Le Origini della Comunità Civile nell'Opera di Giovanni Boccaccio. Dinamiche di Violenza, Ordine Pattizio e Dissenso

This dissertation investigates Giovanni Boccaccio’s engagement with the origins and dynamics of political community through three of his works in the Italian vernacular: the Ninfale fiesolano, the Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia, and the Decameron. Recent scholarship has significantly reshaped our understanding of Boccaccio by highlighting his involvement in the civic and political life of fourteenth-century Florence. His works, however, have not been systematically examined as a sustained inquiry into the nature of political community. This dissertation addresses that gap by arguing that, in these works, Boccaccio uses literature as a space in which he develops an original theoretical account of how violence, contractual order, and dissent shape political community.

Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, I place Boccaccio’s works in dialogue with classical and medieval political thought, the Ciceronian rhetorical tradition, medieval legal culture, theology, and the historical context of fourteenth-century Florence. I show how Boccaccio not only draws on these traditions, but reworks and challenges them to articulate a distinctive conception of political community.

In the first chapter, I reinterpret the Ninfale fiesolano, traditionally considered an idyllic rewriting of the foundation myth of Fiesole and Florence, as an inquiry into the origins of political order. I argue that Boccaccio presents violence and consent not as opposing forces but as intertwined dynamics that drive the emergence of political community. Violence is dramatized not only as a destructive force but as the root of ambiguous forms of consent through which political order becomes possible.

The second chapter turns to the Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia, examining Boccaccio’s reflection on the constitution and governance of political order. I contend that, rather than grounding political authority in the figure of an ideal ruler, the author depicts a contractual order that is continually constituted and reconfigured through processes of negotiation and mediation. At the same time, Boccaccio explores the tensions inherent in this model, revealing its vulnerability to contingency, discretionary power, and authoritarian drift.

In the third chapter, I examine the Decameron through the lens of dissent. The work, traditionally read as an attempt to restore order after the chaos of the Black Death, is here reinterpreted as an exploration of the relationship between communal order and dissent. The Decameron presents dissent not simply as a threat to political community but as one of its constitutive and potentially productive dimensions, while also probing the threshold beyond which it can no longer be accommodated and instead becomes destructive.

These readings demonstrate that the Ninfale fiesolano, the Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia, and the Decameron are united by a sustained investigation into the nature of political community. Rather than imagining political order as the realization of stable concord, Boccaccio conceives it as a dynamic and inherently unstable process structured by the tensions between violence and consent, negotiation and coercion, and consensus and dissent. The dissertation thus identifies political community as one of the central theoretical concerns of Boccaccio’s vernacular corpus of the 1340s and shows that literature constitutes a privileged space in which he develops this theoretical inquiry.