Reconsidering Boccaccio: Medieval Contexts and Intertexts ed. by Olivia Holmes and Dana E. Stewart (review)

This collection of essays stems from a conference at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Binghamton University on the occasion of Giovanni Boccaccio's 700th birthday in 2013. It achieves precisely what it set out to do. Reflecting the new interest in the global middle ages, as the editors explain in the introduction, the volume's essays are multidisciplinary, featuring the thoughts of scholars in Spanish, French, Persian, Arabic, and, of course, Italian as well as the disciplines of history, law, classics, book history, and comparative literature. Divided into five sections, the volume includes fifteen essays focused on different works by Boccaccio including the Decameron, Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, Trattatello in laude di Dante, De mulieribus Claris, and some of Boccaccio's letters. A third of the essays focus on the Decameron, but they examine the Decameron in relationship to precursor or later texts ranging from Persian and Arabic antecedents to Spanish and French works of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The five section titles provide the reader with a bird's-eye view of how interdisciplinary this collection is, in contrast, for example, to other excellent collections of essays that appeared for Boccaccio's centenary celebration (Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works [2013] or The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio [2015]). Reconsidering Boccaccio, as the section titles reveal, addresses "Material Contexts," in which K.P. Clarke examines Boccaccio's autographs and Rhiannon Daniels explores Boccaccio's paratexts. In the second section, "Social Context Friendships," essays by Jason Houston and Todd Boli, respectively, deal with Boccaccio's idea of friendship and his friends. The third section, "Social Context Gender Marriage and the Law," includes Alessia Ronchetti's essay on Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, Grace Molino's careful analysis of the role of the marriage debt in Decameron 2.10 based on the discussion in Gratian's Decretum, Sara Díaz on misogamy in Trattatello in laude di Dante, and Mary Anne Case's interesting analysis of whether women are human in Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan. The fourth section, "Political and Authorial Contexts," explores Boccaccio's relationship to the Neapolitan court, in which Elizabeth Casten examines Boccaccio in Naples and his "troubling" link to Johanna I, Naples' sovereign queen; Kevin Brownlee shows how Christine de Pizan transformed Boccaccio's De mulieribus Claris in the Cité des dames, while Lori Walters demonstrates that Christine's French reading transforms Boccaccio's Johanna I and Andrea Acciaiuoli. The final section, "Literary Contexts and Intertexts," breaks ground with some fascinating explorations of analogues to Boccaccio's Decameron tales as well as exploration of how his works influenced two major fifteenth-century works, La Celestina and the Heptaméron. Franklin Lewis's essay, "A Persian in a Pear Tree: Middle Eastern Analogue for Pirro/Pyrrus," examines all of the possible antecedents to Decameron 7.9, including the Persian and Arabic versions as well as those of European provenance and the later version of Chaucer (Merchant's Tale), and provides an erudite innovation to our understanding of the origin of the pear tree motif. Similarly Katherine A. Brown, using Decameron 8.5 and 8.6 and the fabliau "Barat et Haimet," makes a strong argument for the role of French fabliaux in the Decameron's collection of "beffe." Filippo Andrei's argument about Boccaccio's Fiammetta and La Celestina as examples of the tragicomedy of lament is a highly original contribution. In the final essay, Nora Peterson examines how the sacrament of confession plays out in the Decameron and the Heptaméron.

All of the essays are followed by endnotes that are scholarly and comprehensive, demonstrating the high level of research that the collection features. This collection, while covering a large range of topics inspired by Boccaccio's corpus, is both wide in scope and inspirational. The introductory focus on textual issues reinforces the need for greater attention to Boccaccio's own claims to authority over his work and...