Dante's "Divine Comedy": Audiobook Review

Overall

Performance

Story

"You are not a child anymore"

If you could sum up The Divine Comedy in three words, what would they be?

Inspiring, instructional, immersive

What did you like best about this story?

This encapsulates through a clever three part (!) layering the Tuscan verse of the original, the pilgrim Dante in deft translation, and the recollections of the poet Dante. It refreshes even for veteran readers key themes and characters, and it moves along with momentum.

What do the narrators bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

The tender but firm teaching of Beatrice, the dignified guidance of Virgil, the plaints of the lost, and the praise of the purged and saved souls, all are given nuanced texture. The music is aptly chosen, the sound effects are convincing, and the scope of the otherworld in this audio rendering are evoked dramatically, but soberly and sensibly, clear of unearned emotion

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The gasps as Dante sees Christ, his struggles to comprehend the Trinity, and the final scenes as his consciousness blurs with the Beatific Vision are portrayed convincingly. Not an easy feat, given the limitations inherent in even a BBC radio drama's compressed format.

Any additional comments?

The humanity of the quest and nimble explanations of how God's will is enacted in his creatures caught or liberated here by grace. love,and by choice earns respect. Whatever your own views on theodicy, this thoughtful presentation rewards reflection. A set of masterful and insightful performances allow us to enter into the mindset of eight hundred years ago. (Audible US 1/18/17)

Mark Williams' "Ireland's Immortals": Book Review

How the Christian Irish regarded their island's pagan divinities, in medieval and modern times, comprises the two halves of Ireland's Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth. Mark Williams, an Oxford medievalist, unravels the tangled threads in texts that challenge even the skilled interpreter. Old Irish remains formidable for scholars, and the fact that the evidence exists only in copies centuries after its first renditions onto parchment, deep within already Catholic times, complicates any explicator's task. Dr. Williams remains steady throughout this study. His accessible style remains academic but blessedly free of jargon or cant. His glossaries summarize key concepts and his footnotes address arcane debates.

His history of the gods of Irish myth examines key writings left by the monks and scribes, from the period after conversion. Williams estimates that within a half-century after the Patrician period, Ireland would have been effectively under Christian control. Although pre-Christian practices may have endured, they diminished rapidly, despite the imaginations of later bards eager to insist on secret continuity with centuries nearly up to our own. Williams separates the archaic from the innovative elements inserted into these stories and chronicles preserved within monasteries. Although these tales and accounts were tamed, a "ferocious weirdness" persists in surreal or juxtaposed scenes, distinguishing imagery from the dour scenarios in Anglo-Saxon sagas such as {Beowulf}, for instance.

These Irish pre-Christian versions resemble (as in the Book of Invasions, a chronological origin myth of successive waves of those landing on the nation's shores) the configurations of Romanesque architecture.  Williams compares the sagas to these simple, repeating structures which are decorated with teeming surface details. The medieval corpus, furthermore, rises as a massive edifice, if resting on slender foundations. Pseudo-scholarship at its most ingenious labored to match biblical lore with Celtic supposition. This tension, concentrating around the meaning of the "god-people" the Túath Dé sustains itself within the literature Williams examines. As a blend of inherited narratives with concocted alterations shaped into a Christian mindset, these tales' impact faded by the end of the Middle Ages. The Irish seemed to lose interest. Only in the nineteenth century did curiosity revive about gods.

Part two delves into more recent re-workings of the myths of the Irish gods and goddesses. Romanticism, antiquarianism and the occult all generated speculation. W.B. Yeats and George Russell epitomized the poetic turn of the Celtic Revival at the end of the Victorian period, in the wake of a British passion for the classics and the pagan to counter the tamed, the scriptural and the stolid. Gods, as redefined by the Irish revivalists, emerge as "spiritual entities." Among the Anglo-Irish gentry emerge intellectuals eager to fabricate a past for their country, rooted in wisdom of the earth and appeals to the forces lingering, despite the reign of Christendom, supposedly on fringes of the Celtic homeland.

The ninth chapter introduces William Sharp (1855-1905). Taking on the feminine alter ego of Fiona Macleod, Williams engagingly shares this fantasist of Gaelic Scotland. In Fiona, we encounter a fabled "self-sequestered Highland visionary." Williams labels her as "an imaginary personage, albeit an alarmingly insistent one." Characteristic of this author's tone, he keeps his investigations lively even as he grounds them in careful judgment. He counters the bent suppositions and fey imagination lavished upon sources that, in modern times, create a "feedback loop." Williams analyzes distortions within American anthropologist Walter Evans-Wentz's The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. He adapted his Oxford dissertation oddly; this 1911 compendium persists as a New Age "crank piece."

For Mark Williams' predecessor at his university proved both an "exorbitant Celtophile" and a misled eccentric. Evans-Wentz conjured up the peasantry as informants for a pan-Celtic fairy belief system. He incorporated an unnamed mystic's testimony. Yet this was none other than George Russell. Williams reasons that Evans-Wentz betrayed a "spiritual crush on Russell." Testifying as to the endurance of this account lies beyond the scope of Williams' work, but he admits he had to cut a third of his own draft. The results remain impressive, even if the source of that apt John Cowper Powys colophon beginning Chapter Nine lacks attribution to that fabulist, as obsessive as many in this volume, of strange magic.

Nowadays, Williams tracks a second arc, again with diminishing attention to the old gods, among Irish writers. The Túath Dé and their replacements, the Túatha Dé Danann, as the Irish supernatural race, endure within the "wide uptake" by creative classes outside the isle. The fine arts alongside Celtic Paganism and Celtic Reconstructionism enshrine goddesses, notably the fire spirit of Brigit.

Unfortunately, opposition to the ancient forces still exists. Vandalism of historic sites and a modern sculpture to the Celtic sea-god testifies to the powers of these representations as feared by evangelicals. Unlike other cultures where monotheism replaced paganism, Williams concludes that in Ireland, a "restless refusal to resolve" the ambiguities of the survival of the venerable if often barely recalled deities within a Christian context distinguishes that island's literary legacy within the extant sources.

Fittingly, Williams ends his six-hundred page survey with a tribute to the late John Moriarty, a philosopher and shaman from County Kerry. Moriarty's "ecological and psychic sensitivity" to summon up again the mythic terrain's specters signifies the restoration of "imaginative vitality." In a nation divided by income inequality and sectarian squabbles, Moriarty's vision and Williams' precision combine. This learned volume contributes valuable insights that may guide all those who look to the Irish tales and Celtic heritage as a relevant force of energy.

(Interview with Mark Williams here. Amazon US 1/11/17 and Amazon British 1/12/17)

Paul Strohm's "Chaucer's Tale": Book Review

A "microbiography" of the poet's pivotal year of 1386, Chaucer's Tale reconstructs his situation as he entered a mid-life crisis. Enjoying a rent-free lease on a dank but well-situated residence at London's Aldgate portal, benefiting from a position in Parliament, and supported by a salary as a customs controller, in his early forties, Geoffrey Chaucer would seem to have it made. Depending on noble patronage and royal preferment, this up-and-coming civil servant-turned-insider at court found himself on the outs. On the losing side, he retreated to Kent and then crafted his tales of Canterbury. Forced retirement compelled him to reinvent himself.

Paul Strohm, a retired professor from Oxford and from Columbia, enlivens the London where Chaucer was born and raised. Nearly nothing is known of his literary career from the records extant, but much is about his work for the Crown. From the hints scattered or imagined in his verse, scholars construct a parallel life in private to that of the public man who worked his way into favor, slowly.

His stony, damp cell above the key position of Aldgate in the northeast corner of the old city stands as a "symbol of his entire London experience: rather blatantly public in some respects, yet quite private and defended in others". Chaucer's intense activity contrasts with his withdrawal and retreat from the hubbub. He occupies the intersection between the urban fortified wall and the busy road into the countryside. Strohm sets Chaucer's day within hearing of church bells, from dawn to midnight at Holy Trinity Priory, near his residence. Strohm reminds us of Chaucer's placement near this pattern of liturgical time, daily followed by the monks, and of his affinity for the seasonal cycle of pilgrimage and of devotion, coinciding with the natural rhythm of springtime which opens his tales memorably.

This narrative moves back and forth in Chaucer's lifetime somewhat, to fill in the back story. In 1374, Chaucer's appointment as controller of wool customs put him into a much loftier role than that title may convey to modern audiences. The wool trade dominated English commerce as its "only significant export item". Chaucer's complicity with corrupt merchants and bureaucrats to skim off the profits was expected by his betters, if implicitly. For, his wife's brother-in-law was John of Gaunt, who had ruled as regent, being Richard II's uncle. This had its advantages, but these could prove fickle. Chaucer depended on those higher up for the favors they dispensed and as a commoner he had to accept as he moved up the career ladder more than one "constrained choice", in Strohm's phrase.

Strohm pursues clues in the archives, and digs deep into material that may appear tangential. This may weary some readers, but he uses this data to suggest that Chaucer was not tempted by any great chicanery during his customs watch. Strohm avers Chaucer laid low as London's power elite colluded to enrich themselves from the wool tariffs pocketed and from the bribes exacted from tradesmen. Chaucer did not own land. He had been set up in a safe seat as a "yes man" for King Richard II.

This necessitated Chaucer's withdrawal from the customs post. He was recently estranged from his wife. He had to vacate Aldgate, for his single term in Parliament as a "shire knight" lacking property but representing nearby Kent. This office depended on Chaucer as a loyal backer of John of Gaunt and of the Ricardian factions, but from the time Chaucer entered Parliament through 1389, discontent grew. A majority in government resented the king's control by a few courtiers. Strohm interprets this hostile course of events as shoving aside Chaucer. He prudently absented himself from London during the next two years; some of his former allies turned malcontents were executed by Richard II.

Throughout this intrigue, Strohm tries to keep the tone in tune with us. He uses the phrase "living large", he compares the Parliament's politicians in session back then to those on expense accounts at bars in Pimlico or the Beltway, he nods to the attractions of the Las Vegas strip, and he offers an analogy to Hemingway's novella about the great marlin. These asides do not jar as much as one might expect. The liveliest sections, about Aldgate and about the making of the Canterbury Tales, rush by rapidly. More on Chaucer's most famous work would have been welcome, but Strohm's end notes point to his fellow scholars who have contributed much to our understanding of this story-cycle. After all, Strohm has set himself the difficult task of setting up the assembly of the tales, not their contents themselves. Meanwhile, he reminds readers of its fine predecessor, Troilus and Criseyde.

With "no fixed job and insignificant income", Chaucer decided on not a political but a literary "riposte" to his fall from favor. "Chaucer in 1386 was eminently fame-worthy...but certainly not famous yet." Strohm shows how his forced relocation and his separation from his urban audience sparked innovation. Eager to expand his reputation, Chaucer's hidden rivalry with Italian tale-teller Boccaccio spurred the Englishman to write in his native language its first lengthy masterpiece. Strohm regards the tales as a catalyst for an "audience of his own invention" as varied storytellers became characters, emerging to share a mixture of genres and styles, high and low registers, serious and comic narratives. In Strohm's version, Chaucer had to leave London and his comfortable sinecures. By doing so, and starting all over as a writer bent on making his reputation, he attained fame after all. This account reminds us of the impact Chaucer had, by choosing our own language.
(PopMatters 2-16-15; Amazon US 2-20-15)

Evangeline Walton's "Mabinogion Tetralogy": Book Review

This retelling of the Welsh Mabinogi, acclaimed as one of the best fantasies of the 20th century, finds a long-overdue reprinting in a single volume from Overlook Press. I review the 2002 printing; the volume appeared with a better cover in 2012. As a teenager, I always meant to read the Ballantine four-volume paperback box set, part of the revival by that press of worthy tales post-Tolkien, but somehow I forgot. Inspired by two sources, Morine Krissdottir's 2007 biography of John Cowper Powys, and David Goodway's enthusiastic acclaim in "Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow" for Powys' "Porius," I started that even longer epic but paused three chapters in as it reminded me of Walton.

I had to start with her fiction dramatizing the tension between the Old Tribes (akin to pre-Celts, indigenous inhabitants of Britain) and the New (as in the Celts, although they are not named as such), and hints of even newer religions emerging in very far off lands that one day will seek to wipe out tribal faiths and undermine traditional beliefs and customs over all these isles and more. Powys praised Walton's 1936 debut, originally called "The Virgin and the Swine." It met with no wider success then. While not the best title for the masses, the symbols of commodified woman and coveted magic pigs both fit her emphasis, cleverly teased out and elaborated by her into druidic rituals and Pythagorean cosmologies), of the clash between Old Tribe "conservatives" affirming free love and no bonds between men and women, and the New Tribes, who insist on marriage to lock women into their increasingly patriarchal system, one which traps both sexes into lifelong commitment. It's surprising for that time period, but very congenial with Powys' own take on tribal times. Both Walton and Powys imaginatively delve into this cultural strife, and both elaborate the battles both physical and spiritual, sexual and tribal, between those who push empire or impose rule, and those who fumble to try to attain a more individually based, and erotically liberating, lifestyle.

It's livelier in Walton than this summary sounds. Renamed "The Island of the Mighty" after Betty Ballantine finally tracked Walton down in the 1960s to learn that she had written three other installments, which precede it in this omnibus, the series was published in roughly chronological order as to its narrative in the early 1970s. "The Prince of Annwn" starts off splendidly with the weird hunt, the bargain with forces beyond, and it progresses smartly into the epic fight in the Underworld.

Her prose carries the action along, yet pauses for insight, and commentary. "Blackness terrifies; it is sightlessness, it blinds a man and hides his enemies; yet the darkness within the earth is warm and life-giving, the womb of the Mother, the source of all growth. But in snow or in white-hot flame nothing can grow. Whiteness means annihilation, that end from which can come no beginning." (18)

However, Walton leavens the mythic tone by making her characters believable, and taking down a peg the boasts of legends. "The Mabinogi says that no house or ship could hold him, though if that tale has not grown in the telling, houses and ships must have been very small then. One thing seems certain: Bran was very big." (153) Lightening the tone of much of the original, wit proves welcome.

Poetry fittingly enters into a Welsh setting. "At night the stars, watching those many bright fires upon the once dark earth, must have wondered and searched the sky for a gap in the constellations, shivering lest they too should fall." (164)  This is early in the second book, "The Children of Llyr," which describes the stubborn rivalries that will tear apart not only the Mighty Island but Erinn too.

My favorite hero in this section? A brave starling who speaks. Amidst the war, powerfully evoked. "Dawn found them there, gray men fighting amid gray shadows; as perhaps every man who fights in war fights a shadow, the death that he sees as death because it sees him as death; so that out of their common passion for life all are turned into its foes and kill." (243) Walton subtly raises dark specters of brutality and cunning, even as she gently commemorates those who resist evil with compassion.

An eerie gray figure makes a prophecy not only the Welsh live with today, when "fair-haired invaders will sweep over all and subject us all." The power of women having been abandoned as birth is limited to their domination by men (as procreation begins to be understood by the Old Tribes), and as rebirth (a subject sprinkled deeply into these tales by Walton's hand) eventually is denied, "for ages women will be as beasts of the field and we men will rule, and practice war, our art. By it we will live--or by it, rather, we will struggle and die." (277) The earlier respite from pain gives way to pain.

Bran's prophetic head predicts, too: force will be unleashed, beyond its proper use "only to keep one man from hurting another"; and governments will elevate the masses over the individual. (289) Gods having been corrupted and cruel, people will set up government, and that in time too will threaten all.

Against this top-down oppression, happiness tries to rebound. As "The Song of the Rhiannon," part three scans the fate of a few who escape human destruction and divine vengeance. In life's plain magic, fragile and elusive hope rests. "Yet a Head that talks after being cut from its shoulders is not, if we stop to think, nearly so vast or all-moving a Mystery as the wonders of growth, or or sunrise and sunset." Walton's narrator avers: "We have made of 'natural' and 'everyday' poor words, ordinary and trite, when they should be the Word, full of awesome magic and might; of cosmic power." (348)

Unlike many who delve into this material, Walton refuses to excavate a spuriously "Celtic" artifact to parade as a proto-New Age bauble to gush about. Her story-cycle fairly examines the strengths and weaknesses of Old and New Tribes, and she judges the excesses and follies of rulers over the ruled, as well as the inevitable bickering and petty strife which appears doomed to haunt families everywhere. Even if paternity at this distant point remains a debated theory and a novel supposition that the New Tribes from Dyved appear to import into the neighboring realm of Gwynedd, it hovers.

As this theory starts to become reality, and as women begin to be vowed for life to one man, the anthology as it progresses gains momentum. The storm that assaults Dyved, the flight of the survivors, the increasing despair of their lives, the poignancy of death, as a few seek to rally magic against cunning power, set up the entry of the last and longest portion. "The Island of the Mighty" feels at first more archaic, having been written nearly forty years before. Some spellings of Welsh names differ, and the register of the prose seems more hesitant in the first chapters of volume four.

Then, the excitement grows: the punishment meted out to impetuous Gilvaethwy and scheming Gwydion, their three transformations, the fate of Pryderi, the spite of Arianrhod, the odd births of Llew, Dylan, and Blodeuwedd, the predicament of Goronwy, and the final rounds of cunning retribution. All these resound. While fantasy looms over all and magical spells proliferate, Walton wisely sticks to the everyday, if that adjective works, reactions of confounded characters trying to survive. This reliable set of plot complications drives the last few hundred pages along swiftly.

A generation gap widens. "For it is a strange thing that the most intimate relations of our lives, those which hold our holiest and deepest loves, should also be innate antagonisms, individual combats in the universal war that is as old as sex and as consciousness and the reproduction of life. Yet it shall be so until the day when the world is healed and the sundered halves are welded, and consciousness is more clearly and truly conscious than ever, yet has fused and melted into the One." (560-1) While I suggested above that New Age musings are absent from Walton's presentation as to "Celticisms," she admits that she interposes some slight Atlantis hints, if not named as such, to account for lore from distant times and lands, and to encourage a "stair of evolution" as Math mentions towards unity. I find hints of Platonic models, or Neo-Platonic conceptions, which on the other hand enrich these themes.

Math warns how, in suppressing these "Ancient Harmonies," the New Tribes' "recognition of fatherhood will enslave women." Either that submission by women or their hiring out of their bodies will make women "the bondmaids of men." (588) Arrayed against coercive arrangements, the consciousness of the Whole--as bees and ants possess-- contends against the individual ambition within humans who fight systematic injustice. Llew learns from Gwydion how people lost consciousness of the Whole so as to shut themselves off, to work for their own gain. In turn, this confounds systems, "for in all systems there is injustice, and one class profiting at the expense of another; and since individuals will always work for their own gain and not the system's, the suffering class will always end by turning and preying upon the other." What will eventually transpire is the winning back of a collective identity, when this "wider consciousness" into a oneness with all species and a fellowship where all creatures are known "alike for our fellow beings" will happen. (595) But "millions of ages will pass" before the world moves ahead this far. By then, who knows about human evolution? Heady topics for a rendering of medieval Welsh legend, but reason why Powys praised it.

Again and again, the "magnet and the sting" of attraction reverberate as men and women strive to first couple and then divide again. Peace must come for this to happen safely, and plenty of instances in the previous six-hundred pages, by the time Math and Gwydion muse about this, demonstrate the hazards of trust and the dangers of lust. Each side tries to devour the other, yearning (again the Platonic notion lingers) "unknowing after that lost wholeness." In the "give and take of exchange," Math observes, "through the brief moments when their flesh achieves it, life goes on and the endless round renews itself, and more souls are embodied in the world to carry on the ceaseless quest and strife." (615) This suggests also a Buddhist notion, perhaps, of clinging to the flesh and the worldly.

Requiring the desire of women for men to be buttoned-down into a life sworn only to one man sparks Llew's lament as to marriage as a "crucifying riddle: how to make painless the love between a man and a woman when love must die in one heart at a time." (704) While this saga ends without resolving this eternal question, the wisdom filling this thick book merits reflection. It's a welcome addition to the shelf, although my 2002 printing has six errors on the copyright page alone, and it has typographical slips here and there throughout the text. Finally, the fantasy genre label may confuse some expecting nothing more than swords and romance. On the other hand, the thoughtful presentation of weighty subjects, and the good-natured tone with which Walton leavens arcane lore, provides readers with a vivid immersion into an ancient time of what-ifs, made relevant for moderns. (Somewhat edited for Amazon US 8-14-2014)

"Barlaam and Josaphat/ In Search of the Christian Buddha": Book Review

Canonized unwittingly as St. Josaphat, a corruption of "bodhisattva," the Buddha, condemned as an idol worshipped by his duped followers, had his story transmitted after long centuries within the hagiography translated to convert the Japanese in the 1600s. So runs one of many twists in Barlaam and Josaphat, translated by Peggy McCracken and introduced by Donald S. Lopez, as a Penguin Classic. 

Gui de Cambrai (around 1220-25) adapted the story into French verse; McCracken renders it efficiently into modern English. Gui takes the core elements of the Buddha legend. 1) The prediction that the prince will be a saint or a king. 2) The ensuing protection by his father the king to keep him from the sights of the world. This ruse fails, as a series of chariot rides reveal mortality, sickness, age, and death to the coddled lad. 3.) Then, seductive women seek to dissuade the prince from his destiny and enlightenment as he vows to depart the palace for a life of asceticism. But first, to fulfill his duty, he fathered an heir, as a prince who is expected to carry on the royal family line.

What the medieval teller adds, Lopez in his brief introduction and McCracken in her 2014 edition (if short on footnotes) show, is an elaborate disputation between Greeks (ahistorically if entertainingly including Plato's brother and a nephew of Aristotle for good measure), Chaldeans, and pagans. They integrate fine stories in succession cobbled from ancient lore, and this transmission as with the larger storyline contains inherent interest for how this comes down through to the early eleventh century in Old French. We get clever glimpses into the culture, as when perverse sex earns condemnation in a comparison to chess. Those engaging in "a shameful game" allow themselves "to be mated from the corner." The hectoring narrator goes on: "The clerics were first to adopt it, and they taught the game to knights. The deed is base--anyone who would leave the clearing for the woods is like a base peasant." (100-101) Finally, the teller shakes free of the vice he despises, and the story later elaborates into a set-piece about the Crusades, with the characters off to a holy war. Another addition is the use of the disputation between the body and the soul, a medieval trope, to fit neatly into the frame-tale's theme of renunciation for sacrifice, and the leaving of one's family to seek a higher path.

This tale was one of many which told the Buddha's story with nobody suspecting this until the 1600s. While a chronicler of Marco Polo's journey caught on to a resemblance, modern scholars in the 19th century, investigating the sources for the misunderstood origins of Shakyamuni, or Prince Siddhartha, finally figured out the elaborate and entangled transmission gone haywire much later. Lopez, as a noted scholar of Buddhist reception in the West (see Prisoners of Shangri-La on Tibet and The Scientific Buddha for attempts to reconcile the historical Buddha with post-Darwinian science), is well-suited to convey these crossed messages. Joined by medievalist Peggy McCracken, the two seek to explain In Search of the Christian Buddha: How An Asian Sage Became a Christian Saint (also 2014) the origins of the tales told throughout the Middle Ages, as the Buddha's story was embedded into narratives and biographies which asserted often the superiority of non-Buddhist ideas.

The tale of Barlaam and Josaphat was one of many which told the Buddha's story with nobody suspecting this until the 1600s. A 1446 editor of Marco Polo's journey caught on to a resemblance. Then scholars in the 19th century, investigating sources for the misunderstood origins of Shakyamuni, Prince Siddhartha, finally figured out elaborate, entangled transmissions gone haywire.

Here's the basics. In Persia in the 8th c. a Muslim writer compiled Bilawhar and Budasaf.  Armies of Islam had begun entering northwestern India, the first home of Buddhism. They spread the stories westward. Arabic preserved some of the core tale's triple elements mentioned above. A century later, the Muslims conquered the Christian kingdom in what is today Georgia. Refugee monks fled to Jerusalem and turned the Muslim story into a Christian one, the Balavariani. A Jewish translator four centuries on took the story from Arabic and sent it west again, via Muslims, into Moorish Spain, where it would turn The Prince and the Hermit via Hebrew and much later, rendered into both German and Yiddish.

Greek and Latin stories, once attributed to John of Damascus in their beginnings, kept the idea that the prince learned about God from a hermit, Barlaam. This turned into stories as told in lives of saints, such as the very popular Latin Golden Legend or Legenda Aurea, by Jacobus de Voragine.

The authors err repeatedly on p. 139. While Franciscans are mendicants, they are not monks. Benedictines are not mendicants but they are monks. Additionally, the hagiographer of Ss. Barlaam and Josaphat and many others, Jacobus de Voragine (Jacobo de Varazze), was not a "monk belonging to the Benedictine preaching order" but a Dominican mendicant friar of the Order of Preachers.  Another aside: the book relies on paraphrases of the main texts and one loses some idea of their various styles, lengths, and flavor. Textual excerpts might have helped key in readers as to their strengths or weaknesses, cited more directly. Primarily summarized, the source texts discussed float past rather than sink in.

Back to the authors' main narrative, part of the spark of this tale comes when the stories of saints get sent to Japan by those seeking to win the natives away from Buddha to Christ. The irony is dealt with lightly by Lopez and McCracken, but it cannot be denied. Condemning idolators, the story of Josaphat is used against those supposedly worshiping false gods such as Xaca, the name garbled from Shakayamuni.

Subsequent thinkers, clued in bit by bit to such garblings, sought to deploy them differently. For some in the early 19th century, the discovery of the historical roots of Buddhism in India led them to propagate a bold claim. Buddhism and Christianity were purer as world religions open to all. Judaism and Hinduism were grounded in tribal identities, and not open to adoption by other peoples. Furthermore, the "Aryan" roots of Jesus who studied in the East were purported. Buddhism could be seen here as an attempt to detach Christian origins from Hebrew tribalism.

Others enticed by folklore found appeal in those three core stories repeated. They also liked the tale of three caskets in it, used by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. Finally, another tale of women named as "geese" to a curious boy seeing women for the first time (cited in Boccaccio's Decameron) reveal intriguing tidbits, as elements of folk narrative dispersed across time and space into tales.

Still others saw in Buddhism a palliative to other faith. In it nestled human striving, and purer motives rather than superstitious, quasi-Catholic accretions. Some sympathetic to Protestant reform or humanist progress sympathized therefore with attenuated evidence of the antiquity and durability of the Buddha's presence over so many different times and places. On the other hand, those who liked to sneer at the Church found plenty of ammunition in the ironic canonization of St. Josaphat by Buddhist persecutors. Lopez and McCracken aver some of this guilt underlies the fascination recent scholars have had in the eager reception of this tale's provenance and message. Even if the trace elements of the Buddha's coming of age story are faint by the time they are detected by recent critics, the telling manner in which critical reception "seems to dissolve in the presence of the Buddha," a theme Lopez often analyzes, may account for--if not excuse--the appeal of a sage without priests, ritual, or dogma.

As Lopez repeats a phrase from his "scientific Buddha" book in 2013: "The goal of the Buddhist path is not creation but extinction." (37) The authors here conclude that the aim of Buddhism is not perpetuation of narrative or allurements of story, but a rejection of the pleasures of palace and princes. Separation from the enticements of this world is necessary. As the editors insist, for Buddhism, "The goal is to finally stop dying." (222) Flawed by change and doom, this world is not transcended as in Christian or Muslim terms for future reward but by renunciation of family, goods and attachment to all that would impede separation from its glittering delights. The Christian story of Barlaam and Josaphat sought to lure listeners away from the secular to the spiritual realm of the Church, and to ensure princes listening took care of pious hermits. But as Lopez and McCracken hint, these durable tales also sought to keep alive the very system that Buddhism seeks to put to an end.
(Both reviews edited and revamped a bit to Amazon US 7-28-14: Barlaam and In Search.)

Donald R. Howard's "Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World": Book Review

This provides one of the liveliest narratives on medieval times that I can recall; the added bonus that a leading Chaucerian wrote this just before his death in 1987 adds poignancy, given the final line of the text proper contemplates eternity. Donald R. Howard navigates the difficult path between speaking to his fellow scholars and welcoming a wider audience into the author's works, life, and times. He does this with verve; he shows what Chaucer would have seen and what he did read and where he did travel. He reminds us of how far Chaucer roamed, even if he was a bookworm who preferred staying in London.

The challenge, as Howard admits, is that facts for the Middle Ages are few, and liable to change. For much of this, Howard has to reason on probabilities. For instance, I consulted this wanting more on Dante and Boccaccio, given as a grad school prof (himself a medievalist) asserted Chaucer was likely the first person in England to read the Commedia, as he knew Italian so as to make his diplomatic visit there. Howard supplements this fact with supposition--Chaucer may have met Boccaccio, may have had a quarrel with him, may have therefore not cited him by name in his later literary works, may have rubbed a man twice his age the wrong way. This is all intriguing, but as Howard might have admitted, he has had to fill out much of the bare bones of Chaucer's record with such insights, and so the book turns more a depiction of Chaucer's world and works than his life, and this does fill the book. It is more readable, but it does have to make tangents.

It does, however, with insight. As Howard presented the pilgrim's perspective well in earlier studies, so here. He shows how the mental map of a traveler inverted, so a vague Earthly Paradise atop the half of the sphere named Asia beckoned, whereas Jerusalem was at the center, and bisecting the other half are Europe on the left, and then near the Devil's sinister hand, and Africa on the other quarter. He adds that the Southern Hemisphere was debated as possible back then, and that Columbus did not think any more than many then that the earth was flat. So, in a few pages, Howard corrects crucial ideas many have about medieval lore. He aligns his pitch at both scholars and everyday readers.

This tone sustains the interest that keeps the pace moving along. Howard has to compress a lot about the Canterbury Tales into the latter parts, the sections many may want expanded. Howard's previous The Idea of the Canterbury Tales book may be recommended as is his shorter one on pilgrimage as more in-depth on crucial topics. What provides this book's verve and infuses its pages is Howard's fascination with Chaucer and his time and influences, and now, as fewer turn to this author and his works for pleasure or even for coursework, this biography merits your time and your immersion.
(Amazon US 10-14-14)

Wayne Rebhorn (tr.) Boccaccio's "Decameron": Book Review

This handsome edition fulfills the need for a brisk American English version of these hundred tales. This interpreter of Dante a generation before, and friend (or rival?) of Petrarch occupies the third position in fame among the Italians who championed energetic tales and vivid verse. As this U. of Texas professor emphasizes in his helpful introduction, "being in the middle of things" not only sums up Dante as he started his epic, but Giovanni Boccaccio. Around 1348, nearly half a century after the Commedia took place and the Inferno began, this Florentine set his prose in the wake of the Black Death. Rebhorn reckons that Boccaccio followed the Renaissance-minded Petrarch in turning away from the medieval mindset, as well as the vernacular which Dante had championed, but luckily Boccaccio took time from his classic endeavors to copy his manuscript and to preserve it from a pious mood later in his life when he threatened to burn it and the other salacious or sly stories.

These, of course, kept his reputation, more than what Chaucer took from the classical tales and moralistic concerns before and after the hundred tales. It "takes a set of medieval genres and fills them with Renaissance themes and characters." (xxvi) More women, more merchants, more ribaldry and fewer nobles than before. Seven women and three men tell the tales, ten a day with breaks for all to pray and the women to bathe for the Sabbath, in retreats just outside plague-ravaged Florence. These follow in Rebhorn's interpretation a ritual community of ten tellers, considering as if case studies (for the book ends abruptly and the return to normal life is sudden) of four themes: the power and the temptations of intelligence, fortune, desire, magnanimity (a more sly virtue than it seems).

The stories have unsettled some; their sexual content is famous but the real tug against convention persists beneath the rather decorous tone Boccaccio sustains for his properly raised tellers. That is, the tales test our understanding of why they draw us so much into a morally ambiguous array of characters, and how they often carry out their subversion free of any comment from author and usually the teller. Sophisticated prose in longer fiction was, after all, starting to emerge back then. I will leave explication of the tales aside, for the bulk of this encourages slow reading, as too many rushed by make their themes blurred, and a sensation is dulled of contents. Like Chaucer or Dante, this collection of adventures merits a more thoughtful pace than we modern readers tend to cultivate.

Don't expect, therefore, a quick rush as you make your way through. These tales reflect an early stage in narrative, and they do not display the links between themes and characters or tellers as sharply as Chaucer's tales started to do, a few decades later. As an aside, it's noteworthy to consider how Chaucer seemed to side with Petrarch's advice to Boccaccio to move to the classics for inspiration, even as of course how Chaucer supported his own polished vernacular phrasing, and mixed wittier or earthier content with the very learned and dogmatic pronouncements akin to those three Italians. 

Rebhorn strives for the long, periodic and sinuous sentences of the original, but he admits he cuts some for clarity, as the tone of Boccaccio can elude the more direct phrasing our own time favors. He suits a modern ear, although he often avoids the more elegant diction of British predecessors.  He captures the register and the class or dialect range of the original, and the endnotes assist users, who need a sturdy large-format edition that can hold up under use, as opposed to smaller paperbacks from preceding translators and presses, which have small type and fewer notes, let alone a lovely typeface.
(Interview by Steve Donoghue with the translator; Quarterly Conversation 2013 review by Donoghue helpfully compares Rebhorn's phrasing to previous translations. My review to Amazon US 10-14-14.)

Boccaccio's "Decameron" (Norton Critical Edition): Book Review

The first baby steps in Italian prose, away from the mystical, the ascetic, the heavenly, the Papacy towards the sensuous, the sexual, the clever, and the bourgeoisie, were taken by Boccaccio in his hundred tales, Decameron. These lively (if sometimes awkward or hesitantly told) stories reveal everyday men--and many women, at last--keeping up appearances, fooling priests and potentates, and striving to express their fleshly, calculating, and grasping desires. Narrated by seven young ladies and three gentlemen fleeing Florence during the Black Plague of 1348, these clever schemers may succeed or fail, but their ambitions energize these tales. They promote the Renaissance humanist, eager to hear from his peers.

Twenty-one representative novelle were chosen for a 1977 Norton Critical Edition; the somewhat ironically surnamed Francisco De Sanctis sums up their appeal as human comedy: "The flesh entertains itself at the expense of the spirit." Considered in the triad if below Dante, we get the next two conversing, via the letters of Petrarch, who chides his old friend Boccaccio for recanting (I wonder if Chaucer knew this when he abandoned his frame-tale scheme for his Canterbury project?) and threatening in a state of guilt to burn his manuscripts. Colleagues tended in their biographical accounts to admire not these "new" tales so much as his more edifying ones, inspired by the classics.

Later, scholars weigh in. Seeing this was issued in 1977, I'd reckon as with other Norton Critical Editions (yes, this has a few footnotes if not many), that a revision with some newer scholarship might enhance its value. As to what's in this version, I sympathize intuitively with literary historian Ugo Foscolo, who advances the idea of Boccaccio separating his concerns from Church and urging the expression of the female, the mercantile, even the roguish voices, along with those of the elite and the clerics who had long dominated the conversation of who should act how, in fact as well as fable. Erich Auerbach follows with an excerpt from Mimesis analyzing stylistic variety, and Aldo Scaglione takes on nature and love as the concerns supplanting those of piety and renunciation. Wayne Booth explains how Boccaccio tries out both telling and showing as a narrator early in the evolution of a longer set of fictional tales. Even if he did not meet our expectations, yet he tried to show, not tell.

Similarly, Tzvetan Todorov as to structure and Robert Clements as to collections illustrate the sorting process within stories and among them. Marga Cottino-Jones argues how patient Griselda's account uses the Christian figurative mode to elevate her status, and how despite however moderns react, for the audience of Boccaccio, such a presence resonated with Christ-like ideals of endurance and sacrifice. Ben Lawton defends Pasolini's 1971 film as true to some of the spirit of the source, even as it skips from a medieval time and place to a jarringly modern one, if but two-thirds of a bold triptych.

Translators Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella, who later published a Signet edition of all hundred stories, conclude by pointing to the meaning of them all. Beyond the purported audience of "idle ladies," the impact of the Decameron reverberates in themes of love, intelligence, and fortune. Instead of God's will governing this universe, men and women seek to procure not heavenly but earthly fame.
(Part of this is on a List Inconsequential: Late Summer Reading List, 7-31-14, Spectrum Culture.)

Thomas G. Bergin's "Boccaccio": Book Review

Avuncular in tone, accessible yet scholarly, this survey from the late Yale professor and translator of Dante and Petrarch introduces the third great Italian humanist, Giovanni Boccaccio. Appearing in 1981, this provided readers with a general overview of the life (and in an dense but useful opening chapter, the times) of the writer known in the fourteenth century for his chivalric stories of love, lives of ancient heroes, and edifying if often tedious (to us) or didactic moral tales. Drawn often from ancient sources, mixed with stories closer to the beginning of the Florentine Renaissance, the author, in Thomas G. Bergin's judicious, thorough yet graceful narrative, seems often at a loss for the brio and energy evident in the Decameron. 

He starts with an eloquent evocation of medieval mentality (26 ff.) which while brief, is insightful. Bergin reminds us how the medieval traveler resembled a reader, who wanted not to rush to a destination, but to enjoy the journey, as in the long tale of knightly romance, the Filostrato. (99) Lots of what Boccaccio wrote, for modern audiences, wears less well. However, typical of his eye for the telling or humorous detail, Bergin finds a bit of welcome wit buried in the largely anti-feminist sallies of the Corbaccio: "to one who kisses two mouths, one must stink." (201)

In the "pungent and sometimes spicy package" of the hundred famous tales which secured for Boccaccio his place in the triumvirate of his time, Bergin stresses their secular, anti-eternal quality. This distinguishes the Decameron from its predecessors, written by his peers or himself, and Boccaccio's own succeeding texts. (290) Like our era, here Boccaccio's very human, cunning, and resourceful characters sought to advance themselves. "It is a rational world, a commonsense world, compassionate at least if not altruistic." (336) This remains a fine resource for any Boccaccio reader.
(Amazon US 9-20-14)

William T. Vollmann's "The Ice-Shirt": Book Review

After "Europe Central" and "Imperial," I figured I was ready to return to begin this first installment of Vollmann's gradually unfolding chronicle "Seven Dreams", which imagines the conflicts between natives and European settlers throughout what's now the U.S. and Canada. Vollmann's attracted to frontiers, to clashes between civilized and indigenous peoples, and to raw evocations of longing, loneliness, hostility, and tension. A formidable talent, inevitably seen if a "bastard son" of Thomas Pynchon, Vollmann, born twenty years after that reclusive genius, shares the polymath, world-encompassing, and manic drive of that postmodernist pioneer. But I'd aver that in his travels and his journalistic, conversational style, the younger writer strives towards more empathy for those trapped within systems. He talks to the down and out in American hobo camps, in Third World conflict zones, and in cribs where teen prostitutes huddle. He reports from battlefields as well as archives. Pynchon himself appears more accessible in his later fiction, and like Vollmann, he nods to quotidian, pop-cult detritus, as much as arcane lore and recondite legend, in big books.

Surpassing Pynchon in production years ago, if Vollmann can keep traveling and then tapping, might he rival neither Dickens nor Tolstoy but Balzac's La Comédie humaine which comprises over ninety published and over forty unfinished segments? Contrasted with Pynchon, who after all took seventeen years between "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Vineland" (which overlaps with Vollmann's symbolic terrain), and whose seven novels despite some of their heft add up to a comparatively compact stack five decades on, Vollman's oeuvre from a writer now in his mid-fifties overwhelms. I'm barely getting started, after 700 pages of 2005's WWII novel "Europe," and 1300 pages of "Imperial," its data amassed from a neglected corner of Southeastern California. I've commented at PopMatters on the latter tome's prolix penchant. Vollman's obsession generated carpal-tunnel syndrome, sixteen-hour days typing the second of "Seven Dreams" by the age of thirty. Still, he's forgivable for getting every fact down, refusing cuts. I understand that compulsion to record, for if not him, who? When? Michael Wood, reviewing "Europe" in the NYRB, judged how Vollmann's ability signals a rare pair: he's "both stylish and garrulous, a combination I thought impossible until I started to read him." 

Vollmann's 1990 saga about Norse-native contact starts slowly. He forces you over seventy pages to adapt to the mindset of marauders, and in the manner of medieval tales, he repeats motifs and phrases until you adjust to the violent, endemic tribal mentality of revenge, pride, rivalry, and honor. While this insistence may appear repetitive, so were these sources, the Icelandic stories themselves. Then he does the same, in briefer span, now in everyday tone, with Inuit origin myths. That sets up Leif the Lucky, son of Eirik the Red, who lands in Vinland. Let the first of many culture clashes commence.

Vollmann therefore allows us to shift gradually from our own expectations of pace and brevity to those of a thousand years ago. There, characters may barely appear, may be given but terse backstory, and we must tease out motivations and contexts. Vollmann does this and does not: as his notes document, he may expand the situation for his needs, or he may go along with the primary text's terse declarations. He, another storyteller, then merges with his inspirations, bringing us back in time. This reminded me of Michel Faber's omniscient narrator at the start of "The Crimson Petal and the White." Few historical novelists mediate to allow contemporary audiences enough of a chance to ease in, and to adjust our sensibilities away from a one-click, fast-forward milieu to one where the story accrues incrementally. Impatient readers, we begin to leave the patter of our own times (although as Vollmann keeps himself in the narrative as a 1987 traveler, current times never recede for long), and we start to follow the thoughts and conversations of Victorian parlor, or polar-bound or mead-hall, conventions. 

Impatience opens the novel: Norway feels too small. Iceland seems too settled. Exile or flight appears the only options for thuggish, stubborn, or deluded dreamers, caught up in a common, magically transmitted sensation of all-encompassing snow that shrouds one in illusory but convincing warmth. Vollmann explained to Larry McCaffery how "the characters in The Ice-Shirt see some way of escaping from whatever they are, either by changing their locations and going to Vinland, or becoming the sun, or whatever. That may or may not be an illusion on their part, but at least it’s their hope not to be fixed."  

The Inuit share this restlessness, as even the first two beings created in their white world wonder at fulfillment: "What is loneliness? Does the lonely space between two rocks vanish when spanned by a spiderweb?" (93) The novel then shifts into the contacts between the Norse who, having settled Iceland and Greenland, seek another shore in Markland, Slab-Land, and Vinland: the Atlantic fringes of what today the descendents of later coastal settlers and explorers know as the Maritime Provinces.

First, Eirik's daughter--by a mother who may not be a being we'd recognize--Freydis, seeks her own quest. She has been captivated by the shirt of the title, and the dream which will compel her to leave Greenland to seek Vinland's promise, for her own greed and her own power. However, on her mission, she first must climb a peak in Greenland. "Blue-Shirt Glacier was a pillar to mark her way. The sun wheeled round and round the mountains, making each snow-tip orange in turn while the rocks fell and the ice shattered, instantaneously swelling the roar of waterfalls, and the creeks trickled and the tundra meadows moved scarcely a muscle in the world. It was all unspeakably grand and beautiful. The world was still being created here." (177) Vollmann excels in a set-piece passage which follows, as Freydis proves herself and meets her foe, her lover, and her dark lord, Black Hands.

In Vinland, Freydis lures her rival Gudrun into the fray. "Oh, just as the Bear-Shirt made men see red-leaf forests through a hot rainy haze of blood; just as the Blue-Shirt made the wearer's world glitter cold and grand and beautiful in a thousand twinkling mirrors, so the Gold-Shirt glared and shone like the sun's eye" (242). Freydis goes to hell and back; others trade scraps of coveted red cloth and pails of milk to the Skraelings, as the Norse gain fur and amass riches. But the natives grow restless, and soon clashes among the settlers and against the natives put an end to the Vinland colony.

Vollmann over about 350 pages of narrative, enriched by his sources, glossaries, and commentary, dips in and out of the tale. He mixes lengthy digressions to bring his characters into the conflicts of the original sagas, and he blends his conversations with the natives on Baffin Island and Greenland. These show how the imagery he immerses this book in reverberates a thousand years later. As a fellow traveler to the former Slab-Land, Baffin, tells him in 1987: "If you hear a river moan, you know it has life." (211) In this novel, despite some languor in Vollmann's endemic drive to not leave a detail or a factoid out of his presentation, the stylistic leaps and the thematic sprawl produced attest to his dogged determination to recreate the mood of the Norse who possessed a similar desire for success. Their failure, and the predicament of those who, a millennium later, find themselves again colonized by Scandinavia, across the lands near the North Pole, leave their own telling mark on us. 

The last pages of "The Ice-Shirt" narrative tell over the past five centuries of the Skraelings captured and forced to board the English or Danish ships taking them back as souvenirs for the Europeans. A poignant coda, this allows Vollmann to contrast the homeland of those who call themselves the Inuit, "the People" in Greenland today. Of their counterparts to the south, on Vinland, known as the Micmac to the French, it appears that they survive, but again, in a manner beholden to those who supplanted them as they moved west across the ocean. 

That western impact resumes in the early 1600s with the second installment in "Seven Dreams" which appeared in 1992, "Fathers and Crows." As Vollmann told The Paris Review, he started to test out his craft with "Ice." Compared to "Fathers" and then (back to the Inuit) in "The Rifles," his debut "Dream" has its rough spots; he finds his stride in the next volume, which expands its Canadian plot: it's five hundred pages longer than "Ice." (Except for paragraphs one and two: Amazon US 11/28/13)

P.S. For "Ice" insight, see 1) Heloise Merlin at her blog June 24, 2013. 2)  James Gibbons Bookforum June 2005. 3) McCaffery introduces a 2004 Vollmann anthology, placing his friend firmly in a less post-modern and more post-Pynchon category. Yet this editor connects Vollmann to early Pynchon, for Vollmann "seems able to unweave the fabric of modern history, then put it together again in a new garment showing off the features of this history in ways we've never seen before". ("Expelled from Eden" xx) Speaking of garments that Dream protagonists don metaphorically (or, as in "Ice", as mythic totems) which manifest the coming of ice, axes, iron, Christianity, and capitalism to North America, Vollmann titles two more Dreams with "Shirt". Part four in the series "The Poison Shirt" will pit Puritans against natives during King Philip's War in Rhode Island, and part seven "The Cloud-Shirt" will be set in a Navaho uranium mine later in the last century (ibid, 450). "The Dying Grass" (projected for 2015, part six) is mooted to cover the Nez Perce in the Northwest rather than Hawai'i as once suggested. Ted Gioia champions such conceptual fiction, which "plays with reality, rather than defers to it". This decades-in-the-making project began in the slurry of concrete and speculation.  Vollmann first mused on the Dreams when he pondered how a parking lot in San Francisco's Tenderloin got that way. What happened before this continent was paved over by us?

P.P.S. As he wrapped up an interview with Madison Smartt Bell in the Paris Review 163 (Fall 2000): "All I want to do is be able to have my freedom and do the things in life that I have always wanted to do. I want to see all of these unknown places, walk on the frozen sea as often as I can, and see the jungles. I want to fall in love with beautiful women of all races. Rescue somebody every now and then, improve my painting, and improve my sentence structure."

Prue Shaw's "Reading Dante": Book Review

This veteran expert on Dante guides us through thematic chapters rather than a chronological commentary through the Commedia or a critical biography introducing us to the highlights of his life. The results can be challenging, but if you can keep the Guelphs from the Ghibellines straight--and this Cambridge professor makes sure we do--this study may reward those new to Dante, or those, like myself, looking for a broader overview of his career, and his influences, than a footnoted edition of The Divine Comedy might provide.

Dr. Shaw appears to have spent half a century examining Dante. Therefore, she knows every facet of the poet's considerable erudition, his complicated political entanglements (we are reminded he faced torture and death for his allegiance), and the dramatic achievement that made the vernacular, after the poet had his way with Tuscan dialect and his own nimble invention of so many more words that he recorded in his verse, the standard for the emerging language of Italian, from an era when regional variations proliferated. None, as Shaw shows, as good as Dante's own, as he agrees in a show-off comparison he set down to display his own Florentine expertise. This type of confidence, growing as Dante took on more challenging models after 1300, resulted in those famed hundred masterful cantos.

Reading Dante progresses by chapters on friendship, power, his life, love, time, numbers, and words. I found to my surprise those on time and numbers as engrossing as those on love and words. For, Shaw sharpens her gaze when delving into the textual acumen that displays Dante's talents at their best. You come away convinced that the more Dante took on--the journey down to hell, up past purgatory, and to the Beatific Vision and that surpassing expression itself on a human plane--the more he rose to the occasion and found language worthy of the subject, certainly one to humble any one.

A few highlights from Shaw's take on Dante: he's a "good Catholic but an independent thinker," and humanity's place in the cosmos and the individual's place in society occupy his center stage. His journey downward and upward is also "the story of becoming capable of writing the poem about the journey." In examining for me the unexpected presence of public non-believers in medieval Florence, condemned to suffer infernally, we note Dante's typical symmetry, the punishments he often invents that match or invert the crime perpetrated above on earth. "Those who thought life ended in the grave are destined to spend eternity in a tomb."

However, the Commedia isn't a political tract any more than it is a sermon, for Shaw promotes Dante's primary concern within the "power of words" to chastise his contemporaries and to correct the many flaws of his troubled city and a compromised Church. The vanity of Pope Boniface VIII gains special note, for his massive statue as a memorial--shown in one of the helpful illustrations throughout this volume (although on a Kindle I had to enlarge many to make out their detail, as in the delicate Botticelli line drawings of the cantos)--finds few admirers today, certainly. Shaw contrasts this with a statue of Dante she glimpsed in New York City behind shrubbery. Elsewhere she brings in Catholic schoolgirls in 1950s Australia, UN sanctions, and Siena-Florence soccer rivalries as apropos. She connects the controversies of Dante's era, often in the political realm ones that feel very distant from our own, by revealing a poet who strives to fix his society's woes by honest poetic craft.

While his masterpiece may also appear arcane, Shaw notes how it's "not an account of a dream" as were other visions of the time, "but of something that happened when the poet woke up" at the start of the cantos, intriguingly. We are charmed by some of those whom Dante and Virgil meet in hell, but the moral scrutiny persists. Ulysses or Francesca may inspire our sympathy, but we must keep our guard, for Dante presents an ethical strategy that keeps ambiguity alive along with dispassionate judgment, reflecting after all divine justice as well as human frailty.

The epic spirals down into earth, where Satan burrowed after he fell from heaven, only to claw itself up the slope of the soil displaces from the center of the earth, as purgatory carries Dante to its summit. And, since the cantos end with the heavenly light, and language must stop trying to capture this scene, it's a poignant "dream that one cannot recall on waking" which "leaves a trace of the emotions experienced in it. Snow melting in sunlight retains a faint tracing of an imprint on it. The oracles of the Sibyl are lost on the winds that blow away the pages they were written on."

Thus, referring to dazzling images employed by Dante in his writings, Shaw leaves us with our own wonder at Dante's bold ambition and the courage taken to put down honestly his revulsion against so much corruption clerical, personal, and political around him. He also undertakes a redemptive task, to make his everyday language, enhanced by his talent and coinages, capable of taking on the next world, not to mention this one. From Here to Eternity is her aptly chosen subtitle for this study.

Supplemented by notes and a very extensive bibliography, told in scholarly but engaging language, Shaw's survey of Dante should reward anyone wanting to learn more about him and his times. She makes a strong case for his linguistic range and his dogged ambition, and one will close her own book more convinced than ever, most likely, that Dante's legacy deserves to sustain its lofty power.
(Amazon US 2-6-14)

André Vauchez' "Francis of Assisi": Book Review

Scoured of romanticism and all the more relevant as a new Pope selects this saint as his namesake, this new biography of Francis by an eminent medievalist skilled in the social construction of holiness signals a welcome and timely arrival. Appearing in friar Michael F. Cusato's smooth translation from the French last autumn, its paperback reprint so rapidly may attest to the alignment of the sudden shift at the Vatican with renewed interest, nine centuries later, about the Poor Man of Assisi. His career, centered in the same Italy and buffeted by conflicts from that same Rome, roamed as far as Egypt as he parleyed with Sultan Al-Kamir during the disastrous Fifth Crusade.

That bold foray reminds us of how a courtly young man from modest origins but social ambitions determined to realign power structures--to extend the conventional reach of Catholicism. André Vauchez stresses the need for detachment by modern observers from the legendary tales he analyzes which have been passed off as pious non-fiction since the thirteenth century. Any honest connection to Francis and his companions' irretrievable era, Vauchez admits, must first acknowledge the distance between the fervor and mindset of medieval believers and our own. Only then "does it become legitimate to ask ourselves what it is in the life and witness of the Poor Man of Assisi that still interests us". (xiii)

Around 1206, after a life of unspecified "sin" which featured a stint as a knight against Perugia followed by a year as a prisoner of war, Francesco de Bernardone fell ill and reflected. He resolved to live in the world but against it, appealing to the gospel call for radical evangelicalism. At twenty-five, he rejected his father Pietro's jurisdiction. To respectable Assisi, this cloth merchant's son appeared a well-raised ladies' man turned wayward madman, as he consorted with lepers and dwelt in a ruined stable by the swamps. Beyond the city walls, his rustic residence proved symbolic: Francesco chose to turn away his father as he turned around his loyalty. He placed himself--allegedly naked and symbolically then cloaked by the bishop's mantle--under ecclesiastical protection. No outlaw, Vauchez situates his subject within this "logic of exclusion": Francis joins the outcasts.

Rather than fleeing the city, as hermits and monks, those restless and resentful of a Church more concerned with clerics than with the Gospel flocked to Francis. He marginalized himself, beside those inside as well as outside cities, socially displaced by economic expansion as feudalism gave way to capitalism. Francis never aimed to found a religious order, but others took notice.

Voluntary poverty, Vauchez explains, drew nobles and the emerging middle class to Francis' idealism. Around 1209, they became "little brothers", Friars Minor approved by the pope as legitimate when fears of heresy by similarly countercultural factions had created papal crackdowns upon many who revived the ascetic directives of wandering bands and lay communes eager to imitate the wandering apostles. Allied with simple peasants and unlettered workers, a few rapidly expanded into thousands of friars. They, for a while, "restored to the Beatitudes a timeliness they had lost for centuries". (38)

Vauchez's interpretation of how Francis acted upon one of the harsher demands of the gospels undergoes his scrutiny. Did Francis travel across the Mediterranean to seek martyrdom at the hands of the Muslims whom he and his fellow Catholics barely understood, or did he seek to convert the sultan in Egypt and end the Fifth Crusade? Alternately, did Francis advance, as Vauchez prefers to suggest, a peacemaker's role, aware of Jewish and Islamic differences, yet integrating them into tolerance? After all, from Francis' time onward, Franciscans continue to occupy Holy Land shrines as chosen custodians, recognized by all peoples of the Middle East as appointed caretakers. While Vauchez appears to choose of the three rationales for Francis' mission the one meshing best with our contemporary ideals, he makes his case based on a careful reading of eyewitness reports proving that this dramatic exchange of mendicant and potentate occurred, cross-referenced in verified chronicles.

The tendency for gossip and adoration to inflate popular claims about Francis--as rumors of his piety spawned miracles straight out of the gospels and imitated heroism imported from saints' lives of wonder workers--means that separating hagiography from veracity frustrates any historian. The legend had already begun to overwhelm this physically unassuming but spiritually sincere man, who wore himself out with austerities and fervor. By 1219, leading his Fratricelli of little brothers turned international fellowship left an overwhelmed Francis seeking help from the Vatican. Gradually this Ordo Fratrum Minorum turned into an organization. Inevitably, the early charism of its stunted, homely founder--who when he preached turned eloquent preacher--faded.

He had returned from the Holy Land ill, and from 1220 on, Francis delegated authority and served his brethren more by example than words, to imprint his example upon (or even shock) those whom he directed. He both tore down and built up his holy reputation. This "extreme tension" in Vauchez's analysis dominates the final six years of his life.

In an "upside-down world", Francis rejected money's reduction of all people and things to their exchange value. Instead, his "minority" invited all Christians to see the face of the Crucified One "in our poverty and our infirmity"--as its founder reflected when he entered the ranks of the destitute.

Increasing solitude, the reception of that Crucified One's visible wounds as the stigmata (an issue handled by his biographer with tact), heightened anxiety over the discipline of friars after what had been a casual acceptance in the early years of unsuitable candidates: these for Vauchez add up to Francis' opposition to his Order's "culture of results". A hierarchy of priests within its membership and of bishops overseeing it left the free-spirited nature of its origins compromised, if inevitably. Papal, legal, and clerical functionaries imposed restrictions and compromises, as all feared heresy.

Francis' death in 1226 was followed rapidly by his canonization. A giant basilica grew over his grave. Assisi figured to rake in pilgrimage profits while the commune grumbled over taxes. Rome maneuvered to capitalize on the saint's sanctity to counter competing Italian and European interests. This led to the cult of the saint, and the popularization of the Poor Man. Quickly after his death, his fellow citizens rushed to spirit his body into the walls of the city, so as to lay claim to a new patron.

O.F.M. soon signified a bureaucratic entity, faithful to the Church's bidding despite the friars' emergence defined by a fundamentally fierce rejection of any property. Rome required stability, fearing radical or non-clerical dissension. The Order decided against its founder's wishes for freedom loyal to the gospel, to avoid attachment to any earthly goods. This would fracture the Franciscans into persecuted, dissident Spirituals with a strict observance, and the Community, a majority (some later to be called Conventuals) dwelling in convents, owning them and the goods they required. Even during the life of Francis--given the Order's need for training learned friars who used books and erected holy edifices--practical demands for possessing "immovable goods" clashed with its founder's desire to open a movement to all men and women, based on the itinerant and property-less Christ.

The middle third of Vauchez's study examines the medieval aftermath of Francis' life; his fanciful or sober biographers in a dozen accounts and his posthumous handlers shaped impressions which Giotto's allegorical, dreamlike murals for Assisi's basilica (this book lacks illustrations, diminishing its usefulness as a study of his "afterlife") commemorated for visitors, from around the year 1300.

"Whereas the rules and constitutions tended to fix and thus freeze Francis' spiritual experience and whereas the bulls of canonization betrayed it, the hagiographical account of his deeds calls for a creative assimilation of his message." (187) Despite conveying this aesthetic by text alone, Vauchez explains the transmission of a man with a stigmata, preaching among birds and to a wolf, and whose envisioned apostolate resembled in lore and depiction the deeds of his divine exemplar and predecessor.  An idealized Francis as "alter Christus" (a "second Christ") had replaced whatever living memory had sustained as testimony to the Poor Man from Assisi. 

This angered Protestants. A 1542 attack compared the Franciscan legendary texts to the Qur'an, both daring to supersede the Bible. Voltaire would favor noble Saladin over fanatical Francis. Goethe visited Assisi to see its ruined Temple of Minerva, but he never bothered with the enormous basilica.

Yet the Grand Tour popularized in the early nineteenth century revived sympathy for that city's patron saint and leading attraction. Another parallel emerged. Francis as a New Adam, an model of natural simplicity, appealed to intellectuals and artists seeking an alternative to clerical ideology and political conformity. By century's end, Paul Sabatier's influential biography consolidated two new versions of Francis. As proto-Renaissance "troubadour of genius," au courant with French chansons, and as an anticlerical proto-Protestant reformer, this humanist pioneer captivated more worldly Europeans.

This part of Vauchez's study rushes by in seventeen pages. Far too little for far too great an influence. Tolstoy praised Francis; Antonio Gramsci denigrated him, but for both reactions, we barely hear why. We learn only in an aside the Peace Prayer attributed to Francis was never penned by him; it comes from the end of the nineteenth century. The impact of Francis on the environmental movement, and the recent ecumenical peace meetings held (at least until Pope Benedict's suppression after he was elected) at Assisi combine for but a page and a half of coverage.

Instead, this medieval historian explicates upon Francis' own writings. A simply educated layman, he never possessed a complete Bible. He centered his life not on learning, but around the spiritual transformation of those who wished not to reject the workaday realm but to live in it, renewed. "He does not flee the world; he plunges himself into it without prejudice or ulterior motive because, if it is necessary to renounce the possession of goods and creatures it is legitimate for one to enjoy them on the condition that their enjoyment be referred to the One who has given such things to us for our own good." (282) He eloquently paraphrases the mentality of Francis. As here, Vauchez guides his secular or religious readers into the complexity beneath the birdbath statue, or the bearded brown-clad fellow.

Never reducing Francis to a homespun rabblerouser pitted against a recalcitrant bureaucracy, Vauchez propounds Francis as not a social reformer, but a prompter of a "second conversion of the world to the Gospel message, through which men and women would be able to recognize once again the infinite love which God had shown them and consequently to behave in like manner in their relations with each other and creation". (287)

But the Church welcomed Francis and his upstarts without "really understanding the whole import and meaning of his message". (292) Vauchez places Rome's integration of his movement into its framework as the only way Francis' "intuition" could have been safeguarded and transmitted, so it endured. As Francis has been daringly or foolishly equated with Christ for at least eight centuries, this unsettling comparison may be oddly appropriate: it kept his followers as well as his detractors writing about his astonishing gambit, to live as Jesus did, without goods or cares. For a time, it worked. Compromised, the movement survives. For Vauchez, this is better than the alternative. His presentation of this Umbrian knight turned "poor and begging" imitator of Christ proves as fascinating and debatable as the Man from Galilee whom the Poor Man of Assisi tried to emulate.

(To PopMatters 5-3-13; in shorter and altered form 4-19-13 to Amazon US. Cf. Fr. Augustine Thompson's recent sober, scholarly "Francis of Assisi: A New Biography" 7-20-13 at Amazon US)

Laurence Bergreen's "Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu": Book Review

This retells and comments upon the complicated tales told by "Marco Million" eight centuries ago. Bergreen, as an experienced biographer, navigates the tangled legacy of a hundred versions of the  manuscript, and explains in a useful closing section how the erratic tone and the meandering coverage of "The Travels" stems from the lack of a coherent edition. Ironically, the popularity of his tale led to so many copies and so many versions that the telling of its marvels, suppositions, and innuendos deepened its inherent exaggerations and knotted up the factual twists gleaned from twenty years spent by Marco and his father and uncle in Kublai Khan's vast Mongol empire.

Reading this, therefore, eases the encounter, for you get both generous excerpts from the original tale interspersed with Bergreen's summations, observations, and contexts. He often compares Marco's hearsay or eyewitness accounts to what we know about Mongol, Chinese, and other reports from contemporaries and early explorers. Marco worked, due to his facility for languages, for information gathering and tax collections in the Khan's realm, and Bergreen reminds us how the Polos were the inheritors both of the ruler's largesse and his prisoners, for the fate of the Venetian trio depended on the stability of the monarch, which could be unpredictable.

The impact of "The Travels" lies in its position of its teller as insider able to view the Mongols as an adopted resident and yet, as a Catholic Italian, irremediably as an outsider who will never fit in despite the flexible nature of the Mongols towards employing foreigners as one way to involve others in the administration of the realm by both its conquering overseers and its complicit co-operators. One slight drawback may lie more in the source material than Bergreen's retelling: unlike Tim Severin's incomplete (halfway to the Chinese border) 1961 motorcycle tour along the route of the Polos published as "Tracking Marco Polo" or Belliveau and O'Donnell's "In the Footsteps of Marco Polo" about their '94-'95 journey all the way to China, Bergreen does not despite his visits to the original lands convey an impression of, say, how the Pamirs feel so desolate or how Cathay compares now to then. The map of Marco's conjectured travels into East Asia and India is far too miniscule to do its scope justice. While one welcomes the color inserts mostly of medieval depictions of scenes, one  wishes for the handsome endpaper maps of historical books much more common not too long ago.

Also, while Bergreen tells us where in the chronicle Marco begins to mature and separate his sensibility from his editor-collaborator Rustichello da Pisa, or that Marco started to accept Buddhist precepts despite his Christian suspicion of idols and rebirths, such assertions do not find much support in the texts he cites or sums up. Lots of this book is a combination of large portions of Marco's reports, collated with Bergreen's observations. As expected, but for some stretches, it's unadorned and the tone is more dutiful than enticing; that being said, hints of wit regarding Marco's eye for the salacious and astonishing enliven our time as they have many eras before now. Bergreen's chapter notes at the end of the text and his in-depth bibliography show he has done his research, but his assertions about the multicultural model pioneered by Marco do not appear to be as clearly conveyed as Bergreen would want them to be here.

I found therefore that this study fulfilled my expectations regarding a sustained commentary on Marco's adventures, but its value lies more in the contexts Bergreen provides gleaned more from other studies in other books than his first-person reports, which are barely evident for most of the saga. His strength lies in the straightforward recital of Polo's tale juxtaposed with what scholars and adventurers have since found verifies or challenges the supposedly tall tales or true ones Marco told. (Amazon US 5-28-12)