{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.026701119724375538, 'fraction_numerical': 0.00818260120585702, 'mean_word_length': 4.9411764705882355, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Albert Russell Ascoli A Local Habitation and a Name: Imagining Histories in the Italian Renaissance

A Local Habitation and a Name: Imagining Histories in the Italian Renaissance. Albert Russell Ascoli. New Yor: Fordham University Press, 2011. Pp. x + 387. This volume is a collection of nine essays on canonical authors of the Italian Renaissance: Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Tasso. Eight of these essays have appeared separately in print in various journals between 1990 and 2008 and are here only minimally revised; one, on Petrarch's Familiarum Rerum, is new. Nonetheless, they do indeed form a collection unified in at least four ways. One is simply the cross-referencing among what their author now calls chapters : an essay on Machiavelli's Clizia, for example, refers to the one on Boccaccio's Decameron 7.9, a tale which furnished some of the meanings of character names in the play. A second is the sharing of themes across essays: issues such as the relationship to patrons and politics, or male representations of women and of gender, reappear several times, inviting these chapters to talk to each other (12). A third way is the similarity of method: close reading of a passage, involving a pursuit of intertextual traces and the significance of names, then broadened out to display the implications of its issues for the work more generally. In this regard we see the reading process of one very fine reader at work on a number of important texts, whose authors certainly were reading one another. The fourth is a theoretical framework, indicated in part by the title of the volume: drawn from Theseus's reference in A Midsummer Night's Dream to the poets' giving of specific names and places to the products of their imagination, it introduces a series of discussions, strewn throughout the volume, on the interrelatedness of literature and history, fiction and reality, imagination and memory, and thus also of formalist and historicist approaches to reading. Ascoli strongly suggests that not only he but also the writers he discusses were engaged in reflecting on these interrelationships. Most of the essays take up this interrelationship in one way or another. The opening essay, on Petrarch's Mont Ventoux letter, compares how Petrarch situates himself there in an unresolved middle