Decades before the famous humanist Francesco Petrarch, Albertino Mussato was integrating classical forms into his early Trecento writings. For his Ecerinis, modeled on Seneca, and his Historia Augusta, which recounted Emperor Henry VII's expeditions in Italy, the commune of Padua presented Mussato with a laurel crown. To commemorate the seven hundredth anniversary of this event, an academic conference dedicated to Mussato convened in Padua. The published proceedings of this conference fit into a small but growing historiography on this important figure. For English-speaking readers, Mussato was a key figure in Ronald Witt's magisterial In the Footsteps of the Ancients. There, Mussato bridged humanism's first tentative steps into the writings of Lovato Lovati with Petrarch's later popularization of the new studies. More recently, Mussato's Ecerinis appeared amid other “humanist tragedies” edited and translated by Gary R. Grund for the I Tatti Renaissance Library. Mussato also holds a prominent place in Alexander Lee's Humanism and Empire, a synthetic work that surveys changing views of the empire during the fourteenth century. “Moribus antiquis” makes a strong addition to this growing interest. The Mussato that emerges in this new volume leaves behind dated labels like “prehumanist,” and instead reveals the sophistication, genres, and models for Mussato's works, as well as his life, his associations with contemporaries like Dante, and his later reception.

The book consists of fourteen contributions grouped in three sections. In the first section, the authors look at topics related to the coronation of 1315 itself. Gabriella Albanese and Giorgio Ronconi use historical documentation and references within Mussato's works, respectively, to piece together new details of the laurel coronation, while Giovanna Gianola explores connections between two metric letters by Mussato. In the second section, four authors explore some of the works from Mussato's oeuvre. Luca Lombardo looks at the metric epistles, this time to focus on the sources for the work and editorial decisions underlying a future critical edition. Marino Zabbia and Rino Modonutti mine Mussato's historical works for biographical information. Bianca Facchini explores Mussato's reconceptualization of poetry toward the end of his life. The third section focuses on the reception of Mussato's Ecerinis through the centuries, both in Latin and in Italian. Claudia Villa and Piermario Vescovo situate Mussato within the context of his more famous contemporary, Dante Alighieri: Villa adds new details to the reception of Seneca in the early Trecento while Vescovo looks at the conception of tragedy in the works of Mussato and Dante. Attilio Grisafi also looks at the genre of classical tragedy, but his focus is on the co-option of the genre by humanist writers throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The final four contributions venture beyond the early modern world. Stefano Giazzon and Enrico Zucchi explore an eighteenth-century Italian translation of Mussato's Ecerinis and the broader eighteenth-century reception of the work, respectively. Stefano Verdino moves the story of reception into the nineteenth century, which witnessed several new interpretations of Mussato's work as well as remakes of the story of his titular character Ezzelino. The book concludes with an essay by Luca Morlino, who argues that there was strong interest in Mussato's writings in the early twentieth century, as evidenced by both translations and echoes of his work in the poet Ezra Pound.

This volume adds important components to the emerging picture of Mussato's life and works. Most of the essays focus on specific texts and/or literary studies, and thus the historical contexts in which Mussato lived and worked usually have to be filled in by the reader. Nevertheless, specialists interested both in Mussato's works and the broader culture of the early Trecento will want to be familiar with the many strong contributions to this volume. It is a book that adds new details to the fascinating, still-emerging picture of pre-Petrarchan humanism and its many cultural as well as historical contexts.