El DE MULIERIBUS CLARIS DE BOCCACCIO A TRAVÉS DE SUS TRADUCCIONES CONTEMPORÁNEAS: ¿UNA OBRA ACCESIBLE?

Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris is, to a remarkable extent, the ultimate archetype to which the collections of biographies of famous women that sprang up all over Europe between the 14^th and 16^th centuries in the wake of the querelle des femmes were referred. Beyond the imitations, the work enjoyed a huge number of total or partial translations, some of which appeared almost immediately after its completion. This fact demonstrates the interest that the De mulieribus aroused even among those on the peripheries of the intellectual elite, who therefore had no access to the text in its original Latin version.

After centuries of critical and translational obscurity, five very different translations of the work have appeared in four different languages since the 1960s. These are the English editions by Guido A. Guarino (1963) and Virginia Brown (2001), the Italian one by Vittorio Zaccaria (1967), the Spanish one by Violeta Díaz-Corralejo (2010), and the French one by Jean-Yves Boriaud (2013).

Given the interest that gender studies have generated in different sectors of society in recent decades, this article analyses the characteristics of each of these translations in an attempt to assess their accessibility to a public outside the philological field. To this end, the paper starts from the theoretical assumptions of cross-temporal translation, which are applied to the paratexts with an explanatory function that each work contains. On the basis of the configuration of these elements, an analysis is made of the degree of prior specialised knowledge that each editor assumes of the reader to whom the work is addressed.