Giovanni Boccaccio, Rime: The Complete Lyric Poetry. Trans. and notes by Richard Lansing. Intro. by Akash Kumar. The Lorenzo da Ponte Italian Library. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2025, xi, 243 pp.

I, like many medievalists, have so far focused primarily on Boccaccio’s Decameron and not on his lyric poetry. However, interspersed throughout this famous collection, there is poetry, the storytellers sing and dance, so we know that Boccaccio was certainly interested also in poetry. Indeed, any quick look, and then a closer analysis of his Rime easily confirms that Boccaccio the lyricist certainly deserves our full attention. Boccaccio’s poems, here reproduced on the left side were fully edited already by Antonio Lanza in 2010, consisting of a large group of firmly attributed poems (127), and a smaller group of texts that are uncertain in their authorship (19). A third group contains poems that have been consistently questioned as having been the result of Boccaccio’s pen, and those are not included here, except four sonnets that consist of an apologia regarding his disparagement of Dante’s Divina Commedia, so his response to the critics.