This critical edition represents one of the major editorial achievements of vernacular Renaissance philosophy in the last decade. The volume reconstructs the text of the vulgarizations of Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae, translated and published in 1551 by Benedetto Varchi, one of the most important intellectuals of the new emergent academies in Renaissance Italy between the forties and fifties. The critical edition includes an extensive essay on the reception of Boethius's work in the Renaissance, both in the vernacular and Latin, and its impact on the making of Italian culture. The importance of Varchi's vulgarization, and therefore of Brancato's philological work, is testified to by the number of reprints and editions that appeared, beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing until the nineteenth, outshining the contemporary publications of Ludovico Domenichi's and Cosimo Bartoli's editions of the same text. In his introductory essay, Brancato contextualizes the origin of this vernacularization in the framework of the internal feuds within the Accademia Fiorentina. Futhermore, the historical significance of Boethius's text is reconstructed through an examination of all Latin and vernacular editions and commentaries published before 1551.

Varchi's translation was not a unicum in his literary production. Indeed, as Brancato shows in detail, Varchi had much experience with translation, at least from his earlier experience at the Accademia degli Infiammati. He translated Euclid, Cicero, Ammonius, Aristotle, and many other classical authors. Most of these translations remained in manuscript, but this is not the case for the Boethius text, which was published in Florence by Lorenzo Torrentino, and in this sense represents a privileged standpoint for understanding the theory and practice of Varchi's approach to translating. Thus, Brancato's decision to work on this text, and not only on a theoretical exposition on language like the Hercolano (the usual recourse of scholars for assessing Varchi as a translator and language theorist), is particularly welcome. Working on Boethius, Varchi confronts a long tradition of vernacular translation, starting with the medieval Florentine Alberto della Piagentina (1332) and proceeding forward to the most recent published version of Anselmo Tanzi (1520). Brancato shows how in this confrontation with the past, with the language of other classical authors, and with the various linguistic theories at play at the Accademia, Varchi matured his own language, finalizing his translation techniques. In other words, more than ten years before the Hercolano, Varchi used Boethius's text to establish the Florentine volgare, harmonizing the various tendencies of the spoken language with Pietro Bembo's codification.

The critical edition is based on two complete manuscripts (Florence, National Central Library, II.VIII.134 and Florence, Medicean Laurentian Library, Mediceo palatino 46), on three partial manuscripts (Florence, Medicean Laurentian Library, Mediceo palatino 113; Florence, Ricciardiana Library, 2834; and Rome, National Central Library, cod. 1805), and on eighteen printed books (six of the sixteenth century, six of the eighteenth century, four of the nineteenth century, and two of the twentieth century). At least three of the manuscript copies come from the author's scriptorium, and this makes Brancato's edition even more valuable in its restoration of Varchi's original intentions and linguistic choices. Brancato compiles a long list of errors, additions, and corrections, showing how Varchi worked in practice in the transition from manuscript to editio princeps. Brancato has also been able to trace the presence of other vernacularizations in Varchi's text, in particular those of Alberto della Piagentina, Anselmo Tanzi, and of the Commentum of Pseudo-Aquinas on Boethius. Finally, Brancato provides a detail examination of Varchi's language, with very specific examinations of spelling, phonetics, morphology, syntax, and deixis. Nothing is left to chance in this edition. At the end of the book there is a glossary that aims to show the relationship between Latin and vernacular and the new terms that Varchi mints. This book should be on the shelves of every scholar interested in sixteenth-century Italian linguistic theories and the dissemination of vernacular philosophy in Renaissance Italy.