Compassion in Boccaccio’s Later Writings

• In Event: Boccaccio and Compassion

Abstract

Compassion is a complex value in any society, and perhaps particularly so in a society as infused with Christian doctrine as with a capitalist ethos. Boccaccio’s exploration of the spiritual and social value of compassion binds his later works—narrative and analytical, vernacular and Latin—in a way that rewards examination, particularly in light of a lingering if waning tendency to claim a turn away from the vernacular fictions at the end of his life. I’d like to look at the way compassion is invoked explicitly at the beginning of the Decameron (the Proem, Introduction, and Day One, stories 2 and 3); in the Corbaccio; in the Esposizioni; and in the Genealogies of the Pagan Gods, XIV and XV. I intend to show a coherent position on compassion which is both more nuanced than that of Dante in the Divine Comedy, and consistent across these works.

Author

• F. Regina Psaki, University of Oregon