Reading Dante's Stars.

Alison Cornish, Reading Dante's Stars

New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. ix + 226 pp. $25. ISBN: 0-300-07679-7.

Nowadays, as in the 1950s and 1960s, literary critics are drawn to the history of science. This book accounts for one of the intractable features of Dante's style, his seemingly gratuitous astronomical imagery -- a mannerism parodied by Chaucer: "th'orisonte hath reft the sonne his lyght, -- This is as muche to seye, as it was nyght" (Franklin's Tale, 1017-18). It moves, like the Commedia itself, from the obvious to the abstruse. Chapter 1 elegantly defends the fecundity of astronomy as a topic for philosophical poetry in general and the Commedia in particular. Cornish then sets out to explain, not every astronomical reference, but only the lengthy and prominent ones, namely those in Inferno 20, 24, and 26, in Purgatorio 9 and the transition to Paradise, and in Paradiso 13, 28, 29, and, of course, the final image. Her major points are as follows: "like superlatively beautiful ladies" such as Beatrice, "stars are lures toward virtue, as well as to higher understanding; ... They are thus effective as well as s ignificant ... in the Inferno, the stars appear as guides in agriculture, navigation, time-keeping, and literary pursuits; elsewhere they are ... causes and portents ... ignored or misread at one's peril. Heavenly bodies are, moreover, rhetorical; they are part of ... God's eloquence in the sacramental commemoration of ... the Passion and Resurrection, to which Dante has yoked his journey and his poem.... Removed from the context of the earth, Dante's astronomy loses its application as chronometer to become a ... mirror and a shadow, a paradigm for primordial and proximate change" (143).

Cornish builds on several "handbooks" about Dante's astronomy in Italian (147-48); few books of any sort on this topic exist in English. While similar in subject-matter to Mary Ackworth Orr's Dante and the Astronomers (first edition 1913; revised edition 1956), and Richard Kay's Dante's Christian Astrology (Philadephia, 1994), this book builds on and resembles most closely some articles of John Freccero (i.e., "Pilgrim in a Gyre," "The Neutral Angels," and "The Final Image"). To adopt the metaphorics of her book, a new Freccero has dawned among us.

Cornish's grasp of medieval cosmology and angelology is accurate. Yet she wears her knowledge of it lightly. Except in the unfocused chapter 8, it is explained only where it is clearly invoked by the text and necessary to the argument. She employs frequent summaries, layman's language, and some diagrams. Her style is lucid; it crackles with vivid verbs. Having myself tried to explain the wanderings of the planets, I cheerfully acknowledge her superior facility at it (pages 8, 98, 113-15). Like most scholar-critics in our market-conscious time, Cornish cites preceding critics sparingly; for a given interpretation, she usually cites a single striking medieval source. What this parsimony sacrifices in historical "thickness" it gains in focus, brevity, and readability.

Primary sources are commendably cited in full in the original Latin, French, or Italian, usually with appended translation. Her predecessors in several languages are acknowledged both in the ample notes and in the index; there is no separate bibliography.

Cornish finds "correlatives to modern notions of how literature functions" (7), namely the sacrifice of astronomical accuracy to the poetry (98), epistemology as a dramatized theme, many skeptical messages, and the resulting epistemological indeterminacy as an opportunity for moral choice on the part of characters and readers (119). With relation to the account in Paradiso 29 of the fall of the angels, "change of place in the planets is equivalent to choice in the angels" as to whether to rebel or remain faithful (140); hence in order to reflect this "temporal aporia of the world's [or rather, evil's] beginning" (143), Dante drags into the canto's seemingly gratuitous astronomical exordium those very images and ambiguities which theologians mention on this topic -- chiefly a figure of the heavens that could be either dawn or dusk and a problematization of how long someone remained inactive (119, 141, 143). Again, the very thought-processes that the astronomical exordium of Paradiso 13 enjoins on the reader a re thematized, being themselves both an imitation of God's creative act and an image of reading (100-06). These last two points, while abstruse, are credible in that the strategies discussed harmonize with Paradiso's general use of supra-sensible images and concern with epistemology.