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Dante's Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination. By Peter S. Hawkins. Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. xx + 378. $55.00 cloth; $19.95 paper.
In refreshing contrast to the many studies that investigate Dante's use or possible use of patristic and biblical sources, Hawkins's book approaches religious sources in the Divine Comedy from the perspective of the poem as a work of conversion, the poet's and ours, in the tradition of Augustine's Confessions. Beginning with the effect the Comedy had on him, Hawkins looks not only at the way Dante responds to the Bible and the fathers, but also to the way he uses the Bible to transform other authority figures, such as Virgil and Ovid, as steps in the progress of his conversion. This consistent religious perspective enables Hawkins, though many of the chapters appeared in earlier versions, to draw them together into a coherent whole. It may also make problems for readers who do not read from a religious perspective, but whether or not the reader is willing to go all the way with Hawkins, s/he will find the book stimulating and enlightening, filled with sensitive readings and provocative ideas.
Hawkins sets Dante's knowledge of the Bible-unusual for a medieval layman-in the context of contemporary Dominican and Franciscan preaching in Florence and suggests that Dante used the Comedy as his pulpit, drawing on the Bible to give his message authority. Hawkins speaks persuasively of the Bible as the book that transformed Dante, as internalized and treasured in Dante's memory. He is alert to the liberties Dante takes with biblical texts, treating them as intentional-which they may well be-though it is useful to remember what Mary Carruthers has shown us about medieval memory focusing on the meaning rather than on the words. The Comedy, as Hawkins points out, is the third testament that fulfils the other two,...