Grisel y Mirabella. Edizione critica, introduzione e note di Maria Grazia Ciccarello Di Blasi (review)

Although studies of the novela sentimental and the prose fiction tradition have seen a veritable boom in scholarly interest since Alan Deyermond’s famous rallying call in 1975, access to modern critical editions of several of the most famous texts has remained elusive. It is for this reason that Maria Grazia Ciccarello Di Blasi’s 2003 edition of Juan de Flores’s Grisel y Mirabella is a welcome addition to the libraries of medieval and early modern scholars. Until now, most scholars have relied upon Barbara Matulka’s The Novels of Juan de Flores and their European Diffusion (1931) or facsimile copies of the manuscript; since these versions are out of print, lack of access has been a significant problem.

This critical edition, with the introductory material and notes written in Italian by Ciccarello Di Blasi, features two main parts followed by an appendix and a bibliography. Part 1 includes three introductory essays: thirteen pages on the genre of the sentimental romance, six pages of biographical information about Juan de Flores, and forty-four pages on Grisel y Mirabella. The last discusses the plot, style, and some of the primary literary antecedents that inform the text, including the ars amatoria tradition and medieval debates about women. In Part 2 there is an introduction to this critical edition of the work (83–207) that offers a meticulous philological presentation of the extant manuscripts. Ciccarello Di Blasi includes a list of the translations of Grisel y Mirabella into English, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Polish (as well as the bi-, tri-, and quadrilingual editions of the work), their dates, and where they are currently available. She presents tables that demonstrate divergences among manuscripts and posits the history of the manuscript tradition from which extant copies were originally made. These pages are extensively researched and demonstrate Ciccarello Di Blasi’s considerable skill as a philologist and paleographer. The sheer number of extant editions are presented in a digestible way and the relationships among them are readily apparent. Ciccarello Di Blasi does much to elucidate and map the changes to the text among the different printings. These pages are further evidence of the broad popularity of Flores’s work throughout Europe and the necessity of a modern critical edition for this text.

In her presentation of the text of Grisel y Mirabella, Ciccarello Di Blasi relies primarily on the edition of the manuscript held at the Biblioteca Trivulziana in Milan (Codex 940), which dates to the first half of the sixteenth century and is the only complete manuscript of the text. The editor has done a sensible job clarifying the stemma codicum and her criteria for transcription. The text itself is presented clearly with line numbers in the margins, includes breaks for different sections, and follows current trends in conserving the original version of the text, except to maintain consistency in capitalization, expand abbreviations, and modernize the division of word breaks. The use of accent marks and diacritic signs has been likewise updated according to modern conventions. Approximately half of each page is dedicated to notes with variants from the different manuscript fragments.

Scholars of the history of the book may be particularly interested in examining the appendix, in which Ciccarello Di Blasi includes a full text of the printed version of the work so that readers may assess the manuscript tradition against the role played by editors and copyists at a print shop. The division of these versions also results in readings of the story that may be somewhat surprising for readers familiar with Grisel y Mirabella. To name but one example, the manuscript edition does not begin with the famous opening: “Tractado compuesto por Joan de Flores a su amiga” and readers looking for that line will have to consult the appendix for the printed version of the text. For each version of the text, the editor includes separate notes: there...