Chapter 2 - From Sermon Story to Novella

Summary

Chapter 2 investigates how the three opening stories of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron reformulate examples of ascetic and altruistic behavior used in vernacular sermons, concentrating on Italian sources close to Boccaccio: the homilies of Giordano da Pisa and the devotional treatises of Domenico Cavalca and Iacopo Passavanti. It explores the Dominican friars’ vicious representations of Jews, and the Decameron’s surprisingly sympathetic attitude toward them and other excluded or subordinate social groups in medieval society. The apparent filogyny and filo-Judaism in Boccaccio’s reworkings of antifeminist and anti-Semitic exempla do not seem to respond to contemporary women’s or Jews’ historical circumstances, however, so much as to the reductive didacticism of his sources. The chapter’s final sections examine how Decameron novelle 5.8 and 5.9 parody sermon exempla by showing how abstract moral injunctions can be put to different ends, thereby undermining the assumption that any lesson can be universally applied.