BOCCACCIO, Giovanni.

First edition outside Italy of Boccaccio’s Il Corbaccio (‘The Crow’), also known as ‘The Labyrinth of Love,’ very finely printed. It is the only edition containing the page by page notes of the editor, the Florentine humanist and philologist Jacopo Corbinelli (1535-90), including numerous references to texts in ancient Greek, for which it is esteemed. It describes the dream of the protagonist, who has called on Death to end his life, made miserable by his unrequited love of a widow. In his dream the widow’s husband appears to him to free him from the Labyrinth of Love into which he has fallen. The spirit of the husband warns the protagonist about the evils of women, describing his own experiences with his wife and alerting the protagonist to her many shortcomings. He invites the protagonist to take vengeance on women by writing down all that he has learned in his dream, which the protagonist promises to do. On waking, he finds that he is no longer troubled and finishes with an invective against female wickedness.

The dedicatory letter to Vincentio Magalotti, a Florentine nobleman, describes how Corbinelli, who had arrived in Paris in 1568, found himself lonely and destitute, and how he was supported by the kindness of Magalotti’s relative, Signor Mannelli, of another noble Florentine family. Corbinelli describes their ‘sad’ discussions of the upheavals in France at the time – caused by the Wars of Religion – which would end with dinner and readings of Plutarch in French, or Pliny. The two new friends also possessed a very fine manuscript of Il Corbaccio written by an antecedent of Mannelli in 1384, which they greatly desired to see printed; the orthography of this manuscript was preserved in the printing of the present edition. Corbinelli, who supported himself during his time in Paris by selling books and tutoring the children of noblemen – and where he also met Torquato Tasso – praises the wisdom and excellent fashion of Parisian women, but he would in fact marry an Englishwoman he met there.