Matrimoni di antico regime. Daniela Lombardi
contrast with the decorous formalism of painting (51-52), surely owes much of its emotional charge to Giovanni's upbringing as the sole surviving child of his widowed mother. My chief complaint about this elegant and potent book is its restrictive insistence on the revelatory power of literary texts. As an aficionado of vernacular chronicles, I would take exception with Martines' brusque dismissal of "traditional historical sources such as chronicles and other forms of flat (prose) documentation: these require no concerted analysis in the literary-social mode" (266). For all their apparent artlessness, chronicles can reveal the passions, obsessions, rancor, and affections of their authors as clearly as the poetry of a Francesco degli Alberti does his — if they are read with the informed and sensitive intelligence that Martines applies to Alberti's poetry. Nor would I agree that "[a]s a guide to the minds and sensibilities of people, the flat document, the prosaic record, must always be . . . oversimple and perfunctory" (267). Of course, any historian's presentation of Victorian England is bound to blur and fade beside the indelible precision of Dickens' characters and settings, but so too will nearly any other novelist's. As evocations of human emotions and social interactions, scholarly readings of the documentary record may all too often seem oversimple and perfunctory; but must they always be so? The fault, I fear, lies not in our documents, but ourselves. When read well, read wisely, read above all imaginatively — in a word, when read as Martines reads his love sonnets, political canzoni, and cruel beffe — even so prosaic a text as an account book or an inventory can disclose just as effectively as poetry "the ways in which people both daydreamed and carried out their ordinary activities under an aura of social ideals and stresses" (267). DANIEL BORNSTEIN Texas A & M University