Papers by Maggie Fritz-Morkin
Romanic Review, 2022
Some medical treatises from medieval France and Italy demonstrate surprising rhetorical exuberanc... more Some medical treatises from medieval France and Italy demonstrate surprising rhetorical exuberance, especially in the paratexts where an authorial persona can emerge in the first person. This essay launches from the scatological metaphors and epithets in the exordia of works and commentaries by the physicians Archimattheus, Gilles of Corbeil, and Gentile da Foligno. In captationes benevolentiae styled after Ciceronian precepts, these authors attack their rivals before presenting their own superior science. Their scurrilous invectives-"Hoc salernitani cacantes sanitatem nominant!" (This is what the shitting Salernitans call health!); "discursores alienis fecibus imbuti" (vagrants steeped in other dreck)-tap into carnivalesque modes where excrement is organic, filthy, vituperative, and comic, in contrast to the sterility of the treatises' technical, Scholastic discourse. A close reading of Gilles's twelfth-century Carmina de urinarum iudiciis (Songs on Judging Urine) and Gentile's fourteenth-century commentary on this verse treatise shows that both of these experts in uroscopy tie their excremental imagery into a nuanced poetics that extends from the paratexts into the heart of the work. Both writers demonstrate acute metaliterary sensibility, and respectable training in classical and medieval theories of rhetoric and poetry. Gilles defends his choice to write in verse through a constellation of metaphors pitting the synthetic clarity of both urine and poetry against the muddled confusion of feces and prose. He further ennobles his work by comparing the hermeneutics of uroscopy with allegorical interpretation. Gentile assumes the role of exegete, interpreting Gilles's verses and unveiling their philosophical and theoretical underpinnings.
The Decameron Eighth Day in Perspective, 2020
maggie fritz-morkin Now and then we encounter a Boccaccian novella that seems to exist for the so... more maggie fritz-morkin Now and then we encounter a Boccaccian novella that seems to exist for the sole purpose of setting up a good punch line (Todorov, Grammaire, 37). Just such a tale is Decameron VIII.2, whose plot of sexual negotiation advances through a series of verbal and material references to grinding. These culminate in a priest's meticulously staged double entendre that describes sexual escapades in terms of kitchen grinding. 1 When his lover Monna Belcolore sends word that the priest of Varlungo "non pester[à] mai più salsa in suo mortaio" [will never pound any more sauce in her mortar again (VIII.2.44)], he retorts that "s'ella non ci presterà il mortaio, io non presterò a lei il pestello; vada l'un per l'altro" [if she won't lend us her mortar, I'm not going to let her have my pestle; the one is no good without the other (VIII.2.45)]. 2 The mortar and pestle stand out as the material emblems-"radiant synecdoches," or "memorial objective correlatives" that can reveal "the genetic secrets of the texts in which they appear" (Forni, Adventures in Speech, 60). This essay will follow the novella's cues to take the mortar and pestle as its interpretive key, the structural hinge on which turn both its plot and its meaning. 1 Forni includes the mortar and pestle of VIII.2 among "the book's memorable thematic objects, the objects that make the stories, the vectors of the novum without which there would not be novella" (Adventures in Speech, 60). Cf. Paul Heyse's 1871 Falkentheorie ("falcon theory") recognizing the emblematic objects that emerge organically and come to represent Boccaccio's most gemlike novellas, as does Federigo degli Alberighi's falcon in Decameron V.9 ("Einleitung," xx). 2 All Italian citations of the Decameron are taken from Vittore Branca's edition included in Tutte le opere, and English citations are taken from Wayne A. Rebhorn's translation. Rebhorn renders "vada l'un per l'altro" (VIII.2.45) as "And so, it'll be tit for tat," which I have modified above in order to emphasize the inseparability of the mortar and pestle conveyed in the Italian.
Dante Satiro: Satire in Dante Alighieri's Comedy and Other Works, 2020
Laureatus in Urbe I, 2019
Translations by Maggie Fritz-Morkin
American Boccaccio Association by Maggie Fritz-Morkin
Talks by Maggie Fritz-Morkin
COVID Conversations: Society, Politics and Economics amid the COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020
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Papers by Maggie Fritz-Morkin
Translations by Maggie Fritz-Morkin
American Boccaccio Association by Maggie Fritz-Morkin
Talks by Maggie Fritz-Morkin