Formulas of Repetition in Dante's Commedia: Signposted Journeys Across Textual Space by Lloyd H. Howard (review)

humanities 375 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 >wide [Arabic] influence on Western Europe= and its cooking procedures? How is it that >rather suddenly, a number of purely culinary collections= appear around the beginning of the fourteenth century? Even more particularly, the idea that the >scanty use of any sort of sweet ingredients= testifies to the early date of the recipes calls for further exploration, as does the single mention in one manuscript of fava beans. And what might have been the purpose and auspices of this cookbook? The organization of the edited texts and of the glossaries and indexes is not reader-friendly. The texts and indexes are presented manuscript by manuscript (and, with the glossaries, language by language), so that comparisons can be made only by flipping back and forth between recipes and terms. The editorial decision to be restrictive with etymologies for the Low German and Icelandic vocabularies is unhelpful, as is the absence of discussion, except briefly in the commentary, of linguistic matters such as dialectal forms or macaronic texts. The composite translation and the commentary become, therefore, the most valuable section for explanatory notes and contextual material. The volume allows many of the questions in the history of cookbooks and cookery to be posed anew: what is the relationship of collections of recipes to medical handbooks? How are the dietary regimens of the wealthy and of the poor reflected in these cookbooks? What can be said of the movement of ingredients from southern to northern Europe and from east to west via the Mediterranean? Are the methods of cookery descriptive or practical? Could a modern cook use these recipes? Only, I think, if creative imagination were the cook=s modus operandi. Yet the work=s value is real: it gives a useful and intriguing glimpse of thirteenth-century habits of eating and the preparation of food. (JOANNA DUTKA) Lloyd H. Howard. Formulas of Repetition in Dante=s Commedia: Signposted Journeys Across Textual Space McGill-Queen University Press. xii, 206. $65.00 Many analytical investigations of the Divine Comedy=s pattern of significance assign a special value to the occurrence of what in rhetoric is called a hapax legomenon, the poet=s employment of a single (and, thereby, singular) word, which, precisely because of its singularity, is believed to possess an extraordinary resonance. It is as if nominal individuality carved a space of unique significance and caused silent ripples of surprising associations. In his monograph, Lloyd H. Howard chooses to follow an altogether different route of analysis. He identifies the regular appearance of repetition of keywords , of recurrent groups of words or >formulas= in Dante=s poetic text, and seeks to extract the moral, political, and generally intellectual reasons 376 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 behind the overt grid of the poem. Examples of this >formulaic= technique range from the triple anaphora at the gate of Hell B >per me si va ...= to a once repeated word or metaphor, such as >veglio,= to a repeated phrase, such as >etterno essilio,= and to a shifting formula such as >che pense?= or >vo= che sappi.= This technique, as Howard stresses at the outset of his study by appealing to the authority of Milman Parry and his collection of oral formulas, marks the tradition of Homeric epics. By focusing on the oral formulaic tradition, Parry had managed to uncover a new conception of form and had given a >scientific= basis to Vico=s insight into the rhapsodic and mnemonic origin of the Greek epics. Howard=s argument, however, evokes but quickly steers clear of Parry=s views as well as of any likely suspicion that this sort of textual probe could be accomplished, as concordances are, by mechanical computations. Parry=s views are defective in that he casts the Greek idea of poetry as a static, repetitive exercise. Howard, by contrast, emphasizes the creative, unexpected twists in Dante=s deployment of formulas. As the >introduction= explains, in Dante=s poem the repetitions serve as >signposts= drawing the readers= attention to the multiple journeys (the plural significantly figures in the title of the monograph) that...