Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Boccaccio's Corpus: Allegory, Ethics, and Vernacularity

Boccaccio's Corpus: Allegory, Ethics, and Vernacularity

Kriesel, James C.

Hardcover

Series: William and Katherine Devers Dante and Medieval Italian Literature

Literary CriticismPoetry Criticism

ISBN10: 0268104492
ISBN13: 9780268104498
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: Dec 15 2018
Pages: 400
Weight: 1.55
Height: 0.88 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

In Boccaccio's Corpus, James C. Kriesel explores how medieval ideas about the body and gender inspired Boccaccio's vernacular and Latin writings. Scholars have observed that Boccaccio distinguished himself from Dante and Petrarch by writing about women, erotic acts, and the sexualized body. On account of these facets of his texts, Boccaccio has often been heralded as a protorealist author who invented new literatures by eschewing medieval modes of writing. This study revises modern scholarship by showing that Boccaccio's texts were informed by contemporary ideas about allegory, gender, and theology. Kriesel proposes that Boccaccio wrote about women to engage with debates concerning the dignity of what was coded as female in the Middle Ages. This encompassed varieties of mundane experiences, somatic spiritual expressions, and vernacular texts. Boccaccio championed the feminine to counter the diverse writers who thought that men, ascetic experiences, and Latin works had more dignity than women and female cultures. Emboldened by literary and religious ideas about the body, Boccaccio asserted that his feminine texts could signify as efficaciously as Dante's Divine Comedy and Petrarch's classicizing writings. Indeed, he claimed that they could even be more effective in moving an audience because of their affective nature-- namely, their capacity to attract, entertain, and stimulate readers. Kriesel argues that Boccaccio drew on medieval traditions to highlight the symbolic utility of erotic literatures and to promote cultures associated with women.

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