Twice-told tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri (review)

182 Reviews dozen volumes, and setting aside the anachronisms of the introductions, the work will prove valuable to scholars in the field and, perhaps more so, to those entering for thefirsttime those areas covered in it. Here, particularly, the introductions will quickly and helpfully orient the readers to the manuscripts and the issues. Old English prose of secular learning stands as a solid achievement and a useful addition to thefield.Whether or not i t will become a benchmark for future bibliographies remains to be seen. Phillip Pulsiano ViUanova University Holloway, Julia Bolton, Twice-told tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri, N.Y. and Bern, Peter Lang, 1993; boards; pp. xi, 550; frontispiece, 7 plates, 3 maps; R.R.P. SF87.00. Juha Bolton Holloway has established herself as an expert on the topic of Brunetto Latino with her translation of// Tesoretto (1981) and her later work Brunetto Latino: an analytic bibliography (1986). Twice-told tales is therefore something of a surprise; although, the scholarly debt she claims to owe to Isidore Del Lungo, who died in 1927, perhaps should serve as some kind of a warning. This extensively footnoted work claims to be both a metahistory and a biography of Brunetto Latino's life and work, able to serve as a commentary to Inferno X V and also as a contribution to the history of Florence in the latter half of the thirteenth century. This last claim most justiy reflects the possible value of this work, although the author appears to have eliminated the most obvious readers, serious Dante scholars: 'The reader who comes to this book convinced that notaries are unimportant, has to shed this Americanism. In Europe notaries are above attorneys. The reader who comes to this book convinced that Dante was an aristocrat has to shed that preconception. The Alighieri for several generations were money lenders. The reader who comes to this book convinced that Brunetto was not Dante's teacher ought, like William Penn at George Fox's suggestion, to wear his sword for as long as he can' (p. vii). The book is divided into three parts: 'Praxis: Ser Brunectus Latinus'; "Theory: Maestro Brunetto Latino'; and Appendices. The lack of a bibliography makes it difficult to use as a reference source, although the excessive footnotes may be winnowed for works on selected topics. As a commentary on the works of Dante it is inadequate and often incorrect. For Reviews 1 Q J example, in the introduction HoUoway refers to three 'obscuring fallacies' that have interfered with m o d e m interest in Brunetto Latino. Thefirst,that Brunetto was not Dante's teacher, is supported by a reference to only one critic: Imbriani (1878). The second, that Bono Giamboni did not translate the Tresor, appears equally unsupported. The third, that Dante placed Brunetto in the Inferno for sodomy, a matter that has been debated fiercely for 650 years, is dismissed in one paragraph: 'The Commedia itself clearly shows that the circle in which Dante finds Brunetto is not so much sodomy as that in which usury was punished . . . This book demonstrates how most of the figures in this circle were connected with Florentine and Papal banking and finance—which involved usury' (p. 9). Oddly, Holloway's notes to this question omit F. Guerra d'Antoni's Dante's burning sands: some new perspectives (1991), which makes this same claim and for which Holloway herself wrote the cover notes. One might wonder just how Capaneus, the blaspheming king taken from Statius' Thebaid (Inferno XIV) and Priscian, the sixth-century grammarian (Inferno XV), canfitinto this extraordinary argument. Three kinds of sin are punished on the burning plain of the minor giron of the seventh circle of Hell (Inferno, Cantos XIV-XVU): blasphemy, what is taken to be sodomy, and usury. The cantos involve atotalof 537 lines, of which only 35 describe usurers. There are perplexing and unsupported inaccuracies. In Inferno X V Brunetto does not gossip about Guido Guerra, Tegghiaio Aldobrandi, and Filippo Rusticucci of Inferno X V I (p. 171). All he says is that he may not mix with the approaching group (Inferno XV: 118). Dante's Vita Nuova is not accepted in general...