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In the Mandricardo-Doralice subplot of the Orlando Furioso , Ariosto parodies the courtly topos of \"love by fame\". His parody is marked by violence as well as by a fixation on possession that reflects the dangers of life at court and the precarity of Italy's position in Europe in the late Renaissance. Ariosto suggests that his craft, literature, has been reduced to a form of cultural currency in an increasingly mercenary world.

In this dissertation, I trace the development of love by hearsay both as a topos in narrative and as a point of polemic from the origins of Italian literature to the middle of the sixteenth century. I propose that the idea of love by hearsay occupies a highly significant position in Italian medieval and early modern thought, both fascinating and perplexing writers for hundreds of years. I highlight the transition of this theme from a courtly poetic motif, popularized by the Provençal troubadours, qualified by medieval Italian poets, and satirized by Giovanni Boccaccio; to a questione d'amore debated in sixteenth-century dialogues, treatises, and lectures. Italian writers were deeply divided on the subject, torn between, on one hand, cases of love by hearsay in some of the most influential works in their canon, and, on the other hand, the conflict between the notion of an \"unseen beloved\" and the dominant understanding of love as a reaction to a visual stimulus, supported by a long philosophical and medical tradition. This controversy culminates in a dialogue devoted exclusively to the subject of love by hearsay, Luc'Antonio Ridolfi's Aretefila (1562). Ridolfi pits courtly ideals and scientific theories against each other through the ideologies of his two interlocutors. The outcome of the debate in this dialogue symbolizes the general victory of an academic, humanistic understanding of love over courtly erotic ideals in Italy by the mid-sixteenth century. At this point in Italian intellectual history, a kind of love that existed in great love stories but that could not be sustained scientifically could not be considered a realistic possibility. Ridolfi reinforces the division between what is poetically and realistically possible, effectively banishing love by hearsay to the literary realm, and concluding that its occurrence in the natural world would require nothing short of a miracle. The principal objective of this dissertation is to demonstrate that by tracing the development of the topos of love by hearsay throughout Italian literary history, we may analyze the displacement of courtly values by academic and humanistic scholarship as the supreme authority on eros.

The latest installment in the American Boccaccio Association’s Lecturae Boccaccii/Decameron’s Days in Perspective series faces the considerable task of creating a cohesive collection of essays on tales belonging to a day without a theme. [...]the day’s propensity for disorientation (to which its elusive and often troubling tales greatly contribute), may explain yet another paradox, to which the present volume directly responds: the ninth day, though occupying a critical position in the Decameron’s narrative, remains largely understudied. Rather, he highlights the complexities of the relationship between freedom and authority embodied in the enigmatic Solomon figure.

Zak observes that studies on Boccaccio and consolation have been heretofore almost exclusively focused on this most famous of his works. [...]Boccaccio's associations of consolation with pleasure and distraction have generally served as the basis for excluding it from “the serious ‘business’ of life” (5). [...]in his analysis of the Elegia di madonna Fiammetta in chapter 2, he diverges from the widely adopted interpretation of Fiammetta as a “negative example” (79) and the nurse as “the voice of reason” (84) in matters of love. [...]in his unique analysis of an often-overlooked character, Zak illustrates how, in contrast with Beritola (the protagonist of day 2, story 6 who literally turns feral in her grief), her nurse embodies a modified model of Boethian patientia. Zak concludes with a definition of Boccaccio's consolation of literature as “one which is empathetic rather than judgmental, polyphonic rather than one dimensional, open ended rather than authoritarian” (187). [...]while Boccaccio and the Consolation of Literature clearly demonstrates that Boccaccio's strategy for confronting life's hardships is in close dialogue with his philosophical and literary antecedents as well as late medieval contemporaries, this insightful study reveals that it is also remarkably modern.