Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival: Seven Sacred Plays (review)

196 Reviews Tale. A second observation arises from the perennial problem of determining the primary audience for an edition such as this. The back cover describes it as a teaching edition, and while that somewhat understates the usefulness of this work for scholars as well as students, it seems fair to assume that much of the material is assembled to meet the needs of a student reader. There is, nevertheless, some ambivalence about this. The inclusion of textual variants is a case in point. For a scholarly reader, selected variants are of little help. One needs all or nothing. O n the other hand, some of the variants or marginalia recorded are scarcely necessary for a student to consider. Similarly, one looks for some explanation of editorial practice in a text with a scholarly audience in m i n d — a n expectation that is encouraged by the recording of manuscript variants; absence of such preliminary material is perhaps acceptable in a teaching edition (although even there some basic account is desirable). These two criticisms aside, I should say that this edition of Chaucer's dream poems is an excellent addition to the Longman series. Students will be enormously helped by the very full glossing and annotation (although the latter might be better without the occasional speculative interpretation), as they will by the introductory essays. The editors have rightly assumed that individual readers will be interested in different poems, and so have made their introductions wholly self-contained, while nevertheless including appropriate cross-referencing. The comprehensive bibliography will be a great boon to students and scholars alike. What is needed now is a companion volume of non-Chaucerian dream poems; or perhaps two, with one containing exclusively Scottish materials, for the Scottish tradition deserves considering in its o w n right. Peter Whiteford Department of English Victoria University of Wellington Pulci, Antonia, Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival: Seven Sacred P Other Voice in Early Modern Europe), ed. James Wyatt Cook and Barbara Collier Cook; trans. James Wyatt Cook; Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1996; paper; pp. xxx, 281; R.R.P. US$15.00. This volume represents a novelty. It collects for the first time plays by, reasonably attributed to a fifteenth-century Italian housewife, Antonia Pulci. Secondly, it must be one of the few editions of the complete works of an early female playwright in the whole of European literature. Antonia Pulci's dates are 1452 to 1501, thus she dies well before the performance of what is regarded as the first significant vernacular comedy in the Italian canon, Reviews 197 Machiavelli's Mandragola. Obviously it might be argued that Antonia Pulci is not, qua woman, a totally 'other,' or partly suppressed, or misogynisticallly overlooked, writer. She is not one of the victims of the definition of w o m a n by bile or hysteria or lust which is highlighted in the introduction to this series, 'The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe'. Antonia Pulci was married into the highly creative clan which dominated the city of Florence at the turn of the century (14801527 ). This group surrounded Lucrezia Tornabuoni, the mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the patron of, amongst others, Poliziano. If ever there was a literary circle in which women, or non-aristocrats, or journeyman stonecutters could come to the fore, this was it. The great thing in the De' Medici circle was to be versed in culture and well-read, to know Latin, and better still, classical Greek. Money could be found for the provision of bursaries, the purchase of books, and particularly the funding of translations. The historical overview appended.to the opening of each volume in this series, drafted by the general editors Margaret King and Arthur Rabil, Jr., reminds us of the precarious position of medieval women, their exclusion from power, their 'problem of speech,' the imposition of the dowry system and the imperatives of not 'exceeding their sex.' In the Italian Renaissance, however, vernacular poetry began to be cultivated with the same passion as Latin. There was a large new market for written material after the invention of printing in the mid-15th century. This was particularly...