Tragedy and Comedy from Dante to Pseudo-Dante by Henry Ansgar Kelly (review)

REVIEWS bogen's brief discussion of the Virtues in Scivias. He could not fit Hilde­ gard's Virtues comfortably into the formal scheme he set out, and it is, indeed, her originality that subsequent scholars recognized. The gender of personifications has been effectively problematized by Marina Warner in Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory ofthe Female Form (New York: Atheneum, 1985). Warner devotes two chapters to medieval personifications and describes, in the concluding section of her book, "the varied formal premises that structure allegorical female figures, and the ideas that underpin their appearance both in text and image" (p. xxii). From the perspective of cultural studies, the development of codified systems ofVirtues and Vices beginning in the ninth century and especially prevalent in the twelfth reads as part of the construction of dominant Christian identity against categories of Otherness, especially heretics and Jews, identified by R. I. Moore in The Formation ofa Persecuting Society (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987). Allegories ofthe Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art is the first original work of art history to be published in the MART series (two books of "Sources and Documents" have appeared), and it is thus more than wel­ come. If interdisciplinary scholarship is to thrive, major works by scholars in all disciplines must be available to students in medieval studies. PAMELA SHEINGORN Baruch College and Graduate Center, CUNY HENRY ANSGAR KELLY. Tragedy and Comedy from Dante to Pseudo­ Dante. Modern Philology, vol. 121. UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Cosponsored Publication, no. 7. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1989. Pp. x, 134. $14.50 paper. Discussions of tragedy generally proceed in one of two directions. Either they examine works with reference to such theories of tragedy as that developed by Aristotle in his Poetics, or they examine characteristics com­ mon to a given set ofworks in an effort to abstract a workable theory. Henry Ansgar Kelly's work toward a general consideration oftragedy and comedy in the Middle Ages was complicated, however, because he had to devote a 205 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER book to examining the relevant theoretical comments ascribed to Dante, distinguish those which are genuine from those which are spurious, and establish Dante's authentic ideas. The work was necessary before he could proceed with his more general discussion of medieval tragedy. Kelly's hypothesis in this book is that the unfinished De vulgari eloquentia (written at the beginning of the fourteenth century) contains Dante's own theoretical statements but that The Epistle to Cangrande (assigned by Kelly to the end of the fourteenth century) contains notions brought together from various sources by a compiler who used Dante's name, hence Pseudo-Dante. Kelly presents what he finds to be Dante's own ideas in his first chapter, "The Authentic Dante." In the succeeding chapters he examines the rea­ sons fourteenth-century commentators gave for Dante's naming his master­ piece Commedia. It is in a detailed analysis ofthe commentaries that Kelly builds his model for a relatively late compilation ofthe various elements he discerns in The Epistle to Cangrande. He concludes his seventh and final chapter with: "Pseudo-Dante has had a successful run, but now it is time to set him aside and return to Dante himself" (p. 76). Kelly's position is controversial, but his arguments are solid. At the end of the book three appendices present evidence in support of Kelly's thesis, which is also shared by other noted scholars, that The Epistle to Cangrande is spurious. There is also a bibliography to all footnoted materials, and because about one-third ofthe text is devoted to documen­ tation and notes, the bibliography is extensive. Finally, a well-organized index makes the book useful as a reference on Dante and definitions of tragedy and comedy in the fourteenth century. By being so meticulous in his scholarship, Kelly's hope that "even those who are not convinced by any arguments against Dante's authorship of Cangrande will be able to gather some fruit from my analyses ofthe doctrines ofall of the commentaries" is realized. The subject of tragedy in the Middle Ages has concerned Kelly for at...