This book of essays by ten scholars forms a welcome addition, both to Brill's new series on "The Medieval Franciscans" and to the literature on Dante and Franciscanism. It offers some striking new insights into the Commedia's assimilation of Franciscan culture. As we are so often reminded, however, nothing is really new in Dante studies, and--contrary to the statement on p. 2 and on the back cover--this is not "the second volume dedicated to Dante and the Franciscans" in recent years but (at least) the third. Assigning pride of place may be inappropriate for such a "minorite" subject; yet if it has to be done, the precedence should go, not to my own Dante and the Franciscans (Cambridge, 2004), but to Attilio Mellone's excellent and still useful collection Dante e il francescanesimo (Lectura Dantis Metelliana; Cava dei Tirreni, 1987).
As a multi-voiced treatment of the topic, Santa Casciani's collection has some distinct advantages over the monotone monograph that preceded it in 2004. Amongst these is the range of access it gives to the expertise of several of those who have already made authoritative contributions to the subject. Such expertise is evident, for instance, in the overviews given by William R. Cook and Ronald B. Herzman of "What Dante Learned from St Francis" (113-40) and by Giuseppe Mazzotta of "Dante's Franciscanism" (171-198); as well as in Alessandro Vettori's concise and incisive account of "duality and specularity" in and around Paradiso 11's depiction of St Francis (289-305). It is also apparent in Santa Casciani's own account of Bernardino of Siena as "reader of Dante" (85-111), which draws upon and alludes to her extensive work on a related topic: the reception of Dante's work by the Franciscans themselves (87, n. 10).
Contributions of this kind provide a firm framework for the book's investigation of a promisingly wide range of issues and texts from the standpoint of several disciplines: biblical exegesis, the history of art, and philosophy--as well as Italian and literary studies. Particularly notable and valuable is the awareness throughout of Dante's responses to the exegetical and mystical writings of arguably the most prominent Franciscan of his time, St Bonaventura (c. 1217- 74). Not only is Bonaventura's importance as a sources for the life of St Francis and as a fictional voice of Franciscanism (in Par. 12) recognized; so also is the significance for Dante's visionary and intellectual journey of his Itinerarium mentis in Deum and his less well known treatise of 1273, De reductione artium ad theologiam (esp. on pp. 93-5, 96, 108 and 196-7 here). And a further and highly suggestive argument is put forward (by Mazzotta) for the influence of another Bonaventuran text of 1273, the Collationes in Hexaemeron, as "an important, though so far unacknowledged source for Dante's representation of the Heaven of the Sun" (187-94).
As might be expected, the portrayal of St Francis himself in that Heaven of the Sun (Par. 11) receives attention in several of the essays, notably those by Cook and Herzman, Mazzotta and Vettori. There is also productive discussion of a number of other episodes in the Commedia which draw upon Franciscan imagery and discourse. Two of the essays (Casciana's and Mazzotta's) rightly dwell upon a significant negative portrayal of Franciscanism in the Inferno: the relationship between the failed Franciscan, Guido da Montefeltro and the "prince of the new Pharisees," Boniface VIII, in a canto where a frustrated St Francis himself makes his first brief appearance in the text (Inf. 27. 112). In this grim comedy of deception the cunning condottiere and the scheming pope are well-matched as anti-Franciscan figures, and I agree that they "deserve each other," indeed I used the same phrase to describe them (Dante and the Franciscans, 2004, 64). Yet it remains problematic that Boniface who has led Guido to engineer his "triumph in the high seat" (Inf. 27. 111) should also be due for a less deep place in Dante's Hell (the third bolgia rather than the eighth). However, more relevant to the canto's Franciscan themes and context is the way in which both Casciani and Mazzotta develop an important argument about "logic" and Franciscan attitudes towards it (90-7 and 175-81)--an argument whose groundwork has much in common with several suggestions about kinds of logic in the canto and the conflict between "seraphic" charity and "cherubic" logic that were made in Baldi's 1987 essay (Mellone (ed.), Dante e il francescanesimo, 139 and 142).
The book's chief avowed aim is to "present...a Franciscan reading of the Divine Comedy"; and to this end it also offers a fair range of further examples of Dante's Franciscanism. The well-known parallels between Petrus Iohannis Olivi's Lectura super Apocalypsim and Dante's apocalyptic language in Inferno 19 and Purgatorio 32 are diligently re-examined by V.S. Benfell (9- 50); and it is useful to know that Warren Lewis who edited Olivi's Lectura as a PhD dissertation in 1972 is still "currently at work on revising and publishing this edition" (23 n.36). A valuable reminder of the feminine side of Franciscanism in the Commedia is provided by Tonia Bernardi Triggiano's essay which, although it takes a rather long time to work round to the key issues involving Dante's Piccarda (Par. 3), offers some valuable and well- informed insights into the text's reflections of Clarissan aspirations and commitments (especially 69-78). And a thoughtful exposition of Franciscan apostolicism more broadly in the Paradiso is undertaken in Amanda Quantz's essay (199-228), which once again draws illuminating parallels with Bonaventura, especially the Itinerarium.
More recondite areas are explored, and rather more questionable conclusions reached, in several of the other essays. Elvira Giosi's "Franciscan Explanation of Dante's Cinquecento Diece e Cinque" (Beatrice's riddling messianic prophecy in Purg. 33. 43-5) takes a somewhat circuitous path through Joachimist and Rabbinic imagery and Kabbalistic numerology to arrive (via the notion of "straight feet") at St Francis as the answer to the enigma (141-69). Feet did matter to the Franciscans, of course (as Dante acknowledges in the Paradiso), and Spiritual Franciscan exegesis in Dante's time was imagining a redemptive event comparable to that of Beatrice's prophecy (Dante and the Franciscans 2004, 118-21); but this still leaves us some way from being able to identify Dantes "515" with St Francis. Several other Franciscan themes are proposed as parallels by Brenda Wirkus in her discussion of the Vita Nuova (307-43)-- notably those of wayfaring and the search for "home" and (again by way of Bonaventura's Itinerarium) the notion of vestigia-- but the essay's digressions on other issues do not leave space for these intertextualities to be explored in sufficient detail. Yet more problematic in its approach is the long essay by Lucia Treanor, comparing "palindromic structures" in St Francis's "Laudes Creaturarum" or "Cantico di frate Sole" with St Bernard's invocation to the Virgin (Par. 33. 1-21) and the Prologue to Chaucer's "Second Nun's Tale," by way of other canonical texts such as Plato's Republic and Virgil's Aeneid. The tracing of verbal patterns here takes us in some truly mind-bending directions. Thus, for instance, the ivory (eburna) gate by which Aeneas and the Sybil leave the underworld (Aen. 6. 898) leads to "'Hebrew' ('ebru') and 'Hibernia,' both 'winter' and Ireland" (256); and Chaucer's use of the adverb certes is identified as a way of addressing Boccaccio, as "the author from Certaldo" (287). Semioticians and cryptographers will be better qualified than I to judge Treanor's conclusions about such hidden structures in her main texts. Yet it seems to me that, whereas Dante willingly engages in various kinds of play with words and letters (such as the acrostic in Purg. 12. 25-58 or the "reading" of OMO on the faces of the penitent gluttons in Purg. 23. 32-3), on the other hand St Francis, for all his ludic disposition in other respects, might not have envisaged palindromic structure as a particularly appropriate way of approaching his hymn to creation.
Both Treanor's essay and, to some extent, Wirkus's suggest that their authors really have other fish to fry than those which inhabit the particular ocean on which this book has set forth. An additional problem with the former is that at sixty pages--twice the length of most of the other essays--it somewhat distorts the proportions of the whole book. Different readers will of course look for more and less of different things here, but in the interests of my perhaps rather narrow view of Dante and the Franciscan traditions, I would have welcomed rather fuller discussion of those hundred or more sermons "interspersed with verses from Dante's Comedy" (Casciana, 87 n. 10); of Clarissan sisters such as Battista da Montefeltro (1384-1448) as readers of Dante (Triggiano, 78-83); and of the relationship between Dante's and the Franciscans' ideas about "the vernacularization of piety (and of poetry)" (Cook and Herzman, 139).
Collections of this sort are notoriously difficult to draw together (especially in the absence of a conference devoted to the subject), and Prof. Casciani has done admirably to assemble such a wide range of talent and such a large amount of illuminating and useful material here. The book's usefulness would have been further enhanced by bibliographies for the essays, or (better) a consolidated bibliography for the whole collection; and it would have benefited from a less eccentrically organized index. Above all, some judicious cross- referencing between essays would have helped more clearly to identify some of the project's themes and continuities. Taking the liberty to offer a few examples of such potential links, I would suggest:
pp. 90, 97 and 172, 181 (on attitudes to language, logic, "defective syllogisms"); pp. 165 and 177 (on St Francis as ascendens ab ortu solis); pp. 188 and 290 (on the Heaven of the Sun and Franciscan spirituality); pp. 96 and 196 (on Bonaventura's De reductione atrium ad theologiam); pp. 139 and 224 (on Dante's and the Franciscans' uses of the vernacular and "low" style).
The various voices that are heard here are often forceful and cogent; but they would, I think, have achieved yet more force and cogency, had they at certain points been able to talk to each other.