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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 March 2019
This Article presents the Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio, as a classic writing of universal literature that contains anticipations and fundamental innovations of the political categories of modernity: Contractualism, constituent power, constitutional deliberation, rhetoric, and the relation with Fortuna. The argument is developed in three parts: Initially, the legal and European dimension of the Decameron are summarized; then the discussion focuses on legal issues and institutional characters narrated in the novels; finally, the introduction of the work is analyzed, in which both the political-constitutional theme of the new beginning of the community and the collective archetype of the plague are interpreted as metaphors for the state of exception.
1 I prefer to talk about a “law and literature” movement, rather than a “law and literature” method, because the methodological disputes, typical of the classical areas of law, have been reproduced even within this type of studies. For excellent overviews see Ward, Ian, Law and Literature, Cambridge, 3–56 (1995). See generally José Calvo González, El Escudo de Perseo: La Cultura Literaria Del Derecho (2012); Maria Paola Mittica, O che acontece além do Oceano? Direito e Literatura na Europa, 1 Anamorphosis (2015).Google Scholar
2 It suffices to mention the recent Italian republication of the first work of Hans Kelsen, Lo Stato in Dante (2017). Boccaccio scholars themselves have called attention to the lack of a legal analysis of his work: Giuseppe Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio's Decameron 213 (1986). “With the exception of a few biographical references to Boccaccio's enrolment in the study of the law and to his contacts with Cino da Pistoia, there is not so much to be found on the question of the law in recent scholarship on the Decameron or even on the whole corpus of Boccaccio's work.” See Ricci, Lucia Battaglia, Diritto e Letteratura, Il Caso Boccaccio, in Studi di onomastica e letteratura: offerti a Bruno Porcelli 72 (2007). “Much has been written regarding the role of the market in Boccaccio; but instead the textual relevance of his legal culture has been practically ignored. And yet, his experience as a student of law has been anything but irrelevant for him, as a scholar, author of the Decameron, intellectual reader of Dante and lover of literary fables.” Id. Google Scholar
3 Vittore Branca, Boccaccio medievale 172 (2010).Google Scholar
4 See Manni, Paola, La Lingua del Boccaccio 115 (2017).Google Scholar
5 Lucia Battaglia Ricci, Scrivere un Libro di Novella 117 (2013); Giuseppe Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio's Decameron 213 (1986). “With the exception of a few biographical references to Boccaccio's enrollment in the study of the law and to his contacts with Cino da Pistoia, there is not so much to be found on the question of the law in recent scholarship on the Decameron or even on the whole corpus of Boccaccio's work.” Id. Google Scholar
6 Maurizio Fiorilla, Introduzione al Decameron 53 (2011).Google Scholar
7 For further analysis of the tension between the political order and natural law, see Barsella, Susanna, Boccaccio: i tiranni e la Ragione Natural, Heliotropia 131 (2016), http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/heliotropia/12/barsella.pdf; Mario Conetti, Il collasso dell'ordine giuridico e il diritto naturale nel Decameron, Heliotropia 105 (2016), http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/heliotropia/12/conetti.pdf.Google Scholar
8 Boccaccio, The Decameron 576 (G.H. McWilliam trans., Penguin Classics 2d ed. 1995).Google Scholar
9 Id. at 576.Google Scholar
10 Id. at 461.Google Scholar
11 Id. at 462; see also Doering, Pia Claudia, Madonna Filippa chiamata in giudizio. Diritto naturale e diritto positivo nel Decameron, in Giovanni Boccaccio: Tradizione, Interpretazione e Fortuna (A. Ferracin & M. Venier eds.); In ricordo di Ettore Branca, Udine 442 (2014) (noting that “we can't say that this kind of law really existed, because only fragments of the Prato statutes have survived”); B. Kannowski, Giovanni Boccaccio und die Juristerei. Rechtshistorische Aspekte des Dekameron, in Von des Leges Barbarorum bis zum ius barbarum des Nationalsozialismus. Festschrift für Hermann Nehlsen zum 48–59 (H.G. Hermann, et al. eds., 2008).Google Scholar
12 Boccaccio, supra note 8, at 462.Google Scholar
13 Id. at 463.Google Scholar
14 Here one hears echoes of the medieval legal principle “quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbari debet.” Ricci, supra note 3, at 131.Google Scholar
15 Boccaccio, supra note 8, at 464.Google Scholar
16 Id. at 342.Google Scholar
17 Id. Google Scholar
18 Id. at 335.Google Scholar
19 Id. at 336.Google Scholar
20 Id. Google Scholar
21 Id. at 337–38.Google Scholar
22 Id. at 179.Google Scholar
23 Id. at 179–180.Google Scholar
24 Id. at 181.Google Scholar
25 Id. Google Scholar
26 Id. at 183.Google Scholar
27 Id. at 184.Google Scholar
28 Id. Google Scholar
29 Id. at 185.Google Scholar
30 Mario Penna, La Parabola dei Tre Anelli e la Tolleranza nel Medio Evo 10 (1952).Google Scholar
31 See generally Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Nathan der Weise (2012).Google Scholar
32 Boccaccio, op. cit., p. 44. Cfr. Michael Sherberg, The Governance of Friendship. Law and Gender in the Decameron, Ohio, 77 (2011)Google Scholar
Despite Filomena's reconfiguration of the religious discourse of the previous two tales, the story she tells shares with both a significant interest in the question of evidence. All three tales have forensic elements: Ciappelletto as proof, curial misbehavior as proof, the rings as proof. Each in its own way asserts that we base our conclusions on matters of transcendence on the evidence of the material world.Google Scholar
33 Cfr. Giuseppe Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio's Decameron, Princeton 213 (1986) (“Throughout the Decameron there is a concern with the law and the judicial practice that is so extensive as to appear, on close inspection, nothing less than a central category of the narrative”).Google Scholar
34 Boccaccio, supra note 8, at 26.Google Scholar
35 Id. at 28.Google Scholar
36 On the social role of the solicitor in the 14th century, see Mastrominico, Giuseppe, Diritto e Letteratura. Dissapori Medievali e Moderni 44–50 (2017). For a more economic interpretation of the first novella, see Dotti, Ugo, Storia degli Intellettuali d'Italia 14 (1997) (“[I]t is instead true that Boccaccio meant to open the book with a particularly intense shock, almost so as to warn the reader of the real values animating social life: [N]ot virtue but money, not devotion but usury, not pieties but the calculated deceptions of businessmen.”).Google Scholar
37 Boccaccio, supra note 8, at 8–9.Google Scholar
38 Id. at 13.Google Scholar
39 Id. at 14–16.Google Scholar
40 Id. at 17.Google Scholar
41 Id. Google Scholar
42 Id. at 18.Google Scholar
43 Id. at 19.Google Scholar
44 Cover, Robert M., The Supreme Court, 1982 Term—Foreword: Nomos and Narrative, 97 Harv. L. Rev. 4 (1983).Google Scholar
45 Boccaccio, supra note 8, at 20.Google Scholar
46 Id. at 3.Google Scholar
47 Marino Biondi, Boccaccio e Machiavelli, Occasioni di lettura 56 (2014). Cf. Giuseppe Antonio Camerino, Il Peccato della Fortuna: su un Topos del Decameron, in Giovanni Boccaccio: Tradizione, Interpretazione e Fortuna. In Ricordo di Ettore Branca 163 (2014) (“La fortuna è il campo dell'imprevedibile; ed è volubile ed è insindacabile. Ciò non toglie che i casi e gli avvenimenti nelle più svariate esperienze dell'esistenza sono fortunati o meno in conformità del giudizio degli uomini, liberi di agire e di decidere.”).Google Scholar
48 Boccaccio, supra note 8, at 802 (“Confesso nondimeno le cose di questo mondo non avere stabilità alcuna ma sempre essere in mutamento, e così potrebbe della mia lingua essere intervenuto.”).Google Scholar
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