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Description of  Boccaccio s Corpus: Allegory, Ethics, and Vernacularity (William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature)

0268104492 rar In Boccaccios Corpus, James C. Kriesel explores how medieval ideas about the body and gender inspired Boccaccios 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 Boccaccios 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 Dantes Read more