Gloria Allaire, ed. The Italian Novella: a Book of Essays.

London and New York: Routledge, 2003. viii + 242 pp. + 7 col. pls. index. illus. $90. ISBN: 0-415-93725-6.

This volume of essays, which takes its place in the long series of Routledge Medieval Casebooks, spans the genre in chronological order from Boccaccio's Decameron to the mid-sixteenth century, including discussion on the writings of Sercambi, Masuccio, Firenzuola, Grazzini, Straparola, and Bigolina. The papers, largely culled--with some additional contributions--from sessions on the novella at the Kalamazoo conferences of 2000 and 2001, are all in English, with Italian passages translated. They are uniformly written in a clear and readable style, and for the most part show a solid knowledge of relevant scholarship. Most of the eleven essays focus on one writer, but three take a thematic approach that covers a wider set of examples.

Allaire gives a very brief introduction to the novella genre and to the "new mode of nonprofessional, lay reading--reading for pleasure" (2) that arose with the widening vernacular literacy of Italy. Her argument that the novel developed from the roman and not from the novella implies a narrow sense of derivation in a single line, and is contradicted later in the volume by Nissen's reference to the amply developed "novella-romanzo," as Mario Baratto labeled it. The novella developed toward the novel, not only as it became extended and sentimentalized, but also as tales were linked into episodic narratives that approach the picareque. In any case, Allaire is right that the genre, often anthologized as minor literature, had a major influence across Europe.

The first three essays, by Ernesto Virgulti, Susan Gaylard, and Cormac O'Cuilleanain, concern the Decameron. Virgulti focuses on the "half" tale that introduces day four, arguing that the tale "parodies the beliefs of a reactionary literary intelligentsia" interested only in moral exempla and makes the case for "a more realistic, pragmatic, and socially relevant form of writing" (22). Linking this tale to the one that follows (4.1), he suggests further that the boy sequestered and misinformed by his father represents the women to whom Boccaccio addresses his book. Virgulti's comment that the Decameron, unlike the earlier works, "severs all ties" to classical literature (19) seems to indicate a lack of awareness of scholarship on the multiple, if less overt, presences of the classics in this text. Other claims--that Boccaccio was responding to real criticisms of separately circulating tales from days one to three, or that the tale of Rustico "exposes the hypocrisy of celibacy and ascetic life" (27)--could use supporting arguments instead of being asserted unproblematically. (There is no external evidence for a separate circulation of the first thirty tales; and what about the pious hermits who sent Alibech away?) Gaylard pursues the gendered binary "parole/fatti" set forth by Teodolinda Barolini, demonstrating that the central two tales, 5.10 and 6.1, interestingly read together, complicate these categories. O'Cuilleanain, inquiring about the conditions that permit servants to become foregrounded, presents a survey of servant roles, somewhat long on the retelling of examples, that extends to Lodovico's love-service and Griselda's marriage. For this sort of query, it might be interesting to put Boccaccio's representations in some broader literary or cultural context.

Two essays treat Sercambi from quite different directions. Myriam Swennen Ruthenberg offers an analysis of Sercambi's use of a novella within the Croniche and of an autobiographical account within the Novelle, to explore, in a brief and suggestive manner, the blurred relation between historical "notate" and fictional "narrare," and Sercambi's personal and political reasons for shifting between the two. Cathy Ann Elias looks at the same texts for the evidence they provide about musical tastes and practice in the fourteenth century, arguing, against Howard Brown, that even amateur singers could handle fairly complicated music. She includes information about the composers and a table of where in Sercambi the song texts are located, who composed the settings, in what musical forms, and where the music can be found.

Maria Predelli traces a tale from its twelfth-century English sources into its fifteenth-century Italian appearances in an anonymous cantari manuscript, Giovanni Fiorentino's Pecorone, and Masuccio's Novellino. Given the relatively unchanging story, Predelli investigates whether the meanings remain the same or whether the tale is adapted to address culturally different concerns. Masuccio is the subject also of an essay by Michael Papio, who has published an entire book on that writer. This is a similarly excellent study of Masuccio's "gusto dell'orrido," contrasting Masuccio's social views with Boccaccio's, qualifying Bakhtin's views of the Renaissance grotesque to include the terrifying and tragic as well as the comic, and arguing that Masuccio's innovative style connects him more closely to the Romantics than to the norms of the novella established by Boccaccio. The Novellino offers "perhaps the first authentic horror-story scream" (131).

Manuela Scarci begins with a complaint similar to Papio's: that Angelo Firenzuola's Ragionamenti, like Masuccio's Novellino, has been underappreciated by being read always in terms of Boccaccio's model. Attending to the disjunction between the Ragionamenti's amoral tales and their surrounding Neoplatonic discussions, she argues that Firenzuola was using Boccaccian narratives to challenge Bembo's program for a purely elevated language and literature and the selective reading of Boccaccio which supported it. She sees the contradictions in Firenzuola's text as an intentional unsettling of any norms of uniformity. In a different but compatible manner, Domenico Zanre considers Firenzuola together with Grazzini in order to explain the physical violence and sexual transgression in their tales, concluding that they are "an aggressive response" to contemporary cultural changes, "subversive attacks on authority figures at a time when both Firenzuola and Grazzini were unable to secure a permanent position for themselves in the official cultural milieu" (175). A different sort of social anxiety is manifested in Straparola's tales of semihuman/semianimal monstrous births. Suzanne Magagnini reads these tales together with contemporary scientific and religious writing on monstrous births, observing the cultural need to explain or destroy such cases that seemed to attack the basic categories of human and nonhuman.

The appropriately final essay by Christopher Nissen surveys the theme of women dressed as men, with reference to a number of the writers previously discussed; it then focuses on the repeated and socially significant use of this motif by the one female writer treated in this volume, Giulia Bigolina, whose Urania Nissen is editing for imminent publication. This essay is of interest to women's studies as well as to studies of the novella tradition. The theme is also of importance in Renaissance theater, as Nissen notes.

The variety of topics and approaches in this volume, especially the strong presence of novellieri other than Boccaccio, is commendable. The connections from one essay to another, often highlighted by the contributors, is another attractive feature. The clear writing throughout makes it easily assignable to students. While there is some unevenness in the quality of scholarship and analysis, readers from diverse areas--Italian literature, Renaissance narrative, cultural history, musicology, genre studies, and women's studies--will find something useful here.

JANET LEVARIE SMARR 

University of California 

San Diego