The Poet's Wisdom

Reviews / Votes

Kircher's combined talent for literary criticism and historical contextualization results in a most rewarding fusion which should be of inspiration to a new generation of Renaissance scholars.
Rocco Rubini, Forum Italicum 42.1 (2008): 231-33

Kircher has given the field an important work of literary criticism and philosophical investigation worthy of consideration from all scholars of Giovanni Boccaccio, challenging the reader to regard the Decameron as a foundational text of the philosophy of Italian Humanism.
Jason Houston, Heliotropia, 6.1-2 (2009)

The Poet's Wisdom illustrates conclusively how fundamental these exchanges [between humanists, clerics and layman] are to understanding the central thinkers and texts of Renaissance Italy.
Emily O'Brien, Erasmus Rotterdam Society Yearbook, 29 (2009): 108-114

Readers... 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 Soren 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.
Wiliam Kennedy, Renaissance Quarterly, 2006

Like Ronald Witt's In the Footstep of the Ancients, Kircher's The Poet's Wisdom sheds new light on a critical period in the emergence of modern Western thought and letters.
David Marsh, Italian Quarterly, 2005.

The Poet's Wisdom is an excellent book. Its clarity of argument of exemplary, and it presents a convincing picture of the Decameron that answers some questions that have been nagged at critics over the years. It is a splendid addition to our understanding of early humanism and, especially, provides a new way of interpreting the Decameron. It should be read by scholars and students alike for its insights into the emerging world of Italian humanism.
Stephen Kolsky, Speculum (2007) 1006-1007.