Before the present publication, Pulci had never received the honor of a collection of essays (nor a symposium, before the one held in Modena in January 2018, organized by Maria Cristina Cabani), making this work the first to fill this void. In the introduction, the editors rightly insist on the coexistence of Pulci's “irrepressible wit, and his ability to treat even the darkest themes.” Pulci as both writer and man arises as a key figure of Quattrocento Florence—not anymore a superficial and entertaining writer (a dismissive label that critics have recently contested), but, on the contrary, the author of works (in particular the Morgante, the Confessione, and the sonnets) that challenge the reader with their mixture of comic and tragic, ethical questions, theological ideas, and Christian allegory, as well as personal quarrel, invective, and political engagement.

Marco Villoresi's essay has the merit of redirecting scholars’ attention to Pulci's Confessione. The author, however, analyzes the terza rima poem as an insincere work in which the professed Christian faith of Pulci is merely an orchestrated strategy to disavow his reputation of heresy and immorality. It is a thesis that dismisses the lifelong involvement of Pulci within the polemic against hypocrisy, and his defense of faith's purity. The theological stance of Pulci's writing is at the core of Pina Palma's contribution. In canto 25, Astarotte is summoned to help find Rinaldo. The devil's impossibility in disclosing the future is explained by Pulci with a theological analogy of the mirror, which Palma discusses in depth from its pagan and Christian traditions up until Alberti, Cusano, and Ficino. Palma interestingly shows that in Pulci's words (particularly consonant with Cusano's mirror imagery) a quarrel with Ficino and his intellectual elitism arises. The following two essays align themselves with this seminal line of research about Pulci's contentious vein. Michelangelo Zaccarello studies Pulci's tenzone with Matteo Franco, by focusing on a corpus of sonnets (the critical text of which was edited by Decaria and Zaccarello in 2017) that were exchanged between the two rival poets during 1470–73. The article sheds new light on the responsibility of Tommaso Baldinotti (Matteo Franco's friend) in assembling the manuscript and in giving to the tenzone an anti-Pulci position by including more of Franco's sonnets in the manuscript. Alessio Decaria's essay is a pivotal study on the rhetoric of invective in the Morgante. Given the complete absence of contributions on this topic, Decaria's study is a groundbreaking addition that shows the extent to which Pulci's writing is indebted to the thematic and expressive forms used in the medieval poetics and rhetoric of vituperium. To this purpose, Decaria convincingly identifies several categories that address the various forms of insults in Pulci's multivalent style.

Also centered on the Morgante is Maria Cristina Cabani's examination of the poem's rhetorical use of simile. Cabani shows that Pulci does not share the rhetorical function of simile that Boiardo incorporated in his poem (and which Ariosto and Tasso refined), as an instrument to enrich the epic narrative discourse. Pulci, instead, uses simile as a quick comic and hyperbolic instrument with subversive effects more linked to the cantare and to the comic-realistic traditions. This anticlassical posture displays a polemical Pulci against the humanists in Lorenzo's circle.

The profound Christological symbolism of Orlando's death in the Morgante is the center of Stefano Carrai's article. The author analyzes the interwoven sources of the episode, demonstrating that Pulci creates an original account where the sword Durlindana, planted in the earth, becomes the figure of the cross, while the paladin's body is the figure of the crucified Christ. Linda Carroll's contribution seeks to identify a strand of irreverence between Pulci and Ruzante. Jo Ann Cavallo's essay concentrates on the Roncevaux episode by focusing on Rinaldo's character and his fortune in popular culture, namely the Sicilian Puppet Theater, still alive today. Cavallo shows that Giusto Lo Dico's Storia dei paladini di Francia (1858–60), the main Sicilian puppeteers’ source, was much indebted to the Morgante for the characterization of Rinaldo as the savior and of Charlemagne as a political failure. It should be noted that the majority of the contributors do not challenge the traditional idea of a Pulci in trouble with Lorenzo and forced to leave Florence. In reality, as shown in recent studies, this is a crisis that did not actually happen. It will, therefore, be important for future research to rethink the relationship between Pulci's reexamined biography and his literary texts.

The volume represents an important collection of studies and makes clear (as is rightly declared by the editors in the exemplary introduction) how, in Pulci, the interplay between biography and writing is remarkably strong.