publication at the urging of his parents, and it is a labor of love. Used as a catalogue of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century staged musical entertainments that are related to Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, this is a valuable resource. The analyses, however, as well as the first chapter on sixteenth-century musical settings of excerpts from Ariosto’s epic, suffer from the author’s inexperience. Because the text was published posthumously, it has not received the rigorous review process typical of scholarly publications—a process that is particularly necessary when, as here, a scholar is writing outside his chosen field. Music genres are routinely misiden- tified, and the critique of musicological literature shows a superficial understanding of the field. A rigorous review might have purged the text of petulance, as shown in a lengthy diatribe against feminist scholarship that is followed by an unfortunate chapter subheading regarding “unauthorized pastoral penetration” (97–100). Sixteenth-century Italian terms that are discussed at length in the musicological literature are poorly used, as is the term plettro. While Ariosto’s conception of a miglior plettro may indeed refer to another poet’s superior pen or to a plectrum used to pluck the strings of a lute, the author translates this term alternately as a lyre, a piece of tortoise shell, or a poet (61–63). The text meanders, with material that should be relegated to footnotes appear- ing in the body of the text, and it indulges in needless hyperbole. The accompanying CD-ROM contains transcriptions of twenty-eight entertain- ments, most of which are more readily available on the http://corago.unibo.it website, although the three works transcribed from manuscript are a welcome addition to the scholarly literature. As indicated in the transcriptions’ editorial guidelines, the word “opera” in the book’s title should be understood to include all manner of spectacles that include some element of music, including intermedi, tournaments, jousts, and dances. It is unclear why the editors chose to print the second volume of this work as a PDF file located on a CD tucked into the back cover of the printed book, which is not identified as the first volume of a two-volume set. While the PDF file does enable full-text searches using the browser’s search command, this utility is counterbalanced by the dif- ficulty posed by the general absence of CD-ROM drives in today’s computers. Anne MacNeil, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill doi:10.1017/rqx.2019.578 Dante’s Tears: The Poetics of Weeping from “Vita nuova” to the “Commedia.” Rossana Fenu Barbera. Biblioteca dell’“Archivum Romanicum,” Serie 1: Storia, Letteratura, Paleografia 468. Florence: Olschki, 2017. xviii + 218 pp. €34. Tears can indicate almost any kind of emotion—grief, joy, regret, penitence, pity, fear —and they are everywhere to be found in Dante. The Vita nuova is fairly drenched in RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY 344 VOLUME LXXIII, NO. 1