In the Prologue, Professor Hawkins describes his development from a reluctant auditor of John Freccero's Dante lectures at Yale to a Dantista who became a "Dante spokesman", who began to "talk back to Dante," and who found that the Divine Comedy had become: "part of my own present tense, one of the worlds in which I continue to live my life."
Is it that, like Dante who visited a world apart and came back to testify to it, Professor Hawkins has journeyed to the 13th century, encountered Dante and others and returned to relate what he experienced? The fantasy is that the author lives in, at least, two worlds, Dante's and the modern; and, there is an implied promise: as their guide, he can help moderns enter into Dante's world and persona while providing modern readers the footnoted, analytic style they demand.
Often Professor Hawkins appears to ask two questions: 1. What cultural and personal experiences might Dante have had to bring him to this particular understanding? and; 2. Knowing this, how does it help Dante's readers experience Dante? I chose the word experience deliberately, Professor Hawkins would be disappointed, I suspect, if I had said envision Dante or understand Dante. He wants his reader to experience Dante as a close, contemporary confidant might. It is on this `experiencing Dante' aspect of Dante's Testaments that this review focuses.
In PART ONE - DANTE AND THE BIBLE, Chapter 1 "The Scriptural Self', the program of experiencing Dante is realized by first reviewing the central role the Bible, its imagery, and related pageantry in Dante's time; then showing how closely and deliberately Dante identified himself with the Biblical Daniel, Paul, Isaiah and David; and, finally describing how the 12th and 13th century trends to laicization provided Dante with in-depth late medieval theological and philosophical understandings of the Biblical Testaments. All this provided Dante with a basis for taking on a "scriptural self" and preparing a testament "of his own invention".
This presentation is done so well that at one point I put the book down for a moment and recalled the Easter Sunday pageantry in Franco Zeferrilli's magnificent film of "Cavellera Rusticana." For the first time, I emotionally emphasized with the total immersion of the 19th century Sicilian peasant in the Easter pageantry and by analogy with the 13th century Florentine. What, I asked myself, would the Holy Week pageantry of Seville have meant to me if I were involved rather than a tourist spectator?
In PART TWO - DANTE AND VIRGIL, Chapter Six, "Dido, Beatrice and Signs of Ancient Love," Professor Hawkins, comparing and contrasting the use of language in Virgil's and Dante's writings, helps the reader experience Dante not only as the `saved' Pilgrim of the Commedia, but also as an enamored youth and a successful poet of the Dolce Stil Novo. In effect, Professor Hawkins guides the reader not only into the pilgrim Dante at the moment he encounters the beatified Beatrice, but also the memorial-historic Dante in the moment. Just great!
IN PART 3 - DANTE AND OVID, Chapter 7, "The Metamorphosis of Ovid," Professor Hawkins asks why, in the Commedia, Dante "routinely conceal(s) and . . . openly disparage(s), a poet (Ovid) about whom he elsewhere speaks with respect?" Hawkins' answer concerns how Dante `may' have divorced himself from his earlier "pre-Commedia reverence" for Dante by reading Ovid `in littera' in the period just before the writing of the Commedia and finding an Ovid focused not on the power of providence but on the a world of violence without the promise of grace, `stylistic brilliance,' and the egotistic notion of vivam, I shall live in fame. Now that we have experienced how Dante's perceptions have changed, we are prepared to understand, with Professor Hawkins' guidance, the hows and whys of Dante's use of the Metamorphosis as the major subtext of Paradiso.
Dante's Testaments consist of 14 chapters, based on about 15 years of previously published material. The 14 articles are quite uneven in their "experiencing Dante" quality. Perhaps the book jacket theme of adding "his own `testamental' postscript" to the Biblical Testaments is a better overall unifying theme; but, the reader who focuses on what I call "experiencing Dante" will gain a great deal.
Peace
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