Transcription and Visual Poetics in the Early Italian Lyric.

The thesis of this ambitious and densely written book is simple, striking, and, by and large, entirely plausible. Professor Storey argues that modern editors, and therefore readers, of early Italian lyric poetry have not paid enough attention to the textual layout of these poems in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts. For him the systems of transcription that can be identified, and even classified, on the basis of close examination of the manuscript evidence not only have a history, which he sets out to trace from the early duecento to Petrarch, but amount to a "visual poetics," proper understanding of which is indispensable if we are to attempt to interpret this textual corpus with any degree of accuracy. Moreover - and perhaps more controversially - he attributes involvement in the definition and practice of this poetics to the poems' authors themselves, proposing that "some early Italian poets composed their lyrics with an eye to the manuscript forms in which their poems would be copied and circulated" (xxi). He therefore undertakes a detailed and amply illustrated study of several major manuscript traditions, drawing attention to the way in which scribal techniques and conventions contribute to the generation of meaning, both in individual poems and in collections (or "macrotexts").

Storey begins at the beginning: his first chapter, "From the Margins: Origins and Theory of Appropriating Official Space" (5-69), deals with the mid-twelfth century Ritmo laurenziano, preserved in MS Laurenziano Santa Croce pl. XV dexter 6. From there he moves to the relatively obscure poet Monte Andrea and MS Vaticano Latino 3793 ("Transferring Visual Ambiguity: Semantic-Visual Orientations of a Medieval Text," 71-109), and thence to the better-known Memoriali bolognesi ("The Editorial Redefinition of Margins: The Memoriali bolognesi and the Literary Culture of Chigiano L. VIII. 305," 111-70), and Guittone d'Arezzo ("Guittone's Last Booklet: The Visual-Semantic Orientation of the Trattato d'amore in MS Escorial e. III. 23," 171-92). These chapters make up the book's first section, "Pre-Petrarchan Experiments in Written Poetics." After a summary "Interword" (193-97), the rest of the book is devoted to "The Visual Poetics of Petrarch's Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta."

In this section, Storey first carries out a searching analysis of "Petrarch's Concepts of Text and Textual Reform" (201-24), before going on to examine "Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta: Manuscripts and Scribal Forms" (225-340) and "Organizing Strategies: Aperture and Closure in Petrarch's Fragmenta" (341-419). He works most closely, of course, with MSS Vaticano Latino 3195 and 3196, but also deals with the earlier Chigiano L.V. 176 and many others. Throughout, his work is distinguished by the extraordinary intensity (and accuracy) of its attention to textual features, and by the rigor with which he uses his findings, both to enhance interpretation and to question many contemporary editorial practices that we, as readers, lazily take for granted. Indeed, perhaps the most thought-provoking aspect of this book is its implication that, far from being naive or incompetent textualists who need the assistance of modern philology to make their work readable, medieval authors and their scribal colleagues often presented their texts in ways whose subtlety, flexibility, and semiotic efficiency far exceed the grasp of a twentieth-century imagination hampered by the overly mechanized conception of text inherent in a culture of print.

Though by no means easy reading (thanks to its mass of detail and idiosyncratic typography), this is a book of unusual importance that should be carefully studied by anyone - medievalist or Renaissance scholar - interested in the material realities of writing in a manuscript culture, or in their consequences for reading that culture's literary production.

STEVEN BOTTERILL University of California, Berkeley