Cosmopoiesis. The Renaissance Experiment.

Giuseppe Mazzotta. Cosmopoiesis. The Renaissance Experiment. (Toronto Italian Studies.) Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2001. xvi + l06 pp. bibl. $35 (el), $16.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-8020-3551-5 (cl), 0-8020-8421-4 (pbk).

In this wonderful collection of essays, initially presented as a series of special lectures at the University of Toronto, Giuseppe Mazzotta considers the Renaissance preoccupation with world making and how that preoccupation is treated and reflected in several pivotal texts of the period. As Mazzotta points our in the preface,

"A writer's world is his word or his poetic language" (xii); thus the very act of writing comprises an act of world making, at least on a microcosmic scale, but it is the consciousness of the act and its implications of artifice and transgression, as well as the tension between appearance and reality, that link the works considered in Cosmopoiesis.

In the first essay, "Poliziano's Orfeo: The World as Fable," Mazzotta considers the most primal aspects of literary construction, as the Orpheus myth recalls the creation act inherent in the naming process. Orpheus and Adam both master their respective worlds through the utterance of words but their mastery is illusory and, in both cases, a single act of transgression reveals order and human dominion over the furores to be a thin veil for the chaos that can erupt at any moment. More than a post-Edenic allegory, in the aftermath of the Pazzi conspiracy, the making project of the Orfeo might also be read as "a trenchant critique of a wholly Neoplatonic way of looking at things" (11), and as a challenge to Ficino's optimistic belief in cosmic harmony.

The tension between appearance and reality that lay subtly below the surface of the Orfeo is confronted head on in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. In contrast to Poliziano's dark vision of socio-political artifice, the Orlando Furioso presents the Renaissance as "a brilliant and yet frivolous theatre" (27). In "Ariosto and Machiavelli: Real Worlds! Imaginary Worlds," Mazzotra suggests that play and illusion in Ariosto's project are the means by which one can achieve the detachment necessary in order to transcend one's own worldview and, thereby, attain an objective perspective. Perhaps more significant, however, is Mazzotta's argument that Ariosto's vision opposes the Machiavellian view of power, presenting imagination and illusion as a means of countering the sinister dissemination of power as a species of madness.

In a similar vein, the third essay, "Adventures of Utopia: Campanella, Bacon, and The Tempest, "argues that Shakespeare's The Tempest, with the magic new world that Prospero creates, presents a "deliberate attempt to escape the logic of power (71) entrenched in the Machiavellian project. The Tempest, along with Bacon's New Atlantis and Campanella's City a/the Sun, represents precisely the type of Utopian construct that Machiavelli found impractical. Mazzotta argues, however, that each of these works counters the Machiavellian objection by concluding that nothing exists before one makes it; the choice of world, one can infer, is our own.

The final essay, "The Ludic Perspective: Don Quixote and the Italian Renaissance," underscores the strength of this position, as Mazzotta examines literature's "specific privilege and role in creating reality" (91) and the act of transgression it potentially represents. Cervantes alludes to the conflict by linking Sancho's flight with that of Icarus but, as Mazzotta suggests, the flight is, nonetheless, seen as revelatory of an absolute, visionary standpoint. The resolution, if there is one, then lies in the recognition that the human act of making, though limited by its very humanness, still bears the earmarks of its prototype and cannot, therefore, help but to aspire to divinity.

Although the figure of Machiavelli looms large throughout all of the essays, the presence of Mazzotra himself is even more conspicuous. Mazzotta, the author of several books on Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio has long sought to articulate a "Vichian" reading of literary history. With this recent publication, he has done just that. Here, as he deftly wends his way through the Renaissance world of changing perspective and shifting vantage points, characterized variously by tropes of mirrors and telescopes, Mazzotta's own exercise in world making emerges from the pages of this profoundly insightful act of cross-temporal reconciliation. Moving easily beyond the role of critic and scholar, Mazzotta, with his characteristic elegance, calls convincingly for a rebirth of myths and memories and for a modern renaissance of cosmopoiesis.