La literatura medieval hispánica en la imprenta (1475-1600) eds. by María Jesús Lacarra y Nuria Aranda García (review)

This volume of essays accompanies the launch of COMEDIC (Catálogo de obras medievales impresas en castellano), an on-line, open-access database (http://comedic.unizar.es) created by the University of Zaragoza's "Grupo de Investigación Clarisel". In their preface to the anthology, María Coduras and María Jesús Lacarra outline the genesis and design of COMEDIC and provide readers with a view of the "back end" of the database, including the structuring of metadata, data management and programming systems used, and design principles of the database. As Coduras and Lacarra explain, the primary objective of the COMEDIC project is to study the transmission, evolution, transformation, and reception of medieval Castilian literature in the advent of print and the century following the incunable period, highlighting the success of certain genres above others, the ability of printers to serve the needs and desires of the market, and the ways in which medieval works took on new meaning as they traveled from one century and printed edition to another. At the time of the volume's publication in 2016, COMEDIC contained bibliographic entries detailing the early print editions of twenty-two medieval works. The database, like many other projects in Digital Humanities, is open to continual expansion and, at the time of this writing, COMEDIC offers bibliographical entries on twenty-four medieval works representing a wide range of genres, including -but not limited to- sentimental fictions, cancioneros, hagiography, and sapiential literature.

The twelve essays contained in this anthology are not only a testament to the labor of the COMEDIC team, but also to the kind of work that the database makes possible, as well as the evolution of Digital Humanities projects in the field. Five of the authors take a diachronic view of editions and textual evolution: José Aragüés Aldaz on the Leyenda de los santos, María Jesús Lacarra on the Libro de las propiedades de las cosas, Gaetano Lalomia on the editions of the Spanish translation of Boccaccio's Fiammetta, and María Carmen Marín Pina on the 16^th- century editions of Cárcel de amor. Marianela García Sampere's study of the Lo plant de la Verge María shows how the examination of editions over time sheds light on issues of authorship. Tree essays are dedicated to relationships between texts and images: Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua on text and images of vengeance in La estoria del noble Vespasiano, Daniela Santonocito on the woodcuts in the Libro de montería, and María Sanz Julián on the title pages of the Baladro del sabio Merlín. Josep Lluís Martos and Antonio Moreno Hernández contribute bibliographic descriptions of single editions: a cancionero and the Bellum Gallicum, respectively. Manuel José Pedraza turns to the influence and career of the printer Jorge Coci.

While most of the essays relate directly to titles represented in the database and focus on Castilian texts and editions produced in what is today Spain, two essays look at issues of translation and international networks of printers (Gaetano Lolomia, María Sanz Julián, and Manuel José Pedraza), reminding readers that, in the 16^th century, the transmission, reception, and evolution of medieval literature from many of the literary traditions now identified by the borders of modern states were transnational as well as diachronic processes. By turning the post-incunable period and focusing on how some medieval works moved from manuscript into print, COMEDIC expands upon the essential bibliographic store of other databases such as PhiloBiblon (http://bancrof.berkeley.edu/philobiblon/). Charles Faulhaber's essay on the history and future of PhiloBiblon provides readers with a concise history of the transition from humanities computing in medieval studies to the advent of the semantic web and Digital Humanities. Troughout, the essays continually...