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Reconsidering Boccaccio highlights the great Florentine writer
Giovanni Boccaccio's remarkable achievements in the fourteenth
century as a cultural mediator; his exceptional social, geographic,
and intellectual range; and the influence of his legacy on numerous
cultural networks. Grounded in Boccaccio's own writings,
Reconsidering Boccaccio brings a variety of methodologies and
critical approaches to the works of one of the 'three crowns' of
Italian literature. Containing essays by scholars not only of
Italian literature, but also history, law, classics, and Middle
Eastern literature, this collection is part of a vital movement to
open up a dialogue among researchers in various areas of study that
touch on the works of Boccaccio. The volume highlights the
necessity of a technical and historical framework when approaching
Boccaccio studies, while also shedding new light on the lives of
women and their role in the reception of Boccaccio's works.
This is the first monograph to provide a comprehensive
interpretation of the Decameron's response to classical and
medieval didactic traditions. Olivia Holmes unearths the rich
variety of Boccaccio's sources, ranging across Aesopic fables,
narrative collections of Islamicate origin, sermon-stories and
saints' lives, and compilations of historical anecdotes. Examining
the Decameron's sceptical and sexually permissive contents in
relation to medieval notions of narrative exemplarity, the study
also considers how they intersect with current critical assertions
of fiction's power to develop empathy and emotional intelligence.
Holmes argues that Boccaccio provides readers with the opportunity
to exercise both what the ancients called 'Ethics,' and our
contemporaries call 'Theory of Mind.' This account of a vast
tradition of tale collections and its provocative analysis of their
workings will appeal to scholars of Italian literature and medieval
studies, as well as to readers interested in evolutionary
understandings of storytelling.
Re-examining key passages in Dante's oeuvre in the light of the
crucial issue of moral choice, this book provides a new thematic
framework for interpreting the "Divine Comedy." Olivia Holmes shows
how Dante articulated the relationship between the human and the
divine as an erotic choice between two attractive women--Beatrice
and the "other woman." Investigating the traditions and archetypes
that contributed to the formation of Dante's two beloveds, Holmes
shows how Dante brilliantly overlaid and combined these paradigms
in his poem. In doing so he re-imagined the two women as not merely
oppositional condensations of apparently conflicting cultural
traditions but also complementary versions of the same. This
visionary insight sheds new light on Dante's corpus and on the
essential paradox at the poem's heart: the unabashed eroticism of
Dante's turn away from the earthly in favor of the divine.
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