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.

Texts that warn of the dangers of passionate or excessive love have a history in Western culture going back to antiquity. Writings in this contra-amorem tradition typically characterize obsessive love or lovesickness as a disease and then offer remedies for the sufferer. When interest in Marsilio Ficino’s doctrine of Platonic love began to spread from Florentine philosophical circles to aristocratic courts throughout Italy in the late fifteenth century, some authors writing in the contra-amorem tradition responded directly to the new enthusiasm for Ficino’s ideas. A comparison of two contra-amorem texts – Bartolomeo Platina’s ‘pre-Ficinian’ On Love (c. 1466) and Battista Fregoso’s ‘post-Ficinian’ Anteros (1496) – will illustrate the ways in which the later text directed its arguments against Ficino’s doctrine, and did so with an audience of aristocratic young men particularly in mind. It is noteworthy that Anteros predates the first vernacular popularizations of Platonic love in Pietro Bembo’s Asolans (1505) and Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528), and also that Castiglione’s Courtier responds, in turn, to Anteros by assimilating some elements from that work into its own treatment of Platonic love.

Cicero, Lucretius, and Catullus employ the comic adulescens to examine love as a physical and mental disorder. According to David Konstan, the traditional Roman line held that “amor was tolerated in a young man, but that it was but a transient seizure which would not corrupt the responsibility of a Roman citizen (i.e., of an aristocrat) toward his republic, his family and his dignity.” Cicero and Lucretius both toe this line, using the comic adulescens to drive wayward Roman youths back into the fold to perform according to the conservative norms of their respective communities. Catullus, by contrast, explores the character from the perspective not of one trying to cure another but of a person going through the experience of the lover and trying to make sense of his complex and contradictory thoughts. In trying to think not with the comic adulescens but as him, Catullus displays something altogether new for a member of the Roman elite: a sustained interest in the potential interiority of individuals from Roman comedy and how their staged experiences might be used to reflect on personal struggles.

The primary purpose of this chapter is to show that, in the philosophical and literary discourse that immediately preceded the development of Roman love elegy, there exists a context conducive to the grotesque figuration of the sublimity of love and lovers. In Roman culture the philosophical discourse was dominated by Lucretius, who developed his views in dialogue with the poetry and natural philosophy of the centuries that preceded him, especially in the expository genres that united poetry and philosophy. The literary discourse is focused on Catullus, whose use of metaphors as instances of material identification shock the reader with the violation of logic and the transgression of nature. In the elegiac libellus Catullus resorts frequently to such violations, extending them to the human body, to social conduct, and to love itself. Indeed, Catullus makes bold use of the grotesque to show that beneath the flimsy surface of elegance, urbanity, and sentiment expected of the poetic discourse on love, there lurks a reality that is both defiled and defiling. By using images and evocations of this reality, Catullus admits into the domain of love poetry thematic materials and language that transgress the expectations of works meant to foreground love and beauty.