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Reviews 189 word. In the same chapter 'communis utilitas' is translated as 'common advantage', and 'utilitas' is changed to 'good'. 'Necessitas' is translated as 'need', a very different concept. Ockham strove to connect Papal power with 'utility', 'necessity', and the 'common good' in this chapter. A note should have explained his terminology and its purpose. His thought reflected the language and the norms of the lus commune, but this important connection is obfuscated by the translation. Oddly, in bk. Ill, ch. 8, Kilcullen translates 'utilitas' and 'necessitas' as 'utility' and 'necessity'. These observations should not undermine the achievements of the editors. They have produced a volume that students will find useful and teachers of the history of political theory indispensable. They are also preparing another volume of Ockham's political writings to be entitled Selections from the major political works. For the selections from the Dialogus, they ought to consult Jiirgen Miethke's German translation (1992), in which the handling of legal terminology is superb. Kenneth Pennington Department of History Syracuse University Zlatar, Zdenko, The epic circle: allegoresis and the Western epic traditio from Homer to Tasso (Sydney studies in society and culture, 10), Sydney, Sydney Association for studies in society and culture, 1993; paper; pp.180; R.R.P. AUS$25.00 This volume consists of two essays, thefirstand shorter entitled 'Lectura Dantis apud Gondolam' and the second given the wording which is the second part of the whole book's ascription. While the theme might seem totally literary, the treatment is historical, social, and biographic, as benefits the series in which the monograph is offered. Although it is not an easy book to read, partly because of the dense amount of text on any given page, the volume is a rewarding one, not least because of its amplification of Italian, Ragusan, and Slavic cultural themes. Thefirstessay tells of the literary purposes of Divo Franov Gundulic (1589-1638), a young patrician in the very old city of Dubrovnik/Ragusa, and of how he became a Christian poet in 1620, a m a n of CounterReformation religious sensibilities who by then had a heightened sense of his own Slavonic inheritance of letters and of politics. H e had declared his intention of translating Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata into Croatian, to 190 Reviews follow it by the incomplete epic, Osman. This banned text was proclaimed as treating 'the role of the Slavs' in history, but concentrating on the vaunted successes of the Polish crown prince Wladyslaw, a leader of an unheroic personality. Tasso's epic had been concerned with militant Christianity, and with M u h a m m e d as 'the false prophet' and therefore a Lucifer figure of fatalistic temper. Gundulic had made the central motif of his text the Wheel of Fortune which governed the rise and fall of empires. Zlatar then gives a long excursus looking at Dante's views of love, linking them with Augustine's distinction between the spiritual and the carnal, and showing how both found much of the earlier Aeneid to be concerned with lust and its costs. This section leads into a more detailed consideration of analogy, particularly in the Pseudo-Dionysius Neo-Platonism, and of Dante's prophetic view of history. Gundulic was concerned to glorify the idyllic, pastoral tradition of the South Slavs, as contrasted with a later long saga of bloodshed, treachery, and deceit that brought the Western Slavs low before the Ottomans. Perversions, such as the loss of brotherly love and not keeping one's faith, were reasons for potential national collapse. The core of Zlatar's exposition is that both Gundulic and Dante held a passionate belief in the universal reign of Fortune, its wheel being 'God's instrument for both raising and lowering of empire' (p. 43). The much longer second part of this book is focussed on Dante's Divine Comedy as a special type of epic concerned with the state of souls after death, as well as 'a political allegory' (p. 49). Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (1957) is much invoked for its contrast between literal story and sketched-in and impressionistic text of allegorizing trends. Zlatar's ideas are grouped in two sections...

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