The poet, playwright, and translator Hanibal Lucić (ca. 1485–1553), from a patrician family on the Dalmatian island of Hvar, was one of the most distinguished writers of the Croatian Renaissance. A collection of his works in Croatian, Skladanja izvrsnih pisan razlicih (Collections of Excellent Diverse Poems), was published posthumously in Venice in 1556 by his illegitimate son and then rediscovered in the nineteenth century, with two editions published in 1847 and 1874, respectively. His stature was confirmed with a twentieth-century edition in 1968, in the series Pet stoljeća hrvatske književnosti, which, in effect, established a modern canon of Croatian literature.

So why publish—or review—a new edition of the works of this canonical author, especially when the nineteenth-century versions are freely available on the internet? No one who is curious about Lucić is going to be tempted into an impulse purchase on the basis of the book series’ presentation: the paper is cheap, the margins cramped, the standardized cover severely chaste. Yet Ivan Lupić’s critical edition of Lucić’s works is a significant scholarly event. One reason is that it collects together all of Lucić’s known works, including not just his verse in Croatian, but also all twenty-seven of his Italian sonnets, originally published in Venice in a companion volume to Skladanja, only recently discovered by Professor Lupić. This volume shows us Hanibal Lucić translating from Latin and composing verse in Italian, often in conversation with other poets in Dalmatia and beyond, as well as demonstrating (and expanding) the poetic capacity of the Croatian vernacular, thus establishing him as an important figure within a distinctively plurilingual Renaissance. More broadly, this also suggests new ways of approaching humanist activity on the eastern shores of the Adriatic, not just as multilingual but as something more: producing meaning by moving between and among languages and thus facilitating dialogue across cultural, linguistic, or contextual boundaries.

But there are further riches within this nondescript packaging. The series’ standardized format allows little room for interpretation, but Lupić’s wide-ranging introduction gives many suggestive indications of how one might read specific texts, as well as surveying the publishing history of Lucić’s books and verses (for, as Lupić shows, the poet “published” individual poems and selections by circulating them in manuscript form), exploring Lucić’s dedications and their implications, establishing the political preoccupations in his works, and tracing the network of correspondents recorded in his epistles. This, alongside an extensive chronology of Lucić’s life (with new data revising earlier assumptions, and some provocative but well-supported speculations), places Lucić and his work in in a far more developed historical and literary context than heretofore.

The critical apparatus is exemplary. The deft translations into Croatian of the Italian sonnets by Borna Treska render these accessible to a wider audience, while Lupić’s sensitive editorial emendations, an extensive bibliography (including the most important critical works), a guide to names and expressions, a very comprehensive glossary, and a selection of illustrations (mostly from the beautiful 1556 Marcolini editions), all contribute to making this edition indispensable. As is inevitable in such an ambitious undertaking, a few errors and omissions have crept in: Giovanni Matteo Bembo’s defense of Kotor took place in 1539, not 1538; Il Sero industrioso is a diligent Chinese silk producer, not a river in Central Asia as conjectured here; a long note on the history of Bologna omits the sole reason the city appears in Lucić’s verse—an eagle alighting there on Augustus’s tent as a portent of victory.

But any such criticisms are mere quibbles. Ivan Lupić has done scholarship a great service in this excellent new edition, which can confidently be expected to inspire new approaches to Hanibal Lucić and to Renaissance literature in Dalmatia and beyond.