Looking for the fifteenth-century author: "De ilustres mujeres en romance"

Abstract

The fifteenth-century Spanish translator of Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus enjoyed the advantage of being able to explain exactly what he understood the meaning of the original to be, a privilege rarely afforded to a twentieth-century translator. Even given this extra edge, the constraints are enormous. George Steiner marvels that there can be serious alternity of meaning and expressive form inside the same language-family and cultural lattice" (393). An examination of glosses and interpolations to the text will lead to a partial portrait of the glossator, whose Romance language placed him in the right language-family, and whose training located him in the right cultural lattice. The reader, aware of the glossator's moral stance and judgments, and of his attitude toward Boccaccio should then be equipped to perceive two chronologically and perhaps spiritually distinct layers in the texto