Anthony Kimber Cassell (March 31, 1941 -- October 9, 2005)

Anthony Kimber Cassell (March 31, 1941 – October 9, 2005) Victoria Kirkham With this issue of the journal, which publishes posthumously "Wandering Wombs, Physicke & Bed-Tricks," MLN fittingly honors an accomplished alumnus, Anthony K. Cassell. Cassell took his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins in 1969. His dissertation on Boccaccio's Corbaccio, directed by Charles S. Singleton, with Nathan Edelman, René Girard, and Edoardo Saccone as committee members, was one of several annotated translations of Boccaccio's so-called minor works—Ameto by Judith Powers Serafini-Sauli, my "Questioni d'amore" in the Filocolo—that Singleton hoped eventually to publish in a complete series with his own meticulously updated version of John Payne's Victorian Decameron as flagship (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982). Meanwhile, The Corbaccio, translated and edited by Anthony K. Cassell, had appeared with the presses of the University of Illinois, where after teaching at Ohio State University (1967–71), he joined the Urbana faculty in 1971, becoming associate and then full professor of Italian and Comparative Literature (1976, 1985). Born in Reading, Berkshire, U.K., Cassell emigrated with his family to Canada as a young man. He attended high school in Toronto and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Toronto, where he twice won the prize of the Consul General of Italy (1961, 1962). While a graduate student at Hopkins, from 1963 to 1967, he was awarded Italian government scholarships that permitted him to attend the Università degli Studi at Florence. Cassell's English Corbaccio, which has been reissued with abbreviated notes as The Corbaccio, or The Labyrinth of Love (Binghamton, NY: [End Page 49] MRTS, 1993), contained in its original edition (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1975) an exceptionally rich and rigorous apparatus. This treasury of learning on antifeminism—primary medieval and classical literary sources, patristics, legal history involving sumptuary laws, and a long, contentious tradition of western scholarship—firmly anchored Boccaccio's dream vision to its fourteenth-century cultural context and enabled Cassell to take a compelling stance in the dating controversy (ca. 1355? or ca. 1365?), arguing for the former, closer in time to the Decameron. Cassell's documentation, assembled with impeccable accuracy and sifted with critical acumen, elevated the Corbaccio from its Romantic reputation as the aging Boccaccio's autobiographical revenge on a widow who had spurned him, to the most sophisticated art, achieved through masterful play with the tropes of misogynistic satire. His skilled research finds its complement in an engaging, fluent, and powerful translation, evidence of his great love for the English language, the relish he took in a well-turned phrase, and his amusing talent for shaping witty, often withering, verbal portraits (sometimes applied to his colleagues). Praised by its journal reviewers, this Corbaccio was named "outstanding academic book" in 1976 by the library journal, Choice. Erudition and elegant English, compellingly united, characterize Cassell's subsequent publications. His second book, Dante's Fearful Art of Justice (U of Toronto P, 1984), dealt with the contrapasso in Inferno. Here he reached fruitfully into medieval visual iconography in European mosaic, marble relief, mural, and manuscript illumination, to corroborate a textual interpretation that along Singletonian lines found its sources in the Church Fathers and Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy. Supported by a grant from the Aylwin M. Cotton Foundation, it won him the honor of an invitation from the Dante Society of America to author the first volume of a projected series of 100 canto readings, conceived to celebrate the Society's centennial. His Lectura Dantis Americana: Inferno I (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1989), written with leave time as a Guggenheim Fellow (1984–85), imposes brilliant control on a daunting critical heritage, setting the highest standard for volumes to follow. Its longest chapter, "Three Beasts," made him an expert on animal lore, both naturalistic and symbolic, in bestiaries and encyclopedias of the ancient and medieval world. That knowledge proved valuable for the commentary on his next volume, our collaborative edition and translation, Diana's Hunt, Caccia di Diana: Boccaccio's First Fiction, also with the University of Pennsylvania Press (1991). Although Cassell and I had known each other [End Page 50] in the profession as fellow Hopkinsonians since the early 1970s...

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