The Lectura Boccaccii series, organized by the American Boccaccio Association and published by University of Toronto Press, aims to present ten volumes on the ten days of storytelling in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Each volume places its Day “in perspective”: a different scholar writes on each tale (and on any particularly important parts of the frame story), so the volume can be read piecemeal by those interested in a particular story, or in its entirety by those interested in gaining a broader perspective on the text as a whole.
The Decameron Fourth Day in Perspective, edited by Michael Sherberg, includes eleven essays on the Introduction and ten tales of Day Four. The theme of Day Four is “love stories that had an unhappy ending,” and the Introduction to Day Four includes a famous defense of the Decameronagainst criticisms the author claims to have received--among them, that he devotes too much time and energy to the pursuit of women. Timothy Kircher, in “Love, Latinity, and Aging in the Introduction to Day Four,” reads the Introduction as Boccaccio’s own version of a scholastic quaestio. Rather than appealing to the atemporal wisdom of scholastic auctoritates, Kircher argues, “Boccaccio places the largely deductive scholastic method under an inductive lens, with an eye that attends to the shifting phases of life experience” (14). Boccaccio’s language of “fragility and transience” (19)--the language of the novella, in other words--serves to reckon with the human facts of aging, mortality, and desire.
Tobias Foster Gittes opens the next essay, “‘A questa tanto picciola vigilia de’ vostri sensi’: Senile Recidivism, Incest, and Egotism in Decameron IV.1,” by reviewing the critical tradition of reading incestuous desire (namely, Tancredi’s repressed desire for his daughter Ghismonda) into Decameron IV.1. Gittes argues that the incestuous undertones of the story are in fact a result of Tancredi’s “morbid egotism” and an intellectual lust for inappropriate knowledge. Boccaccio would have seen a source for this kind of transgressive intellectual desire in Dante’s Ulysses, whom Gittes identifies as one of many characters in literature exemplifying the combination of “oratorical skill, charisma, and destructive egotism” (37). In Decameron IV.1, he argues, incest is a symptom of a deeper intellectual disorder.
In her reading of Decameron IV.2, “Incarnation in Venice,” Alison Cornish explores the tale of deceitful Frate Alberto through the lens of naturalism and the imagery of the Annunciation. In this tale, Boccaccio literalizes courtly metaphors (for instance, the topos of an “angelicized lady” desired even in heaven) in a parody of the Annunciation. The Annunciation is one of the most significant moments of Christian scripture, and Frate Alberto’s deception and seduction of the gullible Lisetta is one of the most memorable figures in a vein of anti-clericalism that runs throughout the Decameron. What fraud and the Annunciation share in common is that they challenge “the relationship between the visible appearance of everyday life and the immanent reality of a world unseen” (51), and the cutting sarcasm of this tale deflates the “quasi-religious veneration of women” in the tradition of the dolce stil novo (58).
Michael Papio offers an ethical analysis of Decameron IV.3, “The Tale of the Three Ill-Starred Sisters,” which situates Boccaccio’s tale in a genealogy of stories on “destructive anger” (72). This story, containing minimal direct discourse and thus told from the “single vantage point” of the narrator Lauretta, can be read as a moral lesson on the consequences of unchecked passion: following in the tradition of medieval exempla, the tale offers a “matter-of-fact recounting of the unfortunate events that take place in the wake of an initial ethical lapse” (63). Papio argues that Boccaccio draws on medieval and ancient sententiae of emotions, as well as Aristotle’s Ethics, to explore the ethical boundaries of anger and the destruction that can result when a person slides from controlled, justified anger into a “blinding mala ira, which brings an avalanche of misfortune and death” (67).
In the essay “Love, Heroism, and Masculinity in the Tale of Gerbino (IV.4),” Gur Zak posits self-control as the essential feature of true heroic masculinity, a heroism that the protagonist of this story fails to achieve. Boccaccio mixes epic-nationalistic tones with the genre of romance in this tale, resulting in a would-be hero whose excessive passion (much like in the previous story) leads to violence and death. The unbridled pursuit of desire found in the romantic genre, Zak argues, is incompatible with the goal of nation-building and flourishing found in the epic genre. Like Gittes on IV.1, Zak sees a parallel to the Filocolo in IV.4, comparing the earlier hero Florio with the Decameronian Gerbino.
Kristina Olson interprets Decameron IV.5, “The Tale of Lisabetta da Messina,” as a play on hybrid physical-textual structures, contemplating the generative power of violence within literary worlds (by contrast with its extinguishing force in physical reality). Lisetta, the woman whose lover’s head is truncated by her brothers and then buried in a pot of basil, remains silenced and restricted in the tale, and yet her story expands to a vast afterlife with imitations and homages from artists for centuries to come. In addition to exploring the tale’s textual afterlife, Olson historicizes the tale within the nexus of fondaci (merchant communities) that stipple the Decameron, arguing that this tale is staged at the intersection of eros and commerce.
In “The Dream of the Shadow,” F. Regina Psaki analyzes Decameron IV.6 as a further construction on the “scaffold” of three key tales in Day Four: the first, fifth, and ninth. Psaki argues that, “given the power vested in the patriarch or his proxy, the plots of Day Four are most often framed in terms of masculine prohibition and female resistance” (108). Psaki unravels the parallels and divergences as Boccaccio rehearses this core motif in IV.6: for instance, Andreuola in IV.6 uses powerful speech just like Ghismonda in IV.1, but the father of IV.6 is a kind of “anti-Tancredi,” while it is the podestà, the judicial authority, who embodies patriarchal coercion in IV.6.
Suzanne Magnanini reads Decameron IV.7 as practical advice from its narrator Emilia, a reminder to her listener-readers that, when it comes to women’s testimony in the Middle Ages, “bodies convince more than voices” (143). Magnanini argues that Emilia’s message is at odds with the elevated rhetoric she uses to describe the death of her female protagonist, Simona. Simona dies while trying to provide physical evidence of her innocence, and although her untimely demise is recounted in elegiac terms, it is also a sad reminder that the disregard for women’s verbal testimony has devastating consequences.
Annelise Brody, like Psaki on IV.6, connects her reading of IV.8 to three of the most widely-received tales in Day Four: IV.1, IV.5, and IV.9. While those other tales all share in common the repressive use of authority by a male patriarchal figure, Brody shows that women too can be tools of patriarchal authority: the repressive figure of IV.8 is an authoritarian mother. Her restrictive authority results in the death of her son, and Brody suggests that Boccaccio would have us turn to compassion, not restriction, as a solution for family members in distress due to their uncontrolled experience of love.
Decameron IV.9 is treated by Julie Singer in the essay “How the vida of Guilhelm de Cabestanh ‘quasi tutta si disfece’”. Like IV.1, IV.9 plays on the motif of the eaten heart. Singer reads the story from the perspective of the lady in IV.9 who does the consuming, arguing that her bodily digestion of her lover’s heart serves as a metaphor for the textual digestion that Boccaccio enacts on the Provençal vidas and razos that serve as his source material for the story.
Fabian Alfie discusses the final story of the day under the title “Happy Endings”. Alfie connects Decameron IV.10 to intertexts in Dante’s tenzone with Forese Donati and to the comic poetry of Rustico Filippi, treating the tale as a social satire against corruption within the noble class. Dioneo uses his narratorial privilege to subvert the tragic theme of Day Four by offering a comedic alternative, and he uses the genre of comedy to “[challenge] the love literature upon which the rest of Day Four depends” (196). Yet even as Dioneo changes the genre, readers of this volume will see that his critique of love literature shares much in common with other tragic stories of Day Four.
Although each contributor takes a unique approach to their chosen tale, and the essays of this volume were not composed in direct conversation with each other, practically every essay includes some discussion of Boccaccio’s penchant for rehearsing and replaying core motifs throughout his oeuvre. Day Four is clearly a moment in the Decameron when Boccaccio returns to some of his most-repeated themes, including destructive anger and jealousy (Decameron IV.3 and the Corbaccio), female suicide (Decameron IV.9 and the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta), and parental disapproval of a son or daughter’s love interest in a partner of unequal social status (Decameron IV.1, IV.4, IV.8, and the Filocolo). Finally, the theme of intergenerational family dynamics crops up in a majority of Day Four tales, as discussed in the essays on IV.intro, IV.1, IV.3, IV.4, IV.5, IV.6, and IV.8, so the volume may also appeal to readers interested in family, authority, and parent-child relationships in Boccaccio’s work and in medieval literature more broadly.