Albert Russell Ascoli. A Local Habitation and a Name: Imagining Histories in the Italian Renaissance. New York: Fordham UP, 2011. Pp. 384. Like Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, Albert Ascoli's illuminating essays on Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Tasso in A Local Habitation and a Name steer betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite (Essay on Man, The Design 20), threading a course through such traditional, but inherently reductive, oppositions as New Criticism and New Historicism; history and biography; form and content; literary fancy and rational fact; protofeminism and patriarchy; private lire and public life, and so forth. Each of the nine chapters of Ascoli's challenging and highly rewarding collection uncovers a paradox that effectively blows the roof off the tidy columbarium of conventional critical approaches with subtle, but convincing, arguments that tend to confirm Petrarch's and Boccaccio's view that the value of truths--or critical insights--is enhanced in direct proportion to the work involved in revealing them. Ascoli's saggi sparsi (7) begin with an elegiac meditation on the impossibility of transcendence--a movement beyond history to eternity--against the foil of Dante's eschatological journey or Augustine's conversion. In Ascoli's view, Petrarch's writings reveal an attempt to negotiate and reconcile the competing claims of a Livian, empirical conception of history--stretched on the rack of time and space--and an Augustinian, spiritual vision from the of eternity. Like Orpheus's lyre, Petrarch's rhetorical art, his freehanded manipulation of historical fact, somehow suspends temporality, carving out a variety of Limbo (48), an interregnum in time and a taste of eternity. However, Petrarch himself remains a traveler, walking through time to an eternity that continuously eludes him. If Eric Auerbach currently enjoys the perspective of the (45) that eluded Petrarch, he is unlikely to be too cheered by Ascoli's suggestion, in chapter 2, that his reading of Boccaccio's Decameron in Mimesis is as blind as it is brilliant. What Auerbach did not understand is that his tendency to view Boccaccio's secular realism against the backdrop of an oppressive medievalism was itself shaped by Boccaccio, whose programmatic insertion of well-chosen cues in Day IV had subtly nudged him to conclude--against the overwhelming evidence of the text itself--that the Decameron's playful sensuality heralds a clean break from a Christian ethics and hermeneutics, asceticism, and allegory. Like the blind man who judged the elephant by its tail, Auerbach extrapolated the whole complexion of a notoriously heterogeneous work from a single part. By underestimating the art in Boccaccio's art, he failed to recognize that Boccaccio's naturalism is artificial, not a spontaneous outpouring of authentic feeling, but the calculated effect of a sophisticated and highly self-conscious writer. If Auerbach is guilty of giving Boccaccio too little credit, Ascoli may be suspected of giving him too much. This is particularly true of the arguments in chapter 3, an exploration of power relations wrapped around the onomastic nucleus of the name Pirro, one, Ascoli maintains, that deliberately recalls that of the Roman general Pyrrhus, whose name has long been a byword for the paradox of a victory that is a defeat. Among the many wonderful insights offered in these pages is the discovery that true power lies not in the scepter or the sword but in the ability to manipulate other people's perception of reality--a skill associated with play and round among poets, adulterers, and, evidently, literary critics, for by the end of this essay my initial reluctance to accept an argument at times too dependent on a subtle onomastic web had been swept aside to make way for a new vista. Indeed, the principle of the pyrrhic victory--both in its positive (victory that is defeat) and negative (defeat that is victory) forms--lies, as Ascoli shows us, not only at the center of Decameron, 7. …