Eroticizing Theology in Day Three and the Poetics of the Decameron
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2013
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This essay argues that the fusion of the erotic and religious that characterizes Day Three of the Decameron constitutes a central element in Boccaccio’s poetics, as expressed both in the (significantly contiguous with Day Three) Introduction to Day Four, where Boccaccio aligns himself with lyric poets who had explored the same issue of the relationship between eros and theology, and in the Author’s Conclusion, where the erotics of religious art are a central part of his defense of poetry. As this textual itinerary suggests, Boccaccio’s eroticization of theology in Day Three is part of an effort to theologize poetry by giving literature the same institutional status afforded to the disciplines of philosophy and theology.
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Scholars@Duke
Martin Eisner
Martin Eisner is Chair of Romance Studies and Professor of Italian at Duke University.
His first three books show how an attention to the materiality of texts can transform our understandings of literary history, whether on the scale of the single manuscript, the single work, or the individual biography. In Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature: Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular (Cambridge UP, 2013), he shows Boccaccio’s crucial role in the construction of the Italian literary tradition by scrutinizing one remarkable manuscript. The book was published in Italian as Boccaccio e l'invenzione della letteratura italiana (Salerno, 2022). In Dante's New Life of the Book: A Philology of World Literature (Oxford UP, 2021), he demonstrates how investigating the transformations of Dante Vita nuova across multiple material forms, from medieval manuscripts to modern movies, can yield new interpretations. The book won the Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association. In Boccaccio, the Disguised Revolutionary, which is part of Reaktion Books's Renaissance Lives series, he brings into focus Boccaccio's innovative thinking about desire, language, gender, cultural diversity, and power through the lens of the manuscripts Boccaccio used and wrote.
His next project, provisionally entitled "Dante's Moon: The Curious History of a Cosmic Question”, proposes a new model of intellectual history that highlights how the reception of Dante’s Paradise produced new discursive spaces of poetry, politics, physics, protest, philology, and pedagogy in the works of Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Galileo, Angela Tarabotti, Vico, and Maria Montessori, respectively. His research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the American Academy in Rome, the American Philosophical Association, and the Fulbright Foundation.
Unless otherwise indicated, scholarly articles published by Duke faculty members are made available here with a CC-BY-NC (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial) license, as enabled by the Duke Open Access Policy. If you wish to use the materials in ways not already permitted under CC-BY-NC, please consult the copyright owner. Other materials are made available here through the author’s grant of a non-exclusive license to make their work openly accessible.