2021 Theses Doctoral

The Questioni d’Amore Reconsidered: Contextualizing Boccaccio’s Amatory Manual

Lopez, Christina

This dissertation focuses on Giovanni Boccaccio’s questioni d’amore, a text that, despite its immense richness, has been overlooked within the field of Boccaccio studies. It has been the subject of surprisingly little scholarship, and the sparse work that has been done on them has relegated them to tight and unimaginative spaces. This project, which seeks to fill this critical lacuna, is innovative in three respects: it is the first study to consider all thirteen questioni individually; it offers a new, essential translation of the questioni; and it is the only analysis to date that considers the questioni through a historicizing lens. To this end, I conduct a detailed analysis of the questioni that is contextualized by social history and supplemented with relevant literary intertexts. This study ultimately demonstrates the considerable social, legal, and literary significance of the questioni d’amore and provides new perspectives on Boccaccio’s authorial trajectory and intellectual interests.