Italian
Academic & Teaching staff
Dr Rhiannon Daniels
Lecturer in Italian
+44 (0)113 343 3589
Biography
My research is focused on the reception of Boccaccio, primarily across the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. I am particularly interested in finding ways of using the material form of manuscripts and printed books to (re)construct histories of reading and book production techniques. My current project is concerned with studying the Decameron in sixteenth-century Italy as a 'sociological text'; using the complex relationship and reciprocal influences that exist between the material form of the text, the printers and editors who produced it, and the readers who consumed it to investigate its cultural impact, including its significance for the development of a literary vernacular prose.
Together with Professor Stephen Milner and Dr Guyda Armstrong at the University of Manchester I am organizing a series of events entitled 'Locating Boccaccio in 2013' to celebrate the 700th-anniversary of Boccaccio's birth. This will include an international conference on 12-13 July 2013 and an exhibition of printed books at the John Rylands Library in Manchester. Updates will be posted on the conference blog.
I am a graduate of the University of Leeds: my first degree was in German and Italian, I completed an MA in Medieval Studies at the Institute for Medieval Studies, and returned to Italian Studies to write a doctoral thesis on Boccaccio. In 2003-04 I was a lecturer in Italian at the University of Birmingham, before accepting a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship to continue my research at Leeds. In 2011 I was appointed to a lectureship.
Teaching
In 2007 I received a Faculty of Arts Teaching Development Prize.
| Level | Module |
| Level 1 | Art and Literature in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: An Introduction |
| Level 2 |
Introduction to Dante: Inferno |
| Level 2 | Tall Tales: An Introduction to the Italian Short Story |
| Level 3 |
From Pen to Press: Making and Reading Books in Italy, 1300-1600 |
| Level 3 | Translation into English |
Research and selected publications
Monograph
Boccaccio and the Book: Production and Reading in Italy 1340-1520 (Oxford: Legenda, 2009)
Edited volumes
Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio, edited with Guyda Armstrong and Stephen J. Milner (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2013)
'Transmissions and Transformations in Medieval and Renaissance Textual Cultures', edited with Guyda Armstrong, special issue, Italian Studies, 64.2 (2009)
Book chapters and Journal Articles
'Rethinking the Critical History of the Decameron: Boccaccio's Epistle XXII to Mainardo Cavalcanti', Modern Language Review, 106 (2011)
'Materiality and Marginalia in Renaissance Editions of the Decameron', in Caro Vitto: Essays in Memory of Vittore Branca, ed. by Jill Kraye and Laura Lepschy, Special Supplement 2, The Italianist, 27 (2007), 86-100
'Controversy, Censorship and Boccaccio's Life of Pope Joan', Studi sul Boccaccio, 34 (2006), 185-98
Editorial work
I have been Assistant Editor of Italian Studies since 2008.
Research supervision
I am able to supervise research on medieval literature and history of the Italian book.