The Renaissance of Marriage in Fifteenth-Century Italy (review)
refreshing freedom and lightness to his arguments, it is a liberty too dearly bought. For example, an entire chapter is devoted to a close reading of Decameron 7.9, a novella, Kuhns asserts, that epitomizes Boccaccio’s method of deploying a language of subtle allusions, significant names, numbers, and so on, to convey a “latent” message. Since, however, it was not Boccaccio, but Matthieu de Vendôme, author of the Comoedia Lydiae, who assigned the names (“Nicostrato” is the one exception) and orchestrated the events recounted in this tale — a fact noted in several critical studies of 7.9 — the granting of a peculiarly Boccaccian significance to these inherited narrative elements is, it seems to me, a recipe for misreadings and misrepresentations. Readers well-versed in Boccaccio criticism are likely to be perplexed and piqued by any number of extravagant theories and unfounded assertions. Upon what evidence or authority does Kuhns claim that Boccaccio’s birth name was Boccaccino (80), that Maso del Saggio is Saint-Thomas (66) and Frate Cipolla, Boccaccio (44)? But perhaps these are cavils. More worrisome, because more far-reaching, is Kuhns’s tendency to conflate Boccaccio’s anti-clericism with an anti-Christian stance, and his declaration that, in contrast with Dante, Boccaccio had “cut himself loose from the doctrinal theological and religious positions of the day” (154). Boccaccio was no closet heretic bent on producing “rejecting deniers of God” (93), and Dante was about as orthodox in the sphere of theological positions as Sade was in that of sexual ones. Nobody familiar with Boccaccio’s works doubts they are rife with such “covert” meanings; however, it is the responsibility of the critic — literary or philosophic — to carefully distinguish among the unlikely, the possible, and the probable readings of any given passage. Only a true curmudgeon could fail to appreciate the enthusiasm and vigor of Kuhns’s prose, delighting in Kuhns’s obvious delight in Boccaccio; only a reader who shares Kuhns’s enthusiasm for esoteric interpretations is likely to accept many of his conclusions. TOBIAS FOSTER GITTES Concordia University, Montreal