ABSTRACT
De mulieribus ref lects the mature phase of Boccaccio’s literary career in this study. He began work on it in 1361, in a period in which he also dedicated himself to writing mainly scholarly encyclopaedic and biographical works in Latin under the inf luence of Petrarch’s humanistic ideals.1 While the text has recently enjoyed something of a renaissance among scholars,2 thanks in part to the debate over Boccaccio’s feminism, there has been relatively little research into the status it enjoyed during the Middle Ages and early modern period. Indeed, our current understanding of its reception is largely based on an analysis of the significant number of imitations and continuations that circulated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, together with studies of the text’s translation into Italian.3 As a complement to research on these topics, this chapter evaluates evidence for readers and reading practices located in some of the not inconsiderable number of surviving Latin manuscripts, including a comparison with the intended readership of the extant autograph manuscript. This is supplemented with a consideration of the only edition of De mulieribus printed before 1520, which is based on a fourteenth-century translation into Italian, and which, despite its importance as the first example of De mulieribus in print and the wealth of paratexts included in it, has not drawn as much critical attention as the later sixteenth-century editions which contain translations made by Giuseppe Betussi.
