Giovanni Boccaccio Research Articles

The Consolation of Literature: Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Covid-19 Pandemic

Engaging with plague literature such as Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron during the COVID-19 pandemic arguably enhances our understanding of medieval depictions of the plague. At the same time, medieval descriptions of the pestilence reflect on our current situation. Indeed, reading the Decameron with my MA students in a virtual classroom in the spring of 2021 showed that the human experience of fear and loss in the face of a potentially lethal disease has not fundamentally changed in seven hundred centuries. Furthermore, we all brought our individual experiences with the pandemic to the text, which enabled us to identify with the plague situation of Boccaccio’s time in a way that would not have been possible before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Plague and Literature in Western Europe, from Giovanni Boccaccio to Albert Camus

In medieval times the plague hit Europe between 1330 and 1350. The Italian novelist Giovanni Boccaccio, one of the exponents of the cultural movement of Humanism, in the introduction (proem) of his “Decameron” described the devastating effects of the ‘black plague’ on the inhabitants of the city of Florence. The pestilence returned to Western Europe in several waves, between the 16th and 17th centuries. William Shakespeare in “Romeo and Juliet” and other tragedies, and Ben Jonson in “The Alchemist” made several references to the plague, but they did not offer any realistic description of that infective disease. Some decennials later Daniel Defoe, in his “A Journal of the Plague Year” (1719), gave a detailed report about the ‘Great Plague’ which hit England in 1660, based on documents of the epoch. In more recent times, Thomas S. Eliot, composing his poem “The Waste Land” was undoubtedly influenced by the spreading of another infective disease, the so-called “Spanish flu”, which affected him and his wife in December 1918. Some decennials later, the French writer and philosopher Albert Camus, in his novel “The Plague”, symbolized with a plague epidemic the war which devastated Europe, North Africa and the Far East from 1937 to 1945, extolling a death toll of over 50 million victims. Those literary works offered a sort of solace to the lovers of literature. To recall them is the purpose of the present paper, in these years afflicted by the spreading of the Covid-19 Pandemic.

Epidemics: black death terror in Florence, 1348 – by Giovanni Boccaccio – psychiatry in literature

Among survivors, comparable herd responses recur in the context of our COVID-19 pandemic:a ‘Some […] conceived that to live moderately was the best defence [and they] shut themselves up in those houses where none had been sick […];and there, using […] the most delicate viands and the finest wines and eschewing all incontinence, they abode with music and such other diversions as they might have, never suffering themselves to speak with any nor choosing to hear any news from without of death or sick folk. [...]leaving be that townsman avoided townsman and that well nigh no neighbour took thought unto other and that kinsfolk seldom or never visited one another and held no converse together save from afar, this tribulation had stricken such terror to the hearts of all, that brother forsook brother, uncle nephew and sister brother and oftentimes wife husband;nay (what is yet more extraordinary and well-nigh incredible) fathers and mothers refused to visit or tend their very children’. Be that as it may, ‘weary of going wandering so long among such miseries’, Boccaccio then recounts 100 life-affirming tales told over ten nights by seven young women and three young men self-isolating in a hill-top palace outside Florence … a. The Decameron of Giovanni Bocaccio, Translated by John Payne.

The “accountant” stereotype in the Florentine medieval popular culture: “galantuomini” or usurers?

PurposeThis paper explores the stereotype of the accountant in Florentine medieval popular culture based on literary works and from a historical perspective. It aims to highlight how stereotypes change with time and represent the cultural and historical evolution of a society. This research challenges Miley and Read (2012), who stated that the foundation of the stereotype was in Commedia dell'arte, an Italian form of improvisational theatre commenced in the 15th century.Design/methodology/approachThe authors applied a qualitative research method to examine the accountant from a medieval popular culture perspective. The analysis consists of two phases: (1) categorisation of the accountant stereotype based on accounting history literature and (2) thematic analysis of The Divine Comedy (1307–1313) and The Decameron (1348–1351). The authors explored a synchronic perspective of historical investigation through a “cross-author” comparison, identifying Dante Alighieri as the first key author of medieval popular culture. During his imaginary journey through The Divine Comedy, Dante describes the social, political and economic context of the Florentine people of the 14th century. Then, with its various folkloristic elements, The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio becomes the “manifesto” of the popular culture in the Florentine medieval times.FindingsThis study shows the change of the accountant stereotype from the medieval age to the Renaissance. The Divine Comedy mainly connotes a negative accountant stereotype. The 14th century's Florentine gentlemen (“i galantuomini”) are apparently positive characters, with an ordered and clean aspect, but they are accused of being usurers. Dante Alighieri pictures the accountant as a “servant of capitalism”, “dishonest person, excessively fixated with money”, “villain and evil” and “excessively rational”. Giovanni Boccaccio mainly portrays a positive accountant stereotype. The accountant is increasingly more reliable, and this “commercial man” takes a more prestigious role in the society. In The Decameron, the accountant is depicted as a “hero”, “gentleman”, “family-oriented person with a high level of work commitment” and “colourful persona, warm, and emotional”. Overall, the authors provided new evidence on the existence of the accountant stereotype in the Florentine medieval popular.Originality/valueThis study engages with accounting history literature accountants' stereotypes in an unexplored context and time period, providing a base for comparative international research on accounting stereotypes and popular culture. Additionally, it addresses the need for further research on the accountant stereotype based on literary works and from a historical perspective. Therefore, this research also expands the New Accounting History (NAH) literature, focussing on the investigation of the accountant stereotype connotations in the 14th century.

Text and Document in Dante’s Vita nova

Abstract This article considers the importance of material philological features of the early manuscripts of Dante’s Vita nova for the work’s critical reception. Over the centuries, editors (most notably Giovanni Boccaccio) have recast textual meaning in the work mainly by marginalizing the poet’s glosses and by reformatting the poems. Attention to the material features of the earliest extant manuscript of the Vita nova (MS Martelli 12) with respect to later copies, however, prompts us to consider the creative interplay between Dante’s prosimetrum and the material features of the manuscript. To interpret a text critically is to acknowledge and to examine also how a manuscript or print edition orients textual interpretation. The editorial history of the Vita nova teaches us about the cultural processes and discourses of literary culture and about Italian literary history.

Female Consent and Affective Resistance in Romance: Medieval Pedagogy and #MeToo

This essay offers several pedagogical strategies for teaching medieval romance in the time of #MeToo. Drawing on the robust feminist tradition that has focused on women’s compromised consent in romance narratives, as well as on the insights of trauma-sensitive pedagogy, we offer a range of approaches for addressing literary representations of sexual violence in the classroom, with a focus on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Franklin’s Tale, on Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, and on romances and novelle within larger story collections by John Gower, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Marguerite de Navarre. These teaching approaches seek to position students as critical co-investigators and to open up ways in which sexual and social consent participate in the formation of gendered subjects. We aim to problematize the power hierarchies dramatized in medieval romance texts, while also encouraging students to attend to women’s resistance and their survival.

Reunion

Storytelling, Self, Society, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2021), pp. 137–161. Copyright © 2022 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201 Reunion Michael Jackson I intend to relate one hundred tales or fables or parable or stories—whichever you choose to call them—as they were told in ten days by a band of seven ladies and three young men during the time of the recent plague. —Giovanni Boccaccio, Prologue to The Decameron Lockdown In the early spring of 2020, I developed a sore throat, persistent cough, and mild fever that confined me to bed for three days. Fearing that I had contracted the COVID-19 virus, I emailed my doctor only to be advised that in the absence of any tests all I could do was self-isolate and see what happened. I did as I was told, avoiding physical contact with my wife and spending long hours alone, with only a laptop computer to connect me with the world. During this period, in which I lost track of time, I enjoyed an unexpected reprieve from my ingrained feelings of social inadequacy. Communicating with students and colleagues in writing rather than face-to-face not only restored my self-confidence, it also sharpened my awareness of the degree to which our sense of self reflects the nature of our relations with others. By late March the dogwood and forsythia were flowering and walking in the woods with Pia it was easy to imagine that a semblance of normality was Reunion Jackson 138 n Reunion returning to the world. Yet, despite the excited voices of children off school and out with their parents, it was strange the way we kept our distance from each other, wary of the invisible menace in our midst. On several successive nights, I woke to sensual dreams that left me with the guilty feeling that I was being unfaithful to Pia. Was it because my weeks of self-isolation had precluded any intimacy with her, or because the pandemic and the mounting fatalities had released in me a primordial urge, not to protect myself but to procreate? The same impulse that moved Giovanni Boccaccio to write pornographic tales during the Black Death in mid-fourteenth-century Italy is echoed in Alex Munthe’s memoir of the 1884 Neapolitan plague. Despite the randomness and pandemonium that appear to prevail whenever life and death are fighting for supremacy, as in pestilence and war, Munthe observes that “the battle is regulated in its minutest details by an immutable law of equilibrium. . . . Nature sets to work at once to readjust the balance, to call forth new beings to take the place of the fallen. Compelled by the irresistible force of a Natural Law, men and women fall in each other’s arms, blindfolded by lust, unaware that it is Death who presides over their mating, his aphrodisiac in one hand, his narcotic in the other. Death, the giver of Life, the slayer of Life, the beginning and the end.”* My own yearning also precipitated memories of two of my oldest friends. Although I saw Harry occasionally in London where he worked in publishing, and I always spent time with Fletcher on my periodic trips back to New Zealand, these reunions were always brief and somewhat dutiful. Why then should I now feel it was imperative that I get in touch with them? “It’s understandable,” Pia said. “At times like this, we all long for a time when we felt safe and secure. A time before we went out into the world and had to fend for ourselves. I have been thinking of my parents, who are probably thinking of theirs right now. Of India, Uganda, then England. All those traumatic upheavals in our family’s history that sometimes leave me wondering where I belong.” That I did not tell Pia that I was homesick for New Zealand was because my bouts of nostalgia deeply unsettled her. She was afraid that in a state of dissociative fugue I might quit my job, pull our children out of school, and drag her back to the life she had endured in New Zealand for five years before we moved to America...

2021 ELLAK International Conference: “Beyond Pandemics: Reimagining the Humanities and the New Normal”

188 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE David Langford’s Ansible Editions. Ansible Editions, an ebook and print-on-demand enterprise, is owned and operated by David Langford, a British fan who has won 29 Hugos for his writing and editing. The press, which launched in 2003 (and is named for Langford’s long-running news zine, Ansible), has released a number of titles of significant interest to scholars of Anglo-American sf. These include the collected book reviews and critical essays of Algis Budrys in several volumes; the essays Brian Aldiss published in the legendary British zine, SF Horizons; Rob Hansen’s superb history of British fandom, THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK, 1930-1980 (2017); the fan writing of American editor Terry Carr; and many more. The print editions are reasonably priced, with e-book options being cheaper. Ansible even offers a number of free e-books usefully gathering material in the public domain, including complete runs of Charles Platt’s New Wave zine The Patchen Review and Bruce Sterling’s cyberpunk zine Cheap Truth. The list of titles can be viewed at .—Rob Latham 2021 ELLAK International Conference: “Beyond Pandemics: Reimagining the Humanities and the New Normal.” Organized by the English Language and Literature Association of Korea (ELLAK), the conference will take place at Korea University, Seoul, South Korea, on 16-18 December 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic has turned our world upside down. In addition to disrupting our day-to-day work, travel, and interactions with others, the pandemic has had far-reaching consequences for the economy, educational system, healthcare services, and international relations. As we continue to come to grips with the havoc that the new coronavirus has wreaked on the world, the “new normal” has become an integral part of our vocabulary. It is not an entirely new term, however, having been discussed in relation to other major crises such as the 2005 avian flu, the 2008 financial crisis, and the global recession that shortly ensued. The “new normal” enables us to shed renewed light on the frailties of the human condition—as well as the structural inequalities that prevail in our societies—and consequently to reimagine the post-pandemic world. ELLAK aims to examine how the studies of English language and literature (more broadly, the humanities) can contribute to the interrogation of this term. It is during such times of crisis and radical change that literary and cultural texts can play a significant role. That catastrophes have a stimulating effect on the imagination is made evident by the plethora of plague narratives across human history. As previous works such as Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (1348), Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799), Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), and Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947) demonstrate, literary and cultural texts can help us imagine alternative modes of being and thinking as we face an uncertain future. The 2021 ELLAK conference organizing committee invites 189 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE scholars, educators, and students in the humanities as well as other disciplines to submit papers that directly or indirectly address issues related to the imaginative reconstruction of the “new normal.” Topics may include crises and disasters, conflict, and war. Among topics that might be of special interest to those in science-fiction studies are biopolitics, media and culture, environment and ecology, digital humanities, posthumanity, and transhumanity. To apply for participation in the conference, submit an abstract and short bio to 2021ellak@gmail.com by 30 June 2021. Proposals may be submitted for either individual papers or sessions. Individual paper proposals should include an abstract of no more than 250 words and a short bio. Session proposals should include a one-page proposal with a title and topic for a session of three or four papers, along with individual abstracts and short bios. Notification of accepted proposals will be on 31 July 2021. Presentations, which can be delivered in either Korean or English, will be no longer than 20 minutes. For further inquiries, please contact the Organizing Committee at 2021ellak...

Маленькие трагедии Джеффри Чосера: категория трагического в «Рассказе монаха»

The article examines the implementation of the category of the tragic in The Monk’s Tale, which is part of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. The purpose of this work is to clarify the concepts ‘tragedy’ and ‘the tragic’ in the culture of the Late Middle Ages, as well as their interpretation in Chaucer’s oeuvre. The focus is on the specific understanding of these terms in the Middle Ages: since the genre of dramatic tragedy became a thing of the past along with Antiquity, the word ‘tragedy’ began to be used by poets and scribes of the Middle Ages to specify a distinct type of narration that deals with the power of fate as the main theme. The need to identify what works Chaucer used as examples to follow, as well as to study the peculiarity of the category of the tragic in The Monk’s Tale, determined the choice of methods for the analysis of the material. The research employs culture-historical, comparative-typological, and biographical methods of analysis. It has been established that, relying on the Latin (Boethius) and Italian models (Francesco Petrarca, Giovanni Boccaccio), Chaucer perceived ‘tragedy’ as a variation of the ‘fall of princes’ story. Both Chaucer and Boccaccio were interested in the study of earthly life, the search for a connection between human behavior and human fate, and the image of Fortune. However, the Italian poet did not call his works ‘tragedies’, while Chaucer did: his character, the Monk, tells seventeen stories about the victims of Fortune, among which there were both sinners and relatively innocent people. Our analysis has shown that the main point in Chaucer’s understanding of the category of the tragic is the fundamental incomprehensibility of the ways of fate. Focusing on the category of the tragic, Chaucer receives the opportunity to explore the irrationality of human existence.

Czarna śmierć i lekcja życia – dwie odsłony

The essay confronts two ways in which the Black Death motif is used in two 14-Century Italian collections of novellas. In Giovanni Boccaccio’s “Decameron” the pestilence means the crisis of civilized forms of collective life, the decay of social relations and moral disarray. The protagonists in a sublime way reconstruct various forms of “art de vivre” distancing themselves from the brutal reality. Giovanni Sercambi perceive the plague as a divine punishment that strikes the entire society for collective sins. The only way of salvation is a pilgrimage-penance, and later the acceptance of a new political regime, in which all the power belongs to a preposto, elected for life, and the citizens are interested only in their private affairs and respect of severe moral principles.

Boccaccio's Corpus: Allegory, Ethics, and Vernacularity by James C. Kriesel

Reviewed by: Boccaccio's Corpus: Allegory, Ethics, and Vernacularity by James C. Kriesel Emma Louise Barlow Kriesel, James C., Boccaccio's Corpus: Allegory, Ethics, and Vernacularity (The William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature, 15), Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2019; hardback; pp. xi, 381; R.R.P. US$65.00; ISBN 9780268104498. Since its beginnings in 1995, the William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval and Italian Literature has examined the multiple disciplines that constitute the borderless medieval Italian cultural tradition as they converge in the works of Dante and his contemporaries. In recent years the study of Dante's engagement in dialogic processes with his poetic contemporaries has flourished in the works of scholars such as Teodolinda Barolini, Winthrop Wetherbee, Albert R. Ascoli, and David Bowe. In the current study, James C. Kriesel broadens and vivifies this scholarly debate, applying the theme of dialogism to the works of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). This is a novel and compelling study of Boccaccio in dialogue with Dante and Petrarch as well as other, noncanonical, authors. In the introduction to this volume, Kriesel outlines the aim of the study: to contextualize the ideas about allegory, ethics, and vernacularity presented in Boccaccio's works within literary debates of the medieval and early Renaissance periods, and moreover to explore 'why Boccaccio reflected on these topics by reference to the body, especially the female body' (pp. 2–3). The study is presented in five chapters, each tackling a particular Boccaccian thematic strand (allegory, poetics, ethics, love, hatred) and linking the theme to one or more works, while also examining each work within a comparative framework as Boccaccio himself intended (p. 7). The fundamental and persuasive argument is that, contrary to common scholarly belief, Boccaccio was no mere admirer of his contemporaries. [End Page 234] His declarations of admiration are tactical, used to demonstrate the greater relevance and relatability of his own views on contemporaneous literary debates. In Chapter 1, Kriesel examines Boccaccio's allegory in the Genealogie in dialogue with that of Dante and the ancients. The chapter finds that Boccaccio downplays Dante's truth-telling claims out of a desire to highlight the allegorical properties of literature, and its ability to fulfil spiritual roles like those of prophets. Kriesel also notes that Boccaccio actually uses Dante to defend the feminine and fantastic texts from which he had distanced himself, conceptualizing Dante as a 'feminine vernacular author' (p. 53). Chapter 2 addresses Boccaccio's erotic writings and his symbolic use of both chaste and erotic bodies within those writings. Kriesel argues that Boccaccio's Ameto champions and redeems female bodies, often scorned for their supposed inability to signify ideas about spirituality or ethics, by 'making them the privileged medium through which Ameto […] experiences ethical and spiritual truths' (p. 83). Chapter 3 analyses the dialogic relationship of the Amorosa visione with Dante's Commedia. Kriesel argues convincingly that Boccaccio's texts emphasize the human inability to transcend the corporeal, as it is through embodiment that humans are able to enjoy and learn from erotic narratives. Kriesel also depicts Boccaccio's movement away from Petrarch, disturbed by his erotic desire for Laura, and towards a unique authorial persona comfortable in its symphonic understanding of eroticism and ethics. In Chapter 4, the low style and feminine genre of the Decameron's short stories are discussed in relation to references to Jesus's incarnation and resurrection found in the Decameron's introduction and conclusion. These references, Kriesel argues, invite a comparison between the Decameron and Jesus's body, suggesting that the mundane corporeality of these short stories has also been created for human redemption (a poignant argument amidst the new wave of mass engagement with the text during the COVID-19 pandemic). The chapter also describes the contrast between Boccaccio's body-positive and Dante's anti-corporeal poetics, though it is worth noting that refrains of Dante's description of the universe as a 'volume' (Paradiso, xxxiii. 85–87 (l. 86)) do appear even in the evocation of Boccaccio's purportedly diverse poetics. The fifth chapter focuses on Boccaccio's and Petrarch's reception of one another's depictions...

The Decameron: On the Possibility of Love During Self-Isolation

This article in the genre of the consolation of philosophy deals with the COVID-19 pandemic as a new superphenomenal experience marked by an extremely intense experience of one’s vulnerability and finiteness as well as by problematization of our previous ideas of a human being. The author offers a way to understand our situation and find solace by starting with the performative paradox of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, which contains one of the most famous descriptions of the plague and remains one of the most cheerful and life-enhancing texts in European literature. The article shows that, contrary to the common belief, the consolation offered in the The Decameron is not reduced merely to telling stories that entertain and distract us from tales of grief. Nor is it reduced to the invention of social practices for building a new and more perfect society, although all this, as the author shows, is undoubtedly there in the text and has a beneficial effect. The Decameron’s consolation ultimately consists of the assumption that man himself has metaphysical depths in his incomprehensible (although it is fully embodied in the Decameron) and impossible potential for lovingly accepting the reality of the world as a blessed Gift, to think of eventfulness itself as a gift. The article argues that the anthropology on which Boccaccio’s utopia is based is that of the feast or symposium understood in the spirit of the Platonic-Christian tradition. The author hopes that Boccaccio’s anthropological optics, designed to overcome the pessimism of reason and affirm the optimism of will and faith, can help the reader find meaning and joy in the midst of the suffering and death which are the irrevocable framework of life. This consolation can be heard in the cheerful voice of Boccaccio, which comes to us from faraway plague-ridden Florence and offers us his prescription for healing the “wounds of being.”

A Boccaccian Renaissance: Essays on the Early Modern Impact of Giovanni Boccaccio and his Works by Martin Eisner David Lummus

A Boccaccian Renaissance: Essays on the Early Modern Impact of Giovanni Boccaccio and his Works by Martin Eisner David Lummus

Walka z czarną śmiercią w świetle wybranych pism i traktatów z XIV w.

Combatting the Black Death in the light of selected writings and treatises from the XIVth century This article analyzes texts that show attempts to resist the plague epidemic in Europe in the second half of the XIVth century. Much information on this subject has survived in writings by Italian authors, including Giovanni Boccaccio, Matteo Villani, and Francesco Petrarch. In Italian cities, the sickness led to demographic disaster, permanently changing the social order and the daily life of their inhabitants. Using the above mentioned texts, the author reflects on the triumphal march of the plague, searching for answers to the question as to the extent to which contemporary doctors were responsible for the state of affairs. When they encountered the first attack of the plague, they were helpless, not possessing either appropriate knowledge of medicines. Authors of chronicles noted that when examining the sick, doctors only took simple steps such as measuring temperature and analyzing body fluids, and the drew on philosophy and astrology when doing so. Sharper and sharper criticism fell on their heads as a result, and accusations not just of ignorance but also of cowardice. This was because many medical persons fled from territories affected by plague. Francesco Petrarch was one of the fiercest critics of doctors at this time. In the course of the epidemic, he lost Laura, the love of his life, and his beloved son. Petrarch wrote of the plague and the death that accompanied it in several tracts and poetic pieces. In those, he showed the fear and terror that haunted people when the world they had hitherto known lay in ruins.

A Boccaccian Renaissance: Essays on the Early Modern Impact of Giovanni Boccaccio and His Works. Martin Eisner and David Lummus, eds. The William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature 17. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. xxvi + 324 pp. $65.

A Boccaccian Renaissance: Essays on the Early Modern Impact of Giovanni Boccaccio and His Works. Martin Eisner and David Lummus, eds. The William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature 17. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. xxvi + 324 pp. $65. - Volume 74 Issue 1

What Literature Tells Us about the Pandemic

Literature can play an important role in shaping our responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. It can offer us significant insights into how individuals treated the trauma of pandemics in the past, and how to survive in a situation beyond our control.
 Considering the changes and challenges that the coronavirus might bring for us, we should know that the world we are living in today is shaped by the biological crisis of the past. This understanding can help us deal with the challenges in the current pandemic situation. Literature can show us how the crisis has affected the lives of infected individuals.
 By exploring the theme of disease and pandemic, which is consistent and well-established in literature (Cooke, 2009), we come across a number of literary works dealing with plagues, epidemics and other forms of biological crises. Among the prominent examples of pandemic literature is Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947), narrating the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. The novel illustrates the powerlessness of individuals to affect their destinies. Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912) is another story depicting the spread of the Red Death, an uncontrollable epidemic that depopulated and nearly destroyed the world. The book is considered as prophetic of the coronavirus pandemic, especially given London wrote it at a time when the world was not as quickly connected by travel as it is today (Matthews, 2020). Furthermore, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death (1842) is a short story on the metaphorical element of the plague. Through the personification of the plague, represented by a mysterious figure as a Red Death victim, the author contemplates on the inevitability of death; the issue is not that people die from the plague, but that people are plagued by death (Steel, 1981). Moreover, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) is another apocalyptic novel, depicting a future which is ravaged by a plague. Shelley illustrates the concept of immunization in this fiction showing her understanding about the nature of contagion.
 Pandemic is also depicted in medieval writings, such as Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales illustrating human behaviour: the fear of infection increased sins such as greed, lust and corruption, which paradoxically led to infection and consequently to both moral and physical death (Grigsby, 2008).
 In ancient literature, Homer’s Iliad opens with a plague visited upon the Greek camp at Troy to punish the Greeks for Agamemnon’s enslavement of Chryseis. Plague and epidemic were rather frequent catastrophes in
 
 ancient world. When plague spread, no medicine could help, and no one could stop it from striking; the only way to escape was to avoid contact with infected persons and contaminated objects (Tognotti. 2013).
 Certainly, COVID-19 has shaken up our economic systems and affected all aspects of our living. In this respect, literature can give us the opportunity to think through how similar crises were dealt with previously, and how we might structure our societies more equitably in their aftermath. Thus, in order to explore what literature tells us about the pandemic, the following interview is conducted with Frederick Aldama, a Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University.

Slow Practice as Ethical Aesthetics: The Ecocritical Strategy of Patience

How can cultural works from the distant past –such as the Middle Ages—teach us ethical modes of behavior for today? One form of ecopoetics emerges through slow practice, making the reader collaborate in the measured process of co-creating the emotional impact of an imaginative text. Drawing on rich debates about slow cinema, this essay suggests how Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale—from his grand fourteenth-century poem, The Canterbury Tales—evokes a slow eco-aesthetics with ethical impact. The relative slowness of walking shapes how individuals respond to their environment. In turn, a deceleration of perception affects how travel comes to be written about, as seen in the tale of Patient Griselda. Introduced by Giovanni Boccaccio and adapted by such writers as Francesco Petrarch, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan, she acts dynamically through her apparent silence and notorious patience. The environmental humanities offer paradigms for us to consider the strategies of slowness and patience. This essay shows how medieval pilgrimage literature evokes a slow aesthetic which is at the same time an ecocritical strategy. Slowness results in an enduring impact and heightened sensitivity to the ecological damage for which we all are culpable. Slower somatically inculcates key aspects of environmental awareness. Pilgrimage texts from the Middle Ages teach us slow ethical aesthetics, suggesting that the medieval moment—finally and a long time coming— is now.

A Boccaccian Renaissance: Essays on the Early Modern Impact of Giovanni Boccaccio and His Works. Edited by Martin Eisner and David Lummus. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Pp. xxv+323.

<i>A Boccaccian Renaissance: Essays on the Early Modern Impact of Giovanni Boccaccio and His Works</i>. Edited by Martin Eisner and David Lummus. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Pp. xxv+323.

Psychosocial Reactions to Plagues in the Cultural History of Medicine: A Medical Humanities Approach.

The aim of this work is to elucidate psychosocial reactions to plagues by analyzing three landmark descriptions from different eras: Thucydides' description of the plague of Athens (430 BC) in The History of the Peloponnesian War, Giovanni Boccaccio's description of the plague in Florence (1348) in The Decameron, and Albert Camus' description in The Plague (1947). Using a narrative inquiry, we found psychosocial reactions to be complex and ambivalent and could discern several coping strategies. We propose that this knowledge can help psychiatrists and other healthcare professionals during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

La transmisión textual de la traducción castellana medieval del Decameron: consideraciones sobre el arquetipo, el antígrafo y el modelo subyacente

En este trabajo se traza un panorama general sobre los problemas que presenta la traducción del Decameron de Boccaccio en la España del siglo xv, cuyos testimonios conservados (manuscrito e incunable) son copias de un arquetipo perdido. Se realiza un sintético estado de la cuestión para explicar la problemática textual y se intenta avanzar en la filiación de los testimonios y en la fijación de un stemma más fiable.