Elsa Filosa’s book awarded honorable mention of the MLA Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies

The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is awarding Elsa Filosa honorable mention for the twelfth Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies for her book Boccaccio’s Florence: Politics and People in His Life and Work, published by the University of Toronto Press.

The Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies is awarded biennially, and alternately with the Howard R. Marraro Prize, for an outstanding book by a member of the association in the field of Italian literature or comparative literature involving Italian. The prize will be awarded at the MLA Convention in Philadelphia in January.

The prize committee writes:

Elsa Filosa’s Boccaccio’s Florence: Politics and People in His Life and Work makes new and important contributions to Boccaccio’s essential political dimension, resulting in an expanded context for viewing him as a writer and as a person. The book provides a
wealth of detail about the Florentine conspiracy of 1360, looking both at the conspirators who were directly punished and at the resulting changes in the city of Florence. It is from this perspective (cogently combined with earlier Boccaccian experiences) that Filosa
rereads Boccaccio’s political history, which is then very usefully tied to his various late literary works. In this context, Boccaccio’s treatments of Petrarch and especially of Dante are of particular importance.

Congratulations, Elsa!