Jane Tylus

Petrarch’s Griselda and the Sense of an Ending

The essay compares the final novella of Boccaccio’s Decameron - the tale of Griselda - with Petrarch’s Latin translation of the tale at the close of his letter collection, the Seniles. In considering the status of the ‘ending’ and Griselda’s relationship to it, I focus on Petrarch’s enigmatic line to Boccaccio: ‘I don’t know if I have deformed your tale or beautified it; you be the judge.’ How might we speak about the beauty of the vernacular Griselda vis-a-vis that of the Latin Griselda? And how do both versions of the tale represent their authors’ self-conscious farewells to their feminized and perhaps insufficiently beautiful texts?

Women of God and Arms: Female Spirituality and Political Conflict, 1380-1600 (review)

tural texts” (19). Whether one accepts or rejects the directions that Phillippy has chosen to follow, one will undoubtedly be enriched by many of the previously obscured glimpses that she has succeeded in unveiling. To be sure, whether one agrees with or objects to her way of seeing, one marvels at her multidisciplinary investigation, which calls on such disciplines as literary criticism, history, art history, and the history of religion. That is probably why to fully understand Phillippy’s provocative ideas, one must be equally versed in Italian painting and French philosophy, as well as English history and literature. Moreover, for the purpose of learning from and appreciating Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture, one must read and reread a text which is likely to be considered highly complex and perplexing. YAEL EVEN University of Missouri, St. Louis

Writing and Vulnerability in the Late Renaissance.

Combining historical and theoretical sophistication with close readings of major Renaissance texts, this book argues that late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth- century writers were far more vulnerable to the secular and ecclesiastical authorities on whom they depended for their livelihoods than were writers of an earlier era. The book also explores the creative strategies that the vulnerable authors developed to protect themselves from those authorities. Particularly striking is the fact that writers increasingly turned in the course of their careers to alternate sources of legitimation and protection in the form of various peripheral communities such as the convent, the artisanal society, the acting company, the theater-going public, and circles surrounding but not synonymous with the Renaissance court. In fact, this book shows that these protective communities ultimately enabled writers to produce a disturbing and distinctive literature in an era when authorship conceived in terms of literary property or individual genius was as of yet nonexistent.