Boccaccio's Corpus: Allegory, Ethics, and Vernacularity by James C. Kriesel (review)

Since its beginnings in 1995, the William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval and Italian Literature has examined the multiple disciplines that constitute the borderless medieval Italian cultural tradition as they converge in the works of Dante and his contemporaries. In recent years the study of Dante's engagement in dialogic processes with his poetic contemporaries has flourished in the works of scholars such as Teodolinda Barolini, Winthrop Wetherbee, Albert R. Ascoli, and David Bowe. In the current study, James C. Kriesel broadens and vivifies this scholarly debate, applying the theme of dialogism to the works of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). This is a novel and compelling study of Boccaccio in dialogue with Dante and Petrarch as well as other, noncanonical, authors.

In the introduction to this volume, Kriesel outlines the aim of the study: to contextualize the ideas about allegory, ethics, and vernacularity presented in Boccaccio's works within literary debates of the medieval and early Renaissance periods, and moreover to explore 'why Boccaccio reflected on these topics by reference to the body, especially the female body' (pp. 2–3). The study is presented in five chapters, each tackling a particular Boccaccian thematic strand (allegory, poetics, ethics, love, hatred) and linking the theme to one or more works, while also examining each work within a comparative framework as Boccaccio himself intended (p. 7). The fundamental and persuasive argument is that, contrary to common scholarly belief, Boccaccio was no mere admirer of his contemporaries. His declarations of admiration are tactical, used to demonstrate the greater relevance and relatability of his own views on contemporaneous literary debates.

In Chapter 1, Kriesel examines Boccaccio's allegory in the Genealogie in dialogue with that of Dante and the ancients. The chapter finds that Boccaccio downplays Dante's truth-telling claims out of a desire to highlight the allegorical properties of literature, and its ability to fulfil spiritual roles like those of prophets. Kriesel also notes that Boccaccio actually uses Dante to defend the feminine and fantastic texts from which he had distanced himself, conceptualizing Dante as a 'feminine vernacular author' (p. 53).

Chapter 2 addresses Boccaccio's erotic writings and his symbolic use of both chaste and erotic bodies within those writings. Kriesel argues that Boccaccio's Ameto champions and redeems female bodies, often scorned for their supposed inability to signify ideas about spirituality or ethics, by 'making them the privileged medium through which Ameto […] experiences ethical and spiritual truths' (p. 83).

Chapter 3 analyses the dialogic relationship of the Amorosa visione with Dante's Commedia. Kriesel argues convincingly that Boccaccio's texts emphasize the human inability to transcend the corporeal, as it is through embodiment that humans are able to enjoy and learn from erotic narratives. Kriesel also depicts Boccaccio's movement away from Petrarch, disturbed by his erotic desire for Laura, and towards a unique authorial persona comfortable in its symphonic understanding of eroticism and ethics.

In Chapter 4, the low style and feminine genre of the Decameron's short stories are discussed in relation to references to Jesus's incarnation and resurrection found in the Decameron's introduction and conclusion. These references, Kriesel argues, invite a comparison between the Decameron and Jesus's body, suggesting that the mundane corporeality of these short stories has also been created for human redemption (a poignant argument amidst the new wave of mass engagement with the text during the COVID-19 pandemic). The chapter also describes the contrast between Boccaccio's body-positive and Dante's anti-corporeal poetics, though it is worth noting that refrains of Dante's description of the universe as a 'volume' (Paradiso, xxxiii. 85–87 (l. 86)) do appear even in the evocation of Boccaccio's purportedly diverse poetics.

The fifth chapter focuses on Boccaccio's and Petrarch's reception of one another's depictions...