From: Renaissance Quarterly | Date: June 22, 1996| Author: | COPYRIGHT 1996 Renaissance Society of America. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

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 ...