Reviews 121 prenda l'esempio del commente a migaeque canorae del v. 322, che Piccolomini glossa idest sonus et tuviitiis verborum tumidorum sine sueco, sine pondere, sine rebus. Lo studioso traduce «vale a dire il suono squillante di parole timide senza sueco, senza peso, senza sostanza» : se da un lato confesso di non comprendere la scelta di «parole timide» per verborum tumidorum (semmai«gonfie, roboanti,» ma si tratta con ogni probabilité di un semplice lapsus che ha indotto a leggere timidorum), dall'altro mi pare ottima la resa di sine rebus con «senza sostanza,» che contribuisce efficacemente a rimarcare 1 importanza che Piccolomini assegnava aile res, corne giustamente anche Refini sottolinea (p. 198, n. 131). Ampliando la prospettiva, si potrebbe affermare corne all'erudito senese sia estranea la possibilité di una poesía caratterizzata da un'autonomia del significante che a priori prescinda da un nesso col significato, e quindi con la realté. Questa prospettiva inizia a manifestarsi nella seconda meté del Cinquecento, quando la distanza tra verba e res si accentua per approdare poi al concettismo barocco. L'Apparato critico (pp. 217-219), un intéressante corredo di tavole (tra cui, alie pp. 222-223, uno specimen del manoscritto senese del commento oraziano), gli ludid e una ricca bibliografía concludono molto degnamente un ricco volume che, a parte qualche imprecisione e forse la tendenza (del resto típica delle tesi di laurea) a ribadire i concetti in modo talora eccessivamente analítico, si caratterizza per notevole dottrina, rigore critico e maturité di giudizio. Sergio Audano Chiavari. Italy Lucía Díaz Marroquin, La retórica de los afectos (Estudios de Literatura 110, De Música 13), Kassel: Reichenberger, 2008. 298 pp. ISBN 9783 -937734-59-0 The relationship between emotion and reason has fluctuated consistently within the Western-European territories, traditions and cultural identities. The same tension applies to the one existing between the realms of pathos and ethos. Ever since the Platonic dualism soul/body was inherited and as­ similated by the early-modern humanists, their dilemma used to consist in finding the conceptual and physical loci where the phenomenon of emotion takes place. One of this search's objectives is achieving the perfect synchro­ nization of the human spirit with the biological, visceral and even animal spheres configuring the masculine and the feminine natures. This provokes rhetorical and poetic consequences which, in the course of history, have often received severe moral condemnation. In the 21st century, emotions are generally perceived and evoked ac­ cording to psychoanalytic and post-structuralist viewpoints, deriving from Romantic perspectives which are still in force. This may lead us to forget 122 RHETORICA the sophisticated code inherited from the Platonic, Aristotelian, Galenic, and even the pseudo-Hermetic traditions which used to frame the expression of emotion before the Romanticism. Diaz Marroquin's La retórica de los afectos offers the keys necessary to understand the performance of emotion -affects, passions- within the con­ text of the Renaissance and Baroque Europe, the unmediated cultural heir of the Greek and Latin Antiquity In her own words: "Este trabajo pretende describir la noción humanista de la teoría de los afectos de ascendencia aris­ totélica y, remotamente, también hermética, desde el punto de vista de la retórica textual, de la tratadística musical y de las convenciones gestuales." (p.10). The starting point is, therefore, the actio. Diaz Marroquin's book is a detailed, systematic and interdisciplinary study on the rhetorical delivery, aiming particularly at the description of the means used by actors and protooperatic singers performing early-modern dramas. One of its strengths, in fact, consists in analyzing the vocal technique and the emotional resources a performer could employ at times prior to the generalization of the first treatises on dramatic and vocal practice. The study's approach is critical, polyhedral and eminently practical. The concepts of voice and gesture are described as the means of transmission for the emotional word, which has to do with the author's many-sided profile as an academic (philologist and musicologist) and performer (mezzosoprano). Only someone who has experienced and practiced the operatic vocal emis­ sion could identify and analyze in such...