Abstract
David Bowe's recent volume Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante presents dialogisms within medieval lyric pertaining to the history of Italian lyric poetry as well as Dante. In line with recent scholarly trends, Bowe reads Dante alongside contemporary medieval lyric poets. In so doing, he places Dante in somewhat less frequently explored thematic, literary, and historical contexts. The success of this unique understanding of Dante in his medieval social milieu resonates in Bowe's commitment to innovation in approaching these poems and their dialogic processes.
Demonstrating the breadth of dialogic possibilities within the Italian medieval lyric, while exploring contemporary literary theory and criticism, Bowe argues for multiplicity in any reading of Dante. Writing on Dante's subjectivity, Bowe offers Dante through theories of dialogism and performance and parses a four-part dialogic process to guide close readings of medieval Italian lyric.
Chapter 1, “Guittone d’Arezzo: Dialogic conversion,” turns to the poetics of conversion in Guittone so as to reassess the latter's conversion beyond narrative or historical processes. By following Teodolinda Barolini's treatment of Guittone's “Ora parrà s’eo saverò cantare,” Bowe reads conversion as a remaking of the self, thus following the Augustinian tradition. As Guittone moves his poetics into the moral, he constitutes his subjectivity through dialogic and recursive conversions. Bowe's both reconciles dialogism among Guittone's contemporaries and complicates commonplace distinctions between the courtly and moralizing elements in Guittone's lyrics.
In Chapter 2, “Guido Guinizelli: Dialogic reorientation,” Bowe reads Guinizelli's lyric production in terms of sonnets exchanged with literary contemporaries; at the same time, he also acknowledges Dante's later writing on Guinizelli in the Comedy. Bowe situates Guinizelli's dialogisms—which precede both Guittone and Dante—in Guinizzelli's questioning of God / lady dualities within the lyric. Bowe parses “Bakhtinian dialogic tensions” in “Al cor gentil” by asking “[…] what happens when the poetic word (that of the author of the text) ventriloquizes the divine Word (that of the author of the two books, the Bible and the World)? Who is the author, and who the disruptive, co-sounding voice?” (p. 67). Demonstrating the methodological complexity of working with tenzoni, Bowe introduces Bonagiunta Orbicciani da Lucca and Guittone's replies as bolstering “[…] the dialogic status of Guinizelli's canzone” (p. 70).
Chapter 3, “Guido Cavalcanti: Dialogic subjectivity,” approaches Cavalcantian lyric as a reconciliation of love's practices, concepts and experiences that break free from moralizing. In particular, by reading Cavalcanti's critiques of Guittone, Bowe situates Cavalcanti among fellow tenzonanti. Bowe's Cavalcanti consistently pushes boundaries in his representation of women, in his reading of and writing to poets, and in the resonance of his own voice. Bowe's close and comparative reading analyzes Cavalcanti's lyrics as speech acts in conversation with contemporary poets. Alongside Guinizelli, for example, Cavalcanti's appropriation of the Song of Songs reveals the lyric love as “uncontainable” and “ineffable” (p. 94).
Chapter 4, “Dante in Dialogue”, frames Dante's literary authority in writing about and to poets. Discussions of the polyphony and the multi-voice in sensitive treatment of Dante's own in-process and splitting subjectivity (re)introduce familiar questions regarding Dante's lyric and narrative order in the Vita Nuova. Bowe reads Dante's performative refusal of Guittone, his references to Guinizelli and Cavalcanti, and his intertextualities with these poets through the Comedy—and through Dante's historicizing of them. Reading the Comedy first through Dante and Cavalcanti's lyric informs the semantic space of Purgatory.
Concerned with dialogisms within Dante's work, from the Convivio to his self-citations in the Comedy, Chapter 5, “Ars Legendi, Ars Poetica,” considers intertextuality. Bowe's close reading of Purgatory follows Dante's intermediaries and textual precursors through songs and dreams—from the ‘femmina balba’ to the textual conversion of Beatrice. Bowe dramatizes the intertextualities of the Comedy, with reference, again, to the female figure. In Bowe's discussion, his extension of dialogism to both the reading of Horace and the hybridity of Purgatory's Siren and Beatrice appears particularly significant. For Bowe, these female figures and voices have much to teach us readers about the workings of intertextuality in the Comedy, or the transcendence in which Bowe reads as an in-process conversion.
Bowe's dialogic readings of Dante within his texts as well as in the context of Italy's medieval poets urges towards thinking through dialogic processes both in the Comedy and in literary and historical understandings of Dante. Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante offers a historical and self-fashioned Dante, formed in community and engaged in intellectual conversations with his immediate interlocutors. It is a challenging approach that rejects a single narrative of Dante in favor of an open reading of his works.