The history and influence of the vernacular best-selling book in sixteenth-century Europe has yet to be written. When it finally is, the majority of scholars will be surprised to learn of many books they barely, if at all, knew, and of their broad diffusion and impact on the material culture and social imaginary of early modernity. The late fifteenth-century Castilian sentimental romance Cárcel de Amor by Diego de San Pedro is one of these enormously influential books, as are Celestina, Amadís de Gaula, and Grisel y Mirabella. Cárcel’s reception in sixteenth-century Europe was nothing short of astonishing. Published, translated, and even made over into different forms of art, it was one of the most popular and significant books of imaginative prose in early modernity. Composed by San Pedro, probably in the early 1480s, for the amusement of the nobles at the court of the Catholic Monarchs, and first printed at Barcelona in 1492, there are some sixty-one known editions of the text, including translations into five languages, which appeared between 1492 and 1675.

Emily Francomano's splendid case study of Cárcel’s editorial, intellectual, material, and social history across Europe in the sixteenth century traces how it was transformed from a Castilian sentimental romance into a broad cultural multimedia phenomenon, which she calls The Prison of Love. In it, she establishes a model, and a firm foundation, for constructing the collective history of the best-selling, most influential books of early modernity. Francomano outlines how the The Prison of Love crisscrossed networks of readers, writers, editors, translators, printers, and artists as it adapted different material forms that matched each of its evolving cultural and ideological contexts. At the same time, going well beyond description, Francomano's history interrogates the reasons why this transformative process may have taken place and gone on for so very long: not just how but why San Pedro's Cárcel became the transnational phenomenon called The Prison of Love, as it was recast, retold, and reinvented, adapting itself to both new geographic and social venues, as well as inserting itself into new media.

Although a short review cannot do justice to the subtlety, completeness, and complexity of Francomano's analysis of the transformation of Cárcel into this European cultural phenomenon, a précis of one of Cárcel’s makeovers will help illuminate the range of the work's metamorphosis and the depth and breadth of Francomanos's study. Since the 1940s, we have known that the Musée de Cluny houses a tapestry known as Lérian et Lauréolle, one of a series of nine that represented the main scenes of Cárcel de Amor. The tapestries were the gift of Francis I to his sister-in-law Renée de France, upon her marriage to Ercole II d'Este in April of 1528. The tapestries, however, are not inspired directly by San Pedro's work, but by the French version of it, Prison d'amour (1526), which itself erases San Pedro's name from the text, and is based on Lelio Manfredi's Italian translation of the original at the court of Ferrara in 1513. (Manfredi was a favorite of Alfonso I d'Este, Ercole's father.) In chapter 8, “From Text to Textile,” Francomano follows L'Histoire de Lérian et Lauréolle in its transmutation from text to tapestry, and into the cosmopolitan world of conspicuous consumption embraced by the high aristocracy of the sixteenth century. Through her comprehensive analysis of the tapestries, she weaves together the familial ties that intertwined the blue-blooded domains of Francis I and the court of Ferrara, revealing Francis's bid to forge strategic family relationships for his political ambitions in Italy.

In fine, both through the meticulous gathering of the facts and their imaginative interpretation, Francomano unfolds how the emblematic Prison of Love, with its origins at the Castilian court of Fernando and Isabel, traveled both vertically and horizontally, transforming itself across the social landscape of Europe. As she does so, Francomano exposes with striking clarity the transnational networks of intellectual and social power that emerged there via the book trade in the first half of the sixteenth century. The Prison of Love is a study that everyone interested in the history of literacy and material bibliography, and their effects on the formation of the early modern social and political imaginary, should read.