The Decameron Ninth Day In Perspective

The Ninth Day of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron is significant both for numerological and structural reasons. Whether we consider the Decameron as reproducing an itinerary toward the attainment of virtue or following other possible interpretive schematics, Day Nine remains a liminal moment of pause before the inception of the final stories dedicated to the highest civic virtues of liberality and magnificence. This collection is comprised of extensive and rigorous essays by leading experts in the field of Boccaccio studies and medieval literature, shedding new critical light on the Ninth Day. The volume incorporates a multitude of disciplinary perspectives including literary studies, visual arts, political history, and gender studies. Taking a holistic approach, the contributors to the volume trace the dense and multi-layered web of interrelations between the narrative units and the rest of the Decameron. Connections between individual stories are highlighted and interactions between Day Nine and its counterparts in the book are analysed. In doing so, The Decameron Ninth Day in Perspective synthesizes existing scholarship but also opens up new horizons for future work.

This collection of original essays from leading scholars breaks new ground in our understanding of the tales belonging to the Ninth Day of the ​Decameron.

The Sixth Day of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron marks a new beginning. Its first story is the structural centre of the one hundred tales and signals the start of the day’s reflection on the power of the word as the fundamental building block of human communication. This collection gathers together readings of each of the ten stories in Day Six of the Decameron – the shortest of the entire work. Featuring a diverse group of literary scholars whose expertise is not limited to Boccaccio studies, the collection offers both comprehensive accounts of the tales and new interpretations of their significance. A major contribution to the study of the Decameron, it will also serve as an excellent starting point for new readers of Boccaccio’s masterpiece. The readings demonstrate how Boccaccio engaged in rethinking or elaborating on the heritage of Western literature and thought, including the Bible; the works of Dante; the Roman literary, rhetorical, and legal tradition; the writings of the Church Fathers; and the ideas of scholastic theologians. These lecturae employ a range of methodologies that account for both historical and theoretical issues in their engagement with Boccaccio's poetic and ethical project in the Decameron.

Divided into ten days of ten novellas each, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron is one of the literary gems of the fourteenth century. The ‘Decameron’ Third Day in Perspective is an interpretive guide to the stories of the text’s Third Day. For each novella, a distinguished Boccaccio scholar offers an essay that both reviews the current scholarly literature and advances new and intriguing interpretations of the work. The whole collection reflects the series’s guiding principle of examining the text “in perspective,” revealing the connections among the novellas, the Days, and the framing narrative that holds the whole Decameron together. The second of the University of Toronto Press’s interpretive guides to Boccaccio’s Decameron, this collection forms part of an ambitious project to examine the entire Decameron, Day by Day.

Divided into ten days of ten novellas each, Boccaccio’s Decameron is one of the literary gems of the fourteenth century. The Decameron Eighth Day in Perspective is an interpretive guide to the stories of the text’s Day Eight – a day dedicated to tales of tricks and practical jokes. By drawing on literary precursors such as fabliaux, epic, philosophy, exempla, Dante’s Commedia, and scripture, and by meditating on the dynamics of civic engagement in fourteenth-century Florence, Boccaccio develops in these stories of jests a self-consciously literary representation of the Florentine social imaginary. The essays in this volume, all written by prominent scholars, survey previous scholarship and open up new cultural and historical perspectives on Boccaccio’s sophisticated art of storytelling. They analyze both the literary sources that Boccaccio’s comic narratives transform, as well as the political, legal, and ethical contexts with which they engage. Each contributor tackles a single tale, yet their essays also register major themes and concerns that recur throughout Day Eight, allowing for close connections among the essays.

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.

This compilation of eleven essays offers exciting new perspectives on one of the greatest works of Italian literature.

Olivia Holmes explores the Decameron's sceptical and sexually permissive contents against the backdrop of medieval religion and didacticism.