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In this study I attempt to provide a critical-exegetic reading of Giovanni Boccaccio's Filocolo: critical, because my point of departure is a problem---the insistent, puzzling repetition, on the part of the various characters, of the same story, the story of Florio and Biancifiore; exegetic, because my purpose is to arrive at a global interpretation of the work. / It is my contention that, first, every version of the story appears to be dictated by the purpose of informing the 'ignorant'---namely those unaware of how events truly unfolded---in order to complete a narrative that, from beginning to end "interamente si contenga;" second, that this repetition ensures the unity of the work as a whole. Moreover, the gradual process leading to full information runs parallel, I believe, to the gradual process of Florio's coming of age, from his fallacious "imagining" to his acquisition of "real knowledge." With my interpretation I wish to shed light on one aspect of Boccaccio's poetics, that is, the way he opposes his full, well-founded and consistent account to the "fabulosi parlari degli ignoranti." / On a quite different level, the repetition of the same story can be linked to Boccaccio's penchant for experimenting with the art of storytelling. / I have followed throughout the text of the Filocolo leaving aside, however, Book I, which concerns the parents of the two lovers and is essentially just a premise to the story. The division of my dissertation in four chapters reflects the two distinct phases that, in my opinion, characterize the narration: the 'outward journey' (Chapters I--III) and the 'return journey' (Chapter IV). In Chapter II I deal with the much discussed episode of the Questioni d'amore, that takes place in Naples during a pause in the outward journey. In the Appendix I analyze the phenomenology of death, both actual and 'verbal,' which allows me to explore further the character and personality of Florio and Biancifiore.

When an author produces a frame narrative, she simultaneously makes language both a represented object and a representing agent; when we imagine framed speech, we imagine both the scene its words represent and a mouth that speaks those words. Framed language is thus perfectly mimetic: the words we imagine being spoken within the fictional world are the same we use to effect that fiction's representation. Since its first function is to represent itself, the framed word acts both to push us out of the frame into our own temporality and to draw us into fictional times and spaces. This dissertation explores how first Dante and subsequently his successors, Boccaccio and Chaucer, deploy this structural feature of frames to engage difficult philosophical and theological disputes of their age. In the Divine Comedy, framed language allows Dante to approach the perfect presence of God without transgressing into a spatial conception of the divine. Intensifying Dante's procedure in his House of Fame, Chaucer forecloses the possibility of representation; he transforms every speech act into an image of its utterer rather than its referent, thus violently thrusting us back into the time we pass as we read. Boccaccio--first in his Ameto then in the Decameron--eschews this framed temporality in favor of the temporality of the fetish: while his narratives threaten to dissolve into their basic linguistic matters, the erotic energy of the people that populate those narratives forces them to cohere as fully imagined spaces and times. Finally the Chaucer who writes the Canterbury Tales fuses his initial reading of Dante with Boccaccio's response to it; he constructs the Canterbury pilgrims as grotesques who each open up a limited angle of vision on the time and space they collectively inhabit. These angles overlap and stutter over one another, unsettling the easy assignations of identity any given pilgrim would enforce on a tale or agent within the narrative. In doing so, Chaucer makes the temporality within his Tales strange and poignant in a way that fully mimics our own experience of extra-narrative time.

The aim of this work is to present depiction of seven deadly sins in the Italian literature of 14th century. To achieve this goal the thesis analyses the writings of the three most important writers of that period. The main texts that are analyzed in this work are: an allegorical epic poem La divina commedia (The Divine Commedy) by Dante Alighieri, a collection of novellas Il Decameron (The Decameron) and allegorical poem Ninfale d'Ameto (The Comedy of Fiorentine Nymphs) by Giovanni Boccaccio, and last but not least Francesco Petrarca's latin writing Secretum meum (My Secret Book). The thesis is divided into eight chapters. The first three chapters have an introductory character. There is introduced the concept of sin in general, the traditional catholic concept of seven deadly sins, as well as the historical context of Italy in 14th century. The fourth chapter is the beginning of the focal part of the thesis. There are subsequently presented Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarca, and their concept of deadly sins, their ideas on the relationship between the sins and love, on the relationship between the sins and the virtues, as well as their thoughts on causes of deadly sins and on possible ways how to avoid them. The thesis is then concluded with eighth chapter, which summarizes what has been found in the...

This dissertation focuses on Giovanni Boccaccio’s questioni d’amore, a text that, despite its immense richness, has been overlooked within the field of Boccaccio studies. It has been the subject of surprisingly little scholarship, and the sparse work that has been done on them has relegated them to tight and unimaginative spaces. This project, which seeks to fill this critical lacuna, is innovative in three respects: it is the first study to consider all thirteen questioni individually; it offers a new, essential translation of the questioni; and it is the only analysis to date that considers the questioni through a historicizing lens. To this end, I conduct a detailed analysis of the questioni that is contextualized by social history and supplemented with relevant literary intertexts. This study ultimately demonstrates the considerable social, legal, and literary significance of the questioni d’amore and provides new perspectives on Boccaccio’s authorial trajectory and intellectual interests.

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"Akademische preisschrift 1919." / At head of title: Englisches seminar der Universität Rostock. "Literatur": p. [iii]-iv.