The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio Cambridge Companions to Literature Series

Incorporating the most recent research by scholars in Italy, the UK, Ireland and North America, this collection of essays foregrounds Boccaccio's significance as a pre-eminent scholar and mediator of the classical and vernacular traditions, whose innovative textual practices confirm him as a figure of equal standing to Petrarch and Dante. Situating Boccaccio and his works in their cultural contexts, the Companion introduces a wide range of his texts, paying close attention to his formal innovations, elaborate voicing strategies, and the tensions deriving from his position as a medieval author who places women at the centre of his work. Four chapters are dedicated to different aspects of his masterpiece, the Decameron, while particular attention is paid to the material forms of his works: from his own textual strategies as the shaper of his own and others' literary legacies, to his subsequent editorial history, and translation into other languages and media.

Part I. Locating Boccaccio: 1. Boccaccio as cultural mediator Guyda Armstrong, Rhiannon Daniels and Stephen J. Milner; 2. Boccaccio and his desk Beatrice Arduini; 3. Boccaccio's narrators and audiences Rhiannon Daniels; Part II. Literary Forms and Narrative Voices: 4. The Decameron and narrative form Pier Massimo Forni; 5. The Decameron and Boccaccio's poetics David Lummus; 6. Boccaccio's Decameron and the semiotics of the everyday Stephen J. Milner; 7. Voicing gender in the Decameron F. Regina Psaki; Part III. Boccaccio's Literary Contexts: 8. Boccaccio and Dante Guyda Armstrong; 9. Boccaccio and Petrarch Gur Zak; 10. Boccaccio and humanism Tobias Gittes; 11. Boccaccio and women Marilyn Migiel; Part IV. Transmission and Adaptation: 12. Editing Boccaccio Brian Richardson; 13. Translating Boccaccio Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin; 14. Boccaccio beyond the text Massimo Riva; Guide to further reading.

Guyda Armstrong is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Manchester and is author of The English Boccaccio: A History in Books (2013).
Rhiannon Daniels is Lecturer in Italian at the University of Bristol and is author of Boccaccio and the Book: Production and Reading in Italy, 1340–1520 (2009).
Stephen J. Milner is Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Manchester. He is co-editor, with Catherine Lèglu, of The Erotics of Consolation: Distance and Desire in the Middle Ages (2008) and editor of At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy (2005).