Nicolò Maldina.
In pro del mondo: Dante, la predicazione e i generi della letteratura religiosa medievale.
La Navicella dell’ingegno, 6. Rome: Salerno, 2017. 260 pp. €24.
The main goal of Maldina’s book is to offer an introductory study of the relationship between Dante’s Commedia and the homiletic genre of Medieval preaching. The main issue for such research lies in the substantial impossibility of tracing precise textual references which go beyond generic consonances. As the author himself stresses, it is not possible to point at any precise text because, on the one hand, the manuscripts containing sermons were probably off limits to laymen during the Middle Ages, and, on the other hand, the sermons were written in Latin but planned for vernacular horal preaching, as if they were a sort of outline for the friars. Despite these issues at the basis of the research, Maldina attempts a reconstruction of echoes, stylistic devices which are the common traits which can link Dante’s Commedia to the homiletic genre. In this sense, the most evident relation is the parenetic finality of both Dante’s poem and the sermons offered by preachers.
The book is organized in four chapters which treat different but intertwined topics. The first chapter, Dante, la predicazione e la crisi del genere visionario reconstructs the history of religious literature between eleventh and twelfth centuries. Maldina suggests how, in Dante’s time, the particular genre of the otherworldly visio had been combined into numerous other religious genres. Among these, the homely featured, as a form which gathers the prophetical and eschatological ferments which characterized the visio of previous centuries. Obviously, such ferments are regathered in the genre of the visio in Dante’s Commedia, a poem which reunites eschatology and prophetism under the banner of the afterlife journey.
The second chapter, Predicazione e predicatori nella ‘Commedia,’ analyzes the passages of Dante’s poem which somehow deal with preaching. If on the one hand the false preachers identifiable with modern ecclesiastic hierarchy are condemned because Dante feels they have betrayed the evangelical message of poverty and humility, on the other hand, the Dantean lines tend to praise the preachers who have conveyed that same evangelical message, i.e. the Apostles, especially Paul, and modern saints such as Francis and Dominic.
The third chapter, Figure della predicazione, focuses on the rhetorical and stylistic aspects of the so-called sermo modernus, the particular homiletic genre which came to life during the twelfth century. Maldina argues that Dante’s divine mission is highlighted not only by the substantial function of prophet and preacher accorded to him, but also by the peculiar literary styles through which Dante shapes the eschatological message he carries, as he expresses his prophecies according the style of the rhetorica divina.
The final chapter, entitled Stili omiletici, analyzes three different passages of the Commedia which relate to the genre of medieval preaching. In particular, the instance of Inferno 19 can be related to the specific subgenre of homely which is moral rebuke; the purgatorial episode of the girone of pride (cantos 10-12) helps not only demonstrating how the homiletic style helps repressing sins, but it also exhorts to the opposite virtue (in this case, humility); cantos 4 and 5 of Paradiso offer an example of how the homiletic genre can function as an intertext for what concerns the more marked aspect of the Commedia.
Giovanni Vedovotto, University of Notre Dame