Abstract
Published under the auspices of the American Boccaccio Association, The Decameron Eight Day in Perspective, edited by William Robins, brings the collection of lecturae Boccaccii halfway through its completion. The volume is opened by a thorough introduction from the editor that accounts for the day's thematic focus on beffa, the geographical and urban landscape of the stories, and their intratextual connections. Ten individual essays offer original interpretations of the novelle, while taking into account the Decameron as a whole in its cultural and historical milieu.
While reading VIII.1, KP Clarke addresses its “problems of tone” (p. 21), and connects them to the novella's uneasiness with the transactional nature of human interactions. The inconclusiveness of the story is identified in the moral undertone of the whole brigata, which is not comfortable with the intermingling of economics with virtue and female chastity. Clarke furthers his reading by analyzing four 14th-century responses/adaptations to the novella, that veer from its original sense, and that interpret sexual transactions through a more positive outlook.
Through the lens of the Aristotelian theory of the commensurability of goods, and the principles of fair exchange among personal relationships, Maggie Fritz-Morkin argues that in VIII.2 Boccaccio translates Nicomachean Ethics into a reading that stresses the value of “currency as useful for the good of social cohesion” (p. 43). Moreover, by focusing on the “grinding euphemisms” (p. 45), the author posits that Boccaccio's “poetics of obscenity” (p. 40) marks his creative verbal economy and problematizes the nature of unseemly language as being at once metaliterary and typological, both in the novella and in the author's conclusion.
In his legal and economic reading of Calandrino's beffa of VIII.3, Justin Steinberg moves between the metaliterary component of the novella's question of artistic representation and the juridical undertones of the pranksters’ retaliation. According to Steinberg, the beffa immortalizes Calandrino's figure through a social understanding of art, while the search for the magic heliotrope puts into question Calandrino's private ownership vis-à-vis the needs of Florence—a city-state that by the time of the Decameron heavily relied on tax contributions and fiscal policing for its own survival.
Katherine A Brown's interpretation of VIII.4 focuses on the interplay between absence, morality, and aesthetic pleasure and characterizes the novella as a response to the first two tales of Day Eight. By exercising a “corrective rewriting of VIII.2” (p. 93), the novella valorizes sexual intercourse consummated for personal gain. Although hardly intertexts in themselves, a series of references to Dante's Pg. 17–19 buttresses the complication of the moral system that the brigata experiences, underlining the importance of misura, and its connection with the good.
In contextualizing the novella within the socio-political landscape of the Signoria, William Robins and Leah Faibisoff argue that VIII.5 performs the tensions of Florentine governance. By reading the novella beyond its comedic mechanism, the authors posit that the beffatori “functio[n] as a mechanism of communal reprisal,” and “embod[y] the ideology of democratic republicanism” (p. 118) through their proximity to the responsibilities of the sindacato. As aptly staged in the novella, wide participation of lower-class citizens against the misdemeanors of foreign officials is regarded as an important step in the definition of Florence's republican identity.
Rhiannon Daniels frames her reading of VIII.6 through the intratextuality of the Calandrino cycle and along the dynamics of oral and written cultures. While the “pre-knowledge” (p. 134) acquired in both VIII.3 and VIII.5 supplements the readers’ reception of the characters, Boccaccio's Conclusion encourages reading at will, thus enforcing and subverting the linearity of writing with the modes of orality. The tension between orality and writing is further explored in the opposition of city and contado, which “hinges on the disjunction between word and deed” (p. 138), and thus meditates on the socio-cultural stereotypes of rural illiteracy and literate urbanities.
By intertwining the “axes of gender and of social position” (p. 156), Teodolinda Barolini posits that VIII.7 constructs “an in malo exploration of the basic tenets of the Decameron” (p. 159), namely, the very compassione that opens the book. Despite his philosophical education in Paris, Rinieri fails to recognize the excessiveness of his revenge on Elena, and his own descent into inhumanity. In dramatizing immoderation from a metaliterary standpoint, and in conflating Rinieri with “the learned and sophistic trolls” of the introduction to Day Four, Barolini argues that the novella performs the anti-Aristotelian threats of dismisura, “in which the acquired wisdom nonetheless fails to provide a bulwark against moral collapse” (p. 188).
According to Olivia Holmes, VIII.8 discusses the possibility of “symmetrical retribution as a means for resolving disputes” (p. 190). By openly responding to the previous story “as a specific corrective to the excessive nature of Rinieri's revenge against Elena” (p. 195), the novella of Zeppa and Spinelloccio offers an alternative ending, in which perfect symmetry and balanced retribution are “patently ridiculous and ethically objectionable” (p. 200). The novella thus parodies both the principles of retributive justice, and the “normative conventions of pedagogical and exemplary literature” (p. 201), in showing the inanity of achieving perfect closure.
Elisa Brilli's examination of the possible sources and contexts for VIII.9 reads Boccaccio's portrayal of Master Simone together with his appraisal of the medical profession, as well as with Petrarch's invective against physicians. The faults at the base of Simone's beffa are thus all individuated within his medical background: Simone is at once presumptuous on account of his training and ignorant of the connections between medicine and necromancy. Furthermore, Brilli analyzes the points of contact with Petrarch's Invective contra medicum, through the beffa's “distortion of rhetoric and language” (p. 219) and the “epistemological and ethical” differences between medicine and poetry (p. 218).
Roberta Morosini puts the Mediterranean Sea at the core of VIII.10 by interpreting it as “a powerful absent-presence” in the novella (p. 226). Following the maritime cycles analyzed by Fernand Braudel, Morosini focuses on the structural elements of the Mediterranean in the narrative. The Orientalizing depiction of the dogana and the public bagno in Palermo represents the cultural tensions of the seaport; Iancofiore is constructed as the conflation of both the classical Sirens and the Homeric Circe, as mediated through their medieval exegetes; and Salabaetto's mercantile guile is modeled as “a modern Ulysses” (p. 237) in the final denouement.
The insightful and erudite readings of the authors manage to balance their hermeneutical effort with an exact assessment of previous scholarship. The interdisciplinary focus of the scholars—from legal discourse, to medical thought, to socio-economic policies, and metaliterary analyses—breathes fresh air into the critical debates, making the volume a fundamental contribution to the field of Boccaccio Studies that will open new directions for research and teaching on the Decameron.
