Meditations on the Life of Christ: The Short Italian Text by Sarah McNamer (review)

The William and Katherine Devers Series, founded in 1995, explores the works of Dante and his contemporaries as points of convergence for the interweaving lines of inquiry of the medieval Italian cultural tradition. As noted by Daragh O'Connell and Beatrice Sica ('Literary Cultures in/and Italian Studies', Italian Studies, 75 (2020), 125–39), recent scholarship in the field has shown an inclination to look beyond the canon in favour of examining potential alternative canons and 'minor' authors and texts, contributing to a reframing of cultural authority in the early Italian literary tradition. Given this trend, it is entirely clear why the series editors have invested in Sarah McNamer's book: while the unattributed Latin text of the Meditationes vitae Christi was highly influential during the medieval period, McNamer proposes a previously unstudied Italian text, allegedly authored by one of the Poor Clares of Tuscany, as the original text of the Meditations, thus complicating not only its textual history, but the history of medieval Italian literature more broadly. This book constitutes an exciting and compelling new perspective on a significant text.

The preface to this volume states that it will present the Italian testo breve with an English translation and commentary, as well as a detailed exposé of the ramifications of the Italian text in terms of 'the development of prose narrative in the early Trecento; the role of women as writers and readers in the invention of genres and devotional practices; the part played by the Franciscans in the cultivation of affective piety; the rise and risks of vernacular theology; and the history of emotion' (p. xviii). The presentation of the text, translation, and commentary is exemplary, and McNamer makes illuminating observations regarding the vital role of Franciscans and of women in medieval devotion, and the ways in which prose narrative developed in fourteenth-century Italy. However, the compact nature of the initial paratextual argument leaves the question of medieval vernacular theology and its relationship to affective states comparatively underdeveloped, and McNamer's frequent redirections to her contemporaneous article published in Archivum Franciscanum Historicum (111.1–2 (2018), 65–112) do not quite counterbalance this shortcoming.

The book is presented in two main sections. The first 180 pages contain an introduction that presents the reasoning behind offering a critical edition of this testo breve, alongside a paratextual argument. There is a textual history that accounts for the newly 'discovered' (p. xxviii, n. 13) testo breve as well as the Italian and Latin texts already known to scholars, following a meticulous close reading of particular textual interpolations. The 'authorship' section posits an author of Franciscan affiliation and a woman, based on analysis of textual referents as well as contextual information regarding literacy and social practices, while the 'date and place of composition' section gives a detailed provenance of the testo breve, dated to c. 1300–1325 (p. cxx). This is followed by a catalogue of the manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian MS Canon. It. 174), a linguistic analysis by Pär Larson, which argues that the text is Tuscan but copied by Venetian copyists, and notes on editorial principles and quirks of the translation.

The second section contains the 'critical edition' of the testo breve, divided into its thirty-one chapters. The facing-page English translation is sound and notes on the text prove highly useful in understanding the text's devotional uses and contexts. However, references to the author's close comparative reading of the text with one purportedly later Italian version (the testo minore, a longer text that most closely resembles the testo breve) is revealed only in snippets, rather than comprehensively. While McNamer acknowledges that producing a comparative critical edition is against the intention of the monograph (pp. xxxiii–xxxiv), some confusion remains regarding the accuracy of the term 'critical edition' in reference...