On Famous Women

contributed to the enterprise; in short, they gathered every kind of literary resource necessary for the task. Tommaseo—who was always kind to me from his exile in Corfu original: "corcirese"; referring to Corcyra, the ancient name for Corfu, where Tommaseo lived in exile for his political views in 1851 until his death—appointed me, with Pomba’s consent, to lead that office, and gave me the assistance of Savini of Bologna and others. When I took it upon myself, as was my duty, to review the excerpts excerpts (spogli): word-lists and usage examples extracted from literary works to serve as the raw material for a dictionary of previous lexicographers lexicographer: a person who compiles or writes dictionaries, I paid closer attention to those of Alberti and Gherardini, due to a certain excessive permissiveness they showed in accepting new writers and very recent words; and more than once I hesitated over certain examples that Gherardini had taken from Boccaccio's Donne famose Boccaccio's De Mulieribus Claris (Of Famous Women), a collection of biographies of historical and mythological women, translated into the vernacular by Master Donato degli Albanzani of Prato Vecchio in Casentino (called for this reason the "Apennine-born") in the Neapolitan edition of 1836. To this edition, beyond the distinguished name of the editor Don Luigi Tosti, a monk of Monte Cassino, the Accademia della Crusca The Accademia della Crusca, founded in 1583, is the most prestigious institution for the study of the Italian language had added its authority by citing it in its seven suppressed volumes and in the latest edition of its dictionary.

Although these might have seemed sufficient guarantees guarantees (malleverie): assurances of quality or reliability, they did not prevent me from noticing, from the very beginning, that very grave errors had crept into that printing—even in the textual readings—of such a nature as to have opened the door to the creation of new words, and I will even say, words of the poorest quality original: "di pessimo conio"; literally "of the worst coinage," referring to improperly invented or non-existent words. To make it easier for me to notice those errors and correct them,