A Companion to Pietro Aretino offers exhaustive yet accessible essays aimed at understanding this complex and fascinating author. Its scope extends beyond the field of Italian studies, and includes references to other European literatures, visual arts, music, performance studies, gender studies, and social and religious history. It explores multiple areas of Aretino’s literary and biographical identity: in particular, his religious writings and their fortune, his relationships to visual arts and music, and his fashioning of a public persona. The essays here included support the current scholarly trend that no longer considers Aretino merely as a pornographer, but interpret his work in the light of the contemporary religious debate and cultural crisis.

Contributors include Élise Boillet, Maria Cristina Cabani, Eleonora Carinci, Philip Cottrell, Giuseppe Crimi, Cathy Ann Elias, Marco Faini, Augusto Gentili, Harald Hendrix, Paul Larivaille, Chiara Lastraioli, Paolo Marini, Ian F. Moulton, Paolo Procaccioli, Brian Richardson, Angelo Romano, Deanna Shemek, Jane Tylus, Paola Ugolini, and Raymond B. Waddington.