Boccaccio's Heroines: Power and Virtue in Renaissance Society (review)
sexuality and femininity. In such cases they were “adapting, rather than adopting, the clerical ideas” (293) which still retained a strong hold upon their thinking. Readers of this journal will find the textual analyses of The Poet’s Wisdom wonderfully rich and rewarding. Kircher excavates their meaning and significance while accounting for social, political, and intellectual influences upon them, and with the skills of an acute literary critic he measures them carefully against the writings of mendicant preachers. He brings to the task a comprehensive interest in the philosophy of history, textual hermeneutics, and the integral relationship between style and thought, as parenthetical references to the theoretical work of Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Hans Blumenberg, and G. Heath King enrich his detailed footnotes on the relevant scholarship in history, literary studies, theology, and philosophy. This is a head-clearing book that will reward scholars in all those fields. WILLIAM J. KENNEDY Cornell University