Boccaccio's Heroines: Power and Virtue in Renaissance Society by Margaret Franklin

Abstract

582 Reviews relatives and dependent interrogatives are often difficult todistinguish, thedepen dent clause of the example is indeed not a relative but a dependent interrogative: dime cossa che xe sucesso 'tell me what happened' is the embedded version of the corresponding main question cossa ze successo? 'what has happened?', p. 133:What the author calls some common adverbs of time and manner' are per haps better described as 'time,manner, (and place) wh pronouns', corresponding to English how, when, where. This can help us to understand their syntactic behaviour. p. 134: To the best ofmy knowledge, Venetian does not distinguish nouns from pronouns in subject position with respect to the resumptive clitic:with both types of subjects the clitic copy is optional (with very subtle pragmatic differences, as the author says). p. 135: The idea that the 3rd person subject clitic is compulsory because the verb forms are identical in singular and plural appears common sense but iswrong; in Friulian 3rd sg. and plur. are very distinct but the subject clitic isobligatory in all contexts (even in thepresence of an overt subject). p. 178: Comparing medieval Venetian in texts of the Lagoon with other medieval Venetan varieties and modern Venetian, the author says that sigmatic inflection is absent in central-southern Venetan, and partially present in Lio Mazor. This is a small but important point, since sigmatic inflectionmeans preserving -s inflection (a Ladin feature): inflectional -5 is preserved inVenetian till after the Second World War, when protected by the enclitic interrogative pronouns; it is absent in central Veneto, present in Friulian, but completely absent in Lio Mazor texts;what can appear as an inflectional -s isnot inflectional but part of the ending, with -5remaining infinal position aftervowel-dropping: themost trickyexample is tuseres /seres/,but ifcompared with a language thatvery consistently preserves inflectional -s, such as Friulian, we find the corresponding form tu seress-is and conclude that Lio Mazor's form has undergone the loss of inflectional -s.This is confirmed by the fact that 3 sg.has the same structurepares /pares/; ifthe -swere inflection, itshould appear only in 2 sg. (or plur., in some cases). The amount of space I have devoted to the above corrections should not obscure the wealth of valuable observations and information contained in this volume, which makes amajor contribution to the history ofVenetian from a variety of interlinked perspectives. Itwill surely serve as amodel for thedescription of other dialect areas and stimulate further research intoVenetian. University of Padua Paola Beninca Boccaccio's Heroines: Power and Virtue in Renaissance Society. By Margaret Franklin. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2006. 206 pp. ?47 50. ISBN 978-0-07546 5364-6. Margaret Franklin's study of Boccaccio's celebration of exemplary women, theDe mulieribus claris (c. 1360), and its subsequent 'fortuna'within Italian literary and MLR, 104.2, 2009 583 visual culture is based on the bold assertion that the text presents a consistent delineation of theparameters of acceptable female authoritywith thegoal of provid ing a pre-emptive defence of a social framework implicitly challenged by legendary women who participated actively inpublic life*(p. 1). In distinguishing her project from earlier readings which have stressed the impossibility ofdefining a clearly iden tifiable female subject position within the textFranklin sets the frame forher study: the rearrangement ofwhat were seen as fragments by others to produce a coherent definition of female subjectivity in the text,a configuration which defines 'theappro priate functioning ofwomen in society (p. 2). Such a critical stance, it is claimed, also serves a further corrective role in seeking to remove themisogynistic label attributed to the textby a generation of feminist scholars whose political and ideo logical concerns prevented amore historicist evaluation of the text's status. Instead of chiding the author forhis failure to espouse social and political reform, Franklin argues thatBoccaccio's De mulieribus sought to 'draw the teeth from the challenge posed by unconventional women by co-opting their stories into the service of con temporary Italian standards and mores' (p. 8). In thisway they are assimilated into a moral economy thatwas never going tobe anything but patriarchal in a text thatwas primarily aimed at amale readership and the restatement of normative gender roles. For Franklin...