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Justin Steinberg, Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). xiii + 234 pp.; 17 black-and-white figures and 1 table. ISBN 0-268-04122-9. $30.00.
Two manuscripts lie at the heart of this examination of the early circulation of Dante's poetry, and of Dante's reaction to and anticipation of his contemporary reception. From the end of the thirteenth century to the first quarter of the fourteenth, the Memoriali bolognesi, official registers of the Bolognese communal government that record social contracts and financial transactions, include in their margins and between contracts 'mini-anthologies' of vernacular rime. These provide the only extant transcriptions of Dante's poetry copied during his lifetime, and include the earliest lcnown fragments of the Divina Commedia. The second document, the thirteenth-century lyric anthology Vaticano Latino 3793, preserves more than half the Italian lyric corpus....