Giovanni Boccaccio Research Articles

Il canone linguistico boccacciano, non senza dissenso

Autor da maior obra-prima em prosa da literatura medieval em língua vulgar, Giovanni Boccaccio foi determinante para a definição do cânone linguístico italiano, sobretudo a partir da codificação proposta por Pietro Bembo no século XVI. Mas não sem divergências, uma vez que, logo após Bembo publicar seu Prose della volgar lingua, surgem as primeiras teses contrastantes que apoiam o modelo linguístico apresentado por Machiavelli

A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde by Lavinia Greenlaw (review)

Reviewed by: A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde by Lavinia Greenlaw Elizabeth Langemak lavinia greenlaw, A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde. London: Faber & Faber, 2014. Pp. 217. isbn: 978–0–571–28454–2. £16.99. Lavinia Greenlaw’s newest work, which she terms ‘not a version, and certainly not a translation, but an extrapolation’ (iii) of the story of Troilus and Criseyde, is a beautiful, incisive utterance in the poetic tradition of making old things new again. Joining a long list of writers who have also reinvented this exploration of catastrophic courtship in verse, Greenlaw’s A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde, draws most heavily on Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio. Perhaps the most important material Greenlaw draws on, however, are her own talents as a poet. Shaping a fresh catalog of images, vigorous syntax, and sharp lines over the available scaffolding, Greenlaw’s ‘extrapolation’ is surprising, endlessly readable, and, above all, good poetry. In reinventing such a well-known poem, Greenlaw structures her work as a series of short, seven-line stanzas based very loosely on Chaucer’s rime royal. Each titled stanza is set alone on a page, and the resulting white space around it underscores the precision and directness of her language. Additionally, the reader encounters each stanza along with a compass of signs Greenlaw arranges on the page below it: a note on which particular lines by either Chaucer or Boccaccio inspired that stanza, and sometimes (but not always) a paraphrase of the plot point her stanza takes up. This is a strategy designed for good poem-making: between the title and the paraphrase, Greenlaw generally frees her stanzas from the work of plot, leaving them free to do the finer texturing verse can do. Another result of this structure is that, taken as a whole, the book reads as a sort of composite sketch of the characters drawn from a variety of witnesses: one detail from Chaucer, another from Boccaccio, and still another added by Greenlaw herself. [End Page 152] The annotations leave the reader free to encounter the story as an entirely new work, while also offering the option to trace Greenlaw’s story to its roots. By examining these annotations, the reader can also see the depth of Greenlaw’s reinvention. Chaucer, for example, is by far the most cited source in these stanzas, but in Greenlaw’s work it is not unusual to see a stanza that references thirteen consecutive lines from Chaucer, and then a single additional line more than one hundred lines beyond those. Nor does Greenlaw always use her source material in the order that either Chaucer or Boccaccio present it, and she often passes over huge swatches of lines in favor of focusing carefully on a single moment. Boccaccio’s rendering is left entirely out of Greenlaw’s Book One, appearing only occasionally in Books Two, Three, Four, and Five, in combination with lines drawn from Chaucer. One of the advantages of commingling sources is it frees Greenlaw not only to tell the story of Troilus and Criseyde, but also to comment on the nature of storytelling. Greenlaw’s stanzas include a variety of references to telling and writing, as when the poem’s speaker remarks on how ‘Stories change shape in the telling / As words alter through long use’ (46). Here, as in many moments scattered throughout the poem, Greenlaw simultaneously refers to a traditional plot point (Troilus and Pandarus planning to ensnare Criseyde in love), echoes Chaucer (in this case, she borrows a bit of throat clearing he offers at the beginning of his poem), and also calls attention to her own act of revision. When later in that same stanza she writes, ‘This is nothing new / But it’s close to home,’ a reader catches these allusions, which invest her text with a sense of multidimensionality. Several reviewers have made the apt comparison between Greenlaw’s work and that of Anne Carson, another poet with an interest in history, as well as what it means to revisit the history of a story in a story of one’s own. Certainly, Greenlaw writes with the stiff-necked factuality of Carson, regularly spitting out powerfully end-stopped lines...

Concord Floral and This is my room. Look.

Abstract: Concord Floral, written by Governor General’s Awardwinning playwright Jordan Tannahill, and co-created with acclaimed multidisciplinary artists Erin Brubacher and Cara Spooner, offers us a glimpse of what the future of performance might look like if it took seriously the emotional lives and searing insights of twenty-first century teens. An adaptation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s medieval allegory the Decameron, in which 10 youth take shelter in a villa to hide from the Black Death, the play unearths the dark memories, fears, and desires that swirl around an abandoned greenhouse, a suburban hangout that has become a place of refuge from an often inhospitable and bewildering adult world. The play is accompanied by This is my room. Look. by Erin Brubacher, a series of powerful photographic portraits originally installed with the theatre production. These photos extend our conception of where a performance begins and ends, of what visual, material, and disciplinary worlds a performance might be seen to contain. With an introduction by Laura Levin.

“Måske vil vi engang glædes ved at mindes dette”. Om Giacomo Castelvetros håndskrifter i Det Kongelige Bibliotek

“Måske vil vi engang glædes ved at mindes dette”. Om Giacomo Castelvetros håndskrifter i Det Kongelige Bibliotek

Naples and the Landscape of Virgilian otium in the Carmina Bucolica of Petrarch and Boccaccio

Abstract This article explains how Virgil’s traditional association with Naples inspired the fourteenth-century humanist poets Francesco Petrarca and Giovanni Boccaccio to set their own Virgilian eclogues in the same city. Petrarch began his Bucolicum Carmen by composing an allegorical eclogue about the death of his patron Robert of Anjou, the King of Naples; and in imitation of this poem, his admiring friend Boccaccio later wrote a series of Neapolitan eclogues depicting the events that followed Robert’s death. As Petrarch and Boccaccio each had different relationships with Naples, it will be shown that the city represents their respective ideals of poetic otium.

Creative Culture: The Lessons of Florence

The list of world historical figures from Florence, Italy, reads like a who’s who of the late medieval and Renaissance periods. Among its native born are Amerigo Vespucci (1415), after whom half the world is named; Dante Alighieri (1265), author of one of the supreme works of world literature, The Divine Comedy; Donatello (1383), one of the greatest of all sculptors; Giovanni Boccaccio (1313), author of the Decameron; Niccolo Machiavelli (1469), the first great modern political theorist; and the Medicis—Cosimo (1339), Lorenzo (1449), and Catherine (1519)—whose family dominated Florentine life for 3 centuries. In addition to natives, Florence also counts many illustrious figures who were educated and rose to prominence within its environs, including Botticelli (1444), one of the first great Renaissance painters; Brunelleschi (1377), the greatest architect of the Renaissance; Girolamo Savonarola (1452), the man of the cloth who started the original “bonfire of the vanities”; Leonardo da Vinci (1452), the prototypical Renaissance man; and Michelangelo (1475), whose works include perhaps the most famous sculpture (David) and painting (the Sistine Chapel) in the world. Although this list omits more figures than it includes, it raises a question worthy of serious attention in any age: how can a single city account for so many great figures? Why should Florence, as opposed to other Italian cities such as Milan, Venice, and Rome, represent such a fertile ground for genius? And why didn’t London, Paris, Constantinople, and some of the other cities of Europe prove equally as nurturing during this

Pandemic Fear and Literature: Observations from Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague

The Scarlet Plague, originally published by Jack London in 1912, was one of the first examples of a postapocalyptic fiction novel in modern literature (1). Set in a ravaged and wild America, the story takes place in 2073, sixty years after the spread of the Red Death, an uncontrollable epidemic that depopulated and nearly destroyed the world in 2013. One of the few survivors, James Howard Smith, alias “Granser,” tells his incredulous and near-savage grandsons how the pandemic spread in the world and about the reactions of the people to contagion and death. Even though it was published more than a century ago, The Scarlet Plague feels contemporary because it allows modern readers to reflect on the worldwide fear of pandemics, a fear that remains very much alive. By exploring the motif of the plague, a consistent and well-spread topos (i.e., theme) in literature (2–4), London’s novel is part of a long literary tradition, inviting the reader to reflect on the ancestral fear of humans toward infectious diseases. In the ancient world, plague and pestilence were rather frequent calamities, and ordinary people were likely to have witnessed or heard vivid and scary reports about their terrible ravages (5). 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 (6). The immense fright was also fueled by a belief in the supernatural origin of pandemics, which were often believed to be provoked by offenses against divinities. In the Bible (e.g., Exodus 9:14, Numbers 11:33, 1 Samuel 4:8, Psalms 89:23, Isaiah 9:13), the plague was viewed as one of God’s punishments for sins, so the frightening description of its spread was interpreted as a warning to the Israelites to behave morally. This causal relationship between plague and sin is seen also in Greek literary texts, such as Homer’s Iliad and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (429 BCE). In contrast, the Greek historian Thucydides (c. 460–395 BCE), in his History of the Peloponnesian War, and the Latin poet Lucretius (c. 99–55 BCE), in his De Rerum Natura, refuted a supernatural origin of the disease and focused their descriptions on the uncontrolled fear of contagion among the public. According to these authors, plague did not discriminate between the good and the evil but brought about the loss of all social conventions and a rise in selfishness and avarice. Later medieval writings, such as The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) and The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400), emphasized human behavior: the fear of contagion increased vices such as avarice, greed, and corruption, which paradoxically led to infection and thus to both moral and physical death (7,8). Human reactions to the plague are also the central themes of historical titles such as A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe (1659–1731), a long, detailed narrative of events, anecdotes, and statistics regarding the Great Plague of London of 1665. In a similar manner, The Betrothed and History of the Column of Infamy, both written by Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873), were extraordinary descriptions of the plague that struck Milan around 1630 (9). In English-language literature, The Last Man (1826) by English novelist Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was one of the first apocalyptic novels, telling of a future world that had been ravaged by a plague; a few persons appear to be immune and avoid contact with others. The concept of immunization in this book demonstrates that the author, most famous for the novel Frankenstein, had a deep understanding of contemporaneous theories about the nature of contagion. In 1842, the American poet and novelist Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) published The Masque of the Red Death, a short story unique in the literary tradition of the plague by focusing only on the metaphorical element of the topos. Through the personification of the plague, represented by a mysterious figure disguised as a Red Death victim, the author meditates on the inevitability of death; the issue is not that people die from the plague, but that people are plagued by death (9).

Engaging Love, Divinity, and Philosophy: Pragmatism, Personification, and Autoethnographic Motifs in the Humanist Poetics of Brunetto Latini, Dante Alighieri, and Giovanni Boccaccio

Although the works of three early Italian Renaissance poets, Brunetto Latini (1220-1294), Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), may seem far removed from the social science ventures of the 21st century, these three Italian authors provide some exceptionally valuable materials for scholars interested in the study of human knowing and acting. As central participants in the 13th-14th century “humanist movement” (in which classical Greek and Latin scholarship were given priority in matters of intellectual development), Brunetto Latini, Dante Alighieri, and Giovanni Boccaccio helped sustain an analytic focus on human lived experience. Most of the materials addressed here are extensively fictionalized, but our interests are in the sociological insights that these authors achieve, both in their accounts of the characters and interchanges portrayed in their texts and in their modes of presentation as authors. Although lacking the more comprehensive aspects of Chicago-style symbolic interactionist (Mead 1934; Blumer 1969) theory and research, these early Renaissance texts are remarkably self-reflective in composition. Thus, these statements provide us with valuable insights into the life-worlds of (a) those of whom the authors speak, (b) those to whom the authors address their works, and (c) the authors themselves as people involved in generating aspects of popular culture through their poetic endeavors. More specifically, these writers enable us to appreciate aspects of pragmatist emphases on human knowing and acting through their attentiveness to people’s perspectives, speech, deliberation, action, and interaction. In addressing affective relationships, introducing generic standpoints, and considering morality as community matters, these materials offer contemporary scholars in the social sciences some particularly instructive transhistorical and transcultural comparative and conceptual reference points. Inspired by the remarkable contributions of the three 13th-14th century Italian poets and some 12th- 13th century French predecessors, the Epilogue direct specific attention to the ways in which authors might engage poetic productions as “producers” and “analysts” of fictionalized entertainment.

Introduction:

Introduction:

Urbain le Mescongneu Filz de l’Empereur Federic Barberousse by Claudine Scève, Janine Incardona, and Pascale Mounier (review)

Reviewed by: Urbain le Mescongneu Filz de l’Empereur Federic Barberousse by Claudine Scève, Janine Incardona, and Pascale Mounier Sarah E. Mosher Scève, Claudine, Janine Incardona, and Pascale Mounier. Urbain le Mescongneu Filz de l’Empereur Federic Barberousse. Genève : Droz, 2013. Pp 332. ISBN: 9782600016100. $50.40 (Paper). Edited by Janine Incardona and Pascale Mounier, this bilingual edition of Urbain le Mescongneu filz de l’Empereur Federic Barberousse features Claudine Scève’s original French translation from 1533 as well as the 1526 version by Da Sabbio-Garanta which served as the Italian textual base for Scève’s translation. The structure of this edited volume allows for clear linguistic and literary comparison since the Italian manuscript appears on the left-hand side while Scève’s version is situated on the opposite page. In addition to the translation, pages 7-136 contain a detailed critical introduction and analysis of the work as well as a discussion of Scève’s contributions to French literary history and to the literary traditions of Lyon. Following the critical introduction, pages 137-279 feature the bilingual text followed by appendices that comprise pages 282-296. A glossary of the sixteenth century French version appears on pages 297-322, while pages 323-332 include an index of proper names. The work contains extensive footnotes that further enhance the scope and attention to detail of this study. The Urbain/Urbano narratives tell the story of Frédéric Barberousse, the Emperor of Rome and his illegitimate son who was conceived during the rape of the young peasant Sylvestre. While Sylvestre takes up residence with an innkeeper and gives birth to Frédéric’s son, named Urbain, Frédéric’s wife, Emeraude, dies while giving birth to a son named Spéculo. Years later, three Florentine merchants notice the striking resemblance between Urbain and Spéculo. Aware of the longstanding political rivalry between the Sultan of Cairo and the Emperor Frédéric, the merchants persuade Urbain to serve as an imposter in order to marry Lucrèce, the Sultan’s daughter. Once married, Lucrèce, while in Rome, reveals her identity to the Emperor who is troubled by the physical resemblance between Urbain and the deceased Spéculo. After recognizing Sylvestre, the emperor marries her in order to correct his past transgression. The Florentines are punished and Frédéric, Sylvestre, Lucrèce, and Urbain live the rest of their days in happiness. Completed by Claudine Scève in Lyon around 1533, Urbain is particularly unique in that it is only the second text translated into French by a woman in the sixteenth century. In their study, Incardona and Mounier consider the quality of Scève’s translation as well as Scève’s literary and linguistic contributions to the text. In order to better understand Scève’s text, the editors examine several key elements that provide insight into the genesis and trajectory of the Urbano narrative, among them: intertextuality, lexicography, onomatology, and paratextual influences. The work also cites the five remaining original manuscripts as a point of departure for comparison. From a linguistic [End Page 107] perspective, the work compares Scève’s translation to the Da Sabbio-Garanta Italian text in order to show how the French text is similar to and different from the Italian version. The comparative analysis of multiple versions of Urbano includes discussions of syntax, punctuation, morphology, and orthography in order to trace the origins, authorship, and trajectory of the Urbano legend. When discussing the literary genre, Incardona and Mounier argue that as a result of the structure and content of the Urbain/Urbano text, the work can be considered as a roman. Among the strengths of the edited volume is the detailed discussion of the mystery surrounding the inspiration behind the creation of the Urbano narrative. The original Urbano text was published at the end of the fifteenth century by an unknown author who deliberately signed the text with the name Giovanni Boccaccio to mislead the public of readers. Specialists in Italian literature believe that Urbano was inspired by hagiography since the work shares a striking resemblance to the legends of...

«Le quali cose ciascuna per sé e tutte insieme» / «Así de todas juntas como de cada de una de por sí» : Del <em>Decamerón</em> de Boccaccio a las <em>Novelas ejemplares</em> de Cervantes

The present study sets out to analyze the intertextual relation of Giovanni Boccaccio and Miguel Cervantes, focusing on the presence of the Decameron in the Exemplary Novels. After a first presentation, a description of the structure of the Decameron is attempted in order to detect potential influences on Cervantes regarding the art of relating, narrative procedures, discursive strategies and stylistic traits. Subsequently the study seeks to demonstrate how the birth of the Exemplary Novels depends on a personal reflection by Cervantes regarding the morphology of the prose of extensive imagination, womb of which the genre evolves in the course of the 16th century. Finally the direct correspondences between both raccolte di novella are cited.

“Che paura avete voi?”

AbstractThis paper presents an analysis of the collocations of it. paura (fear) in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. The main goal of the research was to find out how this emotion is conceptualized in Boccaccio’s masterpiece, which is considered a milestone of Italian literature. Following the theory of conceptual metaphors and linguistic research on emotions, as well as a qualitative approach to collocation, it is shown that paura in the Decameron is depicted as an independent and powerful entity that rules the subject experiencing it.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale, Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Tale of the Enchanted Pear-Tree, and Sir Orfeo Viewed as Eroticized Versions of the Folktales about Supernatural Wives

Two of the tales mentioned in the title are in many ways typical of the great collections of stories (The Canterbury Tales and Il Decamerone) to which they belong. What makes them conspicuous is no doubt the intensity of the erotic desire presented as the ultimate law which justifies even the most outrageous actions. The cult of eroticism is combined there with a cult of youth, which means disaster for the protagonists, who try to combine eroticism with advanced age. And yet the stories in question have roots in a very different tradition in which overt eroticism is punished and can only reassert itself in a chastened form, its transformation being due to sacrifices made by the lover to become reunited with the object of his love. A medieval example of the latter tradition is here the Middle English romance, Sir Orfeo. All of the three narratives are conspicuously connected by the motif of the enchanted tree. The Middle Ages are associated with a tendency to moralize ancient literature, the most obvious example of which is the French anonymous work Ovide moralisé (Moralized Ovid), and its Latin version Ovidius Moralizatus by Pierre Bersuire. In the case of The Merchant’s Tale and The Tale of the Enchanted Pear-Tree, we seem to meet with the opposite process, that is with a medieval demoralization of an essentially didactic tradition. The present article deals with the problem of how this transformation could happen and the extent of the resulting un-morality. Some use has also been made of the possible biblical parallels with the tales in question.

«He wrote / after having consulted the books»: On Lope and the «novellieri», a state of the matter (with especial attention to Giovanni Boccaccio), part II

El estudio que sigue constituye la primera parte de un ensayo mas amplio en el que se pretende ofrecer un estado de la cuestion de la relacion intertextual de Lope de Vega con los novellieri . En esta primera parte, pues, se realiza un panorama de la situacion, ejemplificado con un caso concreto y, dentro del repaso de los estudios mas significativos de la relacion autor-autor, se analiza el de Lope con Giovanni Boccaccio.

The Lies of the Painters: Artisan Trickery and the Labor of Painting in Boccaccio’s Decameron and Sacchetti’s Trecentonovelle

Giorgio Vasari’s portraits of fourteenth-century Florentine painters Giotto and Buffalmacco in his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects are indebted to two medieval novella collections: Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and Franco Sacchetti’s Trecentonovelle. Boccaccio and Sacchetti provide more than just anecdotal bric-a-brac to Vasari and his fellow Renaissance art theorists. Both authors identify the painter’s labor as a central problem for aesthetic theories of painting. In contrast to Boccaccio, Sacchetti sees no contradiction between the daily realities that define the painter’s vocation and the potentially sublime qualities of their finished works. Scholarship has yet to acknowledge the sophistication and precocity with which the medieval novella tackled thorny philosophical questions about the materiality of painting.

One Adam and Nine Eves in Donald Siegel’s The Beguiled and Giovanni Boccaccio’s 3:1 of The Decameron

Donald Siegel’s 1971 film entitled The Beguiled is compared to Tale 1 of Day 3 from Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Both stories are about a man who arrives in a garden setting and finds nine sexually starved women. In Boccaccio’s tale, a male gardener finds himself in a convent occupied by nine nuns with whom he proceeds to have sexual relations to everyone’s satisfaction. Siegel’s film is about a wounded soldier taken in at a girls’ finishing school whose nine female residents become the objects of the hero’s amorous attention. While Boccaccio adopts a philogynist tone with respect to the material, The Beguiled appears to be a virulently misogynist film projecting its female characters as jealous demons who end up mutilating and then killing their male suitor. Findings from evolutionary psychology pertaining to female jealousy and reproductive strategies are used to consider the respective attitudes toward women in the medieval tale and the twentieth-century film. Conclusions are drawn about the difficulty of placing either of the stories within a clear-cut philogynist or misogynist category.

Was There a German ‘Geoffrey Chaucer’ in the Late Middle Ages? The Rediscovery of Heinrich Kaufringer's Verse Narratives as Literary Masterpieces

One of the curious phenomena in late-medieval literature proves to be the seeming absence of a major figure like Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, Franco Sacchetti, or Marguerite de Navarre in ...

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Epidemics and Fear

For centuries, the plague caused fear and panic. The term “bubonic plague” relates to ulcerated lymph nodes (the buboes) observed in the groin, armpit, or neck of the infected person. The plague was transmitted from rodent to rodent—and to humans—by fleas. Today, bubonic plague is treatable if diagnosed early, but the pulmonary (pneumonic) form of the infection still carries a very high risk of mortality (1). Between 1347 and 1350, the plague, then known as the Black Death, killed more than 25% of Europe's population (2, 3). Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron is based on stories of people who fled from plague-infested Florence. In the 18th century, after a massive population shift to towns during the Industrial Revolution, squalid conditions in overcrowded cities became the breeding ground for epidemics. Cholera emerged on the Indian subcontinent at the beginning of the 19th century. In its second pandemic (1829–1852), 7000 people died in London amid mass panic. Cholera appeared in New York in 1832 and in South America in 1834. …

Reception, Elegy, and Eco-Awareness: Trees in Statius, Boccaccio, and Chaucer

The essay examines a specific case of “wood-stripping” that occurs in three related texts: one ancient, Statius's Thebaid, and two medieval romance versions of Statius's poem, Giovanni Boccaccio's La Teseida and Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Tale. It argues that all three writers are gazers at nature (in the sense that they situate action in a natural environment that they make visible), by adopting an “affective fallacy” (traditionally called the “pathetic fallacy”) they also convey the “feelings” of the natural world (in this case, its sorrow, suffering, and mourning). In doing so, they become co-partners, even “co-sufferers” or mourners, in the feelings of natural phenomena. The elegy for the trees in Statius, Boccaccio, and Chaucer provides a pointed example of how the intertwining of thinking and feeling that poetry makes possible allows the authors to enter into an eco-critical space that reveals an affective environmental understanding even without the discursive tradition for writing about nature that modern environmentalism has made possible. In contrast to Ernst Robert Curtius's assumption that medieval literary notions of nature follow standard tropes, medieval literary texts in fact reveal a keen awareness and dedicated study of natural phenomenon. Comparing how the three authors discussed here describe the trees, forest, and defoliation in their elegies highlights their knowledge of the natural environment and their affective response to deforestation. Recognizing this eco-consciousness in medieval texts can enhance our understanding of the period while at the same time contributing to a working history of environmentalism.