Dante and the Franciscans (review)

Book Reviews 434 would bring to this study. The book includes a very helpful bibliography that is, nevertheless, limited to the most recent studies on Scotus and to Cross’s own prior publications. After all is said and done, Scotus is not a thinker for the faint of heart, and the more his texts can be studied and scrutinized by means of all methodological approaches, the more their richness can be appreciated. Mary Beth Ingham, CSJ Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles, California Santa Casciani, ed., Dante and the Franciscans. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2006. Pages: iii + 347. The subject of this book, Dante and the Franciscans, is problematic. The evidence for Dante’s knowledge and interest in the Franciscan tradition breaks down into three categories: biographical, textual, and philosophical/theological . Unfortunately, the biographical evidence is sparse and ambiguous. Dante may or may not have attended Franciscan schools, may or may not have been a member of the Third Order of St. Francis, may or may not have known prominent Franciscans like Peter John Olivi. The textual evidence is somewhat stronger: Dante makes specific reference to St. Clare, St. Francis, and St. Bonaventure in the Paradiso, and enlists St. Bonaventure to discuss the Dominican order. The third category of evidence, the philosophical /theological, is mixed. Whether Dante is invoking Franciscanism or simply the Christian tradition is not always clear. As Shakespeare’s Fluellen puts it in Henry V 4.7.32, “there is salmons in both [rivers],” i.e. a thought or expression that appears in both the Franciscan tradition and Dante does not establish a causal relationship between the two. All that being said, the ten essays in this collection examine Dante and the Franciscans from a variety of perspectives, and are careful (for the most part) not to generalize beyond the available evidence. The most speculative of the essays is Sister Lucia Treanor’s “The Cross as Te in ‘The Canticle of Creatures,’ Dante’s ‘Virgin Mother,’ and Chaucer’s ‘Invocation to Mary.’” The essay attempts to demonstrate a symbolic structure within the works discussed, which consists of the letter te as symbol of the Cross or Jesus Christ, and implemented in the works “by graphic figurations within a palindromic structure that centers a puzzle” (p. 244). (A palindrome is a passage that can be read either backwards or forwards, e.g. “Madam I’m Adam”). Sister Treanor recognizes that the evidence for such imbedded rhetorical structures is tentative at best, and I must confess to having little 20.BookReviews.indd 434 12/5/07 20:48:11 Book Reviews 435 sympathy for this form of scholarship. Similarly, Elvira Giosi, in her essay, “A Franciscan Explanation of Dante’s Cinquecento Diece E Cinque,” presents a numerological interpretation of Paradiso 33.41-45. Here Beatrice announces that “... stars already close / at hand, which can’t be blocked or checked, will bring / a time in which, dispatched by God, a Five / Hundred and Ten and Five [Cinquecento Diece E Cinque ] will slay the whore / together with that giant who sins with her.” As Giosi explains, “Critics of the Comedy have always interpreted the image of the prostitute and the giant as symbols of the Church and the Empire; while they have viewed the cinquecento diece e cinque as a numerical transposition of the Latin letters DXV. According to the most largely accepted theory about this mysterious number, Dante was referring to a DUX [Latin leader], probably an Emperor, who would soon put an end to the corruption and the political disorder of his times” (pp. 145-46). In contrast to the currently held view, Giosi relates the eagle, traditionally “a symbol of the imperial power,” to the writings of the Franciscan Joachim of Fiore, “in which the eagle is the symbol of the new Church of the contemplatives in the seventh status” (p. 146). She also claims that “the symbol of the straight feet [in the Commedia] is a Franciscan idea in Dante’s representation of cinquecento diece e cinque “ (p. 166). She is on less firm ground in relating cinquecento diece e cinque to the Hebrew word yesharah, since there is no hard evidence that Dante knew Hebrew. Unquestionably, numerology (beginning...