Despite the 'poca scienza' announced in the acknowledgements, this essay about the massive phenomenon of translations into vernacular in 13th-and 14th-century Italy stands as an important contribution to the field of medieval studies. In her work, Cornish investigates the complex implications of volgarizzamento, traditionally the gate to the classics for those who could not read Latin, and casts light on the illiterates, a group that this book helps to define with less approximation and to account for its cultural agency.Cornish employs the prolific activity of volgarizzamento -she uses the Italian term in order to keep 'the odour of vulgarity associated with the language of the volgo' (p. 4) -as an indicator of social, cultural and literary dynamics. In response to the unalterable texts of the auctores, accessible only to readers learned in Latin, translators proceeded by 'domesticating' the canon. As Cornish points out, these writers did not aim at moving their readers to a higher level of literacy, but instead debased the text by adapting it to the horizon of the new audience. Cornish illustrates through convincing examples that in doing so the volgarizzatori prepared the ground for the philological discipline of the Renaissance -contrary to popular belief -and they empowered their readers to participate in the cultural undertaking (Cornish connects this strategy to contemporary practices such as the compilation of a readerbased canon or the internet-driven transformation of readers into writers). Each volgarizzamento, Cornish claims, substantially affected the general reception of the translated works and altered its own source, by making the crystallized texts of the auctores unstable.In Chapter I, 'Dressing Down the Muses', Cornish sets off to inquire into two short stories from Sacchetti's Trecentonovelle (66, 137), a text that speaks to the end of the age of volgarizzamenti -as is marked by Boccaccio's gradual turning away from the literary use of the vernacular. Sacchetti describes the volgarizzamento as a two-fold process of corruption produced by both authors and readers. Cornish emphasizes also an interesting gender implication: the sumptuary laws included in the narration of novella 66 serve the purpose of connecting high culture and haute couture, the former out of the illiterate audience's reach, the latter out of the women's. In Chapter II, 'The Authorship of the Reader', Cornish analyzes the volgarizzamenti's tradition, dictated less by the faithfulness to the original than by the mutability of the vernacular. However incompatible with the Lachmannian method, the study of this tradition provides important information on the composite
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