The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature by Piero Boitani (review)

REVIEWS seems to have escaped scholarly attention that Haeckel's book, enlarged by the author, was reprinted by Rodopi in Amsterdam. It is this 1970 edition which should be used in the future. KARL HEINZ GOLLER RICHARD]. UTZ Universitat Regensburg PIERO BOITANI. The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xiii, 330. $54.50. "I am interested," says Piero Boitani in the preface to the ambitious series of essays which make up this volume, "in what poems, narratives, and plays written overfive hundred yearsago mean to us today, whether what they say and the way in which they say it are still relevant to modern readers" (p. ix). Thus, in order to link past and present, Boitani appropriates the categories of the sublime and the tragic, categories usually taken to be more charac­ teristic ofmodern literature (and ancient) than ofmedieval, as the govern­ ing idea for the work, but not without warning us that he will be "con­ centrating on particular texts and themes and avoiding systematic treatment of theoretical issues" (p. ix). In fact, this is a series of essays written over a long period oftime and, although rewritten for this volume, only loosely connected to each other and to any formal definition of the sublime and the tragic. The range of texts is very wide indeed, and the categories of the tragic and the sublime provide a very broad umbrella: given the number of medieval texts he does deal with that he implicitly claims are appropriately covered by the ideas ofthe tragic and the sublime, it is hard to think ofmany major texts ofmedieval literature that would not fit the categories as he uses them. Boitani provides a second focus for the book, one of subject matter as well as theme: he gives Dante pride of place in the volume. Most of the essays are wholly or partly studies of Dante, though here too it would be wrong to look for any kind of consistent link that connects Dante with the profusion ofother texts that he analyzes or indeed that connects one Dante study with another. Rather it is as he himself tells us, once again in the preface: "... any Italian critic must sooner or later confront his greatest 165 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER poet,... and that moment has now come for me" (p. xi). So: nine separate essays, most of them about Dante in some way; a loose exploration of the themes of the tragic and the sublime; an attempt to see how these texts are still relevant byconsistentcross-referencing withmodern texts and modern categories. Not an easy book to get a handle on. One cannot help but be impressed by the venture itself, by its ambitious range, and by the confi­ dence needed to undertake such a multilayered volume, not to mention the knowledge. But such admiration as the enterprise evokes by no means mitigates the difficulty of properly evaluating it. One way into a just evaluation is through the question of audience. Some of the characteristic features of the book can perhaps be explained by assuming that the book was written for a more general reader rather than for the medievalist, an attempt to bring readers familiar with different kinds of texts to an appreciation of the grandeur of the literature of the Middle Ages. Such an assumption might explain, for example, the fact that the discussion of so many texts in the Western literary tradition-the list is very long, including but by no means limited to Hemingway, Lorca, Melville, Mann, Baudelaire, Leopardi, Rilke, and Racine-is coupled with a relative lack of direct engagement with recent Dante scholarship. The Dante notes tend to tell us more about what has attracted the author's interest at the moment than about the most recent thinking on a given topic. Such an assumption might also explain why the notes on the whole, though surely learned and wide-ranging, are often casual.For example, on p. 309, in speaking ofJoachim of Fiore, Boitani mentions that "Dante does not accept Giocchino's heretical thoughts on the Trinity," as though it were clear to modern scholars thatJoachim's...