‘Professor Franke’s original, tightly argued study makes a significant contribution to the reappraisal of Dante’s youthful masterpiece by offering, at once, a fresh translation and a well-rounded interpretation. Dante’s Vita Nuova and the New Testament is to be welcomed for its concern to present Dante’s libello to an Anglophone readership, as it offers a global interpretation of the Vita nuova at the crossroad between Biblical and philosophical traditions.’ Giuseppe Ledda, Università di Bologna

Sowell Madison review of VN bk

Mary Watt review, Christianity & Literature Volume 73, Issue 4 (December 2024).

Franke, William. Dante’s Vita nuova and the New Testament: Hermeneutics and the Poetics of Revelation. With the original Italian text and a new English translation of the Vita nuova. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 244 pp. ISBN 978-1-316-51617-1

It is a testament to the elegance and focused writing style of William Franke that this sweeping commentary on the Vita Nuova is actually rather short. (While the volume contains 244 pages, the last 80 or so pages are taken up with the original Italian text and Franke’s superb translation thereof.) This is not to say that the study is in any way lacking; indeed, in my opinion, Franke, a Professor of Comparative Literature and Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University, has produced here what should be considered the definitive study of Dante’s first book-length project.

From the opening lines of the Prologue to the closing arguments of the Conclusion, Franke explores how Dante constructs the Vita nuova, such that the libello (the little book) becomes an instrument of revelation, revealing its ultimate significance not only to the poet protagonist but also to Dante’s readers – including William Franke.

Franke wastes no words. Using prose that is both compact and fluid, he elucidates complex ideas in such a way that the reader cannot help but nod in agreement, marveling at why no one had seen this before Franke. The answer to the question is implicit in the Prologue, where Franke locates his examination in the context of the recent revolution in literary theory. While this revolution has generated a plethora of new approaches, it has ignored (or, perhaps, intentionally eschewed) the connection between literature and religion. As a result, Dante studies, in recent years, have missed the obvious; Dante, Franke asserts, “places his own literary production in a zone nearly continuous with revelation in the Bible.”

In the Introduction, Franke supports this assertion as he shows how the Vite nuova functions as theological revelation through lyrical interpretation. The lyric mode is, for Franke, the key to Dante’s understanding of Beatrice’s significance in his own salvation. The Vita nuova, he contends, owes its “incomparable visionary power to the musical and emotional qualities of lyric.” Franke’s reading, of course, necessarily depends upon and accepts the existence of the soul, and thus, his reading necessarily moves, like Dante’s, ever closer to a theological zone. But, yes, this makes perfect sense! This is what Dante intended all along.

The next chapter, “The New Testament Model for Salvific Reminiscence” considers the specific models upon which Dante relies to signal the salvific significance of Beatrice’s appearance in his life. Here, Franke argues that Dante uses a process similar to that of the a posteriori narrativization of poetic prophecy found in the Gospel of John to gradually reveal about Beatrice what he did not know at first but which is later revealed to him. Further, Franke observes that in the Vita nuova, as in the miracle stories about Jesus, even when the Gospel invokes the rhetoric of factuality, the “facts are always presented as signs.”

The conclusion drawn in the next chapter, “The Vita Nuova’s Hermeneutics of Witness,” naturally follows as Franke examines Dante’s experience of Beatrice as his ‘beatifier.’

This revelation, he suggests, is akin to the revelation of Jesus as the Christ, which is “inextricably bound up in the disciples’ personal experience in relation to Jesus and with their lyrical, poetic expression of it.” (33) Moreover, as in the case of the gospels, in Dante’s recollection of the experience of Beatrice, the memory becomes a way of actualizing revelation in the present.

In Chapter 4, “Phenomenology versus Hermeneutics: Revelation as Mediation,” Franke debates the position taken by Dante scholar Robert Harrison, author of The Body of Beatrice. Harrison’s assertion of the absolute priority of Dante’s experience of Beatrice as a woman rather than as a beatifier, according to Franke, boxes reality into the narrow experience of a subject. In this chapter lies the kernel of Franke’s engagement with the Vita Nuova and provides the foundation for the chapters that follow, where he presents a new hermeneutics-centered critical paradigm. It also leads to his conclusion that poetry is the generative source of Dante’s narrative, the source of, Dante’s own gospel, “the good news according to Dante,” in which he chronicles the revelation of Beatrice as a beatifier.

The Epilogue in which Franke examines the role of dreams in the revelatory process in

Dante’s literary project could, in many ways, may I suggest, equally function as the introduction. While he presents this focus on the dream in the Vita nuova as a denoue

ment and supplement to the preceding chapters, Franke’s reminder that Dante believed in the dream as a real revelation of the immortality of the soul (139,) suggests that a study of the dream might also be an apt starting point for an exploration of Dante’s experience of revelation in his waking state.

It is in this circular quality of Franke’s analysis that we see both its brilliance and its completeness. While other readings, such as Harrison’s, become linear and finite, Franke’s mirrors Dante’s ultimate revelation, articulated in Paradiso 30, where the river of time circles back on itself, fusing time and space and revealing a truth that is enduring and infinite. In the same spirit, then, I return to my opening comments and reiterate that this latest offering from William Franke should be the starting point of any serious study of Dante’s Vita nuova.

Mary Watt

University of Florida