As stated in the opening lines of this book, Ausiàs March (1400–59) “is the most important Catalan poet of the fifteenth century” (7) and one of the greatest European poets of his time. His 128 extant poems, which amount to some 10,000 verses, were written at the court of Alfonso, king of Aragon, Sicily, and Naples, and have been transmitted by fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and sixteenth-century manuscripts and by five editions printed between 1539 and 1560. March’s works were also published in Spanish (1539 and 1560) and Latin (1633). From March’s own lifetime it is possible to trace his influence upon the poets of later generations writing in Catalan and in Spanish. Thanks to his diffusion among Spanish poets at the Imperial court of Charles V, March became one of the two main influences (the other one being Petrarch) upon Renaissance Spanish poets.

Albert Lloret breaks new ground on the topic of March’s reception, as he deals with the manner in which March’s text was interpreted by the first two printed editions of his poems (1539 and 1543), which triggered his fame beyond the Catalan-speaking lands and the narrow circle of Spanish court poets, and eventually imposed a modern, Petrarchan reading of his poetry. Lloret’s methodology is threefold: (1) He reconstructs the historical context of every edition, focusing on the sponsors’ cultural milieu (chapters 1 and 4); (2) textual criticism, codicology, and textual bibliography show how the materiality of texts can help explain March’s posthumous printed life — it should be stressed that this is the first time that textual bibliography has been applied to a medieval Catalan text (chapters 3 and 5); (3) both (1) and (2) allow for a literary interpretation that focuses on translation strategies (chapter 2) and the construction of March’s canzoniere (chapter 6).

The editio princeps (Juan Navarro, Valencia, 1539) prints a selection of forty-six poems with a Spanish translation by Baltasar de Romaní. It was dedicated to Ferrando of Aragon, prince of Calabria and vicerroy of Valencia, great-grandson of King Alfonso. Both the selection and the translation are affected by a moralistic bias, but it is much more significant that Romaní rewrote March in the light of Spanish cancionero and Petrarch’s vernacular love poetry. Accordingly, the distribution of poems into four categories (love, death, morals, and spirituality) must be seen as the result of an “editorial construct” (98–99) aimed at drawing an evolution in March’s poetry, from juvenile love to mature repentance.

The core of the book is the study of the 1543 edition (Carles Amorós, Barcelona), from which all other editions stemmed. It is a collection of 122 poems, aimed at providing March’s complete works, sponsored by Ferrando Folc de Cardona, a Neapolitan nobleman of Catalan descent. Lloret maps the lineage of Ferrando and his wife, and shows how their decision to relocate to Barcelona implied sponsoring the new Renaissance vernacular culture of Boscán and his generation, which included the appreciation of March’s poetry. The codicological study links together manuscripts B and K, commissioned by Ferrando, with manuscript D, and Lloret proves that the latter was also made at Ferrando’s behest and was used as the printer’s copy for the 1543 edition. As the order of the poems in D and in 1543 is completely different, Lloret traces the remaining signs of the manuscript’s casting off in the printer’s office to unveil a deliberate reordering operation. Thanks to codicology and textual bibliography we can therefore witness the “making of Ausiàs March’s canzoniere” (129) from manuscript to printed book and the disclosure of a new Renaissance reading of March’s poetry. Macrostructurally, the poems are distributed in three parts (love, death, and morals), reflecting Petrarch’s division between poems on love and poems on death, plus the moral and religious texts that underline the “palinodial and penitential end to the lover’s life” (175). Lloret then reveals the microstructural clustering of poems in fifteen sequences. Crucial to the argument is the identification of the Petrarchan and elegiac topoi on which the editor based his reordering. After Lloret’s research, it comes as no surprise that, in a context of poetic Petrarchism and humanist scholarship, Petrarchan and classical strategies of making poetry books should inform the assembling of March’s collection.

This book constitutes a landmark in studies on the reception of March in Renaissance Spain. It is clearly written, and the author’s command of history, codicology, and bibliography, as well as his acuteness as a reader of medieval and Renaissance poetry, make it a model for further approaches to the subject.