Lines of Beauty: In Honor of David Quint

Lines of Beauty:In Honor of David Quint Ayesha Ramachandran (bio), Rocco Rubini (bio), and Sarah Van der Laan (bio) The vision of Petrarch clutching his copy of Virgil in the last days of his life remains a resonant emblem of the Renaissance: the exhilarating rediscovery of a long-lost past, the poignant experience of historical difference, and the desire to speak in turn to an unknown future. Drawing together past and future into an uncertain present through the transhistorical agency of the text itself, Renaissance writers from Petrarch to Milton meditate on questions that remain at the heart of critical inquiry today. How can we make the past speak to us, and what stories are we prepared to hear? How do our present concerns refract multiple histories, and what do our critical and cultural practices bequeath to the future? These questions feel especially resonant as we write during the coronavirus pandemic, which has invited numerous comparisons to the late medieval and early modern periods. We are forced, once more, to reconsider our relationship to history and posterity, the intersections between story-telling and social control, and our desire for aesthetic pleasure and human contact even in the darkest moments of quarantine and lockdown. Boccaccio's Decameron has been repeatedly invoked, but a better guide to scholarship and scholarly community in crisis might lie in Petrarch's Familiares. From an opening that reckons with the aftermath of the 1348 plague, Petrarch repeatedly asserts that writing, reading, and responding to each other—often across centuries—sustain and renew communities and transform individual lives. To write in a time of crisis, then, compels us not only to rely upon but [End Page 1007] also to celebrate the intellectual-pedagogical genealogies and affective ties that bind together a community of scholars. These ties are forged by deliberate choice rather than birth or historical accident, formed not only by shared interests and mutual affinities, but by an ethos of inclusion and openness to intellectual inquiry, conversation, and continual interrogation of individual certainties. Like Petrarch's familiares, the members of such a community often find themselves scattered across the globe, reliant on missives written in moments snatched from overflowing lives; such communities represent conscious and continually reaffirmed commitments to the pursuit of dialogue, collaboration, and mentorship. This volume springs from one such commitment, celebrating a community that has grown up around the scholarship and teaching of David Quint. Author of six monographs, two translations, two edited collections, and seventy essays, Quint is the exemplary comparatist. "The exemplar makes a claim on the reader's action in the world," Timothy Hampton observes, quoting Montaigne, to "'practice those great souls of the best ages'" (3). David Quint stands as a model reader, critic, and teacher of comparative literature both as a scholarly discipline and as an ethically-charged intellectual and pedagogical practice. Perhaps best known as an expert on epic and on the classical intertexts of Renaissance literature, his scholarship has in fact ranged from significant studies of major Latin authors (most notably Virgil, Lucan, and Lucretius) to major Renaissance writers in five different languages: Petrarch (but also Dante and Pulci), Bruni, Bracciolini, Poliziano, Sannazaro, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Ariosto, Tasso, Montaigne, Ronsard, Camões, Cervantes, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton—and the list could go on. He has written on early modern dueling practices, on Michelangelo and the design of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, on the modern novel (from Dickens and Flaubert to Proust), and even on the Thousand and One Nights.1 To review his wide-ranging oeuvre over a forty-five-year career is to witness a distinctive model of comparative study in action: the careful disentangling of a multilingual literary web, woven densely over centuries, so that its intricate pattern is clearly revealed for our consideration. The characteristic Quintian move consists of a quest, at once inspired and painstaking, for a trope, allusion, or pattern across texts and time. Careful excavations of telling details build to revelations of the taut energy of the intertextual weft—and the immense [End Page 1008] erudition and long hours of study across multiple literary traditions that are the prerequisites for such dazzling scholarship have vexed his many students over decades...