Between Filocolo and Filostrato: Boccaccio's authorial doubles and the question of ‘amore per diletto’

Abstract

Providing an example of the precociousness of Giovanni Boccaccio's enquiry into the ways in which meaning can be generated through the interaction between narration and metanarration, this article analyses selected passages from Filostrato and Filocolo, in which characters functioning as authorial doubles discuss the degree of pleasure (diletto) deriving from different ways of relating to one's beloved. The debate on whether the love object is best enjoyed in her bodily presence or in her absence is linked by these doubles to the ways in which literature can become a means through which this pleasure can be attained. The analysis reveals how the dialogue between these two works can be better understood against the network of intertextual references that constitutes its background. Here we find some of Boccaccio's most beloved sources, in particular, Aristotle's Ethics, recalled both directly and through the mediation of the commentary of Thomas Aquinas, and Dante's autobiographical works, especially the Vita Nuova. The philosophical and literary models offered by these texts are then subject to a subtle process of misreading that allows Boccaccio, through his authorial masks, to parody and thus challenge tradition, but also to ironically undermine the poetic ideologies informing his own works.