The Decameron Sixth Day in Perspective

2008

The Decameron and Il Libro del Cortegiano:

2004

Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron is the best known and most read work in Italian literature next to Dante's Divine Comedy. In the tradition of Lectura Dantis, the practice of story-by-story critical readings of Dante's work, Elissa Weaver has collected essays from some of the most prominent American Boccaccio scholars to provide critical readings of the Decameron Proem, Introduction, and the ten stories that constitute the first of the ten 'days' of storytelling. The first of the twelve essays opens the volume with a consideration of the Proem, demonstrating the importance of Boccaccio's literary subtexts (Ovidian and Dantean) for understanding his poetics. The second essay, on the Introduction, discusses the title of the work and the framing tale. The remaining ten contributions treat in detail each story, examining the literary, ethical, and social concerns embodied in the short narratives and in the context provided by the comments and discussions of the sto...

The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio, 2015

A reading of Boccaccio's poetics in the Decameron from the perspective of his interpretative strategies in the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods.

CreateSpace, 2019

How Boccaccio became the principal creator of the stylistic Italian vernacular.

Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013

The topos of love by hearsay, or amor de lonh, popularized by the troubadour Jaufré Rudel, is often considered the embodiment of courtly love. It represents an idealized love that is dependent upon a perpetual state of non-fulfillment. The idea of falling in love with a person one has never seen also contradicts the widely accepted definition of love as a reaction to a visual stimulus, supported by such medieval literary authorities as Andreas Capellanus and Giacomo da Lentini. In Decameron I.5 and IV.4, Giovanni Boccaccio offers his readers a new perspective on love by hearsay, demonstrating both how love by hearsay is a possible occurrence in the natural world and how its manifestation in this world is far from the romanticized images depicted in courtly poetry. This article demonstrates how Boccaccio’s manipulation of the topos of amor de lonh contributes to his main objective in the Decameron—the renewal of literature.

Decameron. Trans. Musa and Bondanella., 2010

Heliotropia, 2023

Even though its title might lead us to believe that this volume aims to fulfil primarily an educational role for Boccaccio’s students of third-level educational institutions, we are pleasantly surprised to discover that Alfano has managed to build his original scholarly research on Boccaccio into this work, which should be read in parallel with the new edition and commentary of the Decameron published by Rizzoli in 2014 for which Alfano compiled the introductory notes of each novella and Boccaccio’s biographical profile (Boccaccio, Giovanni. Decameron. A cura di Amedeo Quondam, Maurizio Fiorilla e Giancarlo Alfano. Milano: Rizzoli. BUR Classici. 2013).

Annali di Italianistica, vol. 39, 2021