Modern Language Review

Martin Eisner’s monograph marks a much-awaited breakthrough in the history of Dante Studies. It is the first full-length study to attempt and succeed at reconciling the opposing factions of the field: the pull of textual criticism and the call of inter-disciplinarity and transnational comparativism in Reception Studies. In this book Eisner catalyses the ‘tension’ separating ‘book historians, material philologists’, ‘textual critics’ (p. 4), and reception scholars into a greater interpretative force, convincingly arguing that the key lies in the Vita nuova. Following the dramatized discourse within the libello, Eisner demonstrates that Dante is the first advocate and practitioner of a critical approach in which the scrutiny of ‘strategies of compilation, commentary, textual analysis, material arrangement of the work itself’ (p.10) runs to ‘the twisted course of textual transmission’ (p. 15) and reception among internal and external, fictional and historical, male and female readers.

This exclusive focus on the libello places the work at the forefront of a wider process of re-evaluation of the Vita nuova in English-speaking scholarship, with at least two forthcoming studies: one engaging in a collaborative rereading of the Vita nuova (Dante’s ‘Vita nova’: A Collaborative Reading, ed. by Zygmunt G. Barański and Heather Webb (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming)), the other retracing its Anglophone translation and reception history from 1800 to the present (The Afterlife of Dante’s ‘Vita nova’ in the Anglophone World: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Translation and Reception History, ed. by Federica Coluzzi and Jacob Blakesley (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022)). Eisner charts a micro-history of ‘the work’s survival in the world’ by isolating a series of ‘moments that have most confused and perplexed its readers, calling for editorial intervention or creative response’ (p. 3) and then tracing their perpetual material regeneration across languages, media, and formats.

Eisner’s use of ‘perplexity’ as the organizing principle of the book is most intriguing. While the macro-sections frame distinct hermeneutical acts (of interpretation, explanation, and remembrance) elicited by the figure of Beatrice, the chapters survey the poetry and the divisioni, the commentary and the narrative, to identify elements and episodes whose complexity has enthralled generations of copyists, editors, and commentators as well as writers, painters, sculptors, and composers. Throughout, the investigation takes cues from a heterogeneous and largely untapped body of creative responses, including Emilio Fiaschi’s 1900 sculpture, Phoebe Anna Traquair’s 1902 illuminated manuscript, and Maurice Denis’s 1907 illustrations. [End Page 392]

In Chapter 1 Ezio Anachini’s 1921 postcard of Dante’s first encounter with Beatrice reveals the complexity of the key textual moment rendered in a composite scene which ‘presentifies both the allegorical and the biographical dimension’ (p. 25) against the wider interpretative tradition influenced by Boccaccio’s Trattatello. Chapter 2 explores the Chinese-box effect produced in Ridley Scott’s 2001 film Hannibal, where the first sonnet of the Vita nuova is materially handled, polyphonically recited, and discussed by Hannibal and Allegra against the backdrop of a fictional operatic adaptation of the libello. Hannibal’s representation ‘as cannibalistic reader [. . .] drawn to the cannibalistic themes’ (p. 47) of VN iii illuminates Dante’s own poetic relationship to Guido Cavalcanti (and his circle of ‘famosi trovatori’ to whom the sonetto was sent) as a form of textual cannibalism through which the poetic model is at once absorbed and its influence overcome to foster the perennial renovation of poetry. The editorial problems raised by the quotation of Guido’s sonnet is the stepping stone to a wider examination carried out in Chapters 4 and 5, which explore the range of strategies used to handle the most distinctive and yet puzzling part of the libello: the divisioni. Eisner comments on their inclusion as well as Boccaccio’s relocation of them to the textual margins. This is a choice that alters not...