L'idea del poema: Studio sulla Gerusalemme conquistata di Torquato Tasso (review)
heavenly contemplation. The examples used are the Africa, read as Petrarch suggested it should be read; the Aeneid, as explicated by medieval and Renaissance allegorical commentaries; and the Gerusalemme liberata, read in light of the Virgilian commentaries of Tasso’s day and of Tasso’s own “Allegory of the Poem.” The second path ends up with Paradise Lost, via the biblical epic, which works rhetorically, using seduction and persuasion to prompt responses that will guide their readers from the earthly to the heavenly, from sin to grace. Both allegorical and biblical epic, it turns out, use similar patterns of organization and figuration to similar ends, and each relies on an allusive poetics that informs the other. It is not possible, of course, to attend to the details of the argument in a short review. But I can attest that this is a learned, intelligent book, one that blends boldness of vision with the hard textual and bibliographical work on which enduring scholarship rests. Neither the decision to devote more attention to Virgil’s Renaissance commentators, nor the focus on the Christiads of Marco Girolamo Vida and Alexander Ross, involves brilliant new critical insight: several recent studies on Shakespeare, for example, have returned to Virgil through his fifteenthcentury commentator Cristoforo Landino, and the poems of Vida and Ross have long appeared in lists of intertexts for Paradise Lost. Warner’s achievement is to pull both of these critical strains into the Augustinian tradition, and to trace them through such Augustinian motifs as the two Venuses, the earthly city and its heavenly counterpart, and so forth. As a result, The Augustinian Epic ends up engaging with both modern scholarship and its Renaissance predecessors in some surprising ways: the Virgilian commentary of Giovanni Fabrini, for example, returns to something of its old prominence, and Warner finds in the Neo-Latin epics an unexpected source for the reading process that Stanley Fish attributed to Milton some forty years ago, in which biblical epics stimulate inappropriate responses in their readers in order to correct their errors and guide them on their way to salvation. In short, this is one of those rare books that really does rewrite literary history, recovering an Augustinian strain that will, I think, become a standard part of the way in which we view the epic tradition between Petrarch and Milton. CRAIG KALLENDORF Texas A&M University