1993 Articles

Toward a Sexual Poetics of the Decameron

Barolini, Teodolinda

I will begin with a proverb, one which the Dizionario comparato di proverbi e modi proverbiali gives in Latin, French, Spanish, German, and English, as well as Italian. It is "Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi" (or, in Florio's 1598 translation from the Italian, "Wordes they are women, and deeds they are men"), and I will be using it as a rubric and point of departure for conceptualizing a pervasive Decameronian thematic regarding the relation of words to deeds and of both to gender.