Sparks and seeds : medieval literature and its aftermath : essays in honor of John Freccero

355 Pages·2000·11.78 MB·English

by  Cornish

Sparks and Seeds:
Medieval Literature and its Afterlife
Essays in Honor of John Freccero
Edited by
Dana E. Stewart
and
Alison Cornish
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA
Contents
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Preface vii
Sparks and seeds: medieval literature and its afterlife: Introduction 1
essays in honor of John Freccero. - (Binghamton
GIUSEPPE MAZZOTIA
medieval and early modern studies; 2)
Conversion to the Text's Terms: Processes of Signification 17
I.Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321-Criticism and .
in Bonaventure's Itinerarium Mentis in Deum
interpretation 2.Literature, Medieval-History and
DENNIS COSTA
criticiSm 3.Italian literature - To 1400 - History and
Spirits of Love: Subjectivity, Gender, and Optics in the Lyrics of 37
citicism 4.Aesthetics, Medieval, in literature
Guido Cavalcanti .
I.stewart, Dana E. II. Cornish, Alison
850.9'001 DANA E. STEWART
On Failing One's Teachers: Dante, Virgil, and the Ironies of 61
ISBN 2503509061 Instruction
JOHN KLEINER
Lectura Dantis: Inferno 30 75
JEFFREY T. SCHNAPP
The Love that Moves the Sun and Other Stars in Dante's Hell 87
© 2000, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium JAMES NOHRNBERG
"Our Bodies, Our Selves": The Body in the Commedia 119
Portions of the article by AlisonComish (pp. 139-54) appeared first in RACHELjACOFF
Reading Dante's Stars (New Haven, 2000), © Yale University Press. Telling Time in Purgatory 139
All rights reserved. Reprinted here by permission. ALISON CORNISH
Dante's Aesthetics of Being 155
The article by Warren Ginsberg (pp. 155-73) appeared first in
WARREN GINSBERG
)ante's Aesthetics of Being (Ann Arbor, 1998), © University of Michigan Press.
"Are You Here?": Surprise in the Commedia 175
All rights reserved. Reprinted here by permission.
PETERS. HAWKINS
Solomon's Song in the Divine Comedy 199
Printed in the E. U. on acid-free paper
MARGUERITE CHIARENZA
D/2000/0095/5
Tasso as Ulysses 209
ISBN 2-503-50906-1
WALTER STEPHENS
The Debate Between Arms and Letters in the Gerusalemme 241
All rights reserved.
Liberata
No part of this publication my be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
DAVID QUINT
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
Representing Invention: The Telescope as News 267
photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher. EILEEN REEVES
Contents
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Preface vii
Sparks and seeds: medieval literature and its afterlife: Introduction 1
essays in honor of John Freccero. - (Binghamton
GIUSEPPE MAZZOTIA
medieval and early modern studies; 2)
Conversion to the Text's Terms: Processes of Signification 17
I.Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321-Criticism and .
in Bonaventure's Itinerarium Mentis in Deum
interpretation 2.Literature, Medieval-History and
DENNIS COSTA
criticiSm 3.Italian literature - To 1400 - History and
Spirits of Love: Subjectivity, Gender, and Optics in the Lyrics of 37
citicism 4.Aesthetics, Medieval, in literature
Guido Cavalcanti .
I.stewart, Dana E. II. Cornish, Alison
850.9'001 DANA E. STEWART
On Failing One's Teachers: Dante, Virgil, and the Ironies of 61
ISBN 2503509061 Instruction
JOHN KLEINER
Lectura Dantis: Inferno 30 75
JEFFREY T. SCHNAPP
The Love that Moves the Sun and Other Stars in Dante's Hell 87
© 2000, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium JAMES NOHRNBERG
"Our Bodies, Our Selves": The Body in the Commedia 119
Portions of the article by AlisonComish (pp. 139-54) appeared first in RACHELjACOFF
Reading Dante's Stars (New Haven, 2000), © Yale University Press. Telling Time in Purgatory 139
All rights reserved. Reprinted here by permission. ALISON CORNISH
Dante's Aesthetics of Being 155
The article by Warren Ginsberg (pp. 155-73) appeared first in
WARREN GINSBERG
)ante's Aesthetics of Being (Ann Arbor, 1998), © University of Michigan Press.
"Are You Here?": Surprise in the Commedia 175
All rights reserved. Reprinted here by permission.
PETERS. HAWKINS
Solomon's Song in the Divine Comedy 199
Printed in the E. U. on acid-free paper
MARGUERITE CHIARENZA
D/2000/0095/5
Tasso as Ulysses 209
ISBN 2-503-50906-1
WALTER STEPHENS
The Debate Between Arms and Letters in the Gerusalemme 241
All rights reserved.
Liberata
No part of this publication my be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
DAVID QUINT
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
Representing Invention: The Telescope as News 267
photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher. EILEEN REEVES
VI Contents
Fatti Maschii, Parole Femine: Manly Deeds, Womanly Words 291
PATRICIA PARKER
Desire, Displacement, Digression: Rhetorical Ramification in 317
Giorgio Manganelli's Amore and Tutti gli errori
REBECCA WEST
The Italian Body Politic is a Woman: Feminized National 329 Preface
Identity in Postwar Italian Film
MILLICENT MARCUS Binghamton Medieval and Early Modem Studies is a new series
dedicated to scholarship that crosses traditional disciplinary and
topographical boundaries, reflecting the increasingly global perspective
of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Binghamton;
University (SUNY). The present volume bears witness to one of the
ways the European Middle Ages, epitomized in a single author, Dante,
have taken root in North America. The writings and teachings of John
Freccero, however widely they range, turn ceaselessly around that
paradigmatic journey of the self, drawing out at every return the.
modernity inherent in the Middle Ages, and the medieval origins of
postrnodernity. The essays presented here, whose subjects range from
Saint Bonaventure to the late twentieth century, build on Freccero's
brilliant synthesis of poetics and theology, eroticism and science, spirit
uality and invention, ideology and discovery, tradition and innovation.
Writing on or about shores distant from Dante, these authors continue
to make that crucial connection between past and present that trans- .
forms cultural artifact into living organism, which has been Freccero's
essential lesson.
The first impetus for this collection came from Giuseppe Mazzotta,
seconded by Alison Cornish, with some early collaboration from
Rebecca West and Thomas Stillinger; Dana Stewart brought it to fru
ition. The editors wish to express their gratitude to Charles Burr()ughs,
the Director of CEMERS, and to Simon Forde at Brepols, for having the
vision to establish this series and to include this volume in it. It has been
a pleasure working with them, each of whom has provided invaluable
support and assistance in the preparation of this volume. The editors
also gratefully acknowledge Tracy Youells, for her extensive efforts in
proofreading and copy-editing, as well as LOri Vanderrnark, the produc
tion editor, for seeing this ·volume to its publication.
The cover reproduction of Va sari's "Dante and the Poets" is from a
photograph taken by Edmark Studios of Oxford of a painting by the
Studio of Giorgio Vasari, owned by Oriel College, Oxford. The Provost
VI Contents
Fatti Maschii, Parole Femine: Manly Deeds, Womanly Words 291
PATRICIA PARKER
Desire, Displacement, Digression: Rhetorical Ramification in 317
Giorgio Manganelli's Amore and Tutti gli errori
REBECCA WEST
The Italian Body Politic is a Woman: Feminized National 329 Preface
Identity in Postwar Italian Film
MILLICENT MARCUS Binghamton Medieval and Early Modem Studies is a new series
dedicated to scholarship that crosses traditional disciplinary and
topographical boundaries, reflecting the increasingly global perspective
of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Binghamton;
University (SUNY). The present volume bears witness to one of the
ways the European Middle Ages, epitomized in a single author, Dante,
have taken root in North America. The writings and teachings of John
Freccero, however widely they range, turn ceaselessly around that
paradigmatic journey of the self, drawing out at every return the.
modernity inherent in the Middle Ages, and the medieval origins of
postrnodernity. The essays presented here, whose subjects range from
Saint Bonaventure to the late twentieth century, build on Freccero's
brilliant synthesis of poetics and theology, eroticism and science, spirit
uality and invention, ideology and discovery, tradition and innovation.
Writing on or about shores distant from Dante, these authors continue
to make that crucial connection between past and present that trans- .
forms cultural artifact into living organism, which has been Freccero's
essential lesson.
The first impetus for this collection came from Giuseppe Mazzotta,
seconded by Alison Cornish, with some early collaboration from
Rebecca West and Thomas Stillinger; Dana Stewart brought it to fru
ition. The editors wish to express their gratitude to Charles Burr()ughs,
the Director of CEMERS, and to Simon Forde at Brepols, for having the
vision to establish this series and to include this volume in it. It has been
a pleasure working with them, each of whom has provided invaluable
support and assistance in the preparation of this volume. The editors
also gratefully acknowledge Tracy Youells, for her extensive efforts in
proofreading and copy-editing, as well as LOri Vanderrnark, the produc
tion editor, for seeing this ·volume to its publication.
The cover reproduction of Va sari's "Dante and the Poets" is from a
photograph taken by Edmark Studios of Oxford of a painting by the
Studio of Giorgio Vasari, owned by Oriel College, Oxford. The Provost
VIII Preface
and Fellows of the College have kindly given permission for the print to
be used for the front cover of this Festschrift.
The title of the volume alludes to a passage in Dante's Purgatory,
where the poetStatius acknowledges his debt to Virgil: "The sparks that
warmed me, the seeds of my ardor, were from the. holy fire-the same
that gave more than a thousand poets light and flame." (Purgatory
21.94-96, trans. Allen Mandelbaum.) This title, suggested by Rachel
Jacoff, is meant both to express our gratitude to Professor Freccero and Tabula Gratulatoria
to commemorate his extraordinary influence on scholars working in a
wide range of fields and time periods.
The following scholars wish to mark this volume by entering
their names in a Tabula Gratulatoria in honor of Professor John
Freccero.
Charles D. Adler Guglielmo Gorni
Stefano Albertini Thomas E. Hart
Angela Alioto Peter S. Hawkins
Maria Luisa Ardizzone Nancy Henry
Albert Russell Ascoli Ronald Herzman
Zygmunt G. Baranski Jerry Horner
Teodolinda Barolini Lloyd Howard
Geraldine Pittman Batlle Rachel Jacoff
Aldo S. Bernardo Christopher Kleinhenz
Margaret Brose Patricia Ann Estridge Kmieciak
Jo Ann Cavallo Elena F. Lombardi
.G ary P. Cestaro William Peter Mahrt
Paolo Cherchi Millicent Marcus
Massimiliano Chiamenti Gaetano Maruca
Carlo Chiarenza Sante Matteo
William J. Connell Medieval and Renaissance
Alison Cornish Studies, New York
Catherine S. Cox University
William and Katherine Devers Leslie Zarker Morgan
Program in Dante Studies, Daniel and Kristen Murtaugh
c.
University of Notre Dame James Nohrnberg
Paul A. Dumol Cormac 6 Cuilleanain
Mr and Mrs Robert M. Durling Patricia Parker
Chiara Ferrari Anthony L. Pellegrini
Diana Cavuoto Glenn Lino Pertile
Warren Ginsberg Jennifer Petrie
Eva Gold Alfonso Procaccini
VIII Preface
and Fellows of the College have kindly given permission for the print to
be used for the front cover of this Festschrift.
The title of the volume alludes to a passage in Dante's Purgatory,
where the poetStatius acknowledges his debt to Virgil: "The sparks that
warmed me, the seeds of my ardor, were from the. holy fire-the same
that gave more than a thousand poets light and flame." (Purgatory
21.94-96, trans. Allen Mandelbaum.) This title, suggested by Rachel
Jacoff, is meant both to express our gratitude to Professor Freccero and Tabula Gratulatoria
to commemorate his extraordinary influence on scholars working in a
wide range of fields and time periods.
The following scholars wish to mark this volume by entering
their names in a Tabula Gratulatoria in honor of Professor John
Freccero.
Charles D. Adler Guglielmo Gorni
Stefano Albertini Thomas E. Hart
Angela Alioto Peter S. Hawkins
Maria Luisa Ardizzone Nancy Henry
Albert Russell Ascoli Ronald Herzman
Zygmunt G. Baranski Jerry Horner
Teodolinda Barolini Lloyd Howard
Geraldine Pittman Batlle Rachel Jacoff
Aldo S. Bernardo Christopher Kleinhenz
Margaret Brose Patricia Ann Estridge Kmieciak
Jo Ann Cavallo Elena F. Lombardi
.G ary P. Cestaro William Peter Mahrt
Paolo Cherchi Millicent Marcus
Massimiliano Chiamenti Gaetano Maruca
Carlo Chiarenza Sante Matteo
William J. Connell Medieval and Renaissance
Alison Cornish Studies, New York
Catherine S. Cox University
William and Katherine Devers Leslie Zarker Morgan
Program in Dante Studies, Daniel and Kristen Murtaugh
c.
University of Notre Dame James Nohrnberg
Paul A. Dumol Cormac 6 Cuilleanain
Mr and Mrs Robert M. Durling Patricia Parker
Chiara Ferrari Anthony L. Pellegrini
Diana Cavuoto Glenn Lino Pertile
Warren Ginsberg Jennifer Petrie
Eva Gold Alfonso Procaccini
x Tabula Gratulatoria
David Quint Dana E. Stewart
Eileen Reeves Nick Tosches
Nunziata Rella University College London
Florence M. Russo-Cipolla Library
Introduction
Myriam Swennen Ru thenberg Valente Italian Library
Brenda Deen Schildgen Collection, Seton Hall
Anne M. Schuchman University
John A. Scott Paolo Valesio
GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA
Deanna Shemek Rebecca West
Janet Levarie Smarr Michael W. Wyatt
Barbara Spackman and the other contributors to
Walter Stephens this volume. Tr
1 IS QUITE PARADOXICAL that, over the last ten years, I have seen John
;reccero, who is essentially a private man, only in public places. The
last time I met him was in Florence, in June of 1997. The news had just
Dr Simon Forde reached him that the 1997 Nobel Prize winner for literature had been
Brepols Publishers, Saltaire
assigned to a Japanese writer, Kenzaburo Oe. Freccero, who that
March 2000
evening was perhaps enjoying his role as an American expatriate in
Florence, was elated. With an obvious display of self-irony, he pro
ceeded to tell his convivial audience that he had been internationally
acknowledged. An autobiographical novel byOe, available in French as
Lettres aux annees de nostalgie: Roman (and which was then being trans
lated into Italian), recounts the author's discovery of Western spiritual
ity and poetry through the reading of Dante's Divine Comedy, or, better,
through Freccero's reading of Dante.
Oe must have been looking for a guide into what for him probably
are the elusive byways in the dense intellectual forest of the Middle
Ages. That he turned to an American scholar in order to find the route
into the roots of the European sapieritial tradition cannot be without a
special significance. His novel records the writer's relentless engage
ment with Freccero's Poetics of Conversion, which, as is widely known,
casts Dante's poem as the re-enactment of an Augustinian autobiogra
phy, as the narrative of the path of the soul to God. On reflection, onIy
an American Dante scholar could have been the privileged interlocu
tor/guide in the Japanese writer's self-reckoning or paideitl.
There has long been in American intellectual life the extraordinary
phenomenon of American Dantism, which is as profound as the Renais
sance retrieval of Latinity or the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
phenomenon of German HellenIsm. From Winckelman to Nietzsche,
HellenIsm or the "spirit of Greece" came to mean the aesthetic quest for
x Tabula Gratulatoria
David Quint Dana E. Stewart
Eileen Reeves Nick Tosches
Nunziata Rella University College London
Florence M. Russo-Cipolla Library
Introduction
Myriam Swennen Ru thenberg Valente Italian Library
Brenda Deen Schildgen Collection, Seton Hall
Anne M. Schuchman University
John A. Scott Paolo Valesio
GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA
Deanna Shemek Rebecca West
Janet Levarie Smarr Michael W. Wyatt
Barbara Spackman and the other contributors to
Walter Stephens this volume. Tr
1 IS QUITE PARADOXICAL that, over the last ten years, I have seen John
;reccero, who is essentially a private man, only in public places. The
last time I met him was in Florence, in June of 1997. The news had just
Dr Simon Forde reached him that the 1997 Nobel Prize winner for literature had been
Brepols Publishers, Saltaire
assigned to a Japanese writer, Kenzaburo Oe. Freccero, who that
March 2000
evening was perhaps enjoying his role as an American expatriate in
Florence, was elated. With an obvious display of self-irony, he pro
ceeded to tell his convivial audience that he had been internationally
acknowledged. An autobiographical novel byOe, available in French as
Lettres aux annees de nostalgie: Roman (and which was then being trans
lated into Italian), recounts the author's discovery of Western spiritual
ity and poetry through the reading of Dante's Divine Comedy, or, better,
through Freccero's reading of Dante.
Oe must have been looking for a guide into what for him probably
are the elusive byways in the dense intellectual forest of the Middle
Ages. That he turned to an American scholar in order to find the route
into the roots of the European sapieritial tradition cannot be without a
special significance. His novel records the writer's relentless engage
ment with Freccero's Poetics of Conversion, which, as is widely known,
casts Dante's poem as the re-enactment of an Augustinian autobiogra
phy, as the narrative of the path of the soul to God. On reflection, onIy
an American Dante scholar could have been the privileged interlocu
tor/guide in the Japanese writer's self-reckoning or paideitl.
There has long been in American intellectual life the extraordinary
phenomenon of American Dantism, which is as profound as the Renais
sance retrieval of Latinity or the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
phenomenon of German HellenIsm. From Winckelman to Nietzsche,
HellenIsm or the "spirit of Greece" came to mean the aesthetic quest for
2 GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Introduction 3
perfection or the "whole man." American Dantism is both a more com Their works share many of the values of Emerson and Thoreau, but
plex and a nuanced reality. It is not altogether identifiable with the they hark back primarily to the theology of Jonathan Edwards, to his
esthetic myth of Italy that shapes the Anglo-American and German belief that redemption comes only through the arbitrary and free grace
imagination of, say, Byron, Hawthorne and Hemingway, Goethe, San of God. For all their Calvinist theological underpinning, they recast their
tayana,James, Pound, and Tate. The cult of Dante in America belongs to visions through the prism of Dante. Hawthorne's "Rappacini's Daugh
a different-both esthetic and ethical-order of experience. It involves, ter," a phantasmagoria that takes place in a garden in Padua, chastises
among others, the likes of Thornton Wilder, James Merrill, Ezra Pound Emerson's surmy optimism as indifference to evil, and represents an
himself, Robert Penn Warren, T. S. Eliot, and, above all, R. W. Emerson. eerie revision of Dante's HelL Penn Warren's A Place to Come to retrieves
'Emerson rhapsodizes about Dante as the very horizon of freedom, the central tenets of the theology of man's innate sinfulness and uncon
as the maker of imaginative "new worlds," and as a "cosmic intellect," ditional election. In a polemical move against Sartre's idea of a self
,Dante, he says in his treatise on Poetry and Imagination, "was free adrift in the world, he projects the education of self from an esthetic to
imagination,-all wings,-yet he wrote like Euclid." Emerson's philo an ethical stage of being in an explicitly Kierkegaardianlanguage. More
sophical optimism is rooted in the principle of autonomy of the self and poignantly, the story unIolds as the fictional autobiography or novel of
in the view of the self as a Universal Mind, which find in Dante their education of the Emersonian "American Scholar" in the guise of a
supreme expression. In Dante, who knits a multitude into one man, the contemporary Dante scholar. This scholar learns from Dante that man
individual and the Oversoul are identical. The acknowledgment of is in time and history, that only in history does he come to grips with
Dante's enlarged individualism is flanked by his unswerving awareness himself, and that he must make a night journey in order to come home.
of the superiority of the moderns. Thus, in "The American Scholar," John Freccero's Dante scholarship belongs fully to this rich and
Emersonmakes of self-reliance and self-trust the first duty of the Amer complex tradition of American Dantism. Against the Emersonian strain
icanscholar and ends up urging, in a vein that Nietszche would eventu of Dante criticism, his Poetics of Conversion theorizes, in contrast to the
ally approve, that we take our distance from Europe: "We have listened self-referential, idolatrous view of esthetics, an ethics of literature.
too long to the courtly muses of Europe." Nostalgia for the past hides Emerson casts the poet (and his reversal of Plato is transparent) as a
timidity of spirit. charioteer who throws up the reins and relies for guidance on the
There is, however, a more problematical, amore disturbing strain in horse's instinct. Freccero's essays, such as those on "The Prologue
the American imagination, a gloomy vision which is deliberately anti Scene" and "Dante's Ulysses: From Epic to Novel" consistently evoke
Emersonian. In this view, America, far from being merely the place of the pilgrim's twilight of knowledge and set it against the "philosophical
an errand in the wilderness, of titanic individuals who transcend all presumption" of the Platonic allegories about the soul's flight to the sun.
frontiers, who look at the world with new eyes, and who will to re-make And against Emersonian claims of optimistic self-reliance, they explore
history, is a fallen Eden. Nor is the Self an all-encompassing, monistic the self floundering against the reefs of solipSism and autonomy turning
insularity capable of soaring, as Emerson has it, "from our body into the into pride of knowledge. Clearly, in the peculiarly Augustinian-Amer
Empyrean." This anti-Transcendentalist tradition radicalizes Emerson's ican power of its viSion, only Poetics of Conversion could have been
paradigm of self: it tUrns the searchlight on oneself; it focuses on the chosen as the road-map for Oe's journey of consciousness or conversion.
shadowy contours or dark world of autobiographies and personal nar Conversion, which for Freccero is the essence of Dante's vision, renders
ratives; and it induces this different breed of American writers to live as also a quintessentially American view of America's own history: its
exiles in Paris or Rome or Florence, hoping to find their latitude in the need for a leave-taking from the past as well as the need to return to the
penumbra and against the horizons of these cities' histories. In the ranke spiritual fund of the past.
of this traditipn one finds, among others, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Another encounter with Freccero took place in New York City on a
James, and Robert Penn Warren. hot Sunday afternoon in the late August of 1994. I was crossing Wash
ington Square. To this day, the park has lost little of its original nine-