Browse below for recent scholarship and writing on The Decameron accessible through the University of Chicago Library.
Elena Ferrante: A Power of Our Own
“The seven female narrators of the “Decameron” should never again need to rely on the great Giovanni Boccaccio to express themselves. Along with their innumerable female readers (even Boccaccio back then knew that men had other things to do and read little), they know how to describe the world in unexpected ways.”
Marilyn Migiel: The Ethical Dimension of the Decameron
Precisely how the Decameron complicates our moral views – how it goes about teaching us about moral reasoning, how it leads us to reflect on what we find praiseworthy or blameworthy, and above all how it demonstrates the value of literature to this enterprise – is a matter unlikely to be resolved any time soon. It must continue to be discussed.”
F. Regina Psaki: Voicing Gender in the Decameron
“Does this asymmetry in the Decameron argue an antipathy towards women? Or is Boccaccio ‘willing to generalize about the lives of women – to universalize – in order to file his “class-action” suit on their behalf?’ I believe the latter.”
Pier Massimo Forni: The Decameron and Narrative Form
“The illusion is one of dealing with a book that not only is a world in itself, but in which the whole world is contained, with the totality of human experience in it.”
Justin Steinberg, Mimesis on Trial: Legal and Literary Verisimilitude in Boccaccio’s Decameron
“Even when exploring its inner contradictions, … Boccaccio innovates through, rather than from, rhetoric. Studies that neglect the influence of rhetorical verisimilitude on Boccaccio’s realism, preferring to imagine a seamless evolution from the plausible to the particular, miss this essential tension at the heart of the Decameron between competing notions of the real.”
Rivka Galchen: Lifesaving Tales
“In the Italian of Boccaccio, the word novelle means both news and stories. The tales of ”The Decameron” are the news in a form the listeners can follow.”
Teodolinda Barolini: The Essential Boccaccio, or an Accidental Ethics
“But Boccaccio is more concerned with the lives of women than many authors of his time. Beginning with the Author’s Preface, he is willing to generalize about the lives of women—to universalize—in order to file his “class-action suit” on their behalf. And in fact the Decameron is less a blanket indictment against universalizing, which it seems to consider inevitable, than a meditation on various kinds of universalizing.”