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Dante and the Franciscans (review)

The subject of this book, Dante and the Franciscans, is problematic. The evidence for Dante’s knowledge and interest in the Franciscan tradition breaks down into three categories: biographical, textual, and philosophical/theological. Unfortunately, the biographical evidence is sparse and ambiguous. Dante may or may not have attended Franciscan schools, may or may not have been a member of the Third Order of St. Francis, may or may not have known prominent Franciscans like Peter John Olivi. The textual evidence is somewhat stronger: Dante makes specific reference to St. Clare, St. Francis, and St. Bonaventure in the Paradiso, and enlists St. Bonaventure to discuss the Dominican order. The third category of evidence, the philosophical/theological, is mixed. Whether Dante is invoking Franciscanism or simply the Christian tradition is not always clear. As Shakespeare’s Fluellen puts it in Henry V 4.7.32, “there is salmons in both [rivers],” i.e. a thought or expression that appears in both the Franciscan tradition and Dante does not establish a causal relationship between the two. All that being said, the ten essays in this collection examine Dante and the Franciscans from a variety of perspectives, and are careful (for the most part) not to generalize beyond the available evidence. The most speculative of the essays is Sister Lucia Treanor’s “The Cross as Te in ‘The Canticle of Creatures,’ Dante’s ‘Virgin Mother,’ and Chaucer’s ‘Invocation to Mary.’” The essay attempts to demonstrate a symbolic structure within the works discussed, which consists of the letter te as symbol of the Cross or Jesus Christ, and implemented in the works “by graphic figurations within a palindromic structure that centers a puzzle” (p. 244). (A palindrome is a passage that can be read either backwards or forwards, e.g. “Madam I’m Adam”). Sister Treanor recognizes that the evidence for such imbedded rhetorical structures is tentative at best, and I must confess to having little