The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy by Guy P. Raffa (review)

REVIEWS 297 Catholic character of the order as a whole, which could not survive Henry VIII’s usurpation of church authority: “[i]t was the Hospitallers’ very success in remaining a truly international order that brought about their downfall in England” (166). The most problematic aspect of Prior of the Knights Hospitaller is what Phillips means by “access to the king.” He details the Prior’s extensive involvement in diplomacy and other government service, as well as his frequent presence at parliament, general council and king’s council, but he denies that these activities translated into access to the king. The vastness of modern administration makes most government servants anonymous to the head of state, but surely this was not the case for so prominent a baron in the fifteenth century . What criteria are used to establish what “access” meant in this period, and who had it? Is it the regular opportunity to speak privately with the king? Is it the frequency with which one’s opinion is solicited in council sessions? Is it influence in crafting concrete state policies, or in receiving concrete favors from the crown? Phillips does not really address these questions; he is mainly concerned to document the Prior’s political activity and mitigate the allegedly exaggerated claims of other historians. Prior of the Knights Hospitaller also raises the important question of “secularization ” of the military orders, but treats it in a limited, if detailed, manner. The bestowal of land grants and other attempts to curry royal favor are important indicators of secularization, but so are the changing patterns of religious observance, which Phillips mentions but does not explore. He acknowledges the difficulty of determining to what extent the late Priors regarded themselves as lay or ecclesiastic, a difficulty that plagues the study of the military orders in general. The question of “national interests” is especially germane to the Hospital , which, unlike its Iberian and Baltic counterparts, retained something of a universalist outlook. The lines of inquiry that Phillips has launched regarding secularization might well be extended into other aspects of the question. Prior of the Knights Hospitaller is nonetheless a fine study whose use of English source material is a healthy corrective to other works that have relied too extensively on Maltese records. I hope that future historians, and perhaps Phillips himself, will reassess the general history of the English Hospitallers in light of these sources. SAM ZENO CONEDERA, S.J. Guy P. Raffa, The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2009) xix + 371 pp. The Complete Danteworlds is a reference guide to Dante’s Commedia, and covers Hell (the subject of Raffa’s 2007 Danteworlds: A Reader’s Guide to the Inferno), Purgatory, and Heaven. It stands out from the large corpus of Dante reference works in its organizational style, accessibility for the non-specialist, and the comprehensiveness of the related website. Deriving inspiration, one assumes, from classical and medieval mnemotechniques , The Complete Danteworlds is organized spatially: each canticle is divided not into cantos but into circles, terraces, or spheres as relevant. The chapter on Purgatory, for instance, contains a section on “Terrace 2: Envy REVIEWS 298 (Purgatorio 13–15).” Raffa notes in his introduction that this structure has helped his own students remember the order and relation of the different places, themes, and characters in the Commedia. The overall effect may at first seem underwhelming for the reader more familiar with the text: after all, by following the spaces of Dante’s journey, the guide perforce still follows the order of the cantos. But, by lessening the number of units that must be comprehended and assimilated (ten spheres instead of thirty-three cantos, for instance), The Complete Danteworlds helps the reader at any level of expertise establish a firmer perspective on the scope—and not just the geographic scope—of the poem. The accompanying illustrations, by Suloni Robertson, effectively represent the spatial relationships of Dante’s numerous places. As the name implies, The Complete Danteworlds is designed for the autodidact and for the student in the early stages of Dante studies, or even the early stages of literary studies. For the general...