In bringing back to scholarly attention a vast corpus of Trecento texts dealing with the Kingdom of Naples, Musto's volume sets out to fill a documentary lacuna, while also challenging conventional views of the Italian Renaissance. As stated in the introduction, the goal of the volume is to problematize traditional approaches to historical texts in light of cultural theory and reappraise fifty years of “Anglophone scholarship on Medieval Italy” (xxix). The result is a broad investigation of visual, archival, and literary sources penned by both well-known (e.g., Villani, Petrarca, and Boccaccio) and often-neglected authors (e.g., Clareno and Gravina). Their narratives, Musto shows, are highly rhetorical texts that weave together facts and fictions, thus calling for a consideration on the nature of history writing.

The book contains ten variously sized sections, opening with an introduction and closing with a summary. Chapters 2–6 scrutinize the available evidence in the form of a checklist of authors (chapter 2), a catalogue of sources to be found in their works (chapter 3), a list of their rhetorical strategies (chapter 4), and a selection of historical accounts modeled on medieval romance literature (chapter 5) or in dialogue with public art (chapter 6). This first block of chapters not only addresses the general goal announced in the introduction but also complements it with additional information. For example, chapter 3 lists a number of texts using rumor as evidence (58–60). Similarly, chapter 4 sets out to interpret the deployment of formal features (e.g., linguistic choices, rhetorical strategies, narrative structures) with the social background of their users as a way to reconstruct interpretive communities. In doing so, therefore, these chapters not only contribute to the scholarly understanding of the Italian South but they also raise a number of issues that might be relevant for legal historians, such as Vallerani and Sbriccoli, as well as literary critics interested in the application of Hayden White's Metahistory to the interpretation of historical sources.

The book's central thesis and main argument emerge clearly in chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 7 focuses on rituals of punishment and prison dialogues—two themes, the author argues, whose representations defy modern-day standards of factual accuracy and offer a point of entry into the culture of premodern historians. Through an astute analysis of Gravina's descriptions of frenzied mobs and the gruesome executions of the presumed assassins of Andrew of Hungary or the pro-Hungarian judge Martuccio, Musto effectively questions the factual reliability of atrocities such as ritual cannibalism. Absent from legal literature and conjured up, sometimes in suspiciously similar terms, by different authors in relation to different events, cannibalism could plausibly be, the author contends, a specimen of enargeia to be judged in light of its rhetorical effectiveness rather than analyzed as an existing practice relevant to the field of anthropology.

Chapter 8 looks at the black legend of the Angevins of Naples, its origin in Hungarian propaganda against Giovanna I, and its crystallization in Petrarca's Familiares. Effectively combining close reading with insights coming from gender and postcolonial studies, the author convincingly traces still enduring perceptions of Naples and the south as a site of unleashed passions, dangerous intrigues, and extravagant decadence to Petrarca's misogynist demonization of Queen Giovanna and her court. As it moved from Petrarca's letters to the histories penned by Villani, Gravina, and Boccaccio, Musto demonstrates that the history of Angevin Naples became entangled into some sort of Orientalist topos, the factual accuracy of which historians should therefore handle with a certain degree of skepticism.

That this black legend, as chapter 9 asserts, still influences current scholarly interpretations of Southern Italy is an interesting insight that will certainly be useful for future historical investigation into this often-neglected area of Renaissance Italy. As Musto contends, the tendency to rely on histories penned by Flavio Biondo and other humanistically trained historians might have indeed induced scholars of Naples and the south to reiterate a black legend rooted in Petrarca's letters but not confirmed by the other evidence discussed in this useful study.