 'natura' che 'forma' nel cuore gioia e tormento (d'amore) e quello complementare della lingua-parola che interpreta e 'porta fuori' i sentimenti interiori (213). Forte di un insieme di indizi, pur 'non macroscopici' Paolazzi sottolinea non solo il ruolo fondamentale svolto dall'Ars poetica di Orazio sulla nascita del Dolce Stil Novo ma anche quanto fu decisiva la mediazione guinizzelliana che sviluppò la teoria oraziana della 'natura' come causa orginale del linguaggio poetico (223-224). Emanuela Zanotti Carney, University of Chicago
Tables of Contents | Norms for Contributors | Upcoming Volumes | Subscription Information | Books Received for Review | Editorial Policy | The Editorial Board | Series Studi e Testi | Mail the Editor Olivia Holmes. Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubaour Song to Italian Poetry Book. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. It was my interest in the relationship between lyric voice and the concept of authorship in the Old English Frauenlieder that attracted me to Olivia Holmes's Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book. On this topic it did not disappoint: Holmes does indeed provide a fascinating discussion of the relationship between the author and his (fictive) "I" that, while remaining specific to the poets under discussion at the level of detail, has wide ramifications for the corpora of the Liederhandschriften of any European vernacular. Even better, Holmes's careful study of selected manuscripts proved to offer much new information and cogent discussion on two related topics: the transition from oral to written composition and presentation, and the concomitant development of the poet's persona by means of the sequencing of poems to create an autobiographical narrative. Holmes frames her study as an argument against the widespread notion that Petrarch invented the "author-ordered, first-person" lyric sequence (3) that presents the poet's literary person via "an aggregate of inferences" (4). This mistaken assumption, Holmes says, derives from the historical failure of scholarship to pay sufficient attention to manuscript sequencing, prose bridges, and other layout clues. By the simple but rarely chosen expedient of reading Occitan and Italian lyrics in their manuscript contexts, Holmes is able to show that rather than inventing the implied-author biography, Petrarch was rather the heir of a gradually developed tradition. The story begins, for Holmes, with Uc de Saint Circ, an early thirteenth-century Occitan troubadour who lived most of his adult life in Treviso. He may well have been responsible for much of the flurry of compiling activity occurring in northern Italy during his lifetime, and for the composition of the vidas and razos that accompany the manuscript collections of ostensibly oral lyrics. Following Zumthor, critics have naturally assumed that the purpose of the vidas and razos was to personalize or individualize the lyric "I" on the page, where it is unnaturally divorced from the physical presence of the singer-author troubadour. In reality, as Holmes demonstrates, these prose additions act as palinodes, "draw[ing] attention to the figure of the poet as a liar or artificer" (28). Counterintuitively focussing on a manuscript that happens to be wholly devoid of prose palinodes as well as of any graphic enhancement, Holmes makes her point about Uc as a self-conscious writer by showing how sequencing alone implies a persona and a life history. Unlike Uc, who was presumably an oral composer, Guittone d'Arezzo was clearly a writer and "explicitly ordered [his poems] into thematic or narrative cycles" (48) to tell a life story turning on a religious conversion (apparently based on Augustine's Confessions). As with Uc's palinodes, however, "the entire collection implicitly undermines Guittone's conversion, since the love poems [. . .] are never entirely suppressed [and] their proximity and similarity to the religious poems that oppose them renders the opposition itself unstable" (55). For Holmes, Guittone's creation of a macrotext from a lifetime of lyric production set a precedent for subsequent thirteenth- and fourteenth-century canzonieri. This fact is shown in Holmes's discussion of Vaticano Latino 3793 (ms. V), a multi-author anthology embedding many single-author sequences that Holmes concludes are author-ordered, based on her observations of "formal or thematic connectors" (71). Rustico Fillippi, for example, links sonnets into a fixed order by enchaining their rhyme schemes. Monte Andrea creates fictive tenzoni to connect short, lyric sequences. A long, anonymous corona is linked with, among other devices, the interlocking repetition of key words and motifs. As Florentine literary culture was thus thriving, Guittone's contemporary, the last Occitan troubadour Guiraut Riquier, was compiling an autobiographical libre. Beginning with a self-conscious rubric alluding to the autograph manuscript, Riquier's libre presents his lyrics in (alleged) chronological order, each dated and numbered "in order to make them tell a story, to mimic change and motion, [. . .] to tie them down, to give them authority and monumentality" (104). The poems are also frequently enchained with the "elaborate metrical schemes" that became possible with written composition and transmission (105), and even a sequence in the most conventional lyric genre, the pastorella, is given autobiographical weight by the conceit that the knight is Riquier himself, and the two shepherdesses a mother-daughter pair whom he courts in sequence over more than twenty years. At about the same time, a younger contemporary of Guittone and Riquier was expanding many of these lyric-sequence conventions in his Vita nova. Holmes argues that young Dante Alighieri, taking the Gospel of John as his model, superimposed "a literary vision of reality in which things and events are interpreted as signs," (125) onto the now conventional lyric sequence, with the innovation of the prosimetrum form. Despite these radical departures from received tradition, "Dante's lyric sequence consists of a repertoire of conventional situations and amorous dilemmas" that recalls the anonymous corona of ms. V, previously discussed (127). The poems are, in fact, so extremely conventional that "[i]t is the prose that does the work of increasing their levels of meaning and of making their allegorical meanings explicit, that is, of making them 'new'" (132). The connection between Dante and Petrarch, who, according to Holmes, was prevented by "the anxiety of influence" from learning directly from his great predecessor (169), was Nicolò de' Rossi, whose canzoniere is presented as autobiographical and whose sequences are Dantean in many respects. "What Nicolò learned from Dante (and Dante from Guittone, and ultimately from scripture) was that one's courtly mistress could be an emblem of Wisdom, or Christian Grace, and that the traditional song of change could be reinterpreted upwards [. . .] to figure religious conversion" (168). It was from Nicolò, according to Holmes, that Petrarch learned how to represent his persona "as both historical and emblematic" (169). Like Nicolò, who was so interested in writing for the page (rather than the ear) that he composed some of his poems to be written in shapes ¾ a star or flower, for example ¾ that would uncover for the reader some intricate word play otherwise invisible and inaudible, Petrarch was focussed on the codex's "precise physical dimensions and formal characteristics" (170), matching his text boundaries with those of the page or pair of facing pages. From Nicolò, Petrarch borrowed the technique of implying chronology via interspersed anniversary poems. From earlier canzonieri, he took the fiction that the book is a transcription of a live performance. Through Nicolò, he created Laura as his Beatrice. Olivia Holmes's chief contribution to the study of Italian lyric surely lies in her evidence of a strong continuity of tradition, but she does not conduct her argument without close readings of the text, which will be of interest in their own right. Nor does her argument for continuity in any way detract from the achievements of Dante and Petrarch. While they learned from earlier and contemporary poets and canzonieri, Holmes is always quick to remind us that the quality of their verse and their vision was on a level quite beyond that of their colleagues. I, for one, appreciate these two giants all the more, now that Holmes has reconstructed the paving of their road by their predecessors. If Assembling the Lyric Self could be said to disappoint in any way, it would be in its surprising omission to note any humor in the poetic corpus it examines so carefully. Holmes's decision to focus exclusively on the love and religious lyrics precludes forays into the comic and satiric poems, of course, but one does wonder from time to time, reading her earnest discussions of apparently thoroughly solemn canzoni, sonnets, tenzoni, and pastorellas, if the love lyrics especially weren't a bit more playful than she would have them. A study of the witty and whimsical aspects of the same poetic corpus, if conducted with the same high standards as the book under review, would likely discover additional and complementary evidence for self-conscious authorship in Petrarch's predecessors. Lois Bragg, Gallaudet University
Tables of Contents | Norms for Contributors | Upcoming Volumes | Subscription Information | Books Received for Review | Editorial Policy | The Editorial Board | Series Studi e Testi | Mail the Editor Gabriele Costa. Le origini della lingua poetica indeuropea. Voce coscienza e transizione neolitica. Firenze: Olschki, 1998. Pp. 505. The work examined here seems to be rara avis these days. The impression, conveyed already in the title, is confirmed in the "Preface," in which the author firmly champions the legitimacy of overcoming the particularistic approach, dictated by an undue preoccupation with individual methodologies and specific up-to-date contributions, and the necessity of delving in the problems and themes themselves. The extensive monograph is structured in a "reconstruction of the forms" and a "reconstruction of the values." In the first part, an overview of the early studies on the origins of the Indo-European poetic language is traced back to its origins in the German scholarship of the nineteenth century. Then the more recent developments, in particular, after the publication of Rüdiger Schmitt's Dichtung und Dichtersprache in indogermanischer Zeit (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1967) are examined in greater detail, with special emphasis on the positions of five different scholars: Françoise Bader, Enrico Campanile, Marcello Durante, Gregory Nagy, and Calvert Watkins.. The professed impartiality of the scientific approach does not prevent Costa from frankly and clearly expressing his judgment: "Ritengo che la linguistica sia di fatto una scienza interpretativa, al pari della storia, della filosofia, dell'antropologia, della psicologia, cioè delle altre scienze che si occupano, [. . .] della creazione di significati all'interno di tradizioni e istituzioni culturali, e dunque che essa non possa sottrarre alle e dalle proprie indagini l'esplicitazione dei valori ¾ l'ideologia ¾ insiti nei sistemi semiotici che ricostruisce, rendendo evidente in tal modo, attraverso il giudizio sul passato, anche l'epistemologia di chi, ricercando, modifica e rimodella i dati della Creatura e consentendo apertamente, infine, il controllo metagiudiziale di chi, lettore o critico, si assume il compito della controverifica sperimentale e dela falsificazione teoretica" (6-7). The second part directly examines and reconsiders the main issue that a scholar has to face nowadays in the light of our present knowledge. In an effort to define the epistemological setting of comparative linguistics today, the author proposes a "systemic model" (modello sistemico) which draws from such concepts as Bateson's application of the principle of entropy to a theory of the Mind and Nature, Korzybski's notion of "map" and "territory", and finally on Bohr's complementarity principle. The historical (or rather, pre-historical and proto-historical) section that follows, "Le origini indeuropee," focuses on the possible time frame of the Indo-European diaspora: the early third millennium B.C., rather than the traditional hypothesis of a later dating, end of the third and beginning of the second millennium. (On the subject, see, lately, Andrew Sherrat, "Echoes of the Big-Bang: The Historical Context of Language Dispersal" in Proceedings of the Tenth UCLA Indo-European Conference, Los Angeles, May 21-23, 1998, Washington D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man, 1999, 262-81). Seemingly abstract and often poised on minute linguistic questions (for instance, the analogy between the Greek formula kleos aphthiton, "incorruptible glory," and its Vedic equivalent) these studies are a reflection on the meaning of those language forms that shape the world views of Western civilization. As J. Hilman puts it: "[. . .] finché la nostra cultura resta tradizionalmente e ufficialmente legata alle lingue indeuropee [. . .] non potremo cambiare la nostra mente, anche se potremo, beninteso, ampliarla, rivederla, e reimmaginarla (Kinds of Power, Italian trans. 1996, 18) (326). We may add that any such research ultimately aims at a hermeneutic contribution to the understanding of the cultural system that, in this century, has been variously referred to as Welt (Heidegger), uncharted territory (Wittgenstein), ideology (Ferruccio Rossi-Landi), or labyrinth (Borges). To give a tangible example of some of the problems debated in the book, I will focus on an issue that is crucial in any research on the origins and character of the Indo-European poetic language: the oral vs. written tradition. It is interesting to note, in fact, that the practice of writing can be ascribed to the common period (as uncontroversially documented by the pan-dialectal diffusion of the root pei-k/pei-g ("to write, to paint, to decorate") in Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, Balto-Slavic, Greek, Latin, and Germanic languages. In a diachronic perspective, on the other hand, a culture which has appeared of paramount importance since the very beginnings of Indo-European studies for its unquestionable antiquity, namely Old Indic, has been ostensibly lacking in written documents until relatively recent times: from king A·oka's inscription (third century B.C.) to the onset of epistolary literature with Kâlidâsa (fourth century A.D.). The Vedic, and later Sanskrit and Pali traditions, in fact, seem to be governed by an ideology of memory (ideologia della memoria) that lays a tabooistic stigma on writing itself (clearly prohibited in the Mah·bh·rata 13, 24, 70)), which is viewed as a dangerous means of transmission, requiring a specific initiation, in order to avoid the almost sacrilegious spreading of arcane truths. In other traditions, too, the magic character of script is variously alluded to (see, for instance, the reference to the Druids in Caesar's Bellum Gallicum VI: 14, 3-4) as well as mythical narratives. Particularly suggestive, in this respect, is the story of Bellerophontes as told in the Iliad (VI: 153-174). The hero, victim of the treachery of a woman (in a situation comparable to the Biblical episode of Joseph and Potiphar's wife), is given a scroll with some "ominous signs" (semata lygra), which are meant to cause indirectly his death. This is the only Homeric passage in which writing is mentioned: the context is the initiation of a hero, who with his force, courage, and cunning eventually prevails over his enemies. If a brief remark can be added to the detailed analysis and beautiful interpretation of this passage by Françoise Bader (La langue des dieux, ou l'hermétisme des poètes indo-européens, Pisa: Giardini, 1989, 34-39), I would say that writing, placed on the threshold between life and death, has all the ambivalent power of an oracle: a message from the other world. A subject closely related to the above topic is the metrical aspect in the Indo-European poetic tradition (see, in this regard, the very recent contribution by Morris Halle, "On Stress and Accent in Indo-European," (Language 73 [1997]: 275-313). The issue is often discussed in the context of the possibility, or impossibility, of reconstructing an even partial framework that is common to the different languages, (see the debate among Enrico Campanile, Marcello Durante, and Calvert Watkins 117-21). The research, however, more importantly addresses the question of the verbal scanning of time ¾ rhythm which, regardless of the different historical forms, is a founding element in the very genesis of poetry. It is highly significant in this context that in some Indo-European languages, like Sanskrit, Greek, and possibly Latin, the linguistic accent was musical in nature, namely, it was based on variations in pitch, not differences in expiration (as in the case of the dynamic accent of modern languages). The reflection on the musical character of poetry could well lead into the direction of the psychoanalytic investigations on the emotional dimension of language, a venue, however, usually disregarded (whence its absence in Costa's book) by scholars of Indo-European studies. In view of some very promising beginnings (already with Freud's very insightful remarks on the opposite meanings of primitive words), such a gap between linguistic archaeology and psychology seems to be a highly regrettable one. Among the few exceptions is the masterful work of the not adequately known and recognized Hungarian psychologist and linguist Theodore Thass-Thienemann. His book, The Interpretation of Language 1. Understanding the Symbolic Meaning of Language. 2. Understanding the Unconscious Meaning of Language (New York: J. Aronson, 1973), now out of print, is a journey into the enchanted silva of multi-lingual etymologies, conducted with the confidence and originality of a Vico, who assimilated Indo-European linguistics as well as twentieth-century philosophy and psychoanalysis. By way of conclusion, I may note that the very extensive (145 pages!) critical bibliography appended to Le origini della lingua poetica indeuropea seems to belie my opening statement about the rarity of such works in contemporary scholarship. I would simply add that, aside from the number of related works, Costa's work can still be viewed as rara avis for the nearly poetic sensibility of an extremely erudite work, in which the rather frequent literary citations appear as but the surface aspect of a deep empathy of the author with the subject of his research: the origins of Indo-European poetic language. Massimo Mandolini Pesaresi, Columbia University
Tables of Contents | Norms for Contributors | Upcoming Volumes | Subscription Information | Books Received for Review | Editorial Policy | The Editorial Board | Series Studi e Testi | Mail the Editor Wilhelm Pötters. Nascita del sonetto. Metrica e matematica al tempo di Federico II. Ravenna: Longo, 1998. Pp. 189. In the immortal words of W. S. Gilbert's Yum-Yum (The Mikado), "here's a how-de-do!" Few readers of this undeniably thought-provoking book will, I suspect, be able to maintain complete scholarly equanimity in the face of the sheer unexpectedness of its contents. Lulled into a sense of comforting familiarity by its sober presentation and respectable publisher, the charming miniature on its cover, or the numerous illustrations reproduced from late medieval manuscripts in its first chapter, the literary scholar will scarcely fail to note - it may be with a certain disquiet - the proliferation of figures and statistical tables that begins in the book's opening pages. For some, disquiet may soon turn to alarm, as the remaining pages fill with geometrical diagrams, mathematical symbols, fractions, equations, sketches of flatfish, sunflowers, and horses, computer-generated images derived from fractals, and more or less grainy photographs of the Apollo Belvedere, sculptures at Chartres Cathedral, and sundry works of Raphael, Duccio, Dürer, Mondrian, and Aristide Maillol - not to mention the Parthenon, the Pyramids, and a singularly unattractive Le Corbusier apartment building in sunny Marseilles. It all seems to take us a long way indeed from the author's titular preoccupation, the "birth of the sonnet." Which, of course, is precisely the point. Wilhelm Pötters is anxious to make us think about this hackneyed problem of literary history in an entirely new way. In order to do so, he has marshaled an astonishing variety of (mainly) non-literary evidence in support of a simple but dramatically original argument: that the sonnet takes the form that it does - fourteen lines of eleven syllables apiece, usually grouped into eight-line octave and six-line sestet - because its inventors were writing, at the Sicilian court of Frederick II in the early thirteenth century, in a cultural atmosphere suffused by the most advanced mathematical theories available at that time in the Christian West. The numerical values inherent in the sonnet structure - not only 11 and 14, but also 154 (the total number of syllables in a sonnet), 22 and 7 (the numerical elements of p in their respective proportional relationships with 11 and 14), and the ratio 4:3 (or 8:6, octave to sestet) - are thus neither arbitrarily devised nor adapted from existing models in a tradition of literary forms, but chosen precisely for their power to signify key mathematical ideas, especially those connected with squaring the circle and the so-called Golden Section (in the late medieval discussion of which these very numbers, as Pötters exhaustively demonstrates, recur over and over again). This is revolutionary stuff indeed. Many a scholar has ventured a hypothesis as to the origin of the sonnet, all the way from the form's dependence on Provençal (or classical, or even Arabic) literary precedent to Ezra Pound's reductive, but not altogether implausible, suggestion that the sonnet simply came into being one day when an incompetent artist found himself faltering in the attempt to compose the opening stanza of a canzone. No one before Pötters, however, has gone so far outside specifically literary history in pursuit of an answer, or has presented such a wealth of information in support of so provocative a thesis. There is much to be learned from this book about both the history and the theory of mathematics - Pötters is generous with his description and quotation of some remarkably interesting primary texts - and even the most deplorably unmathematical reader will come away not only much better informed but also with a deeper sense of the richness of cultural and intellectual possibility that distinguished the thirteenth century in general and the Frederician court in particular. That being said, from a strictly literary point of view the book suffers from some serious problems. In essence these are structural: there is much more about matematica than metrica here, and the imbalance is not redressed by any very searching inquiry into the relationship between the two concepts, either in theory (beyond the identification of the importance of certain numbers), or in practice (through, say, the analysis of particular texts in which numerically-based disposition of syllables has a verifiable influence on poetic meaning). Pötters tells us that 11 and 14 are crucial numbers in medieval mathematical theory, and we believe him. He tells us that squaring the circle and the Golden Section are fascinating topics in mathematics, influential in art and architecture down to the present day, and we believe that too. Then, instead of clinching his argument by demonstrating the concrete significance of these connections for literary analysis, he contents himself with piling up evidence - much of it (see the list above) dubiously relevant to the invention of the sonnet or to any other aspect of medieval culture - for points he has already made. Likewise, the book fails to deal with some fairly obvious potential objections to its thesis. Apart from the biographical question, which seems likely to remain unanswerable for lack of hard evidence (we remain, that is, entitled to wonder just how much the poets at Frederick's court did actually know, or care, about mathematics), it might be asked why, if 11 and 14, or the ratio 4:3, are really so indispensably important to the invention of the sonnet, they seem to lose their indispensability so early in the subsequent development of the form? It is not long after 1250 that the sonetto caudato appears, its extra lines putting an end to the ubiquity of 14. A mere couple of centuries after that, sonnets begin to be written in non-Italian languages, and there goes the need for 11 (replaced by the 10 syllables per line of English pentameter or the 12 of the French alexandrin). As for the 4:3 ratio, it too ceases to be mandatory as early as the third quarter of the thirteenth century, with the replacement of the octave by the ten-line fronte devised by Guittone d'Arezzo and perfected by Monte Andrea. Of course, it might be replied that Pötters's concern is with the birth of the sonnet, not with what became of it in later life; but it does seem strange that, if certain numbers and proportions are so universally significant in mathematical culture as to have spilled over into prosody and generated the sonnet form, their significance in the history of poetic practice should thereafter be restricted by features of language and chronology. Wilhelm Pötters has written a learned and original book that certainly deserves to be taken seriously by scholars of literary history and poetic form. But some of his readers may find themselves wishing for rather fewer pictures, however pretty, and rather more - and more incisive - discussion of literary texts. Steven Botterill, University of California, Berkeley
Tables of Contents | Norms for Contributors | Upcoming Volumes | Subscription Information | Books Received for Review | Editorial Policy | The Editorial Board | Series Studi e Testi | Mail the Editor Alison Cornish. Reading Dante's Stars. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Pp. 226. Alison Cornish has written an elegant, erudite, and engaging little book. I say "little" because it runs only 144 pages of text, plus 70 pages of notes ¾ testifying to its erudition. Yet despite its remarkable learnedness and the difficulty of the subject matter, it is simply and lucidly written. The numerous Latin citations are generally translated into graceful English, with the original text given only in the notes. The book is easily readable, unlike, perhaps, the stars that it describes. Cornish tackles as her subject Dante's invocations of astronomical learning, including some of the most notoriously difficult passages in the Commedia. We Dante scholars are frequently tempted, out of a mixture of laziness and humanist snobbery, to give short shrift to the poem's scientific and technical aspects. The writings of John Freccero first taught many of us, however, that understanding the science of the age increases, rather than diminishes, the poem's beauty. Cornish shows how astronomy has everything to do with its beauty, but also with its meaning, and how form and content are one inseparable package, by reading the astronomical references contextually, in terms of the narrative or thematic moments in which they appear. Two basic ideas with which she begins and to which she repeatedly returns are that: 1) in Dante's world view, the stars are concrete representations of eternal ideas, exempla of the spiritual order that governs the universe by the power of love; and 2) Dante's astronomy is not simply aesthetic but also ethical, inasmuch as it demands a personal application and interpretation. The constellations are invitations to virtue, serving to remind us of what we ought to do and requiring us to opt for the good. The volume is divided into an introduction, eight chapters, and a brief conclusion. The chapters are generally based on the explication of a single astronomical invocation or a short series of related references. Chapter 1 addresses the relationship ¾ in the Vita nuova, the Convivio, and the Commedia ¾ between astronomical motion and love. Aristotle posited a First Mover who set the cosmos in motion by being desired. The behavior of the material universe is analogous, in the microcosm, to the human appetitive faculties. With each description of the celestial wheels, "the reader is made to stand before the universe [. . .] as the lover stands before the beloved" (23). Chapter 2 takes on the date of the pilgrim's journey and the apparent discrepancy between Dante's astrology and the "real" positions of the planets on Maundy Thursday 1300, showing how Dante's "false" astronomical description of spring yokes the journey's fictional beginning to Easter and to the anniversary of the creation of the world. Chapter 3 discusses three literary references to farmers as readers of the stars (Inferno 20, 24, and 26) which stand as symbolic positive alternatives to antiquity's deluded soothsayers and rash sailors whose excessive curiosity led them to precipitous disaster. Chapter 4 analyzes the elaborate astronomical periphrase at the opening of Purgatorio 9 which refers to the contemporaneousness of nighttime in Purgatory and dawn in Italy, on the other side of the world, inviting the reader to compare "there" and "here," the corrective afterlife with our present sinful state. In Chapter 5, Cornish moves on to the Paradiso, where the astronomical descriptions generally lose their function as time-markers, to become metaphorical representations of spiritual abstractions. The canticle begins with a complex and imprecise chronological indicator based, once more, on multiple time references ¾ it was day there and evening here ¾ suggesting an atemporal or post-temporal perspective in which all times converge. In Chapter 6, she examines the imaginative exercise, in which the poet asks the reader to participate in Paradiso 13, of reshaping selected stars into a new configuration in order to activate the image of the Trinity in the individual soul. Chapter 7 examines, rather, the relation between the traveler's vision of nine concentric circles wheeling around a fixed point in Canto 28 and the homocentric Aristotelian universe. In the most intricate and, to my mind, interesting argument, Chapter 8 demonstrates how the astronomical exordium to Beatrice's discourse on angels in Paradiso 29 ¾ a simile ostensibly describing a pause in her speech ¾ relates to the theological issue raised later in the canto as to whether there was an interval and, if so, of what sort, between the creation of the angels and Satan's fall. The astronomical image focuses on the momentary balance of two planets on the horizon, one rising and one setting, corresponding to the undecided state in which both sets of angels hesitated momentarily before making the single, irrevocable decision that set the universe in motion. This final discussion brings Cornish neatly back, in the book's conclusion, to her original emphasis on observed celestial phenomena as texts that are open to different personal interpretations, and that demand the reader take a stand, choosing virtue and love. If this book has a limitation, it is that it gets a little bogged down at times in dry, technical discussions. Despite the admittedly ambiguous nature of some of his imagery, Dante is almost always shown to think rationally, like a scientist or philosopher, and just what distinguishes him from his scholastic contemporaries may not always be adequately explained. But the fault may also lie in this reader's perhaps too-short attention span for issues that obviously fascinated both the poet and his contemporaries. Cornish's contribution is, without a doubt, an extremely useful and supremely original addition (not a small feat in such an overcrowded field!) to the canon of American Dante criticism. Olivia Holmes, Yale University
Tables of Contents | Norms for Contributors | Upcoming Volumes | Subscription Information | Books Received for Review | Editorial Policy | The Editorial Board | Series Studi e Testi | Mail the Editor Gloria Allaire. Andrea da Barberino and the Language of Chivalry. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1997. Pp. 183. Although the subject of this interesting study has never quite sunk altogether out of scholarly sight, it is probably safe to say that there will be relatively few readers outside Italy, other than specialists in his period (c. 1370-1431) or his favored (chivalric) genre, for whom Andrea da Barberino is much more than a name. (In Italy, narratives based on his writings have at least enjoyed a prolonged afterlife in popular culture.) Even the specialists, however, have still not found decisive answers to many of the fundamental questions that might be asked about the output of any late medieval author: exactly which texts can safely or plausibly be attributed to him? What are the defining stylistic features of his writing? What precisely are the relations among the various manuscript witnesses to the dissemination of his works? What are the generic and thematic connections of those works with their literary and cultural matrix? Thanks to Gloria Allaire's lucid and meticulous account of her pioneering work on Andrea's manuscript tradition, we are at last in a position to begin to answer all of these questions, and indeed to come to Andrea's work not only better informed but more sensitive to both its cultural significance and its specifically literary value. Allaire begins at the most traditional of beginnings with an account of Andrea's "Life and Works" (5-13). She spells out what is known of his life, what can (judiciously) be inferred from his works and scribal glosses in manuscripts thereof, what kind of reception his uvre enjoyed among his contemporaries, and what impact his plots and characters had in subsequent literary, cultural, and even folkloristic manifestations down to the 1990s. She then undertakes an analysis of "Andrea's Narrative Style" (14-30), identifying such key features as a "striving for verisimilitude" (14), a "chronicle-like texture" (16), an abiding interest in geography and genealogy, a "varied use of registers, shaped according to the particular narrative needs of a passage" (21), frequent reference (more so than might have been expected in the genre) to the Latin classics and the liturgy, characteristic use of particular narrative and rhetorical formulae, and the presence of determinable devices of grammar and syntax such as polysyndeton. Allaire is careful to acknowledge that several of these "hallmarks" (30) of Andrea's style are shared with many other late medieval authors and texts, and that their use as identifiers must therefore be subject to rigorous control. She is also under no illusions about the potential (and potentially vast) distance between author and manuscript, admitting, for instance, that the appearance of polysyndeton in a given text may easily have been created by a scribal rather than an authorial preference for, and insertion of, conjunctions (30). Nonetheless, she makes a strong - because cautious - case for the definition of a recognizable style as characteristic of the authentic works of Andrea da Barberino, and, on that basis, sets out in subsequent chapters to determine several still controversial questions of attribution connected with his name. The first of these ("The Case for La Prima Spagna," 31-42) involves the text known as the Prima Spagna, an account of the first of Charlemagne's wars in Spain. Here the eponymous case is especially tricky because, codicologically speaking, there is no "there" there: the only surviving manuscript of the Prima Spagna, found in a Roman library in the early nineteenth century, was lost some time thereafter and has never resurfaced (literally: it went down with the ship that was carrying it to Germany). The only available evidence for its contents is therefore a set of rubrics transcribed from the manuscript before its ill-starred embarkation. Allaire examines these minutely, along with other surviving evidence of the manuscript's appearance, and concludes both that "[i]n addition to similarities of plot and characters, the lost Prima Spagna shares specific narrative motifs with the known works of Andrea" (36), and that there is substantial evidence (provided by the rubrics) for the presence in the Prima Spagna of lexical items typical of Andrea's authentic works, but rarely if ever found in a control group of tre- and quattrocento Tuscan chivalric texts by other hands. The next chapter, "The Case for Ansuigi (La Seconda Spagna)" (43-64), likewise begins from the lost Roman manuscript, arguing that the Seconda Spagna it contained is probably identifiable with an extant Storia di Ansuigi, re di Spagna, which in turn can be attributed to Andrea on the basis of lexical and stylistic analysis and comparison similar to those conducted in the previous chapter. Allaire does some admirable philological spadework here, clearing the ground of misconceptions and confusions introduced by earlier generations of scholars, and consistently handling her sometimes evanescent textual material with critical acumen and sound common sense. She continues to exercise her skills in the following chapters, in which she argues first (65-92) that the lengthy prose narrative known as the Storie di Rinaldo da Monte Albano is probably Andrea's, and then (93-122) that the slightly less lengthy Libro di Rambaldo da Risa, occasionally assigned in the past to Andrea, probably is not. A brief conclusion (123-24) expresses the hope that this book's establishment of more precise definitions of Andrea's style and canon will lead to "more thoughtful and comprehensive critical treatments" (124) of his works (which, it might be noted, Allaire herself would surely be very well equipped to provide). The volume is rounded out by useful appendices that list extant manuscripts of Andrea's texts and supply a diplomatic transcription of a key extract from the proem to one of them. They also analyze the content of the disputed Rambaldo in comparison with that of Andrea's undisputed works, as well as provide thorough notes and bibliography. In every chapter, Allaire's basic method is to take a fine-tooth comb to the texts themselves, examining lexical and stylistic evidence with minute care, assessing individual texts in the light of a wide range of analogous contemporary material, taking full account of the variants and vagaries of the manuscript tradition, and restraining any impulse to push the ensuing argument beyond the limits of the possible, the likely, or the probable into the treacherous realm of the categorical. It must be conceded that there are points at which particular claims or applications of method seem open to question - given the nature of the subject, it could scarcely be otherwise. But Allaire herself is well aware of the limitations inherent in her chosen approach; as a result, the effect of her painstaking accumulation of evidence and her refusal to squeeze that evidence harder than it can bear is, in the end, impressive enough in its own terms. Unless they are prepared to deny the validity of the entire philological method itself (which some, of course, will be) readers who wish to challenge Allaire's conclusions will have to engage with the material in a fashion as methodologically responsible and as exhaustively detailed as her own, which they will not find easy. All in all, this book stands as a fine monument to a way of doing things in literary study which has fallen out of fashion in recent years, but whose value is likely to endure long beyond that of more modish forms of literary-critical practice that have taken its place. By dint of great learning, subtle argument, and sheer hard work with texts, Allaire has been able to clarify confusion, dispel ignorance, and point the way toward deeper and more satisfying readings of a previously under-rated author. It is an achievement that any of us who call ourselves scholars might, and should, envy. Steven Botterill, University of California, Berkeley
Tables of Contents | Norms for Contributors | Upcoming Volumes | Subscription Information | Books Received for Review | Editorial Policy | The Editorial Board | Series Studi e Testi | Mail the Editor Charles Klopp. Sentences: The Memoirs and Letters of Italian Political Prisoners from Benvenuto Cellini to Aldo Moro. Toronto: UP, 1999. Pp. xv+276. Charles Klopp's Sentences: The Memoirs and Letters of Italian Political Prisoners from Benvenuto Cellini to Aldo Moro is an authoritative and insightful guide through the fascinating realm of confinement and its representation in literary expression. Although he includes items as early as the 1500s, his selection of prison letters and autobiographical writings is dominated by works belonging to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ¾ a somber indication, in and of itself, of the prevalence of political detentions and strife in Italy's recent history. With laudable economy of detail, Klopp situates each author in his or her respective historical milieu, provides the reader with pertinent biographical information, and balances the often intimate revelations of his subjects with his own distanced yet discerning reflections. In his exposition of this literature that deals with some of humankind's darker moments, he highlights both its drama and pathos, while relieving his reader with an occasional amusing and even entertaining comment. His book, then, presents a kaleidoscopic vision of many separate and distinct portrayals of the experience of confinement, each linked by historical repetition and by a self-perpetuating network of intertextual allusions and themes. At times, Klopp seems to embrace this phenomenon of intertextuality; in one example, he connects twentieth-century prisoner/authors Rodolfo Morandi and Mario Alicata with their Risorgimento predecessors by way of the recurrent theme of conversion (161-62); at other times, he censures it, as indicated by his summation of the Spielberg patriots' "squabbles," "bickering," "rewriting, refutation, and repudiation of one another" (66); and in several instances, he concludes that prisoner/authors are de facto "captives of the intertextual tradition of prison writing" (36; also 29, 37, 118-19). One might argue that all genres (Klopp is treating several: the epistolary genre, the memoir, and poetry) possess textual prototypes and traditions or they would not be defined as such. Would all writers then be "captives" to precedent models? Setting aside the somewhat forced metaphor, I do agree that the shared imagery and the tendency to identify with past models are outstanding features of prison discourse and, as such, substantiate its designation as genre while investing it with something of an eternal quality. This said, it should not be forgotten that prison writing is also influenced by the literary currents, trends, and values of the historical moment from which it emerges. Klopp has successfully integrated this notion into his discussion and thus illumined certain aspects of the Aldo Moro writings, for example, and those of Andrea Costa and the Communists. His book certainly whets the appetite for more of this type of analysis, which must obviously be minimized in a wide-ranging survey. Indeed, the strength of Sentences lies in its broad coverage of materials not easily accessed, but, nonetheless, brought forth with mastery. The reader's understanding and appreciation of the more peculiar or distinctive tropes of prison narrative are advanced by Klopp's acute observations of the ordinary and extraordinary experiences of imprisonment. One such elucidation highlights the potentially paradoxical state of forced confinement in which bodily constraints may actually dispose the mind to a certain broadening, a heightened receptiveness, or even freedom. Klopp also points out that the reverse is possible, in that victims of confinement may be so traumatized, demoralized, or otherwise unable to adapt to captivity that they simply lose the powers of concentration or memory. In this same spirit of mental and physical interplay, Klopp presents an interesting discussion of the "textualization of the body and the accompanying corporalization of the text" (191). As he demonstrates with numerous examples, the suffering body itself can become a medium of expression "able to authenticate or subvert an accompanying or competing text" (192). Whether it be writing in blood or on soiled bandages, the visible scars of torture or illness, or in the "dialectic of substitution and replacement" (191), the pathology of the prisoner is a graphic fixture of prison discourse. Klopp's elaborations on this theme are extremely important not only to the study of these particular texts, but in furthering, from a socio-cultural perspective, our understanding of the role of captivity in human society. Any interpreter of highly subjective material must be faithful to the content of the text, that is, to the words each author has chosen to convey his or her thoughts. Klopp tells us, though, that he and the reader must also see what is not stated in the text. He explains that prison writing consists of an ostensible text beneath which lies a "clandestine" or "unarticulated, secret" text which, in his view, is "more authentic" (10, 192) than that which the author has in fact composed. Although I admire his line of reasoning and am equally intrigued by these authors' allusions to hidden or lost texts, suppressed emotions or ideas, censored fragments, and ineffable experiences, I do not agree that the unspoken text is somehow more authentic than the text which functions as its referent. Rather, I believe that just as the shadow of a person or an object is not invisible, but a perceptible presence ¾ albeit of a different nature and dependent upon its concrete source ¾ so, too, the unarticulated text or shadow-text, if you will, is perceptible and meaningful in tandem with, but not separate from, the ostensible text. If indeed a covert, though undefined, text is somehow implied within the overt text, the allusion itself must be seen as meaningful. In a sense, the author has, consciously or subconsciously, invited the reader to speculation. In the altogether different case of writings in symbolic language, cryptic alphabets, acrostics, or even invisible ink, which are intended for a specific recipient, the question is not one of authenticity but of simply recognizing the symbiotic function of a foil text (or, literally, a pretext) and the coded message it harbors. It seems to me that Klopp's engrossment with the text manqué forces him to characterize the prison writings in terms of their inadequacies. He repeatedly refers to "inexpressible passion," "ineffable suffering" (192), "unexpressed affection" (122), "inexpressible texts of suffering and desire" (10) as if these experiences, common to all people, surpass the limits of human expression. If that were the case, the world would have very few works of art, musical compositions, or books. Is it not in the act of writing, singing, painting, dancing, or remembering, whilst body and mind are engaged in the struggle to express, that the experience lives? Artistic expression is never finalized nor perfected, yet in that imperfection, it accurately reflects the human condition. Countless Holocaust scholars invariably refer to the unutterable nature of that horrific event, yet there, within the testimonies of each survivor, a voice speaks the unspeakable. The nightmare, according to Primo Levi, himself a Holocaust witness, was not the "gruesome privilege of writing," but the fear that the world would not listen, or in his own ironic turn of phrase, that his would be an "unlistened-to story." In conclusion, I cannot neglect to mention what I perceive as a persistent source of distraction throughout Charles Klopp's otherwise masterful work. The very title of his book, Sentences: The Memoirs and Letters of Italian Political Prisoners from Benvenuto Cellini to Aldo Moro, presents a troublesome issue in that neither Cellini nor Moro was a political prisoner by any definition of the term as it is understood today or, for that matter, in its prototypical sense. Since there exist slightly variant definitions of the term "political prisoner" presently vying for universal recognition, it seems all the more imperative that Klopp clarify his own interpretation in a way that remains consistent throughout his discussion. The elasticity with which he treats this key term has spilled over onto other closely associated terms, such as the word "prison" itself. A convent or a ritiro (as Mondragone was called in Caracciolo's case) is not a prison, nor is a hospital for the mentally ill (Tasso's case), although I am well aware not only of their historical associations with carceral institutions, but also of the many similar experiences that forced confinement in such places might produce. However, some defining parameters must be drawn, or we could easily expand the discussion to include house arrests or any number of institutions from orphanages, schools, factories, retirement homes, military barracks, rehabilitation centers, and so on. For all of their Foucaultian similarities, these institutions are symbols of quite different social mechanisms, operating on distinct principles and generating their own logic and purpose, some with the aim of protecting society from the dangerous transgressor, others to protect, for example, the chaste nun or wayward juvenile from society and its contaminating evils. Is the nun Enrichetta Caracciolo's erotic interest a "prison doctor" or a "convent doctor"? Klopp uses the words as if they were interchangeable (127, 129). The reader is further baffled by the inclusion of a purely fictitious work (the Pignata story), the letters of Red Brigades' hostage, Aldo Moro (who committed no crime at all), and the cases of Cellini, Tasso, Casanova, and Caracciolo, whose offenses do not appear to be politically motivated. Klopp's introductory remarks on Cellini, Tasso, and Casanova, in which he states that "these men were transgressive enough in their behavior for irritated ecclesiastical or civil authorities to decide they should go to jail" (12), and are thus "precursors" to later political prisoners, do not, in my mind, serve the reader adequately nor bear the burden of expectation that his weighty title creates. My concern with this matter is as practical as it is theoretical in that the autobiographical writings of prisoners are, with few exceptions, acutely focused upon the particular physical and psychological conditions of their prison environment, on the circumstances of their trials and interrogations, and on the nature of their actual or purported crimes. Their respective self-portraits and portrayals of captivity, while intimately linked to the constricted world on the "inside," are also shaped by the "outside," that is, by the perceived moral judgments of family, friends, society in general, and even their oppressors. My argument is not with Klopp's treating the various aforementioned authors. In truth, these segments of his book are among the more interesting, for here we find much of the shared imagery that connects all portraits of confinement. Nonetheless, I maintain that the writings of a political dissident reflect a very different perspective and overall experience from those of a mentally disturbed poet or a wanton libertine, and the attempt to represent all such writers as political prisoners is simply misleading, and conveys a false sense of continuity where, in fact, stands an historical discontinuity. Fortunately this flaw does not mar the many virtues of Klopp's work, not the least being its originality as an extensive critical survey of strictly Italian prisoner/authors. Beyond the culturally specific considerations which so richly inform this book, and regardless of country or language, Charles Klopp's Sentences represents one of the most thought-provoking and vital contributions to the study of prison literature in recent scholarship. Maria Smith, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Tables of Contents | Norms for Contributors | Upcoming Volumes | Subscription Information | Books Received for Review | Editorial Policy | The Editorial Board | Series Studi e Testi | Mail the Editor Nancy L. Canepa. From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999. Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone, a collection of forty-nine fairy tales framed by a fiftieth tale that opens and closes the collection, which was published posthumously in 1634-36, is described by Marina Warner as "the foundation stone of the modern literary fairy tale" (From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers 148). Critical attention to this work, however, especially in English, has been sparse and uneven. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century folklorists tended to see Basile as an anomalous figure in early seventeenth-century Italian letters. Although Canepa agrees that his choice to write the work in Neapolitan dialect impeded widespread diffusion of the work, she also points out that, until recently, this same perception dominated his reception in his own country where he was also categorized as an "unconscious ironizer" of Baroque persuasion, a secondary aesthetic at best (31). Canepa proposes to remedy Basile's marginal status in the English-speaking scholarly community with this historical and literary study of the varied and innovative elements that distinguish "Basile's version of the literary fairy tale from both the oral folktales and from the fairy tales of his better known successors" (22). According to Canepa, "the true novelty of Lo cunto lies not in any structural elaboration of the genre but in the figural and ideological interpolations, the references to diverse social orders and narrative traditions, that crowd the tales and disturb their illusory 'happily ever after' linearity" (22). In the book's nine chapters, Canepa shows how Basile 1) creates a seminal text in the history of the fairy-tale genre; 2) uses a highly innovative baroque poetics to participate in the century's cultural debates on the intersections of "low" popular with "high" elitist traditions; and 3) offers and simultaneously critiques a portrait of the socio-historical and cultural contexts in which it was written (11-12). Central to her analysis is Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque although Canepa is also extremely well versed in international scholarship on fairy tales, rhetoric, and the Baroque period. Bakhtin used the theory of the carnivalesque to clarify the role of folk humor in the works of François Rabelais and solidify Rabelais's status as a canonical writer in world literature. Like Rabelais, Basile uses carnival and grotesque themes and techniques to fuse seemingly antithetical traditions. Basile drew his materials from the more realistic novelle of Boccaccio's "groundbreaking model of the Decameron in the mid-fourteenth century" (54) which, mutatis mutandi, Matteo Bandello and Giovan Francesco Straparola kept in circulation, and from the Neapolitan dialect tradition of writers like Giulio Cesare Cortese and Felippe de Scafata Sgruttendio, who were already carnivalizing themes and motifs from classical, chivalric, epic, and folk literature (Chapter 3). Theoreticians of dialect literature view the tradition either as engaging in a critical polemic with the literary traditions and institutions of the time, or as aiming to valorize the local culture and integrate these resources into a unified literary tradition. Canepa uses both theories in her analyses of the tales which she organizes around the fairy-tale characters rather than around a day-by-day analysis of the stories (Chapters 5-7). Although there are some similarities between the tales told each day, it is through the diverse representations of fairy tale's stock characters that we see Basile's "critique of social reality and the power hierarchies of his time [. . .] [his] utopian revision of these hierarchies into an alternative system, [. . .] [and the] wealth of 'anthropological' details regarding the structuring of human relationships and [. . .] the organization of human and natural space" (111). Portraits of corrupt and inept kings and courtiers (Chapter 4) mask Basile's autobiographical reflections on the vicissitudes of his life as a working bourgeois intellectual (and not as a populist as some critics would have it) in a court consumed by conspicuous and prestige consumerism. Basile's kings are of a "diminished authority and distracted nature"; rather than being "the guarantors of the well-being of a system, they are the most blatant symptom of its malaise" (113). In Chapter 6, "The Key to Success: Enterprising Heroes and Heroines," the artifices of trickery, solidarity, and ingenuo, usually on the part of the female characters, provide caustic commentary on what life has become in Spanish-dominated Naples. Chapter 7 demonstrates how the portraits of ogres, fools, and forests that proliferate throughout the tales can be interpreted as comic caricatures of Basile's historical self, or as alternative figures of transgression and positive difference. Canepa's readings of the historical and cultural contexts of the tales are scholarly and well-informed although, at times, by dint of their seriousness, show the limitations of these theories when dealing with the burlesque. Although Basile participates in the formation of a literary genre, which fifty years later Madame d'Aulnoy and others would use to represent a "transformed world in which justice, equality and love would reign" (19), this was far from the case in the majority of Basile's tales where Fortune and chance, semi-humanized ogres and fairies helped less than ideal protagonists stumble through stock ordeals that ended well most of the time despite their misguided efforts. For example, in the most famous tale of the Pentamerone, "Lo cuento dell'uerco" ("The Tale of the Ogre"), where an ogre and a lazy fool are the principal protagonists, Canepa sees the moral initiation of Antuono (a stock name for a fool) and happy ending as part of the reward for Antuono's learning to use language effectively, something a nice ogre was trying to teach him. This reward also figures into Basile's project of bringing the low tradition into the mainstream. However, as Canepa states, Basile has a preference for the "low-mimetic mode" (Northrop Frye's term although no mention is made of Frye) which indeed functions to make the burlesque and its characters seem more based in everyday reality (70). Hence are we to sympathize with or just laugh at this half-human, pragmatic ogre type who gives the fool a jewel-defecating donkey to take home to a mother already frustrated with her son's denseness? Antuono loses the donkey on the way home to a tavern keeper, and brings home a donkey who does his business on the linens saved for his sisters' dowry, and gets thrown out again. Canepa quotes Jameson's theory that "Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a specific cultural artifact" (69). Indeed it is difficult to interpret a "contract" in a text where all genres are being burlesqued (including that of the common sense proverb at the end of so many of Basile's tales which misses rather than clarifies the point of the story). Basile destabilizes all meaning except perhaps in the eclogues which, as Canepa points out, attack directly one form, the pastoral, and thus make Basile's criticism of the court clear. However, as Canepa states early on, her main goal is not to read the tales as cynical reactions on Basile's part, or as a historical or sociological tract in which Basile is pleading for a more just and noble world for himself and fellow members of the "Oziosi," (the literary academy founded in 1611 whose name showed the members' irreverent awareness of the precarious status of the literary tradition in which they wrote). For Canepa, Basile's greatest achievement was his creation of a model of "literary interaction" (34 ). Basile was working with materials from the long illustrious Greek and Roman romance tradition, whose plots and characters can be found in the fourteenth-century Gesta Romanorum, a text long believed to be the principal storehouse of Italian novelists writing realistic, horror, tragic, or comic stories. Basile even wrote his own version of Heliodorus's romance Aethiopica. (62). But it is precisely his brilliant use of dialect which makes Basile even more difficult now for us to understand. Canepa's theory of the workings of metaphor in Basile, which she works into every chapter and then fully and brilliantly develops in the final two chapters, elucidate how Basile parodies Classical, Renaissance, and finally the folk tradition itself in ways that exemplify and clarify the rhetorical creativity and exuberance of the Baroque. And, most important, Canepa gives a multitude of textual examples and translations so that the contemporay reader can decide for him/herself how to interpret the parody. Therefore, thanks to Canepa and this well-written, well-researched, and most interesting and amusing critical work, it will be hard from now on to ignore Basile and his place in the Western literary tradition. Carol Lazzaro-Weis, SouthernUniversity
Tables of Contents | Norms for Contributors | Upcoming Volumes | Subscription Information | Books Received for Review | Editorial Policy | The Editorial Board | Series Studi e Testi | Mail the Editor Moderata Fonte (Modesta Pozzo). The Worth of Women Wherein is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men. Trans. Virginia Cox. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Pp.XXVII + 290. Among Italian women writers of the Renaissance who have most impacted on teaching and research recently, Moderata Fonte seems to occupy the number one position. Writing a few years ago an entry for a European encyclopedia on women, I was undecided whether I should catalogue this writer under her family name, Modesta Pozzo, or her penname, Moderata Fonte. At that time few people seemed to have heard of her. What a difference a few years make! Today Fonte has graciously taken her place among canonized Italian Renaissance writers, and the recent beautiful translation in English by Virginia Cox of her work, The Worth of Women (Il merito delle donne), goes a long way toward making her name known within a larger pool of critics and students. The Worth of Women constitutes a new addition to "The Other Voice" series that coeditors Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr. are offering through the University of Chicago Press. Their stated aim is to make sure that the "silent voices" of early modern women in philosophy, narrative, medicine, poetry, and natural science (and likewise of men who have examined the "woman question") are finally loudly heard. Like all others in the series, this volume is preceded by an introduction of the coeditors that frames the issues facing women during the period, and sketches in broad strokes the extent of past misogyny. Then Cox provides an introduction to the author and her work, with special emphasis on her biography and on the intellectual climate of her times. Next the treatise is examined and put in context, and a history of its reception is given. Within the translated text, the notes guide the reader thoroughly and detail the relationship of this dialogic defense to similar works. Published in 1600 a few years after her death, Fonte's Worth differs from other treatises on women not only because its title places more emphasis on the inner worth of the female sex than on its superiority (the latter being the usual approach in many pro women texts of the querelle des femmes), but also because it boldly politicizes women's powerlessness and lack of authority. The seven Venetian ladies discussing women's worth in the relaxed environment of a garden consistently debate the pros and cons of marriage, since this was the status that gave women "status" in sixteenth-century society. But marriage is shown as inconvenient to wives, given the cultural assumptions and the behavior of their legal companions. On the other hand, since women legally were always minors no matter their age or their social class, the condition of female singlehood was difficult to advocate. And yet Fonte repeatedly does so through the figure of Corinna and her free-spirited sisters, who time and again denounce the inattentiveness or outright malice of male guardians who forget to set up, say, a sufficient dowry, to assure that the women of their household do not plunge into a life of prostitution or utter poverty. The chasm between this view and that expressed a few decades earlier in the similarly titled treatise by Sperone Speroni, Della dignità delle donne (1542), is enormous. In Speroni, Beatrice degli Olbizzi was made to embrace nonchalantly a misogynist and demeaning position by claiming that wives were happy to serve their husbands ("in questa tale sua servitù esser posto tutto il suo bene e la felicità sua"). In Fonte, women are thinking beings, led more by their logic than by their appetites, and men repeatedly are said to be envious of them. This part of the conversation constitutes Day 1 of the treatise and until Cox's introduction, it was the only section closely examined by critics. Day 2 was dismissed as a mixture of unrelated pronouncements on geography, medicine, patronage, and the like. The seemingly scattered knowledge on these topics that the women in the conversation appear to have acquired through hearsay seemed to some critics only to confirm how difficult it was for those who lacked proper schooling to navigate the world of bookish, encyclopedic knowledge. But Cox authoritatively argues that Day 2 does not constitute scientific prattle. Rather, it foregrounds Fonte's strategy of reclaiming for women a right to equality by naming a nature - i.e., rivers, plants, animals, herbs, and the like - in harmony with itself, a nature in which no hierarchy exists between males and females. The issue of seriousness in treatises on women's worth has been a topic hotly debated in Italy and central to the argument of Adriana Chemello in the first modern edition of Il merito delle donne (Venice: Eidos, 1988). Cox rightfully argues that Fonte opted indeed for a form of serio ludere in discussing issues of social friction (e.g., the status of prostitutes, men's hypocrisy) but that she was also deadly serious. I agree. It is true that some writers praising women's worth have been facetious in their claims for radical changes in the relationship between the sexes. But women writers could not adopt this strategy. Fonte is sure-footed in her denunciations even though she ends her argument on a conservative note by letting the reader assume that marriage is a necessary evil for women. While I am on the subject of conclusions, it is worth noting that we do not really know how Fonte concluded the Worth. In the introductory material that accompanied the publication of her book, Fonte's uncle, Giovanni Doglioni, claimed that his niece was busy finishing her manuscript the night before her death in childbirth, as if a premonition of sorry events to come was spurring her on. To argue, as Cox does, that the Worth was only a first draft cut abruptly by the author's death is certainly in the realm of possibilities. In the same vein, one could reason that in revisiting the text a few years later, her children and uncle corrected it. Today we do not have a manuscript copy to which to refer in studying erasures and additions imported by different handwritings, since master texts were routinely discarded after publication. But we know from Doglioni, himself a writer, that the lengthy poem in ottava rima that concludes the treatise was not meant by Fonte to be put in this work. We can only surmise what other changes have been effected and what other arguments have been adapted and discarded during the process of preparing the manuscript for printing. Be that as it may, the Merit's conservative ending does not detract from the import of what Fonte forcefully argues throughout. In her biographical sketch of Fonte, Cox argues that there must have been an enmity between the writer and her only brother because he was not mentioned in her first will. This siblings' rivalry, she adds, may have stemmed from money matters preceding Fonte's own marriage. Cox's hypothesis may very well be grounded in reality - and in the Worth Fonte strongly chastises inept brothers - but in general the omission of a brother's name from the will of a married woman with children in the early modern period was the norm in Venetian society rather than the exception. (See, for example, Stanley Chojnacki's essays on patrician Venetian women, now usefully collected in Women and Men in Renaissance Venice, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000.) But such an instance of perhaps over-reading is just a quibble in an otherwise intelligent, well organized, and superbly argued introduction. Valeria Finucci, Duke University Linda Bisello. Medicina della memoria. Aforistica ed esemplarità nella scrittura barocca. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1998. Pp. 300. Il titolo del libro, di complessa evocatività, dà un saggio dei percorsi, non tutti egualmente perspicui e lineari, che l'autrice tenta di segnare nella vasta proliferazione della scrittura aforistica nel Seicento. Il volume è diviso in tre sezioni, o parti, indicate con titoli superbamente barocchi, in cui un materiale di straordinaria ricchezza viene catalogato, ancorché con connessioni talvolta implicite. Le 'parti' in cui il libro è suddiviso servono dunque da contenitori meglio che da linee prospettiche, punti di fuga o direttrici dell'analisi. Tra XVI e XVII secolo la "pratica centonaria" già seguita dal Lipsio, ovvero "l'allestimento di quaderni di citazioni, di rubriche generali", subisce una repentina crescita, che esprime una "mentalità analogica" e un gusto estetico favorevole al collezionismo di porzioni testuali (19). La scrittura "sussiste sempre dialetticamente rispetto al bianco della pagina" e si mantiene con esso in un rapporto costante "come se da questo schermo [. . .] i pensieri si rapprendessero in parola in modo irrevocabile" (31). I moralisti si volgono alla scrittura aforistica (una scrittura frammentaria che prevede una lettura "parcellizzante" dei testi) consapevoli che la tradizione offra i paradigmi sui quali fondarsi. L'avvicinamento e il confronto tra testi a carattere aforistico, generalmente moralistici, e testi di stampo religioso viene tentato dall'autrice in un significativo capitolo del libro, apparentemente dotato di un'impalcatura concettuale più continua di altri (il cap. III della prima parte: "La stilistica della via breve: semitae della letteratura spirituale", 33-67). La forma breve ¾ si propone di dimostrare l'autrice ¾ diventa un punto di simile protensione per i mistici (numerosi sono i riferimenti all'opera di Giovanni Bona), spinti dall'urgenza della comunicazione, e i moralisti, diffidenti verso la forma articolata e compatta del trattato. Il linguaggio acuto e aforistico e quello "mistico-apofatico" convergono nella "rifondazione di un eloquium dell'autenticità, in cui la parola non sia espressione di una frattura, quanto coincidenza tra verbo e cosa" (44). Il mistico (si pensi alla definizione di Giovanni Bona, per cui "il canone della presenza di Dio" è formulato "come esperienza della contrarietà", 64) sperimenta il linguaggio come una corrente di contraddizioni. La parte seconda del volume ("Strictius arctius: l'impresa e lo statuto del neolaconismo", 71-170), momento fra i più interessanti, si incentra sulla controversia che ebbe per oggetto la forma ellittica sentenziosa, confrontata o equiparata al concettismo e al laconismo di marca senecana. Il laconismo, attratto nell'orbita del concettismo in alcune opere teoriche tra Cinque e Seicento, continua a essere considerato come una categoria stilistica a sé da critici avveduti, come il Fioretti. La questione della ""quantità" lessicale più adeguata alla scrittura in prosa" (73) produce una disputa, alla quale partecipa anche Daniello Bartoli. Quest'ultimo prova avversione verso uno stile "lambiccato a goccia a goccia, allo stentatissimo lume d'una lucerna" (80) e considera il concettismo e il laconismo sostanzialmente non diversi. Il dibattito (cfr. cap. I, "La controversia secentesca sul 'parlare a riciso'", 73-112) sorto in Italia, dove lo stile neolaconico ha un rappresentante conosciuto e tradotto in tutta Europa, Virgilio Malvezzi, trova risonanze e riprese in tutte le principali letterature europee. Per il francese La Mothe Le Vayer lo stile neolaconico è un morbo linguistico da ricusare. Per Mascardi, "successore di Famiano Strada nella cattedra di retorica del Collegio Romano" (84), di cui la Bisello riassume attentamente le posizioni, è un gioco per asmatici, balbuzienti o bambini. Nel tardo Cinquecento l'innalzamento del modello senecano e tacitista fa seguito al declino del modello ciceroniano. Gianbattista Manzini, tra i maggiori sostenitori del senechismo e del laconismo (che nelle sue scritture si offrono come due suggestioni parallele), teorizza "una prosa dell'ingegno come sostituto della vacua efflorescenza decorativa (che produce 'libracci migliaiosi')" (106). Seneca incarnava, per il Bartoli, "un esempio di libertà dalle consuetudini e dalla tradizione, deputata ad educare il gusto, non ad irregimentarlo" (108). Anche gli scritti di Tesauro, che adduce esempi normativi prelevandoli da scrittori fino a qualche tempo prima ritenuti irregolari, testimoniano una variazione del gusto stilistico. Per il Malvezzi, ricercatore della novità e di una "dicitura" "tanto prodiga d'insegnamento, quanto avara di parole" (da una cit. di P. Sforza Pallavicino, 110), la maniera di Tacito deve essere assunta come modello e simbolo ideale dello stile laconico. La compiuta codificazione dello stile laconico avviene, al principio del Seicento, con l'opera di Ericio Puteano (cfr. cap. II, "'Laconismi patrocinium': i fondamenti del fiammingo Ericio Puteano", 113-124), che soggiorna lungamente a Milano, stringendo rapporti con l'erudito Giovanni Ambrogio Biffi, traduttore di alcuni suoi scritti, e intrattiene rapporti epistolari con il Malvezzi. Il Puteano sostiene una corrente brachilogica che trova riscontro anche nello stile epistolare di quegli anni, teorizzato, tra gli altri, da Bernardino Pino da Cagli, segretario del cardinale Giulio della Rovere. È certamente degno di attenzione anche Carlo Pasquali, di cui la Bisello ricorda il recupero di una modalità dell'eloquenza nel circuito delle circostanze storico-politiche che vi avrebbero influito: "proprio dall'assolutismo monarchico [. . .] il Pasquali desume la necessità contingente di una modalità espressiva contratta e allusiva" (118). Tacito e Malvezzi sono i capisaldi dell'indagine
del capitolo terzo ("Tra 'veloci tragitti' e 'batter di palpebra':
il processo mentale associativo nello stile acuto", 125-170). L'aforisma,
nella logica della scrittura malvezziana, non disvia dal tracciato della
storia ma collabora al suo fine, includendolo: quando si scrive per
i prìncipi, che dispongono di poco tempo, occorre essere brevi
e incisivi. L'aforisma, "prima ancora che un'articolazione linguistica"
(136), rappresenterebbe "una disposizione del pensiero, che si
rapporta in modo peculiare alla realtà mutevole, al transitare
di eventi irrevocabili, il cui commento sarà ugualmente immediato,
discontinuo" (136). Malvezzi tiene a modello la prosa di Tacito
e la questione stilistica diviene per lui, come fa notare la Bisello,
occasione di una disputa che vede scendere in campo lo Sforza Pallavicino,
coerente con il Tesauro e ostile all'ornamento quando sia "uno
straniero accidente, il quale o corregga o celi i difetti della sustanza"
(da una cit. di P. Sforza Pallavicino, 139). "Il punto archimedico"
della querelle stilistica che ne sorge, poi penetrata anche in Francia,
viene trovato da i più equilibrati "nella proficua collaborazione
di logica e retorica", cioè affermando "il necessario
contemperarsi di materia e forma" (148). Circa le argutezze, la
Bisello si sofferma a illustrare le posizioni del Tesauro (il quale,
intendendo la natura come l'enciclopedia delle immagini e delle nozioni,
sostiene "l'unica loda delle argutezze consistere nel saper ben
mentire", 150) e del Peregrini, nemico di quelle acutezze che si
esauriscono nell'esteriore abbellimento del discorso, ma favorevole
ad esse quando istituiscano un legame fra le "cose lontane"
(152), in modo tale da generare ammirazione per la mente vivace e accorta
che le abbia escogitate. Giungendo all'ultima parte del saggio, la terza ("Immensum minimis arctat: l'esperienza compendiata nei precetti", 171-269), attraverso un percorso sorretto quasi completamente da una tramatura di assonanze e ricucito su uno sfondo di affinità dipendenti dalla simile temperie culturale, l'autrice si propone di indagare l'"affermarsi di un uso cosciente della forma aforistica presso i suoi cultori [. . .] in quanto genere letterario peculiare" (173). La storia letteraria dell'aforisma s'intreccia a questo punto con il culto per le sentenze tacitiane, per i massimari enciclopedici desunti da Tacito e per lo stile acuto dello storico imperiale, talvolta applicato come maschera su un latente machiavellismo. La prima accezione di 'aforisma' riconduce la parola al campo della medicina ippocratea, mentre "sul crinale tra Cinque e Seicento, è l'estensione semantica del sostantivo dall'ambito medico ad uno politico e morale" (178). Il legame tra medicina e arte di governo si consolida in seguito in Spagna, Italia e Francia e l'aforisma assume l'accezione attualmente corrente: ha nome di Aforismos il commentario, volto in italiano nel 1618 ad opera di Girolamo Canini d'Anghiari, "gremito di circa cinquemila annotazioni politiche e morali" (180), che Baltasar Álamos de Barrientos redige a margine della propria traduzione degli Annales e delle Historiae di Tacito. Tenta di spiegare le motivazioni del culto di Tacito l'editore Paolo Baglioni nella prefazione con dedica preposta alla riedizione degli Aforismi del 1665: gli scritti dello storico romano vi vengono presentati come "un tesoro di prudenza civile", più ricchi di misteri "che i gieroglifici d'Egitto", nonché come "una scuola d'aforismi, e di massime riservate" (da una cit. di P. Baglioni, 188). Filippo Cavriana, diplomatico e medico di Caterina de' Medici, suggerisce in un proprio commentario "la simmetria tra l'empiria medica e quella politica" (187), indicando come propri maestri, in originale associazione, Ippocrate e Cornelio Tacito. La prosa dei Ricordi del Guicciardini è soggetto di forte influenza sugli storici "penetrativi", come il Brignole Sale e il Boccalini, apparendo loro con le caratteristiche di una valida proposta di registrazione sintetica del fatto all'interno della predominanza del ragionamento. In alcune tra le non molte pagine davvero limpide del saggio (203-05) la scrittura aforistica di impronta guicciardiniana viene messa in rapporto con la discontinuità del silenzio e della lacuna volontaria, su cui si appoggerebbe per scavalcarla. La brevitas tacitiana, nel gioro di pochi anni, viene vista con scetticismo, riprovata, quindi lodata e talvolta esaltata. La storia e gli strumenti dell'indagine storica vengono assimilati alla medicina; la diagnosi sullo stato di salute della politica alle prescrizioni mediche rilasciate a un paziente. La prosa tacitiana, "siccam ac sobriam" per il Mureto (230), può apparire come la "cifra connotativa di un ragionare sui fatti, strumentale all'espressione di una verità oggettiva che scaturisce però sempre dall'esperienza" (230). Esprimono giudizi sullo stile di Tacito, tra gli altri, Giorgio Dati, suo volgarizzatore, Bernardo Davanzati, Adriano Politi e Benedetto Pucci. Si chiarisce l'immagine della 'gara stilistica' che il traduttore sosterrebbe con il suo modello, cercando di raggiungere una concisione equivalente e una pari densità d'espressione. L'ultimo capitolo del libro è dedicato all'acuità dello sguardo e alla prudenza, associate sul tessuto della scrittura aforistica e della precettistica morale. Per l'Álamos de Barrientos, non lontano dal Malvezzi, la prudenza si incardina sull'esperienza "che è fomite di regole ¾ quasi un viatico ¾ per condursi nella vita, e sapervisi destreggiare" (245). La precettistica, come vorrebbe provare anche Raimondo Montecuccoli, autore degli Aforismi dell'arte bellica (1670), si presenta quindi come una scienza rigorosamente deduttiva, mentre la storia, in cui si comprende "tutta la vita del mondo" (257), offre allo studioso, insieme al diletto, una sorta di scorciatoia dell'esperienza: "ivi a spese d'altri l'uomo impara quel che conviene a sé, ivi si veggono i naufragi senza orrore" (da una cit. di G. Botero, 257). Stefano Termanini, Genova
Tables of Contents | Norms for Contributors | Upcoming Volumes | Subscription Information | Books Received for Review | Editorial Policy | The Editorial Board | Series Studi e Testi | Mail the Editor Giuseppe Mazzotta. The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. Princeton: UP, 1999. Pp. xviii + 267. This volume was hailed as "the best book on Vico . . . written in any language since Isaiah Berlin, forty years ago, delivered his Vico lectures . . . that would later become the first part of Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas" (Cecilia Miller, "Ancient and Modern," TLS, 10 Dec. 1999: 30). One can understand the reason why Miller, who worked for her DPhil in Modern History under Berlin's supervision, considers the lectures on Vico that he delivered at the Italian Institute of London in 1957-58 as a watershed in the development of Vichian studies. Obviously, she wants to profess her admiration for her master who was indeed an exceptional man. One can also interpret Miller's attitude as a proof of modesty, since she is the author of a book on Vico which is not without merit (G. Costa, New Vico Studies, 13 (1995): 67-70). But Miller not only proclaims the superiority of Mazzotta's book on Vico over any other work published since 1957-58, including the one by Leon Pompa, which Berlin regretted not to have been able to exploit since it appeared too late (I. Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas, New York: Viking, 1976, xi). She also assures us that Mazzotta "has a better sense and knowledge of Vico than almost any other writer," that "his work can be associated with that of Michelet on Vico" (TLS, 10 Dec. 1999: 30). Such wild claims require careful verification. Mazzotta's book is based on a wide and diligent reading of the vast literature dedicated to Vico. In the preface, Mazzotta credits his predecessors, including this reviewer, for "having succeeded in putting Vico studies on a solid philosophical-historical footing" (x). Since he has no original ideas or data to offer, Mazzotta tries to complement the conclusions reached by previous scholars by recasting previous interpretations. The central idea of the book under review, namely "the unification of the arts and sciences" (xi), is taken from Giorgio Tagliacozzo who stressed the importance of Vico's "tree of knowledge," the symbol of his pursuit of a philosophy able to close the gap between humanistic and scientific knowledge. In the introduction, Mazzotta acknowledges that the "question of the 'whole'" and "the encyclopedic genre in the New Science" have "already been pointed out by contemporary scholars" (10-11). He intends to draft "Vico's periplus around the kingdom of the arts and sciences," and to show "how poetry, as it links them together, modifies the logical coherence of the whole" (10-11). Mazzotta believes that poetry, the master key of the New Science, "is a unique mode of making and knowing, that the whole must be perceived in the perspective of metaphor's property to join together disparate worlds" (11). Obviously, the poetry and the metaphor mentioned by Mazzotta are deeply rooted in studies on Vico's rhetoric by such scholars as Ernesto Grassi, Andrea Battistini, and Donald Phillip Verene. That poetry or myth is essential to Vico's project we already knew from Benedetto Croce and his followers. What Croce chose to downplay is that Vico considered poetry exclusively in primitivistic terms, relegating it to the most remote phase of universal history. Unfortunately, the same fallacy is to be found in contemporary inquiries on Vico's rhetoric. Even Mazzotta advocates Vico's "poetic philosophy," which is an oxymoron in light of the New Science §185: "Imagination is more robust in proportion as reasoning power is weak" (I quote from the classical translation by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch). Therefore, in Vichian terms, a poetic philosophy is either a weak philosophy or a travesty of something else. Croce identified it with his own, late romantic philosophy, founded on aesthetics. Mazzotta, following in the steps of other scholars (Grassi, Battistini, and Verene) views Vico's poetic philosophy as a travesty of rhetoric. But you cannot adopt this view unless you cancel (as Croce and Grassi did for different purposes) the clear-cut separation between archaic and developed civilizations which Vico carefully draws in his New Science. In other words, you obtain a more coherent Vico only at the cost of ignoring the inner complexity of his thought, which is further complicated by Vico's strategy to elude the censorship (always ready to neutralize any attempt to make early eighteenth-century Italian culture an active part of the contemporary European culture). Mazzotta's eclectic attitude is probably responsible for the exasperating fuzziness of his formulations. He seems to consider the sublime as the basis of his interpretation of Vico's poetry. But Mazzotta, like Battistini and Massimo Lollini, considers sublime poetry as coextensive to human history, while it should be viewed as coextensive only to the early phase of it. Vico offered an original interpretation of the Longinian sublime, which was confined to archaic societies. These, however, did not exist only in the past. Indeed, he considered contemporary England as a relatively primitive country. The fact that Vico at the same time praised English culture is not at odds with his idea that creativity is the main connotation of primitive civilizations. We should also keep in mind that the continent was under the spell of England, which after the Glorious Revolution was considered a rampart of Protestantism. In this context, Vico's ideal eternal history, emphasizing the creativity of primitive people, appears to be the embodiment of his dissatisfaction with the Catholic countries of Europe. Mazzotta's reluctance to make use of textual evidence and concrete historical data accounts for his strong inclination for abstract, atemporal "discourse." He rightly takes side against those interpreters who follow Lorenzo Giusso's view that Vico was a representative of the Baroque: for Mazzotta, the New Science has nothing to do with "baroque theories of art as illusive, ironic artifice" (9). We would be grateful to him for disposing of Giusso's old hobby-horse (that has been recycled under various guises by scholars content to consider Vico a sort of Italian conterpart of the hero of Fray Gerundio de Campazas by José Francisco de Isla), were it not for the fact that later on Mazzotta stresses the "baroque technique, which Vico applies to the representations on the great stage of history" (74). Anyhow, we can hardly be satisfied with vague statements such as "Vico proposes an ancient and yet new esthetics whereby the imagination and the passions are no longer sundered from reason," or "Neoplatonic ideas of the imagination merge with neo-Aristotelian notions of art" (9). The ambition to offer, in a normally sized book, a summa of Vichian studies severely mars the validity of the book under review. Mazzotta is obliged to compress in ten chapters the huge amount of published material, from which he freely draws, without taking into account manuscript sources. Chapter 1, "The Life of a Philosopher"(16-39), is an outline of Vico's autobiography or Vita. Here the reader will find many basic facts of Vico's life, but no allusion to his familiarity with Giuseppe Valletta's library which possessed many prohibited books. The author has forgotten to see the 622-page volume of Valletta's philosophical works, edited by Michele Rak, who also made a list of Valletta's library. Such a gap cannot be filled by Biagio De Giovanni's article on Valletta, which Mazzotta quotes in chapter 8 (184n). Even Paolo Mattia Doria goes unmentioned. He will appear only in the same chapter 8 as "Vico's own friend and imitator in Naples" (183), a characterization that is going to r |