Compositio: Horizons of Truth in the Decameron, the Notarial Register, and Civic Peace Pacts

Abstract

This article proposes a new reading of Boccaccio’s Decameron that highlights how the text shares the form and outlook of two central elements of contemporary documentary culture: the notarial register and the civic peace pact. By privileging a comparison to the law as practiced rather than as theorized, this reading complicates the generic divisions between documentary culture and early Italian literature. The form, textual horizon, and even the author’s own literary biography invite us to understand compositio in both law and literature as fundamentally oriented toward the future, toward the truth on the horizon, rather than mired in deliberations on the past. Boccaccio himself exploits legal frames in several of his tales to accent the generative potential inherent to realist literature and therefore to the civic horizon as well.