Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie by Giovanni di Garlandia (review)

BOOK REVIEWS451 occurs by the late fourteenth century, that changes were more interactive between church and state, religious and secular players, and notions about charity and social welfare, than any uniform broad social movement or radical change in thinking. Religious motives remained important. However, the scale of welfare institutions changed, and their operations required more and more public funding. With the broadened programs of medical care in large hospitals like Santa Creu in Barcelona, came also specializations in treatments, program delivery , and care packages. Also evident is a distinction between the deserving poor and undesirables like professional prostitutes and beggars. Finally, Brodman argues that the plight of poor people was addressed by two entwined sets of practice, charity and welfare, voluntary acts for individuals and politically governed social programs for the common good. While the author takes care to guard against presentism and read modern notions into medieval practices, conventions, and institutional forms, his theme rings relevant today with our concerns about social welfare, types of poverty, causes and solutions, and distinctions between direct intervention and immediate help for the unfortunate, and longer range social programs for the welfare of elements in society that have been present always. One might have wished that the historical treatment were more informed by the current fields related to social work and health care. The persistence of need for social welfare and Christian charity and our current struggle over forms of program delivery, funding, and matters of conscience, cannot but help make this investigation into the origins of welfare in our history resonate with the contemporary. This is not just a book to recommend to medievalists, therefore, but to the broader audience of social historians and social science, and beyond history as a background to those studying in such professional fields as social work, criminology, counseling , nursing, and allied health. In its pages modern readers will find much to cause them to contemplate notions of charity and welfare that were articulated centuries before, are still relevant, and which prompt heightened consciousness of the human condition and means for helping others. The subject necessarily reminds one of the ever present differences between the haves and have nots, the privileged and unfortunate, the rich and the poor, and their awareness of each other. As such this book is thought-provoking beyond its purely historical dimension. Lawrence J. McCrank Davenport College Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie. By Giovanni di Garlandia. Testo critico, traduzione e commento a cura di Antonio Saiani. [Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere "La Colombaria," Studi CXXXIX.] (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore. 1995. Pp. 682. Ore 130.000.) What has to be considered, unquestionably, the first known lyric of Italian literature , a canzone d'amore in fifty-five decasyllable verses found on the verso 452book reviews of a parchment dated February 28, 1 127, and preserved in the Church Archives of Ravenna, is going to be published by Alfredo Stussi in the next issue of Cultura Neolatina. News concerning this matter can be found in the Sunday literary supplement of Sole 24 Ore (February 28, 1999, p. 29), which carries an ample account by Professor Vittore Branca. Definitely relevant is the fact that the literary text is accompanied by musical neumatic composition. What makes this profane (so to speak) poetry similar to the great religious work ofJohn of Garland (1 195-1272), together with a profound, indeed supernatural, sense of man and world as divine, is the artistic shaping of Delight and Pain in love as dramatis personae. The pattern, as Antonio Saiani shows in his superb commentary , is certainly to be found in classical sources, but scholars of the Middle Ages and historians will find very interesting a wide spectrum of biblical references , above all to the Psalms, mediated through liturgy and early Christian hymnography so well blended in the works of those who had access to cultural education. Medieval studies have given us the excellent subsidia of J. De Ghellinck, L'essor de la literature latine au XIF siècle (2nd ed., Brussels, 1954) and E. R. Curtius,Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern and Munich, 1953; English translation: NewYork, 1963), both to be taken as still fundamental for the amalgam of...