Sergio Di Benedetto's volume represents the first critical-interpretive monograph dedicated solely to the lyric production of Florentine author and Dantist Girolamo Benivieni (1453–1542). Because Benivieni lived nearly nine decades, writing for approximately seven of them, his lyric legacy runs the gamut of youthful love lyrics, encomiastic pieces, piagnone lauds composed for Girolamo Savonarola's Bonfires of the Vanities, pastoral rhymes, and verses revised and glossed during the restored Florentine Republic and beyond—in short, vastly different poetic sedimentary layers of historical, cultural, and psychological tensions. Di Benedetto hermeneutically excavates many treasures from Benivieni's literary humus, and does so meticulously, as if with a soft brush and fine-mesh sieve.

This book consists of seven chapters, bookended by a brief introduction and conclusion, along with a comprehensive bibliography. The first two chapters consider Benivieni's participation in the Firenze laurenziana through his early love lyrics, stamped by the dolce stilnovo, Ficinian Neoplatonism, and Dantean and Petrarchan strains in his early Canzone e sonetti and Bucoliche, before the Psalmi penitentiali of his spiritual conversion and his determination to destroy his earlier collections by consigning them to the flames. Chapters 3–5 represent the primary focus of Di Benedetto's study, each dedicated to the three parts of Benivieni's Commento of 1500: the soul's ascension, its fall into sin, and its ultimate revelation through union with God. The author rightly declares, “scorrendo i libri di poesie del Quattrocento, possiamo dire che essa è un unicum nel momento in cui esce” (“scanning through fifteenth-century books of poetry, we can say that [the Commento] is unique for the time in which it appears,” 72), given the spiritual expression and pedagogical impetus that the poet brings in uniting his self-glosses to his canzoniere. Di Benedetto traces Benivieni's praxis of lyric reform (rewriting, but also redefining the terms that remain in his poetic work) by means of what Benivieni calls “depurare le tenebre,” which Di Benedetto aptly uses as his title. For Benivieni, it is an allegorical-pedagogical mode intended to cast off the darkness of the ignorance and original concupiscent sin of his early love poetry by means of a significantly reworked edition of that poetry, encased in a self-commentary that specifies how, for instance, earthly love and beauty really intend to point the human soul toward divine love and beauty.

We also see in Di Benedetto's procedure how the shadows of Benivieni's grief (for Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, first and foremost, but also for Lorenzo de’ Medici, Antonio Manetti, Marsilio Ficino, Politian, Savonarola, and so many others; Benivieni, in his lifelong bachelorhood—at turns lonely and desperate—outlived all of his closest friends) find the light of hope through a Dominican spirituality shared in part with other turn-of-the-sixteenth-century poets, including Ugolino Verino and Giovanni Nesi. Di Benedetto demonstrates appreciable finesse in not painting all piagnone poets as a monolithic group. Chapter 6 consists of a pioneering consideration of Benivieni's oft-overlooked appendixes to the Commento (the “Deploratoria” and a poemetto titled “Amore”) vis-à-vis the itinerarium animae in Deum, while the final chapter presents a consideration of Benivieni's Opere and final edits to his poetry in the Cinquecento.

At no point does Di Benedetto attempt to force Benivieni's verse to stand for a single poetic school or ideology, nor does he want needlessly to flatten or reconcile the divergent strains of influences on Benivieni's poetic production. This research concentrates and distills Benivieni's lyric text, thus foregoing any consideration of how Benivieni's poetry extended to other disciplines (one immediately calls to mind in musicology how Benivieni's lauds were set to melodies already familiar to Florentines in the 1490s, an area admirably explored by Patrick Macey in Bonfire Songs: Savonarola's Musical Legacy [1998]). By focusing on the cultural precedents for Benivieni's poetry, Di Benedetto's research earns its place in the company of Benivieni studies destined for long duration.