Chapter 5 examines Boccaccio’s authorial defenses in the Decameron in the light of medieval medical and literary prescriptions for lovesickness, such as those in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris, and Andreas Capellanus’ De amore (which Boccaccio has been credited with translating). Like these didactic works, the Decameron can also be seen as teaching both how to recover from an unhappy love affair and how to procure a new liaison, thus aggravating the very ills that it is said to cure. Indeed, the book is presented metaphorically as fighting fire with fire, redressing unrequited desire by offering female readers the solace of a personal relationship with its author. But Boccaccio also recognizes that it useless to try to prevent sexual desire, and the cure may do more harm than good. The chapter’s second half examines stories that seem to draw on the dialogues between lovers of different social statuses in De amore. The attempted seductions are all unsuccessful in Andreas’ hypothetical encounters, but the corresponding novelle tend to end happily and to model healthier, more productive human relationships.

In the mythological account inherited by Ovid, Pasiphae went through a psychological transformation in which she was assailed by the grotesque desire to be mated by a bull. She thereby lowered the human character of her sexuality to that of an animal. When Ovid imports her story into the domain of elegy, her degradation runs counter to the genre’s conventional idealization of sexual life. Yet Ovid’s Pasiphae lives out that craving as if propelled by the rhetoric of elegy. She is a queen pursuing a beloved in a georgic landscape, but she behaves like a composite of the elegiac puella and the elegiac lover. Pasiphae thereby brings her grotesque psychology into the imaginative world of elegy, cultivating her dark desire under its mannerisms, until she manages to have sex with the bull. The elegiac echoes of her role in the erotic scenario, the meter in which it is outlined, and the elegiac allusions in its images – these all shift the ground of the reading experience from the mythical horror of aberrant sexuality to the realm of the elegiac grotesque, in which nefarious eroticism and elegiac love conventions are fused, appearing at once monstrous, contemptuous, and ridiculous.