Mythos und Metapher: Metamorphosen des Kirke-Mythos in der Literatur der italienischen Renaissance (review)

There is a canon and there is a repertory. Despite what we can say about the current and altogether legitimate diffraction and proliferation of the former, its distinction from the latter remains inescapable, albeit still understudied. The canon may have a paradigmatic function, implying a systematic arrangement of books according to a given taste, genre, or issue; or it may have an exhortative one, depending on the aesthetic or historical value ascribed to certain works viewed as representative of a given culture. If this sketchy definition is acceptable, then the repertory arguably constitutes its objective and material background and is tantamount to all works produced by that given culture. In the case of Italy, the canon tends to be astonishingly narrow, the repertory astonishingly broad. Hence, there is the need, not only for didactic purposes, to find some ways to excavate and explore the repertory in order to produce new and nimble strategies for the assessment, the analysis, and the appreciation of the Italian literary tradition. The German tradition of Toposforschung certainly offers a viable and proven solution, and within this tradition the reader may situate Barbara Kuhn's book, a book which offers a dynamic exploration of the Italian Renaissance repertory qualified by a specific and yet all but merely descriptive attention to the mythological figure of Circe. Her work, supported by a startling wealth of textual and documentary research, examines the metamorphic function of the famous Homeric episode in the period between Dante and Bruno, and affords very interesting insights into the poetic, anthropological, and epistemological dimension of Circe, considered, in effect, as a "dialectical image" rather than merely a topos, an "historical index," to use Benjamin's terminology (573), whose emergence in the Renaissance shows us not just the humanistic passion for ancient mythology, but rather a strong skepticism toward the stability of the human being and its position at the center of the universe.

The temptation to review this book as a catalogue raisonné of virtually all literary material of the time associated with the Circe mythos is difficult to resist. The reader is invited (and compelled) to move through a rich exhibition of literary and philosophical works, where major authors of the caliber of Machiavelli, Ariosto, Tasso, and Bruno are assembled together with rather esoteric ones, such as Federico Frezzi, Giovanni Gherardi da Prato, Luca Pulci, and Andrea Stagi, whose Quadriregio, Il Paradiso degli Alberti, Pistole, and L'Amazonida still need to find their readers and admirers even among Italian scholars. Practically all genres (or "Textsorten," 15) of the period are taken into consideration — from mythographic compilations, translations, commentaries, and poetic treatises, which provide the theoretical grounding of the research within its historical context, to fictional and philosophical dialogues, novellas, romances, and epic poems (the only reservation one could voice on this regard concerns the rather sporadic consideration of lyric material and the related commentary tradition), whose variations in the treatment of the topos are accurately examined from a stylistic to a philosophical perspective. This material is not arranged in a taxonomical or chronological order, but rather dynamically inserted in a web of correspondences and parallelisms that aims at pointing out the subversive power of the topos: Circe is seen here as a myth that can be historically, allegorically, or ironically interpreted; as an empty form ("eine Art Lehrform," 8), subject to multiple variations; as an ambiguous exemplum against love and a symbol of multiple truths; as an epistemological metaphor that challenges any rational and logical principles and that asks to be read according to a "logica phantastica" as opposed to a "logica rationalis" (592).

The idea is not entirely new, for the Renaissance as we have learned to see it nowadays is far from constituting the solar, positive, and optimistic paradigm that nineteenth-century historiography once ascribed to it; but Kuhn convincingly demonstrates that the lunar, negative, and...