This new collection of essays on the life, works, and legacy of Giovanni Boccaccio is comprised of papers presented at the conference Boccaccio at 700: Medieval Contexts and Global Intertexts, held in 2013 at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies of Binghamton University. It brings together the work of important scholars from a variety of disciplines, interests, and methodologies. There are some excellent essays, many on topics that have been little explored that will interest Boccaccio scholars and medievalists generally. While there is no central issue or approach that unites the contributions, the editors have organized them under rubrics that suggest ways they might be considered together: “Material Contexts”; “Social Contexts: Friendship”; “Social Contexts: Gender, Marriage, and the Law”; “Political, Authorial Contexts: On Famous Women”; and “Literary Contexts and Intertexts.”

Two essays comprise the section “Material Contexts.” The first, by K. P. Clarke, suggests that Boccaccio's illustrated catchwords in his autograph Berlin manuscript (Hamilton 90) not only connect the quires as ordinary catchwords do, but that the characters depicted in them add to the story that came before and open onto what will follow, underscoring how the manuscript book will come together. In the second essay, Rhiannon Daniels studies the many paratexts in Boccaccio's works, his authorial interventions and dedications, and the dedications written by subsequent editors, all adding layers to his complex narration and complicating the connections between Boccaccio's fictional and biographical worlds.

Under the rubric of “Social Contexts” the editors include two essays on the subject of friendship and four that, in quite different ways, apply a gendered approach to Boccaccio's work. Tod Boli considers Boccaccio's friendships with young poets, in particular Mainardo Cavalcanti, and Jason Houston treats the classical rhetoric of friendship expounded in Boccaccio's letters as well as the friends and enemies to whom they refer. Alessia Ronchetti introduces the subject of emotion, in particular that of compassion, in the Elegia di madonna Fiammetta, gendered feminine in Fiammetta's appeal to an audience of sympathetic women. Essays by Mary Ann Case and Grace Delmolino apply a legal approach to Boccaccio's work, Case to the medieval debate about whether women share the same human nature as men, affirmed by Boccaccio in the Decameron but called into question in his De mulieribus claris. She also treats other aspects of canon law and in particular the maxim quod omnes tangit, or, what touches all must be approved by all, the issue propounded by Madonna Filippa in Decameron 6.7. Delmolino explains the notion in canon law of conjugal debt and applies it to a reading of Decameron 2.10, the tale of the old judge abandoned by his young wife who did not fall for the religious calendar he devised to exempt himself from his conjugal duty. In the final essay of this section Sara Díaz introduces the subject of misogamy, or the discourse against matrimony, espoused by Boccaccio in his biography of Dante, the Trattatello in laude di Dante, and in his Esposizioni on the Commedia.

In the section on famous women, Elizabeth Casteen takes Boccaccio back to his Neapolitan connections and, importantly, to his changing view of Queen Johanna I, negative in his earlier works (a she-wolf, adulteress, and murderer in his eclogues) yet the virtuous, wise, and strong queen of the De mulieribus claris. Casteen sees this dramatic shift as part of Boccaccio's evolving relations with the Angevin court. Christine de Pizan's twenty-eight references to Boccaccio in the Cité des dames are the subject of essays by Kevin Brownlee and Lori J. Walters. Brownlee lists and explains each while Walters sets them in the context of fifteenth-century Paris to explain both Christine's departures from Boccaccio's example (in her emphasis on the Virgin Mary and female saints) and her appeals to Queen Ysabel of France to emulate Johanna I, an Angevin queen and a Valois relative.

The final section of this miscellany concentrates on specific works of literature. Franklin Lewis offers an exhaustive discussion of the Persian, Asian, Latin, and European versions of the story of the pear tree of Decameron 7.9, with a nod also to Chaucer's “Merchant's Tale.” Katherine A. Brown provides a reading of two stories of beffe (8.5 and 8.6), or practical jokes, and their debt to the tradition of the fabliau. Filippo Andrei's essay demonstrates the influence of the Fiammetta in Spain and in particular on Fernando de Rojas's Celestina, and Nora Martin Peterson argues that the different nature of confession in the Decameron and in the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre reflects the time and religious change that separate the work of the two authors.

The volume is a welcome contribution to Boccaccio studies, but I find the term “global” in the title misleading. But for the piece by Lewis, the geographic reach of the articles is European.