Guyda Armstrong, Rhiannon Daniels, and Stephen J. Milner, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio. (Cambridge Companions to Literature.) Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xxxv, 256; 6 black-and-white figures. $84.99. ISBN: 978-1-107-01435-0.Table of contents available online at http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/european-literature/cambridge-companion-boccaccio?format=HB (accessed 20 July 2016)

Abstract

Guyda Armstrong, Rhiannon Daniels, and Stephen J. Milner, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio. (Cambridge Companions to Literature.) Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xxxv, 256; 6 black-and-white figures. $84.99. ISBN: 978-1-107-01435-0. Table of contents available online at http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects /literature/european-literature/cambridge-companion-boccaccio?format=HB (accessed 31 May 2016); doi:10.1086/687889 T he Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio nicely complements Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works (University of Chicago Press, 2013) as volumes created for the sev- enth centenary of Boccaccio’s birth. In contrast to A Critical Guide’s chapters on each work, the fourteen essays of The Cambridge Companion are organized by topics, divided into four sections: “Locating Boccaccio,” “Literary Forms and Narrative Voices,” “Boccaccio’s Literary Contexts,” and “Transmissions and Adaptations.” As with any system attempting to deal with so rich and complex a subject, such categories are loose, and the essays speak to each other across their boundaries. The four essays in the “Literary Forms” section all bear “Decameron” in their titles, the only essay titles indicating the text they treat; nonetheless, the full range of Boccaccio’s writings comes into discussion throughout the volume, and the index can help readers find where particular works are treated. Also unlike A Critical Guide’s focus on Boccaccio’s reworking of the traditions he had inherited, The Cambridge Companion looks more to Boccaccio’s social contexts, material practices, and reception and influence. The volume opens with select lists of manuscripts, critical editions, and preferred transla- tions (McWilliams is the Decameron translation suggested here, but the later essay on trans- lations compares several), and a chronology of Boccaccio’s life, writings, and contemporary events. The list of manuscripts includes both autographs of Boccaccio’s own works and his copies and glosses of other texts. The select nature of these lists is justified by reference to other catalogs of Boccaccio’s writings and library, especially the Florentine catalog Boccaccio autore e copista (2013). The bibliography at the end of the volume is similarly a selection of further readings—mostly in English but also in Italian—organized by topics. Quotations from Boccaccio’s Italian are given in English without the original. Contributors to the vol- ume are distinguished international scholars in the field, and the level of scholarship is high and up to date, the slightly belated publication of the volume enabling it to cite the outpour- ing of new work in the centenary year 2013. The preface presents Boccaccio “not merely as the author of deservedly renowned liter- ary works, but as the pre-eminent cultural mediator of his age” (xiii). The opening essay, by all three editors, emphasizes Boccaccio’s mobility and connectedness within and across literary, intellectual, cultural, social, and political networks, eschewing the traditional linear biography for a “network analysis.” They point to the combination of cultural contexts in which he operated as reader, writer, lawyer, businessman, civic official, and ecclesiastic. Seek- ing out directions for future research, they suggest, for example, replacing the old pursuit of Boccaccio’s supposed love life with investigations into the real women who were “authors, translators, printers, artists, or scholars” involved in his afterlife. Beatrice Arduini’s “Boc- caccio and his desk” looks at the tools, materials, and techniques of Boccaccio’s writing practice, including his distinct choices of paper or parchment, script, layout, and ornament. Rhiannon Daniels, “Boccaccio’s narrators and audiences,” emphasizes the rhetorical and performative qualities of the texts, often with multiple audiences and varying authorial roles, Speculum 91/4 (October 2016). Copyright 2016 by the Medieval Academy of America. For permission to reuse, please contact journalpermissions@press.uchicago.edu. 160016.proof.indd Achorn International 06/14/2016 05:06PM