Five Frames For The Decameron

Using a fourfold approach derived from symbolic anthropology, sociology, semiotics, and philology, Joy Hambuechen Potter focuses on the cornice, or frame tale, of the Decameron, its purpose, and its relationship to the stories. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"A remarkably well-informed and truly innovative study of the way Boccaccio reimagined and rewrote Old French fabliaux in his Decameron."—François Rigolot, Princeton University "Theoretically savvy, and yet jargon-free, philologically impeccable and critically acute, this is a book that shows the author’s unflinching dedication to the highest standards of scholarship."—Simone Marchesi, author of Dante and Augustine "Brown’s attention to codicological contexts coupled with persuasive new interpretations of some of the fabliaux and Decameron stories make this book a pleasure to read for medievalist veterans and novices alike."—Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, author of Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1378-1417 Short works known for their humor and ribaldry, the fabliaux were comic or satirical tales told by wandering minstrels in medieval France. Although the fabliaux are widely acknowledged as inspiring Giovanni Boccaccio’s masterpiece, the Decameron, this theory has never been substantiated beyond perceived commonalities in length and theme. This new and provocative interpretation examines the formal similarities between the Decameron’s tales of wit, wisdom, and practical jokes and the popular thirteenth-century fabliaux. Katherine Brown examines these works through a prism of reversal and chiasmus to show that Boccaccio was not only inspired by the content of the fabliaux but also by their fundamental design--where a passage of truth could be read as a lie or a tale of life as a tale of death. Brown reveals close resemblances in rhetoric, literary models, and narrative structure to demonstrate how the Old French manuscripts of the fabliaux were adapted in the organization of the Decameron. Identifying specific examples of fabliaux transformed by Boccaccio for his classic Decameron, Brown shows how Boccaccio refashioned borrowed literary themes and devices, playing with endless possibilities of literary creation through manipulations of his model texts. Katherine A. Brown is a specialist of medieval French and Italian literature.

Rumble offers a comparative study based on the concept of 'aesthetic contamination, ' which is fundamental to the understanding of Pasolini's poetics

This new translation by Guido Waldman captures the exuberance and variety and tone of Boccaccio's masterpiece.

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 story-tellers, and exploring the intertextual relations within the Decameron and with sources and analogues. This inaugural book in a new series of critical essays on the Decameron will provide an important guide to reading the complex series of narratives that constitute the opening of the Decameron and will serve as a guide to reading the entire work.

"Addressing herself equally to those who argue for proto-feminist Boccaccio - a quasi-liberal champion of women's autonomy - and to those who argue for a positivistically secure, historical Boccaccio who could not possibly anticipate the concerns of the twenty-first century, Migiel challenges readers to pay attention to Boccaccio's language, to his pronouns, his passives, his patterns of repetition, and his figurative language. She argues that human experience, particularly in the sexual realm, is articulated differently by the Decameron's male and female narrators, and refutes the notion that the Decameron offers an undifferentiated celebration of Eros. Ultimately, Migiel contends, the stories of the Decameron suggest that as women become more empowered, the limitations on them, including the threat of violence, become more insistent."--Jacket.

This volume, part of the Lectura Boccaccii series organized by the American Boccaccio Association, offers close readings by top scholars of Day Four of the Decameron. As fans of the Decameron know, the Fourth Day opens with an important intervention in which the author defends his project against his critics, which coincides with a significant change in tone as the subject matter turns to stories with unhappy endings. The contributors approach the stories from a variety of perspectives, including the linguistic, philosophical, anthropological, and literary historical. These fresh readings of stories that are nearly seven hundred years old testify to the enduring power of Boccaccio’s masterpiece to speak to new audiences and to find compelling relevance even at a great distance from its immediate medieval context.

This book explores the tangled relationship between literary production and epistemological foundation as exemplified in one of the masterpieces of Italian literature. Filippo Andrei argues that Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron has a significant though concealed engagement with philosophy, and that the philosophical implications of its narratives can be understood through an epistemological approach to the text. He analyzes the influence of Dante, Petrarch, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, and other classical and medieval thinkers on Boccaccio's attitudes towards ethics and knowledge-seeking. Beyond providing an epistemological reading of the Decameron, this book also evaluates how a theoretical reflection on the nature of rhetoric and poetic imagination can ultimately elicit a theory of knowledge.