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Giovanni Boccaccio played a pivotal role in the extraordinary emergence of the Italian literary tradition in the fourteenth century, not only as author of the Decameron, but also as scribe of Dante, Petrarch and Cavalcanti. Using a single codex written entirely in Boccaccio's hand, Martin Eisner brings together material philology and literary history to reveal the multiple ways Boccaccio authorizes this vernacular literary tradition. Each chapter offers a novel interpretation of Boccaccio as a biographer, storyteller, editor and scribe, who constructs arguments, composes narratives, compiles texts and manipulates material forms to legitimize and advance a vernacular literary canon. Situating these philological activities in the context of Boccaccio's broader reflections on poetry in the Decameron and the Genealogy of the Gentile Gods, the book produces a new portrait of Boccaccio that integrates his vernacular and Latin works, while also providing a new context for understanding his fictions.

Poetry makes nothing happen: it survives.--W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" W. H. Auden's widely quoted assertion in his elegy for W. B. Yeats has occasioned much commentary, both contesting and confirming its slogan-like claim for poetry's impotence, but few commentators have followed Auden's thought beyond the wide-mouthed colon that follows its famous negation. 1 Auden's line not only registers resignation to poetry's powerlessness, but also affirms its ability to survive as "a way of happening, a mouth" even after the poet's death, when "the words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living." Literary works may make nothing happen and leave "the history of man materially unchanged," but they also change materially during their survival in history not only in the bodies of readers, but also in hands of their authors (Auden 2002, 7). A reading beyond the colon in the two major critical editions of his poems reveals that Auden was undecided about the modalities of poetry's survival. Does it survive "In the valley of its saying where executives / Would never want to tamper," as in The English Auden, or "In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper," as in the American edition? (emphasis added). 2 Rather than attempt to account for Auden's possible intentions in changing "saying" to "making," I take these variants as two poles for a possible future of literary criticism, which would explore how a work's "sayings," that is, its transformations at the hands not only of its author but also of its scribes, editors, and translators, might help critics to understand better its "making," that is, its poetics. The history of a work's survival, I argue, can help us understand its form.1 "A colon, says Karl Kraus opens its mouth wide: woe to the writer who does not fill it with something nourishing" (Adorno 1991, 91). For a review of some different readings of the first half of the line, see Robinson (2002, 53-55). 2 The history of Auden's own poem makes the point. First published in the March 8, 1939 issue of The New Republic, the poem originally consisted of only two sections, but, a few months later, Auden added as an intermediate section the stanza containing the famous hemistich quoted above. The revised version first "appeared in The London Mercury in April 1939 and in his next book of poems, Another Time, in 1940" (Mendelson 1999 and is published in The English Auden. The later version of the poem, which was first published in the 1958 W. H. Auden: A Selection by the Author, changes "saying" to "making," and omits three stanzas from the third section (Mendelson 1991), is published in the American edition.

Petrarch’s 1345 discovery of Cicero’s personal letters in Verona has long been regarded as a foundational moment in the historiography of the Renaissance. In the traditional view, Petrarch’s discovery engenders a new historical self-consciousness that has frequently been described, since the middle of the twentieth century, in terms of a contrast between a medieval Dante and a Renaissance Petrarch. In keeping with recent work rethinking periodization, this essay revisits Petrarch’s letters on his discovery to reconsider the distance between Dante and Petrarch and to reveal how Petrarch constructs his new relationship with Cicero through Dante’s characterization of Virgil. While some critics have noted this Dantean presence, they have not examined its meaning. This study argues that Petrarch’s borrowing from Dante is significant because it shows how Dante’s complex relationship to the past embodied in the figure of Virgil shaped Petrarch’s construction of his Cicero and informed Renaissance ideas of history.

Given Dante's prominent place in discussions of vernacularization, this chapter reconsiders the substance of Dante's theories and their relationship to his poetic practice. It proposes an investigation of vernacularization that encompasses not only the choice to write in the vernacular but also the decision to transmit those works. Taking up Dante's definition of the vernacular as the language of women, it argues that while Dante can use the vernacular in the world of God, the interventions of other mediators (scribes, editors, commentators) are necessary for the work to survive across time and communicate to future generations.