This panel explores how family resemblances—whether biological, narrative, intertextual, or conceptual—function in Boccaccio’s texts. Following the Presidenatial Theme, this family-focused inquiry will reveal the societal, cultural, and narrative structures at the heart of a medieval masterwork.
Taking steps from Giuseppe Chiecchi's seminal monograph, Giovanni Boccaccio e il romanzo familiare (Marsilio, 1994), this panel will provide critical response and further the discussion on the topic with three innovative papers, combining diverse methodological approaches.
We envision this on a traditional session of three talks lasting 15 to 18 minutes each, leaving time for a final discussion.
1. Kathryn McKinley: Rendering Hecuba: Pregnancy, Motherhood, and Canine Transformation.
Boccaccio presents Queen Hecuba and her calamitous loss of children in De casibus 13; De mulieribus claris 34; Esposizioni V.Lit.124 (Inferno 30.16-21); and Genealogie 6.22. Drawing from Euripides’ tragedy Hecuba and Ovid’s Metamorphoses XIII.481-575, Boccaccio relates the story of the pregnant Hecuba’s prophetic dream that she would bear a firebrand “whose flames would engulf all of Troy” (Esp. V.Lit.124). Priam ordered that the infant Paris be exposed, but Hecuba (ebbe pietà di lui) had pity on him, defied Priam and secretly had Paris raised by shepherds. Hecuba’ s crisis over her baby Paris’ fate echoes the plight of the anguished pregnant nymph Mensola (mother-to-be of Pruneo), after the goddess Diana expels her (Ninfale Fiesolano, 328-340; 410-13). Finally, having witnessed the deaths of her husband and children Paris, Deiphobus, Polites, Cassandra and Polydorus (Appendix), in her grief Hecuba is transformed into a barking dog (or one barking like a dog, in Dante and Boccaccio). This paper will treat briefly Boccaccio’s own copy of Euripides’ Hecuba (Biblioteca Laurenziana, San Marco, MS 226), but will mainly discuss his range of gendered treatments of Hecuba within her family’s emotional community, her pregnancy and mothering of Paris, and her losses of her other children.
2. Anna Dini: Saladin, A Mediterranean Exemplar in Decameron 10.9
Saladin’s legacy is ubiquitous throughout the Mediterranean world. Born in northern Iraq in the Twelfth century, he held several positions throughout his life: vizir, lieutenant, and founder of the Ayyūbid dynasty. His early rise to the position of secretary in the previous Fatimid dynasty garnered a host of critics as well as admirers. Memory of the sultan has also inscribed him with multiple appearances in the Decameron. This paper argues that Boccaccio’s recurring use of this character does not merely parody contemporary ecclesiastical writings. Instead, this paper will read Saladin’s role in Decameron 10.9 as a figure that illustrates the long-standing multi-confessional space in the medieval Mediterranean. This paper will demonstrate how Saladin amplifies the mirroring effects of exemplum, encouraging its readers to perform good virtues even as Boccaccio renders the narrative device as malleable throughout the tale collection. In sum, the narratological mirroring on the dialogic level expressed in generous acts places the historical figure at the center of a device that is too often provincialized in a culturally dynamic landscape.
3. Jonathan Combs-Schilling: Boccaccio’s Family Trees: On Olympia and Inheritance
There is no more personal depiction of kinship and inheritance in the corpus of Boccaccio’s fictional works than the fourteenth eclogue of Buccolicum carmen. A shepherd Silvius (a figure for the author) awakens to find his woods illuminated with celestial light that marks the arrival of the spirit of his deceased daughter Olympia (a figure for Violante, the daughter whom Boccaccio lost when she was five years old). Yet alongside the vulnerable biographical candor of this intimate domestic scene, the eclogue is also a manifesto of Boccaccio’s literary experimentation and a summa of his cultural mentalities. This paper will examine how family resemblance animates this key Boccaccian work on multiple levels—from kinship pathos to narrative genealogies to intertextual resemblances—by tracing the vexed but generative lines of inheritance and kinship that intersect between Silvius and Olympia, through which Boccaccio reconsiders the resemblance between his own early and “mature” works, the legacy of “Pagan” antiquity in the Christian present, and what Boccaccio himself did, and did not, inherit from Dante and Petrarch.
A plurality of points of view and critical perspectives inspires this panel, giving voice to the representation of motherhood, fatherhood, inter-religious dialogues, and mediterranean intersections of cultures, grounded in solid philological scholarship.