Boccaccio and the Book: Production and Reading in Italy 1340-1520

Martin Eisner is Professor of Italian at Duke University.

His first three books show how an attention to the materiality of texts can transform our understandings of literary history, whether on the scale of the single manuscript, the single work, or the individual biography. In Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature: Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular (Cambridge UP, 2013), he shows Boccaccio’s crucial role in the construction of the Italian literary tradition by scrutinizing one remarkable manuscript. The book was published in Italian as Boccaccio e l'invenzione della letteratura italiana (Salerno, 2022). In Dante's New Life of the Book: A Philology of World Literature (Oxford UP, 2021), he demonstrates how investigating the transformations of Dante Vita nuova across multiple material forms, from medieval manuscripts to modern movies, can yield new interpretations. The book won the Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association. In Boccaccio, the Disguised Revolutionary, which is part of Reaktion Books's Renaissance Lives series, he brings into focus Boccaccio's innovative thinking about desire, language, gender, cultural diversity, and power through the lens of the manuscripts Boccaccio used and wrote.

His next project, provisionally entitled "Dante's Moon: The Curious History of a Cosmic Question”, proposes a new model of intellectual history that highlights how the reception of Dante’s Paradise produced new discursive spaces of poetry, politics, physics, protest, philology, and pedagogy in the works of Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Galileo, Angela Tarabotti, Vico, and Maria Montessori, respectively. His research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the American Academy in Rome, the American Philosophical Association, and the Fulbright Foundation.