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Reviewed by:
  • Writers Reading Writers: Intertextual Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Literature in Honor of Robert Hollander
  • Pina Palma
Janet L. Smarr, ed. Writers Reading Writers: Intertextual Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Literature in Honor of Robert Hollander. Cranbury: University of Delaware Press, 2007. 255 pp. index. bibl. $51.50. ISBN: 978–0–87413–976–1.

This volume, divided into two parts, covers what could be called the development of the Western Canon from the ancients to the moderns. Part 1, “Reading [End Page 612] the Ancients,” focuses on the continuity of the Latin tradition in the Middle Ages. Part 2, “Reading the Moderns,” centers on the continuity of the classical tradition well into the Renaissance and what is called Post-Enlightenment. The figure of Dante, and to a lesser extent of Boccaccio, towers over the arc of the sequence and his poem becomes the point of reference to subsequent literary history and, thus, it gives a sort of thematic continuity to the various contributions.

It is impossible to give an adequate account of each single piece, let alone discuss critically the often interesting points they raise. Simone Marchesi elegantly focuses on Dante’s exile and suggests that his representation straddles the models of Ovid and Brunetto Latini. Jessica Levenstein examines the motif of Philomela and Procne from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and treats their function in Dante’s Purgatorio. As other Dante’s scholars have done (whom Levenstein chooses not to cite), she draws particular attention to Dante’s concern with the relationship between violence and poetry. Suzanne Hagedorn, on the other hand, studies Boccaccio’s mythography of the prophetess Manto (who in turn depends on Dante’s reference to her in Inferno 20), but never really explores the metaphorical link between divination and poetry, a problem that lies at the center of Manto’s tradition. Lauren Scancarelli Seem treats Dante’s doubts about judgments. One wished she made clearer the connection and distinction among moral judgment, intellectual judgment, and divine judgment. Her tendency to pull these different forms of judgment together misses the tensions Dante sees among them. Jamie C. Fumo turns to Chaucer’s House of Fame and proposes the well-studied idea that he reads Ovid through the lenses of Dante. To close off this first section of the collection, William Robins reexamines Shakespeare’s Pericles in terms of the genre of romance and the character’s self-identity. It is certainly a worthwhile and smart effort.

The second half of the volume begins with a paper by Earl Jeffrey Richards on the critical perspective articulated by Ernst Robert Curtius on Dante as a reader of medieval Latin authors. The role of Curtius in his monumental efforts to rescue the fragments of medieval Latinity and show their continuity in European medieval tradition has often been studied and deserves a continued deeper critical engagement. The next contribution by Macklin Smith wonders whether Langland was familiar with Saint Bonaventure’s Lignum Vitae, which is a Franciscan meditation on the role of the Holy Cross in the life of the Christians. Langland’s Will is understood through this important ascetic text. The interest of this rewarding, rich piece is heightened by a useful appendix documenting for future scholars the circulation of the Lignum Vitae throughout medieval Europe. One can add that this sort of analysis owes much to two masters of the Franciscan strain of spirituality at Princeton, John Fleming and D. W. Robertson, Jr.

The next three articles deal respectively with Vasari’s Lives by James H. S. McGregor, the figure of Griselda in Boccaccio and Maggi by Janet Levarie Smarr, and, finally, with Nicholas Rennie’s digressive contrast between the harmonious cosmology of the Pythagorean and both Leopardi’s and Goethe’s inversions of the ancient cosmic system. McGregor’s piece, which along with Marchesi’s and [End Page 613] Smiths’s, is the most scholarly of the collection, argues that Vasari’s Lives reshape and owe to the vernacular fictions of Dante and Boccaccio. The potentially interesting links between Vasari’s text (in which Michelangelo is treated as the point of arrival of the history of art that starts with Giotto) and the issue of...

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