Boccaccio's Decameron and the Italian Novella

This course focuses on Boccaccio’s Decameron, widely hailed as the fundamental text of early European vernacular prose storytelling, as well as on novellas of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (by Sercambi, Sacchetti, Salernitano, Firenzuola, and Bandello, amongst others). The course explores the narrative, formal, and sociological features of each work within relevant historical and literary contexts and takes an interdisciplinary approach that can contribute to our understanding of ways of writing and reading (at times) distant from our own. The course also includes a discussion of the impact of Pietro Bembo’s evaluation of the Decameron on its reception history and on the numerous novella collections of the Renaissance.