Given the breadth of Martin McLaughlin’s scholarship—from classical literature to “Dante, Petrarch, and Vernacular Humanism to Verga, Vittorini, Pavese, Fenoglio, Calvino, Eco, Tabucchi and beyond, including travel literature and translation studies” (xvii)—this hefty volume in homage to his distinguished career reads much more like a journal of high-quality manuscripts than as a cohesively themed festschrift. It contains a whopping twenty-eight essays. With Renaissance Quarterly’s readership in mind, I shall highlight just a few, but certainly not the only worthy contributions from the first half of the chronologically organized tome.

Zygmunt G. Barański presents a deeply contextualized understanding of the Orpheus myth in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, taking into account Virgilian and Ovidian antecedents, and the traces of their elaboration in works including the Bucolicum carmen and Familiares. At the heart of his essay, Barański boldly, but not unpersuasively, asserts Petrarch’s lyric collection of fragments to be “the great overlooked Orphic text of the Western tradition” (15), reading Petrarch’s Orpheus as a civilizing counterpoint to Dante’s infernal monstra and noting Petrarch’s pioneering linkage of the figure of Eurydice to Christ.

Brian Richardson’s essay is also among the most ambitious, tackling a massive quantity of Renaissance Italian poetic production—extempore Latin and vernacular lyric compositions—and he does so with aplomb, providing perhaps the first categorization with a qualitative/theoretical valuation of this imporant but almost entirely overlooked subgenre of poetry. Richardson divides his examples into two typologies: social performances of orally recited extemporaneous verse, and impromptu lyric invention embedded within epistolary correspondence. Richardson culls examples from Cassandra Fedele to Leonardo da Vinci, and from Camillo Querno (the Archipoeta) to Bernardo Accolti, in order to examine the ways in which receivers assessed the quality of publicly recited compositions. Adapting a conceptualization previously proffered by Bill Overton for eighteenth-century English correspondence, Richardson also attempts to analyze the embedded lyric spontaneity in the letters of Aretino, Michelangelo, and Machiavelli, among others, offering a novel approach to conceptualizing poetic sprezzatura in this period.

Meriting special distinction, Peter Hainsworth’s contribution rescues John Dickson Batten’s illustrations to Dante’s Inferno (1897–1900) from their relative oblivion. While many of Batten’s pen and ink drawings have a marmoreal, classicizing, pre-Raphaelite sensibility, beautifully reproduced by Legenda, the detail and demonic expressions, especially in “The Devils Fallen in the Pitch” (248) are arresting, making the way that Hainsworth analyzes Batten as a “subtle and careful interpreter” of Dante through the illustrative precedents of Blake and Frederick Pollock and the text of George Musgrave reminiscent of McLaughlin’s significant scholarship on Dante reception in England.

Both Joseph Farrell and Letizia Panizza (whose bio is conspicuously absent from the “Notes on the Contributors,” ix–xiv) focus on striking differences between works on the same figure—in Farrell’s case, the crucial distinctions between the Carlo Goldoni and the Carlo Gozzi depictions of Don Giovanni, and in Panizza’s case, the lives of Hypatia of Alexandria as they diverged in the writings of John Toland and Diodata Saluzzo. Other thought-provoking studies on early modern literary subjects include: a comparison by Elisabetta Tarantino of the Auster in Lucan, Dante, and Vigil to argue that Boccaccio’s spirante turbo offers a nuanced defence of interrelational tolerance; a detailed presentation by Michelangelo Zaccarello of the philological advances concerning Franco Sacchetti’s Trecento novelle; an examination by Marco Dorigatti of the centripetal forces of imperial authority in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and the ultimately overriding competing centrifugal forces of power exerted by myriad individual quests for autonomy, both at the diegetic level and at that of Ariosto-poet; a rigorous intertextual comparison by Elena Lombardi of the violent cutting of Lucan’s figural enchanted wood by Ariosto and Tasso to effect poetic appropriation; and a clarification by Hilary Gatti of the allegorical message of Bruno’s second dialogue in his Cena de le ceneri. Essays on early modern architecture also include contributions by Francesco Paolo Fiore on Sebastiano Serlio and by John Woodhouse on Giacomo Leoni between Alberti and Palladio.

In short, this volume of densely written essays aptly celebrates McLaughlin’s career as one of today’s most wide-ranging author-editor-translators, credited with four monographs, twelve edited or coedited books, and another eleven book-length translations.