"Le Muse son donne": sessualità, comunità e lettura al tempo del Decameron

The present dissertation investigates the role of women in Boccaccio's The Decameron, establishing a connection between the philosophical, historical and fictional levels. The Decameron is a book that was first circulated around 1350 in Florence, in the aftermath of the Black Death. The narrative is composed of two constituent elements. Firstly, a frame story in which a group of ten youths escape a plagued city, and secondly, a collection of one hundred novellas that the youths tell each other in order to entertain themselves. Historically, the high concentration of speaking female characters in the book has been tied to the rise of vernacular literature. I argue instead that the opposition of the male and female gender works as a structuring device on which Boccaccio bases his imagination of the reconstruction of civic community all the while rethinking courtly love and the institution of marriage. I propose a gendered reading of Roberto Esposito's philosophy of community, through which I connect a biopolitical reading of the role of women and a reading of Boccaccio's political interest in Florence, which has been the object of recent critical attention. The core chapters of my dissertation contextualize the representations of prostitution and female pleasure in the time of Boccaccio, showing how the stern treatment of prostitution in The Decameron is connected to its lack of value for the civic community and how the indulgence on a subtle representation of female pleasure is instead condoned in view of its crucial role in conception according to late-medieval medicine. The final chapter looks at the reading practices that shape both the reception and the narrative structure of the book, taking as a paradigm a famous epistle to Boccaccio's friend Mainardo Cavalcanti, whose family, I argue, offers a negative model of reading. Novellas analyzed include, among others: 5.10 (Pietro di Vinciolo the homosexual and the voluptuous wife); 7.2 (Peronella in Naples); 8.1 (Ambruogia the failed prostitute in Milan); 8.2 (Belcolore the peasant and the priest); 9.3 (pregnant Calandrino and wife Tessa); 9.10 (Donno Gianni turns Pietro's wife in a mare).