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A Boccaccian Renaissance: Essays on the Early Modern Impact of Giovanni Boccaccio and His Works . Edited by Martin Eisner and David Lummus. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Pp. xxv+323.

2020; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 118; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/709728

1545-6951

Michael Papio,

Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewA Boccaccian Renaissance: Essays on the Early Modern Impact of Giovanni Boccaccio and His Works. Edited by Martin Eisner and David Lummus. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Pp. xxv+323.Michael PapioMichael PapioUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis handsome volume is the fruit of a conference held in the fall of 2013 at University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University. Although the celebration of Boccaccio’s seven hundreth birthday inspired no small number of books and essay collections, this one stands out for its crisp thematic focus and, as the editors explain, as a testament to “Albert Russell Ascoli, whose scholarly imagination motivated our collective inquiry into Boccaccio and the Renaissance” (xii). Indeed, recognizing that the great abundance of studies dedicated to the Three Crowns’ fortune in the Renaissance consists mostly of analyses of Petrarch, the editors sought “to correct this imbalance by examining Boccaccio’s prevalent place in the period” (xiii). The happy result comprises a dozen essays, written by scholars of wide-ranging backgrounds, which are grouped into four sections: “Boccaccio and Renaissance Humanism,” “Framing the Renaissance Boccaccio,” “Boccaccio in Renaissance Italy,” and “Boccaccio in Renaissance Europe.”The collection begins with an important essay. James Hankins presents a fresh and welcome reassessment—against the grain of now aging work by Hans Baron and Eugenio Garin—of Boccaccio’s political thought. Hankins argues for considering our author not as medieval (as Vittore Branca suggested), but as a genuine “representative of Renaissance humanism” (4). Like other humanists, Boccaccio believed in the superiority of moral virtue and in the ideal of a meritocratic government (like that presumed to have been enjoyed by the ancients), one that would honestly and objectively promote citizens of the highest ethical caliber. Against this background, Hankins evaluates Boccaccio’s own public service and political perspectives. His convincing reading of the De casibus provides interesting insights and offers useful observations on wealth and nobility, coming to a conclusion with a case study of Walter of Brienne.In the second chapter, “Boccaccio’s Humanist Brigata,” Timothy Kircher provides a handy review of the Decameron’s reception among fifteenth-century humanists and then maps out a web of Boccaccian influences throughout the Quattrocento. Kircher sees the beginning of the century as characterized by Coluccio Salutati who, despite his profound admiration for Boccaccio, almost ashamedly defends the author’s insistent self-deprecation and not-quite-humanistic Latin. Though Pope Pius II (Piccolomini) and Poggio Bracciolini were not put off by the Decameron’s eroticism, Giannozzo Manetti, Leonardo Bruni, and Francesco Filelfo were. But it was perhaps the masterpiece’s multilayered frame structure that most piqued the interest of humanists because it contained nested, divergent perspectives that, like the dialectic structure of Plato’s Symposium, allowed for the presentation of a range of truths. Kircher locates the clearest example of this phenomenon in Leon Battista Alberti’s Intercenales.There then follows Victoria Kirkham’s “Poets Prefer Company,” in which she returns in English to themes earlier treated in Italian.1 Using some early visual representations of Boccaccio as models (sometimes with and sometimes without Dante and Petrarch), she considers the initial creation and promotion of the idea of the Three Crowns within the canon and explains its superiority to rather less convincing groupings, such as the four (the same three plus Zanobi da Strada) portrayed in the Palazzo dell’Arte dei Giudici e dei Notai and the six immortalized in Vasari’s 1544 painting called, in fact, “Six Tuscan Poets.” The chapter’s appendix (73–84) contains a timeline of significant writings and paintings that contributed to the canonical conception of the Three Crowns.Jonathan Combs-Schilling takes up the subject of Boccaccio’s contributions to the pastoral genre in his “Under the Cover of a Green-Hued Book.” After a review of Boccaccio’s innovations (such as the use of the vernacular, the terza rima rhyme scheme and significant new themes), Combs-Schilling argues that as many as nine of his works are meaningfully indebted to pastoral poetry; in other words, that Boccaccio conceived of the pastoral as a “metagenre” (99), one that can accommodate elements with which it was not commonly associated.Rhiannon Daniels’s “Squarzafico’s Vita di Boccaccio and Early Modern Print Culture” is a case study in the investigation of biography with a twist. Daniels reevaluates the influence of Girolamo Squarzafico’s life of Boccaccio (first composed to accompany the 1472 Venetian edition of the Filocolo) through the lens of publication and transmission histories. This paratext, reprinted numerous times over the next hundred years, had an outsized impact on subsequent generations of readers. After an analysis of its contents and Squarzafico’s possible motivations, Daniels turns to an examination of the material presentation of Squarzafico’s Vita in the Filocolo tradition, principally in terms of the mise-en-page, and concludes with an appendix in which she lists the editions of the Filocolo printed between 1472 and 1527.Simon Gilson’s intelligent essay, “Vernacularizing the Latin Boccaccio in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italy,” discusses general trends in the translation of Boccaccio’s Latin works into Italian (including excerpts incorporated into the Dante commentary tradition) and then takes a closer look at two specific cases: Liburnio’s translation of the De montibus (after 1527) and Betussi’s of the Genealogie (1547). For the latter, Gilson also provides an index of paratexts and Betussi’s essay (in Italian and English) on translation.In “Bembo, Boccaccio and the Prose,” Michael Sherberg reflects on Pietro Bembo’s decision not to produce an edition of the Decameron, even after publishing the Canzoniere in 1501 and the Commedia one year later. Indeed, the question is good one, especially since Bembo had so highly praised the literary style of its frame tale in his Prose of 1525. Sherberg presents a series of sound reasons, beginning with its placement on the Index in 1559 and culminating in an intriguing hypothesis regarding the chronology of Bembo’s publishing activities, especially with an eye to the scarce popularity of the Asolani, which depended so heavily on the Boccaccian model.Brian Richardson dedicates his essay, “‘For Instruction and Benefit,’” to an analysis of sixteenth-century editions of the Decameron. He begins with an overview of the editorial strategies employed by Lodovico Dolce (1541) and Girolamo Ruscelli (1552) to reconcile the widely promoted notion that Boccaccio’s prose was an ideal model with the undeniable fact that the work contained no small number of stylistic idiosyncrasies, inconsistencies, and even textual variants, which tormented lexicographers in particular. After the work’s inclusion in the Index, editors were additionally saddled with the obligation to purge many tales deemed unacceptable by the authorities. A list of sixteenth-century editions is included in the chapter’s appendix.Ronald Martinez turns his attention in the following chapter to the theatrical afterlife of the Decameron from 1486 to 1533. He notes several instances of playwrights incorporating Decameronian characters and plots, including Ariosto’s I suppositi, Bibbiena’s Calandra, and Machiavelli’s Mandragola. From there, he looks at reworkings of Boccaccian motifs mixed with Plautus, Terence, and Apuleius in the commedia erudita of Publio Filippo Mantovano, Galeotto Del Carretto, and Bernardo Accolti.Marc Schachter’s chapter, “Boccaccio’s Second Life in French,” turns our attention toward Antoine Le Maçon’s translation of the Decameron and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron as barometers of Boccaccio’s 1545 role in increasing the richness of sixteenth-century French. Le Maçon was determined to show that the Gallic language was sufficiently precise and mature (especially with regard to its lexicon), not only to do justice to Boccaccio’s extensive vocabulary but also to meet the new challenges presented by the 1539 law that required all official documents to be written in French. This argument is strengthened by the introductory statement that Emilio Ferretti penned for the translation.In “Boccaccio in the Spanish Renaissance,” Ignacio Navarrete looks at our author’s influence on Juan de Flores’s Grimalte y Gradisa, a late fifteenth-century novela sentimental that blends events and characters of the Fiammetta into a sort of sequel. Two lovers (whose names provide the work’s title) send their own relationship into turmoil after reading the Fiammetta. Gradisa then demands that Grimalte make amends by finding—and reconciling—Fiammetta and Panfilo. Navarrete concentrates principally on the interplay among various renditions of character and self.In the final chapter of the book, “Regendering Griselda on the London Stage,” Janet Smarr looks at the Pleasant Comedie of Patient Grissil, a play first performed in 1600. Its authors—Henry Chettle, William Haughton, and Thomas Dekker—indirectly borrowed the plot from the Decameron via Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. Dekker revisited the motif in 1603, flipping the roles of good and bad spouse, and calling his new play The Honest Whore. Smarr looks at the two works together in this interesting examination of “the gendered nature of patience” (295). Notes 1. This chapter is very similar, though in some places expanded and others reduced, to Kirkham’s article, “Le tre corone e l’iconografia di Boccaccio,” in Boccaccio letterato: Atti del convegno internazionale, Firenze-Certaldo, 10–12 ottobre 2013, ed. Michaelangiola Marchiaro and Stefano Zamponi (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 2015), 453–84. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 118, Number 1August 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709728 Views: 256 HistoryPublished online June 09, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.