Favole, parabole, istorie: The genealogy of Boccaccio’s theory of allegory

Description

This study maintains that allegory is the key to understanding Boccaccio’s poetics and literary theory. Boccaccio either composed allegorical fictions such as the Ameto, Amorosa visione, or Buccolicum carmen, or he theorized allegory’s role in literature’s semiotics, for example in his Trattatello on Dante and in the Genealogie deorum gentilium. Despite Boccaccio’s interest in allegory, it has not been understood that allegory is foundational for Boccaccio’s conception of literature. Traditionally, scholars have considered Boccaccio to be the first Italian “realist” author, who criticized simplistic notions of God, theology, and medieval allegory. This thesis reevaluates Boccaccio’s understanding of allegory in the wake of proto-Humanist defenses of classical literature and Dante’s valorization of vernacular fiction. Chapters 1-2 contextualize allegory within medieval literary theory. Medieval debates about allegory turned on two questions: what texts are allegorical and how are they allegorical? Chapter 3 suggests that Boccaccio represents the culmination of medieval literary theory because he develops a theory of allegory universally applicable to all texts. Rather than prioritize the historical and figural semiotics of the Bible over fiction, Boccaccio suggests that all texts and literatures are equally allegorical, and thus communicate similar truths and have similar value. Boccaccio’s allegorical literary theory allows him to justify the coherence of his own diverse writings, synthesize the Italian and Latin cultural projects of Dante and Petrarch, and valorize secular fiction. Chapter 4 treats Boccaccio’s allegorical use of the erotic in the Ameto and Amorosa visione. Boccaccio’s early fictions experiment with literary semiotics as a system in their own right, without being justified by theology or philosophy. In polemic with Dante, whose fiction signifies in relation to Biblical prefiguration and metaphysics, symbolized by the ideal erotic, Boccaccio’s signify in relation to the real and the physical, symbolized by the mundane erotic. Chapter 5 suggests that Boccaccio’s Corbaccio functions as an Ovidian remedium for readers who do not read allegorically. Based on elegy’s connection, as developed in Ovid’s amatory writings, between loving, reading, and writing, the Corbaccio uses hatred as a metaphor for the literal reading of women and literature. The Conclusion briefly discusses allegory in the Decameron.