The recent past: Dante, since Boccaccio

The lecture returns to the notion of "Dantesque society", developed the previous week, between the fiction of the case and the friction of norms - a juridical reading of the Comedy that allows us to recapture the figure of the poet as procreator. But it does so on the basis of his memory in Franco Sachetti's Trecentonovelle , attempting to define the notion of the "recent past" that has designated Dante since Boccaccio and the novellistica. We analyze an episode from Boccaccio's life (his journey to Verona in 1350 to pay Florence's debt to the exile's daughter, now "Sister Beatrice"), posing the question of the proper name as a "shield of truth". This question also sheds light on the first short story of the first day of the Decameron, which we propose here as an exercise in micro-reading, reconstructing the fictional chain that, from Ceparello to Ciappelletto, leads from the author to his narrator and from a historical character to his imaginary double. This parody gone awry brings into play the ambiguous relationship between derision, emancipation and social criticism on which the analysis ends, in dialogue with the hypotheses formulated by Robert Hollander on the force of satire and the relationship between Dante and Boccaccio.

Contents

• Verona, 1350: Boccaccio and Sister Beatrice
• The name is a "shield of truth": "When to my eyes appeared for the first time the glorious lady of my thought, who was called Beatrice by many who did not know what it is to give a name" (Dante, Vita nuova)
• "To Messer Giovanni Boccaccio paid this day ten gold florins for him to give to Dante Alighieri's sister Beatrice, nun of Santo Stefano degli Ulivi in Ravenna."
• Bologna, 1317-1321: first documentary evidence of the Commedia's social spread
• Dantesque society, from Franco Sacchetti's Trecentonovelle onwards
• Who was Boccaccio in 1350?
• "Here begins the book whose title is Decameron and whose subtitle is Prince Galehaut, in which are contained one hundred short stories told in ten days by seven ladies and three young men."
• Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta: "Galehaut was the book and the trouvère" (Inf., IV, 137)
• Boccaccio's account of Paolo and Francesca's death in 1373, or the ^101st story of the Decameron
• A human comedy. "I want everyone on this first day to be free to deal with any subject he likes" (Decameron, I, 1)
• When should we start laughing? Derision, emancipation and social criticism
• Io sono una forza del Passato : Pasolini and the Trilogy of Life
• Boccaccio, Genealogiae deorum gentilium libri : fable is like a veil or a bark that hides the truth of the example beneath a fiction
• The operations of law, theology and the logic of as-if (Yan Thomas)
• "My story is Musciatto Franzesi's story"
• From Ceparello to Ciappelletto : a character named by equivocation
• The author, his narrator, a historical figure and his imaginary double: the fictional chain
• Documenti di Ser Ciappellatto (Cesare Paoli) , "A notary by trade, he was very ashamed when one of his deeds (even though he wrote very few of them by hand) was not considered a forgery"
• La fabrique des saints, a parody gone wrong: "So lived and died Master Ciappelletto of Prato, who was made a saint as you have just heard. Far be it from me to deny his presence among the blessed"
• Quand on cesse de rire: translations of the first short story from the first day of the Decameron in Castilian and French (Enrica Zanin)
• "For it always begins before and something always ends up missing" (Mathieu Riboulet, Entre les deux il n'y a rien (Verdier, 2015)
• Infamia, arbitrium, privilegium, pactum: a normative reading of Dante's work (Justin Steinberg, Dante and the Limits of Law, Chicago UP, 2013)
• The poet procreator : "Expect no more from me either say or my sign/for freed, straight and sound is your arbitrator/ not to do as he pleases would be forfeit" (Purg., XXVII, 139-142)
• Is Ciappelletto Brunetto Latini's parodic double? (Robert Hollander, Boccaccio's Dante and the Shaping Force of Satire, 1997)
• Siete voi qui ser Brunetto ? Dante sous une pluie de feu (André Pézard, 1950)
• L'Ulysse de Dante désire divenir del mondo esperto (Inf. XXVI, 98)
• Primo Levi, Si c'est un homme: "Here I am, attention Pikolo, open wide your ears and your mind, I need you to understand: Considerate la vostra semenza: Fatti non foste a viver come bruti/Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza. And it's as if I, too, were hearing these words for the first time: like trumpets sounding, like the voice of God"